Automation
Automation
Visualizing anything
Blender is an open-source application for creating visual models of just about anything. The rich feature set includes everything you'd need - a range of object types and surfaces, a rich set of operations (including rigging, animation, and physics models), and an efficient rendering engine suitable for graphics design or gaming, all on just about any platform you can imagine. Five years ago, this suite would have cost you thousands of dollars (if you could have even gotten it!). Now, it's free, for all. Check out the gallery for what it can do - if you can imagine it, you can communicate it!
Knowing what to ask for in a tool
There are many commercial and open source tools out there which provide support for the tracking, decomposition, assignment, communications, and status reporting of various aspects of projects. Classic examples requirements tracking tools, problem reporting tools, and change tracking tools, though project management, task planning tools, risk management tools, and aspects of workflow planning tools all share similar features. Increasingly, tools like Sharepoint are beginning to offer similar functionality, which can complicate the choices of selecting which of these tools is best for a particular situation, especially since the functionality provided by such solutions may not always be robust for complex applications. The user interfaces and information presentations of these different types of tools often also differ quite extensively; however, the structure of their underlying schemas are typically quite similar in nature.
Requirements provide the means to capture and track progress towards a desirable future state. So do problem problem tracking systems. Regardles of what tool is selected, a similar set of information is essential to managing any complex task in order to frame the goals being pursued, and close the gaps between the current reality and the goals that are being pursued. Read more »
Eclipse - an open development platform
Eclipse is an IBM-sponsored open source community that is building a development platform, runtimes and application frameworks for building, deploying and managing software across the software lifecycle. The community's projects are organized into a number of categories:
- Enterprise Development
- Embedded and Device Development
- Rich Client Platform
- Rich Internet Applications
- Application Frameworks
- Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
The Eclipse community is also supported by major IT solution providers, start-ups, universities and research institutions and individuals that further extend, support and complement this evolving platform.
Drupal
Drupal is the primary content management system platform upon which this site is based. This site is a Drupal partner and is actively participating in the ongoing evolution of that product.