Software development as it should be: WinSCP! I have been using WinSCP for transferring files for years because it supports a host of protocols. With Secure Copy (scp) it supports my demand for security. Recently, its author shipped version 5.17 with a bug which probably affected only a few users.Read More →
Special challenges need special solutions. Most companies walk a thin line between off-the-shelf software and individual solutions. How this decision is taken depends on many factors, such as the desire or need to optimise, cost and maintenance efforts, to name but a few. A primary principle for such decisions shouldRead More →
Billing systems create invoices from data and ideally send them right away. Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Access are common tools to do the job. Sometimes, parts of the invoice creation process are already automated. Mostly, however, the majority of the work is still done manually because of the need forRead More →
Occasionally, aggregating data into information is a labour intensive, tedious job which takes lots of comparisons, consistency checks, summations etc.. Even the creation of the initial data can be complicated. The good news is, however, that practically all of these process steps can be completely automated: Starting with the extractionRead More →
A picture paints a thousand words! For many people this proverb holds true. Be it bars, lines, 3D graphs, bubble charts or any other type of visualisation, they convey a message from the displayed data at a single glance. What individual form of display is used depends on the informationRead More →
There is usually more information in a given dataset than one would expect. The Austrian Post scandal has demonstrated this impressively and gives a faint idea of what Google is capable of doing, especially given the information grows faster than linear with the amount of data. So having more dataRead More →
A key element to the usability of data is the design of the database it resides in. Correctly designed, one can quickly manipulate or get fast reports from it. If the design is bad for the purpose or simply missing, any operation on the database will be slow and mayRead More →
Encrypted and certified Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the encryption protocol used by practically all websites. However, TLS can be used also for encrypting other communication channels like VPNs, email etc. TLS is based on a Private Key Infrastructure (PKI), which issues certificates for the owners of public keys. ThisRead More →
Although theoretically independent of the subject matter, managing an IT project requires a specific managerial skillset. This is especially true as it takes particular methods to assess and track progress. The project manager needs special knowledge to be successful, particularly in an agile environment. One specific but recurring challenge inRead More →
Decisions are taken based on data in reports. Do you have all required reports to make those decisions great? Is the data contained in them correct? Up to date and accurate reports are crucial for everybody in management. How much effort does it take to create them? Is it worthRead More →
