March 11, 2009

Adding the Boolean Operator OR to Nutch

Nutch  is an open source web-search crawler and engine.  Built upon the Apache Lucene text search engine, Nutch allows you to add a mini “Google”-like indexing and query environment right to your Web site, but with added features like semantic tagging…
March 9, 2009

Federal cloud computing workshop on March 23

Shahid Shah alerted me to the Strategies and Technologies for Cloud Computing Interoperability (SATCCI) event on March 23rd in Crystal City, Virginia (just outside Washington, DC). As Shahid notes on the Federal Architect blog: The Obama Administration in general and…
March 3, 2009

UK government strongly advocates open source

This is truly fantastic. The UK government has decided that, where there is little price difference between open source and commercial products, open source should be selected due to its inherent flexibility. The initiative is also promoting re-use of product…
December 10, 2008

2009 Excellence.Gov Awards nomination period now open!

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2009 Excellence.Gov Awards, sponsored by ACT-IAC’s Collaboration & Transformation Shared Interest Group. This awards program is one of the most prestigious in the industry, with recognition being given to agencies with successful IT programs…
November 24, 2008

Getting Sabrent SATA Host Cards to Work

To support a large number of hard drives on our backup machine, we bought a Sabrent SATA 4 port PCI host card (SBT-SRD4).  Guess what?  It hangs with our 1TB drives.  In fact, it will hang with anything larger than 175 GB! Instead of…
November 19, 2008

KTvid lives! Affordable mobile two-way video now available

Our friends at KT-Tech have just released KTvid, a really-very-cool mobile video technology aimed at consumers and businesses. Their press release says it best:  KT-Tech has accomplished what no other company in the wireless industry has achieved: enabling real-time, high-quality, person-to-person video…
November 4, 2008

A Script to Automatically Update Clamav Packages

Clamav is an excellent open source multi-platform antivirus program that we use on our systems and projects.  While clamav comes with utilities to update the antivirus definitions, there isn’t a utility to update the engine (instead the antivirus update gives a warning).…
September 4, 2008

FederalArchitect.com: A blog for government EA types

Shahid Shah, a great friend of TCG’s who founded Netspective, has started a new blog aimed at the federal enterprise, system, and solutions architecture community. The Federal Architect aims to create discussion and collaboration among architects working in the federal government. Based…
August 22, 2008

The Amazing Power of Spamhaus.org

Recently, we turned on block-list spam protection provided by the zen.spamhaus.org in addition to regular DNS-based restrictions. Thanks to Zimbra’s graphing capabilities we have a powerful visual depiction of the power of Spamhaus:  This graph displays the number of messages processed…
August 21, 2008

Achieve Zen About Spam with Zimbra

This past Monday the amount of spam hitting our Zimbra mail server (5.0.5) spiked to twice the usual amount, causing our sever to fall 15 minutes behind in delivery.  While we were doing pretty well with spam blocking through Pyzor…