The Power And Pain of Process–Part 1

Part of why I love IT is finding patterns and creating new ones. Patterns by themselves are interesting, but when you’re able to automate a pattern that’s when you start to really deliver value to a business. The result of that work is what I call process, and it might range from a batch file […]

Firefox and NTLM Authentication

By default Firefox doesn’t pass through NT credentials, not a big deal when you’re browsing Amazon by a big pain when you’re trying to hit a corporate Reporting Services site – you get prompted to enter credentials each time. It turns out there is an easy fix, just modify the config file with the names […]

JTDS & Grails

Recently I had the chance to do some tuning on a system that was built using Grails (formerly Groovy on Rails) and the short and hopefully accurate enough scoop for our purposes is that includes an ORM layer – a data abstraction layer. ORM’s excel at rapid development/time to market scenarios, and they can also […]

PASS Update #53 (Bylaws)

This week we posted some pending changes to the PASS bylaws. We try to do a review at least once a year and it’s a hard process. Hard because we have to agree on the change we want first, and then we have to figure out how to state it cleanly because this is a […]

A Plug for Wirefly

Wirefly is a website devoted to purchasing cell phones and plans. I found it when I was researching my Droid X, and you know how it is – should I trust a web site to deliver my phone? At the time the difference in cost was substantial, $99 via Wirefly which included 2 day Fedex, […]

What Should PASS Be? I Challenge You

PASS isn’t what it should be. I hear that a lot, and in many ways I agree with you. We’re finally growing and evolving, but we’re still far from what I think most of you expect from a true professional association. But. I’m not sure you or I have realistic expectations. So I want to […]

Notes from the February 2011 MagicPASS Meeting

I attended the second meeting of MagicPASS (no web site yet) on Feb 16 at Stetson University in Celebration, FL. Great facility – classroom style seating, dual projectors and screens, couldn’t ask for better. The only downside to it so far is that it’s $200 per meeting for the space, quite a chunk of overhead […]

Who Is This Super Hero?

We recently switched from Brighthouse to DirectTV and of the first things we did was to find the kids channels to see what we gained or lost. I flagged a few to record for use on the proverbial rainy day, and one of the ones I selected was Hong Kong Phooey, a cartoon that ran […]

Working on the Railroad

I work with a client that has an office about 25 yards from a train track and recently the railroad company decided it was time to do some maintenance on a large length of the track including that piece by the office. That ‘maintenance’ consisted of replacing all the ties under the rails. If you’ve […]

Book Review: Packing for Mars

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach ($15 @ Amazon) is a ton of fairly interesting trivia about the space program, space travel, and the challenges of trying to go to Mars. She talks about doing tests on Earth to figure out how bad body odor would be if someone didn’t bathe for an extended period […]