Applied Trust has been producing The Barking Seal for our clients, supporters, and friends since 2003.
One of the greatest features of being consulting IT infrastructure engineers is that we have the opportunity to see, touch, and experience a wide variety of technologies and their successful (and sometimes, not so successful) application. We have the opportunity to solve problems that have never been solved before. And, every once in awhile, we make mistakes that provide good lessons. It's our hope that sharing some of these experiences will better our community as a whole. We hope you enjoy it!!
Feb 16, 2010
In a recent study conducted by The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, Boulder received top honors as the overall happiest, healthiest, and most optimistic city in the United States. The study surveyed more than 350,000 Americans across the country and assessed their lives based on a variety of pre-defined categories...
continue reading Feb 15, 2010
The PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) sets a number of expectations for IT assessment. Activities, from scanning for rogue wireless access points to reviewing vendor contracts, are scattered throughout the PCI Data Security Standard document. Below is an attempt to assemble those requirements...
continue reading Feb 10, 2010
We wrote about the HITECH act and its impact on business associates a little less than a year ago. By February 18, business associates are required to:
Comply with the HIPAA security and privacy rules
Provide medical information breach notifications
Work with the Department of Health and Human Services to...
continue reading Jan 15, 2010
IT infrastructure work is certainly not the same as software development, but the Agile methodologies offer some good advice to us system and network administrators. In general, Agile has grown from a Manifesto about software development to a full-blown project management methodology. Powerful tools are available to...
continue reading Jan 12, 2010
I know, you love your network card. You installed Linux, the NIC was autodetected at first boot, and everything "Just Worked." Your server has been happily providing services over the network ever since. But what do you really know about your network card? Is it the culprit of slower performance for your CPU-...
continue reading Jan 01, 2010
Ok, I admit it - I'm generally not a fan of New Year's Resolutions. I believe that folks should always be looking for ways to make positive changes, and shouldn't need a specific day/event as a trigger. That said, it does make a nice marker date for an annual evaluation of the state of things.
Last year, I posted an...
continue reading Dec 20, 2009
I've watched with amusement these past few weeks as the marketing folks at Verizon finally figured out what I've personally known for the last year, and captured it in their "coverage maps" campaign. In summary, Verizon coverage is awesome while AT&T coverage completely sucks. Way-to-go Verizon marketing geniuses...
continue reading Dec 11, 2009
Daisy, an attacker identified by the CSI
The Computer Security Institute has just released the results of its 14th annual Computer Crime and Security Survey and, as always, there are some interesting findings. This year’s results are based on 443 responses given by information security and information technology...
continue reading Nov 11, 2009
Good grief. For those paying attention, tools like sudo and the concepts behind them have been around for a really long time. Long enough that I can barely remember working on them, though I agree with this article that I did and it did in fact occur many years before Microsoft's "invention" of this technology. ...
continue reading Nov 10, 2009
Over the course of 2009 we’ve embarked on a number of employee-initiated projects to help make Applied Trust a place where we really want to work long term. Dan’s recent blog post about our new and improved third-floor deck is one example. Another of these projects involved introducing healthier beverage options for...
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