The Production Issue

If you’ve been working in software development then you’re probably very familiar with the term “production issue”.  This is a problem that is discovered in the production environment that causes the application to become unavailable or to exhibit incorrect behavior.  For example, a production issue in an online banking system might be that customers’ account […]

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Pitfalls of Overlapping Releases

On my current project, new functionality is often released in increments over a period of several months, as opposed to developing the functionality and deploying it in one release. This is a good approach to release management because it reduces risk, since relatively small changes will be made to the production environment. It also allows […]

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Improving Software Quality through Communication

I recently gave a presentation to undergraduate students about some of the challenges of working on large-scale software development projects.  One of the key challenges that I highlighted was communication.  Although this is not specific to a software development project, it is extremely important. If communication is not performed properly, then it becomes nearly impossible […]

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Selectively Deploying Files from a Subversion Repository

During a recent project I needed to modify user interface (UI) files in a Subversion repository and then deploy them to a Tomcat server.  At first I recursively copied all of the files using a batch script, but because of the size of the repository this could take anywhere from 10 to 15 seconds.  That […]

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Coping with Long Feedback Loops during Software Development

I recently had the opportunity to work on a software development project as part of a 300 person team.  On this team there were two types of developers: user interface (UI) developers and service developers.  In order to evaluate the effect of a code change, UI developers needed to deploy their modified JavaScript files to […]

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A Brief Introduction to the R Programming Language

The R programming language is an open-source, interactive language that was designed for manipulating datasets, creating visualizations, and performing statistical analyses.  It is based on the S language, which was originally developed at Bell Laboratories.  R is a full-featured language (it supports conditionals, loops, functions, I/O, etc.) and its functionality can be easily extended by […]

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A Brief Introduction to the R Programming Language

The R programming language is an open-source, interactive language that was designed for manipulating datasets, creating visualizations, and performing statistical analyses.  It is based on the S language, which was originally developed at Bell Laboratories.  R is a full-featured language (it supports conditionals, loops, functions, I/O, etc.) and its functionality can be easily extended by […]

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Making Windows Server 2008 R2 Look And Feel Like Windows 7

Amazon EC2 supports creating Windows Server instances in the cloud; however, it does not currently support creating instances of the desktop versions of Windows, such as Windows 7.  Although using a server edition is acceptable for most uses of EC2, a desktop version of Windows may be preferable if end users will be interacting with […]

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Increasing the Amount of Memory Available to a 32-bit Windows Application

Despite the fact that I am running a 64-bit version of Windows 7, I sometimes need to run 32-bit applications.  By default these applications are only able to use 2 GB of memory, regardless of the amount of available memory on the system (see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/memory/memory-limits-for-windows-releases ).  However, I sometimes need these 32-bit applications to be […]

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Using Sequences of System Events to Identify Users

In my last post on the Active Authentication project I described how to use Microsoft Detours to collect a trace of system calls (also known as system events) for a single process.  At Coveros Labs we leveraged an example program provided with Detours in order to create our own prototype system that validates the identity of a […]

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