What defines personally identifiable information? I’ve been involved with a surprising number of conversations of late talking about what PII consists of, and what you need to be aware of when protecting it. It’s easy to say that it’s social security numbers and credit card information. Those are the obvious choices. If you’re building applications and/or protecting the data though, […]

Code Reviews? What About Database Reviews? I’ve been involved in numerous code reviews – most of the time they’re a huge benefit to the process. You can make suggestions (or take suggestions as the case may be) and learn new ways to approach the work you’re doing. It’s hard to under-state what you can learn and just how helpful those […]

Do You Consciously Return to the Basics? When you’re designing new solutions, troubleshooting an issue or working with an existing bit of code, it’s easy to get caught up in the most elegant solution to the challenge you’re facing. At times, this can add surprising complexity as you work through all the things the problem you are solving may involve. […]

Anyone Remember .ZAP? .SQL? Got such a kick out of this update article we found – that dBase is being updated and new features added to it. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t realize it was still available – pretty cool to see it up and running. Some very intriguing tools now included, from query building tools to […]

Twitter, Big Data, Information Ownership… Have You Considered? I was reading this article about "Who owns that twitter account" – while it’s not old news, it is something you’ve probably seen as companies grapple with social media, transparency and media-active teams. But then, as I was mulling over that article, I tripped over another article headline, completely unrelated, talking about […]

Planning for Your Vacation – And Preventing Downtime Yesterday I talked about proper planning so your team is aware and able to respond if something happens to your systems while you’re away – this lets you actually *be* away, whether it’s for sleep or vacation. There is one other thing though that is a huge part of successful management of […]

That Time of Year Again You always hear about people having to do so much work pre- and post-vacation that it almost makes it seem like no vacation at all. It’s true of IT too – you have to put in place the pieces and parts that let you have a true vacation. If you just pick up and leave, […]

Is Malware Detection (and Intrusion Detection) a Thing of the Past? I saw a really great article in Network World magazine (link here) that suggested that so much of malware now comes in through social engineering or valid (whitelisted) entry vectors that they think detection packages are a thing of the past in the not too distant future. Clearly social […]

Keeping Up With the Upgrades It’s an interesting time (still) when it comes to updates and upgrades, new features and new capabilities with hosting providers. Today I’m specifically talking about Amazon’s RDS services, but the fact is that the entire field moves so fast that it’s difficult to stay on top of what’s available. One example from Amazon in particular […]

BYOD a Reality In Your Workplace…Officially? Bringing your own device started with cell phones, even back when they simply made (gasp!) calls. Even with that type of device however, you still have issues. Are people allowed to make business calls on personal phones? Now of course, with smart phones, tablets, personal laptop systems and many other devices, the picture is […]