Information Technology

"Leadership. Communication. Strategy. Diplomacy. Money. Technology. Industry. These are the things IT leaders must master."

- Frank Hayes, "Frankly Speaking: IT Unleashed", Computerworld, December 11, 2006

Congratulations to the Ruby language folks for converting their CVS repository over to Subversion (SVN). From what the "experts" tell me, it is not easy moving your developers over to another version control system. At least that's what was hinted when I asked the question, CVS or Subversion?

"IT has no value whatsoever if you can't help people carry out their missions."

- Chris Niedermayer, "Go with the grain", Government Computer News, May 2, 2005

A few weeks ago, Federal Computer Week, had an article about the role Web 2.0 may have in the federal government. Is there a place for wikis and other tool now included in most modern content management systems in the federal government?

The article hints that Web 2.0 may have place more behind the scenes then in public view.

On a recent visit to Drupal's forum I found another post with both Joomla and Drupal in the subject line. Making comparisons between Joomla and Drupal are very common these days as they are currently considered the top two open source content management systems (CMS) out there. The forum post written by Steve Burge contains a link that takes you to a comparison table he did between Joomla and Drupal.

"In today’s global economy, a company’s success or failure may hinge on the ability to implement technology to remain competitive. The business managers of tomorrow must be able to see the big picture while also understanding the nuts and bolts that keep everything running. The type of thinking that was once left to technologists is now essential for business managers."

C.J. Kelly, "Can a Manager Be a Techie and Survive?", Computerworld, November 20, 2006

C.J. Kelly is the alias for a security manager that wishes to hide her real name and employer in her articles for Computerworld.

Those in IT with any ambition to move up the ranks need to understand their organization's business better, obviously. What isn't acknowledged so readily by management is the need for managers to know IT better.

The November 20, 2006 article "Spam surge linked to hackers" from eWeeks is a must read. Unfortunately, I can't find the actual online version of the article in print.

The article discusses the increasing complexity hackers are using botnets running on tens of thousands of hijacked Windows computers to spread spam. The article focuses on the research by SecureWorks regarding the malware trojan called Troj/SpamThru. Some scary unique features have been identified with this trojan including:

I'm convinced that digital identity and universal authentication systems will make it big on the IT radar scope for 2007. While a number of propriety systems have cropped up over the years, the open-source project OpenID has started to make headlines as it tackles the problems and solutions for digital identity.

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.

Computerworld and the National Policy Research Council (NPRC) recently completed a study ranking the Websites of state, county, and local governments on usability and other criteria. In the study, Michigan's site earned top marks.

According to the article, the "the e-government report card is based on an extensive examination of 11,227 official government Web sites." Sites were judged on 25 criteria, including "whether people could use them to pay taxes, bid for contracts, find government jobs and complain to local officials about concerns such as potholes." Also included in the article was a report card summarizing other top e-government performers among city, state, and local sites.

What separated the winners from the losers?

Over the weekend, I upgraded the server that hosts CMS Report with the latest stable releases of MySQL and eAccelerator. The upgrade from MySQL 4.1 to 5.0 was easy compared to the upgrade I made a year ago from MySQL 3.23 to 4.1. This time around I also have use of CPanel which meant I could make the database upgrade with at least one eye closed. My journey with upgrading from eAccelerator 0.9.4 to 0.9.5 however took a lot longer.

I've been using eAccelerator 0.9.4 since it was released early in 2006. I've gotten into some trouble in the past by those smarter than me when I tried to explain exactly what eAccelerator does and does not do. To play it safe this time around, I'll give you the summary of what eAccelerator does straight from eAccelerator.net: