Tuesday, September 7, 2004

Cooperative Information Technology

Another excellent article was recently published in Computerworld magazine title "Intelligent Disobedience." Many of us have enjoyed the antics of the Dilbert comic strip in recent years and, laugh at the foibles of the "Pointy Haired Boss." Unfortunately, these antics often turn into realities when technical staff go up against management on project design and implementation issues. This article offers some ideas on how these problems might be addressed. Click here to read more.

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

IT Survival Guide Article from Computerworld

An excellent article from a 40 year Information Technology professional was published recently in Computerworld magazine. The author, Paul Ingevaldson, currently the Chief Information Officer, has been with Ace Hardware for 25 years. He obviously knows something about how to "survive the IT jungle." Click here to read the article.

Friday, August 20, 2004

Thursday, August 5, 2004

Real World Digital Security

John Udell of InfoWorld magazine has posted an interesting report from a security conference on how the use of digital security works and doesn't work in the real world. Click here to read the article.

Thursday, July 8, 2004

Getting to Done

There is an excellent Computerworld magazine article posted titled "Getting to Done" by Paul Glen. This is a critical part of project management, to define success hopefully before you start your project. What is "done"? Are there degrees of "done"? If you can set achievable milestones for the project the court staff and judges can see that progress is being made. Read the article by clicking here.

Computers in the Courtroom

In many courtrooms there is often a lack of space for personal computers. I have seen computers on top of and under the furniture taking up valuable table and more important, leg space. Hewlett Packard is introducing a new system call CCI for Consolidated Client Infrastructure that centralizes the PC's into rack storage "blades" with a thin-client workstation installed, in our case, in the courtroom. Read about this new system by clicking here.

Thursday, July 1, 2004

State Supreme Court Web Broadcasting

Rory Perry, Clerk of the West Virginia Supreme Court and frequent speaker at Court Technology Conferences reports on his Blog that there are now eleven state supreme courts that are providing live and archived internet video streams of their oral arguments. Click here to read more.

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Imaging Space Calculations


Computer storage requirements for various digitized document types:
1 scanned page (8 1/2 by 11 inches, A4) = 50 KiloBytes (KByte)(on average, black & white, CCITT G4 compressed)
1 file cabinet (4 drawer) (10,000 pages on average) = 500 MegaBytes (MByte)= 1 CD (ROM or WORM)
2 file cabinets = 10 cubic feet = 1,000 MBytes = 1
GigaByte (GByte)
10 file cabinets = 1 DVD (WORM)
1 box (in inches: 15 1/2 long x 12 wide x 10 deep) (2,500 pages) = 1 file drawer = 2 linear feet of files = 1 1/4 cubic feet = 125 MBytes
8 boxes = 16 linear feet = 2 file cabinets = 1 GByte

Tuesday, June 8, 2004

E-Courts Conference Website

The E-Courts Conference website has been updated with the conference program schedule, registration, and hotel information. Please go to E-Courts Conference for more information.

Saturday, June 5, 2004

Article on US Federal Court use of Linux

Tom Adelstein has written in Linux Journal about the use of Linux in the US Federal Courts as their primary server architecture. As an FYI, the US Federal Courts are long time users of Unix stretching back to the early 1980's. Click here to view the article.

In an earlier article Mr. Adelstein also discussed the Justice Department XML standards work and other open source initiatives. Click here to view that article.