John Hoffler's blog

In honor of Black History Month, I'm reposting one of my early writings... This editorial was published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Feb 14, 2001. A new economy is upon us. The so-called "Post-Industrial Information Age" is maturing. That means that most companies know how to make ...

If you're a parent your child has at some time told a "whopper" that's so outlandish that you had to respect the kid for having the cojones to even try it! Yesterday, while trying to drill down into the numbers surrounding the recent budget fight, I bumped into two such whoppers within 15 ...

Dice.com just released the results of their salary survey of nearly 20,000 IT professionals taken last fall. You can see a summary of the results on eWeek. This survey is self-selecting, but I think you can still draw some conclusions from the results, one of the main conclusions being that you need...

New Laptop I got a new laptop a few weeks ago. This machine, an HP Pavilion dv8 is radical! Intel i7 quad-core processor with multi-threading shows up as an eight-way box in System Monitor. With Blue Ray DVD, 8 GB of memory and 18.4" screen it still came in under $1400 on eBay. I decided to go ...

I've started a development project on the Liferay Portal server. Liferay is a nice opensource Java Portal server with auser-friendly  Web-2.0 interface. For example adding or repositioning portlets on a page is a simple drag-n-drop affair. Liferay also ships with a lot of portlets, so it's easy...

A funny thing happened at lunch the other day. I was dining with several area CIOs when one fellow asked the table whether or not they were able to realize any electricity savings from their virtualization efforts. You may recall from Why start a Virtualization Blog? or Virtualization: The Importan...

I once interviewed for what I suppose you could call the chief architect position at a small firm (about 1,500 employees) that wrote logistics software. Their flagship product was based on Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) version 2.1 and they were looking for someone to lead them through the migration to...

Do you run test environments on your production hardware? If you're like many IT professionals, you're offended that I even have the nerve to ask such a question. As Michael Moore implies in Understand Your Workload, we've accepted segregation of production from non-production hardware as a central ...

Many IT shops leave huge virtual server benefits on the floor because they focus on the technology instead of the processes that the technology can enable. Virtual servers can supercharge your server delivery process to new levels of agility. Yet, many organizations' server delivery process is too b...