Cool Tools

Packing Passwords

Posted by Avani Cheriathundam on Thursday, August 16, 2012 - 14:56 Cool Tools, Best Practices Best Practices, Cool Tools, Security

A common problem faced at the workplace and at home is finding a way to securely store your passwords. With people like “Anonymous” and identity thieves out there, gone are the days for scribbling passwords on post it notes (who would do such a thing?!?), or keeping word docs with your passwords listed on your hard drive. Users now want a more secure way to not only store passwords, but share them as needed.

Recently for a client site, we implemented Passpack (http://passpack.com/en/home/) as our online password repository, and so far, it...

I, for one, Welcome our new JavaScript Overlords

Posted by Jon Reid on Monday, July 30, 2012 - 13:59 Cool Tools, Development, Enterprise 2.0 Cool Tools, Development, Javascript

You are probably most familiar with JavaScript as that sometimes useful, often quirky, client-side scripting language used on websites to enhance user interfaces and enable dynamic content.

Wikipedia describes JavaScript as “dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions … a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.” Fairly generic technical description there. Wikipedia fails to point out that JavaScript may also be a ravenous monster intent on infiltrating every bastion of technology we have!

JavaScript is not...

A Little Bird told me...

Posted by Mitul Patel on Friday, June 8, 2012 - 18:34 Cool Tools Classification, Clustering, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Supervised Learning

Banner Artwork from jasonpruett.com

You can imagine the scene in the cartoon above playing out in the office of a marketing professional in almost any corporate environment these days. In this case, the little bird is the data mining wizard that was brought in, and the big mountain ram is the marketing executive finding out about all the beautiful nuggets of information that had been discovered, all while he's dreaming up the potentially useful (clever and/or evil muuhahahaha...

On meetings and coming together

Posted by Allan Mai on Tuesday, May 8, 2012 - 17:35 Cool Tools 37signals, basecamp, Collaboration, Cool Tools

It is hard to justify calling a meeting. Do all five of these people need to be here for the next hour? Are we brainstorming? Is something unclear?

Brainstorming during a meeting is not always a good use of time.

When is the last time that, when called upon, you were able to summon all of your creative energies to focus into a burst of inspiration about something, anything? Can you do it in the next 10 minutes? Hour? Or in a room with all these other people, at the same time? In the ideal situation this would be a difficult task, in reality, Mary didn't get her coffee yet and...

Then One Day It Happens...

Posted by Kevin Chu on Friday, May 4, 2012 - 14:00 Operational Intelligence, Function1, Cool Tools Analytics, General, Splunk

Image: nokhoog_buchachon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

You’ve joined an elite team of engineers and administrators tasked to oversee your company’s technological needs. As your company’s ambitious marketing teams generate more and more buzz, you find that with each day your job circles increasingly around growing your business’s capacity. Months go by filled with unhindered efforts in project completion. You’ve helped double your web traffic, beef up your network, and revamp your monitoring system. ...

Using the Visualization Editor to Create a Dashboard in Splunk 4.3

Posted by Rupak Pandya on Thursday, April 5, 2012 - 16:09 Operational Intelligence, Cool Tools Analytics, Cool Tools, Dashboards, Simple XML, Splunk, UI, Visual, Visualization

Hello world! This is my first blog post with Function1 and I hope you find it useful. This post will give you an idea of how simple it is to use the new Visualization Editor in Splunk 4.3 to create a dashboard. This neat new feature is great because it simplifies the dashboard and panel creation process by allowing any user to create a custom dashboard without having to write any XML code and/or book time and consult with the IT guy! Each Splunk user can create their very own custom dashboard with panels that can include a table, pie chart, line graph, or a variety of other options with...

A Non-Technical Girl Living in a Technical World

Posted by Amee Dalal on Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - 05:43 Cool Tools

Living in a new city, it never fails that in social settings one of the very first questions I get asked is, “What do you do?” For most people, my reply of “operations for an IT company,” is normally enough. The problem arises when the other party also works in IT. In cases like these, they want more. “IT company” doesn’t cut it. It’s then that I am left trying to explain that we work on things like operational intelligence and web content management. Luckily for me, even though I find these concepts somewhat foreign, the other party usually understands.

While I come from a family...

Have you Seen Subscriber?

Posted by Hani Atalla on Monday, December 19, 2011 - 14:38 Cool Tools, Development eAlerts Subscriber Portlet Notification

Among the core components of WebCenter Interaction (WCI) is its “notification engine.” Users get notified via email or RSS feeds when information stored in the portal is updated. Typically, we subscribe to specific pieces of information we are interested in: e.g. collab projects, documents, discussion threads, tasks, etc. and then decide on the notification frequency: e.g. immediate, hourly, daily, or weekly summary email alerts.

I’ve often subscribed to pieces of information in WCI only to realize that my inbox gets flooded with notifications alerting me that content was updated...

Sauce Tasting

Posted by Vasanth Manikumar on Tuesday, December 6, 2011 - 05:30 Cool Tools, Development

As most web developers would attest, one of the most time consuming and challenging aspects of the job is to test and support your code across multiple browsers. A couple of years ago, one might have gone about testing with separate VMs that have different versions of browsers. Then along came tools such as IETester, which allow you to test across various versions of Internet Explorer (IE). By the way, if you keep up with our blogs, then you might recall...

Fiddle me this

Posted by Allan Mai on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - 18:55 Cool Tools, Development

Coding up some javascript is often an exciting and debuggery filled exercise, with much time spent hopping between your text/code editing device and your browser, hammering away at f5 or clearing some cache.

And when javascript results are not what you're intending to see it is a delightful, delicate, and disciplined dance that developers then do - a sprinkle of a firebug add-on here, or maybe you will toss in a dash of Internet Explorer's Developer tools, or maybe you prefer the surprisingly strong new-ish flavor on the block, Google Chrome's "...