management

Activision makes the games play on time with Alfresco

Activision, best known for making innovative games like Guitar Hero, apparently also has a tendency to be innovative in its use of open-source technology. As announced today, Activision is using Alfresco for web and document management and collaboration. On the web aspect:

Activision is using the innovative Alfresco Web Content Management (WCM) application to manage content for a series of new interactive customer Web portals, each centered on one of the company's major video game franchises. These 40 micro-sites, in six different languages, will provide a personalized one-to-one Web experience that lets more than 5 million video gamers test … Read more

Reclaiming my brain from the Internet

I really like this post over on the 43 Folders blog on "attention management." I've been thinking a lot lately about how to reclaim my brain from the Internet vortex, and the simple advice to unplug struck a chord.

...[T]ime management has no prayer of working if it's not accompanied by even tighter attention management.

Now, hearing and appreciating that advice is one thing. Doing it is quite another. I'm going to take baby steps this week. I'm actually going to start listening on those conference calls instead of blogging. :-)

By the … Read more

Top network exec leaving Yahoo

Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network division and leader of many of the company's core products, is leaving the company, CNET News.com has confirmed.

A source familiar with the executive's plans said he is departing, a move reported earlier Thursday by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.

Swisher also said Weiner will become an entrepreneur in residence at two venture capital firms, Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, neither of which immediately responded to requests for comment.

Weiner joined the company in 2001 during the reign of former Chief Executive Terry Semel, who left last year and … Read more

Puppet takes on automation of the cloud

One of my favorite open-source projects is Puppet, a system used to automate system administration tasks. Think BladeLogic or Opsware...at a fraction of the cost and, according to the Puppet team, at a significant performance and functionality boost. Leading organizations like Google, Stanford University, and more use Puppet.

OStatic talked with Reductive Labs, the company behind the Puppet project, and wrote a great article detailing its promise.

So what can Puppet do for you? It allows system administrators to write "recipes" that define machine functions and maintenance tasks that automate their routine work. Thinking along the lines of cloud or utility computing, Puppet allows you to manage a large number of systems or virtual machines without doing manual labor or writing small one-off scripts..."The Puppet project was conceived when clouds were on the far horizon, but Puppet solves configuration problems that virtualization potentially multiplies," said [the Puppet team]."

In other words, as more services move to the cloud or to complex, virtualized environments, with higher server counts and an ever-increasing cost of downtime, a system like Puppet becomes critical plumbing.

I had the chance to talk with Reductive Labs' founder, Luke Kanies, recently, and asked about Puppet's/Reductive Labs' mission. His answer?… Read more

Featured Freeware: Security Process Explorer

Security Process Explorer is a freeware replacement for the Windows native Task Manager. It comes with some useful functions, but the simplistic layout doesn't adapt well when displaying deeper investigations into the relationships between different processes. Still, it's worth looking at.

It offers many of the same functions that other process-managing programs offer. You can explore the connections between different processes, block processes, end them, and view in-depth information about a particular process. You can even search on the Web for a particular process, but unlike other programs, Security Process Explorer takes you to a proprietary page to … Read more

Featured Freeware: Session Manager

Session Manager can save, backup, restore, and manage multiple Firefox tab sessions. It comes with the option of loading the last saved session, not loading a previous session, loading a specific older session, or asking the user to choose. If it stopped there, it'd still be more powerful than the native Firefox session manager is but it has more to offer.

In addition, it can save more than 20 older sessions, and offers users several options for session management when closing Firefox. The plug-in automatically backs up sessions in the event of a crash. Users can also configure how … Read more

Being your own IT person still sucks

Last week, my wife's Dell Inspiron decided to stop printing to our wireless HP all-in-one. It was apparently a problem with the spooler, whatever that is. At that point, I had two choices: leave it alone and hope for a miracle, or fix it and perform some upgrades I'd been putting off.

Let me back up and explain something. I hate working on my wife's computer. Whatever I do inevitably screws something up, it takes way longer than I would like, and well, let's just say, my wife is impatient when it comes to technology.

It's OK for a doctor or dentist to poke and prod her, but when I poke or prod her computer, she acts as if I do it for the pure sadistic enjoyment of screwing up her peaceful existence.… Read more

Clear duplicate files from Outlook the free and easy way

Sometimes I wish I was one of those people who manages to keep their e-mail inbox empty by assigning the messages they need to keep appropriately named folders and deleting the mail they don't need.

Most of my inboxes have thousands of entries dating back years. And since I've combined my ISP's POP mail account with my Gmail account, the inbox-overflow problem has gotten out of hand.

Rather than spending half a day manually removing the duplicates, I installed Vaita's free Outlook Duplicate Items Remover. The program places an "ODIR" entry on Outlook's … Read more

Featured Freeware: What's Running

Ever wonder if your PC is keeping secrets from you? Wonder no more. The utility What's Running reveals all your system's active processes, services, drivers, and connections.

It's like Windows Task Manager, except far more informative. The cramped multipane interface is a bit hard to read, but even it has its good points: it lists processes in a parent-child hierarchy, not a bad way to accidentally spot malware. It also lets you choose which columns of information to display, and it makes stopping or prioritizing processes as simple as a mouse click--a right-click, to be precise. It … Read more