P. J. Connolly

Although many organizations have a standard template for naming servers, it wasn’t always that way. One of the few perks of being admin was getting to choose a naming convention. In my years in IT, I’ve seen schemes that used everything from Looney Tunes characters to stars and planets as the basis for naming network […]

Data loss prevention isn’t a new idea, but it’s a concept that’s become increasingly important to IT as organizations recognize the threat to their operations from leaks by disgruntled insiders or intrusions by hostile outsiders. At least, that’s the pitch DLP (data-loss-prevention) vendors use. But in most cases, notes Securosis analyst and CEO Rich Mogull, […]

I want to get caught up on a couple of topics I’ve discussed recently; it’s been a busy week here at Chez Peej, despite (or because of) the recent Independence Day holiday. First is the forthcoming release of Mac OS X Lion, where my greatest complaint was Apple’s decision to make the operating system available […]

So, if Cisco’s research is correct, maybe the floodtide of spam has finally broken. I kind of doubt it, but as squishy as the numbers are, I know that I’m not getting anywhere the amount of spam that I was a year ago. The company says that the worldwide volume of spam has been cut […]

Well, here’s another trend for me to buck, just in time for the holiday weekend. It seems that demand for e-readers seems to be taking off far more rapidly than the tablet market, according to new figures released this week by the Pew Research Center. [WP_IMAGE] I’m not surprised by this, if only because e-readers […]

The calendar says that it’s summer, which means that we expect to see some action on the latest thing in device connectivity, Thunderbolt. Formerly known as LightPeak, the technology has the potential for 100-gigabit throughput thanks in part to its combination of DisplayPort and PCI Express technology. Apple earlier this year became the first vendor […]

Office 365, which launched today, is interesting, but in order for it to be a success, it’s going to have to live up to its name; its predecessor, Microsoft’s BPOS service, has rung up enough downtime in the last two months to give any potential customer reason to think twice about relying on the cloud. […]

Apple today released the 10.6.8 update to Mac OS X, which is recommended for the company’s Final Cut Pro X video editing software, and which may be the company’s final update to the Snow Leopard release train. It’s available through the Software Update feature of Mac OS X or as a download from Apple. [WP_IMAGE] […]

I’m extremely skeptical of the performance claims made by wireless carriers, and with good reason: as someone who works in downtown San Francisco, I’ve found wireless coverage around my office to be somewhere between problematic and unreliable. The Peninsula’s representative in Congress, Anna Eshoo (D-Palo Alto) introduced legislation today that would force mobile carriers, including […]

Cirrus Thinking’s Dolly Drive is a simple-to-use backup tool that allows Mac users to replace locally-attached devices that use the Time Machine feature of Mac OS X with cloud-based backups. It, in essence, bolts onto the Time Machine infrastructure and provides a Blowfish-encrypted backup link to the Dolly Drive servers. Users interact with Dolly Drive […]