Yearly Archives: 2011

A recap from GOSCON: Open source beyond cutting costs

My colleague, Gunnar Hellekson, posted some great insights from GOSCON this week on a session he attended about “Cutting Costs” — before the big shake-up…I mean Earthquake. Honestly, I didn’t know GOSCON and using open source in government could be so moving and disruptive. (Too early?) Paraphrasing, Alex Howard of O’Reilly moderated a panel discussionRead… Read more »

Managing IT in Jails and Prisons

Managing IT in a jail environment can be difficult as you constantly consider the safety of employees before making any IT decision. Whether you are considering auditing hardware inside of a jail block area or simply fixing a paper jam, you must consider your own personal safety first and foremost. What is interesting is thatRead… Read more »

Who retweeted you?

I didn’t know you could do this. Maybe you don’t either, so I’ll share it. How do you find out which of your tweets have been retweeted, and by who? Turns out, by looking on the Twitter website! First, go to twitter.com and log in. Then click the little ‘Retweets’ tab just under the updatesRead… Read more »

Local TV

I think it’s fair to say that DCMS’s plans for Local TV are mostly terrible. Luckily, people who know a lot more about it that I do are writing it all up. I enjoyed these three posts on the LSE blog on the subject, all by Sally Broughton Micova. They are well worth reading forRead… Read more »

Splunk: Bringing Big Data Analysis to the Rest of Us

Today’s IT departments need to deal with incredible amounts of machine data. Splunk collects, indexes and harnesses all the fast moving machine data generated by enterprise applications and devices. This is a Big Data challenges that others find intimidating, with terabytes of information in many formats and from many sources. Many large enterprises now generateRead… Read more »

A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer

Day 19 Another GIS day Today was another day primarily spent on tasks related to GIS. Several of us discussed the structure and vision of GIS for the city. This has been important not only because our city is working on a succession plan, but also because GIS is changing so much as it evolvesRead… Read more »

OSHA’s Heat Safety Tool

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration‘s new mobile product, the OSHA Heat Safety Tool, allows workers and supervisors to calculate the heat index for their worksite, and, based on the heat index, display a risk level to outdoor workers. The app, which is available on Andriod devices, pulls data from the National Weather Service forRead… Read more »