What is the best project management software for a startup
Somehow I got roped into a thread on Quora and noticed this item http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-online-project-management-software-for-a-startup Lots of people shilling their Web 2.0 SaaS services for project management but at the end of the day, you have to ask why a startup even needs project management software. I’ve been thru a few startups either as founder or CTO […]
The security of open source software
A conversation with a client this morning revolved around software development tool alternatives in an environment of Web Socket. Why not use Flash on the client and AMF on the server side?, the client asked. I hesitated for a moment and answered – because Adobe is proprietary and closed source and the only developers looking […]
Secure collaboration, agile collaboration
One of the biggest challenges in global multi-center clinical trials (after enrollment of patients) is collaboration between multi-center clinical trial teams: CRAs, investigators, regulatory, marketing, manufacturing, market research, data managers, statisticians and site administrators. In a complex global environment, pharma do not have control of computer platforms that local sites use – yet there is […]
Apache.org hack
Friday morning August 28, a compromised SSH key enabled attackers to deploy a rootkit and upload files to one of the Apache Foundation servers, the files were then synch’ed to a production server. A blog post from the Apache Foundation explained that attackers accessed an account at a hosting provider: “To the best of our […]
Open source trumps closed access
The comparison between an open source collaborative recommender system and a closed access research effort is revealing – the open source project is already implementing production grade systems and the closed source research project can allow us to read their article for a fee. The Apache Mahout/Taste version 0.1 open source software project is being […]
Postgresql 8.4 or MySQL
MySQL now belongs to Oracle – Oracle’s track record on keeping acquisitions alive is mixed. If you want a real database that is extremely Oracle compliant (PLpgSQL is very close to PL/SQL) look no further than then harder (more secure), better, faster Postgresql 8.4 the world’s most advanced Open Source database. Using the new […]
Why do people commit crimes?
The president of a prospect was recently discussing with us whether Oracle IRM (information rights management) was a good way of preventing data loss, and a viable alternative to a DLP (data loss prevention) system. Rights management would appear at first blush to be orthogonal to data loss prevention but it’s an interesting question that […]
The worst bugs are the simplest bugs
It is a truism of security that the worst vulnerabilities are usually the simplest – many are configuration bugs or simple design flaws like leaving temp files world read. Many Open Source projects such as Open Clinica use the excellent PostgreSQL database. You get 90% of Oracle at 10% of the weight and for free. […]
Teachers Matter More Than PCs
Just as I was wondering how pumping trillions into banks will solve the GFC (great financial crisis) – along comes Craig Barrett (former CEO of Intel) and tells us that Teachers Matter More Than PCs “We’re bailing out Wall Street, we’ll be bailing out Detroit soon, we’re bailing out the agricultural sector with high subsidies […]
Cloud computing, buzz-word du-jour
The buzzword du-jour in the current economic crash of 2008 is “Cloud Computing”. There are several interesting question around cloud computing – why now, how are people building it, what are people doing with it and what about security. 1) Why now? Back in 2001 after the dot com crash, On-demand / SaaS started picking […]
