Entries by Alan Zeichick

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NetGear blinked – will continue VueZone video cloud service

Thank you, NetGear, for taking care of your valued customers. On July 1, the company announced that it would be shutting down the proprietary back-end cloud services required for its VueZone cameras to work – turning them into expensive camera-shaped paperweights. See “Throwing our IoT investment in the trash thanks to NetGear.” The next day, I […]

Real food vs yucky food – don’t eat what you don’t understand

Eat real food. Avoid food laden with additives, or which are overly processed. My family has a few rules which we follow pretty closely when shopping: Always look at the ingredients. The fewer ingredients, the better. (Food expert Michael Pollan recommends no more than five ingredients.) If one of the ingredients is High Fructose Corn […]

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SharePoint 2016 On-Premises – Better than ever with a bright future

Excellent story about SharePoint in ComputerWorld this week. It gives encouragement to those who prefer to run SharePoint in their own data centers (on-premises), rather than in the cloud. In “The Future of SharePoint,” Brian Alderman writes, In case you missed it, on May 4 Microsoft made it loud and clear it has resuscitated SharePoint […]

A scammer owned by the “Christian Church”? I don’t think so.

Isn’t it reassuring to know that this scammer’s loan agency is “owned by the Christian Church”? Yeah, right. Don’t be fooled by these sorts of emails. The scammer’s next step would be to request sensitive personal information (like bank account numbers), or ask you to wire over a “fee” for processing the not-to-appear loan. Or both. Your […]

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Celebrating Ada Lovelace and doubling the talent pool

Despite some recent progress, women are still woefully underrepresented in technical fields such as software development. There are many academic programs to bring girls into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) at various stages in their education, from grade school to high school to college. Corporations are trying hard. It’s not enough. We all need to […]

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Retrospective: 2010’s ESDC, the Enterprise Software Development Conference

Today’s serendipitous discovery: A blog post about the Enterprise Software Development Conference (ESC), produced by BZ Media in March 2010. I was the conference chair of that event; our goal was to try to replicate the wonderful SD West conference, which CMP had discontinued the year before. (I am the “Z” of BZ Media.) Unfortunately, […]

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Quantify the risk of automotive software failures: The SRR Warranty and Recall Report

The costs of an automobile recall can be immense for an OEM automobile or light truck manufacturer – and potentially ruinous for a member of the industry’s supply chain. Think about the ongoing Takata airbag scandal, which Bloomberg says could cost US$24 billion. General Motors’ ignition locks recall may have reached $4.1 billion. In 2001, […]

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Bird meet bug, bug meet bird

This is one of my all-time favorite photos, taken during a week-long vacation in Redmond, Oregon, summer 2012. We’ve been visiting the Eagle Crest resort every few years since the early 1990s — it’s a magical place. Canon EOS 5D Mk II, EF 200mm f/2.8 L prime lens, shot at 1/1250 f/4.

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Howdy, podners: Sheriff Alan rocks the Cowboy Look

It’s not the usual fisherman-in-a-yellow-slicker¹ look of a born-and-bred Yankee: Here I am in my Western duds. It’s a surprisingly comfortable style, once the boots were broken in. What’s the occasion? Why am I wearing a black Stetson, gray pinstripe suit, ivory shirt, turquoise bolo tie, cowboy boots, and a corsage? Delivering the blessings at a wedding near Phoenix. […]

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The legacy application decommissioning ceremony

I once designed and coded a campus parking pass management system for an East Coast university. If you had a faculty, staff, student or visitor parking sticker for the campus, it was processed using my green-screen application, which went online in 1983. The university used the mainframe program with minimal changes for about a decade, until a […]