Timothy Dyck

About

Timothy Dyck is a Senior Analyst with eWEEK Labs. He has been testing and reviewing application server, database and middleware products and technologies for eWEEK since 1996. Prior to joining eWEEK, he worked at the LAN and WAN network operations center for a large telecommunications firm, in operating systems and development tools technical marketing for a large software company and in the IT department at a government agency. He has an honors bachelors degree of mathematics in computer science from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and a masters of arts degree in journalism from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.

Quest Tool Ups DB Support

Quest Softwares Benchmark Factory database, Web, mail and file server benchmarking tool has long been a favorite of mine in tests, for its polished interface, ease of use, programmability, real-time feedback, detailed performance reports and trouble-free agents. Version 3.1 shipped last month and gains a number of enhancements, most notably support for importing a Microsoft […]

Next Wave: Sharable Servers

X86-based PCs dont scale well in the data center, and IBM is doing a better job than anyone else at helping customers keep the key PC benefits of unmatched software selection and ready administrator and developer availability without the associated PC hardware pain. The PC problem boils down to manageability. Administrative, organizational and security requirements […]

Lessons Learned at the Excellence Awards Site

This year, as with last year, we used a secure Web site to gather entry information for the eWeek eXcellence Awards program. The Web application was written in JavaServer Pages and runs on Apache Software Foundation Inc.s Tomcat 4.0.1 application server. All data was stored in an IBM DB2 7.2 database. The biggest change to […]

State Standing Up for Users

In what will be a major, precedent-setting case, the state of New York sued Network Associates earlier this month to end the restrictions that the company claims over its users, restrictions that block publication of benchmark results as well as unauthorized product reviews. New Yorks attorney general attacks these censorship clauses on several grounds (the […]

Waveset Does Quick Scans

While researching Waveset Technologies Waveset Lighthouse user directory management system (a finalist in this years eWeek eXcellence Awards), I found the companys free Windows directory Risk Assessment Utility. Risk Assessment Utility is a teaser for Wavesets commercial products, but its useful on its own. It examines Windows 2000 or NT domain databases (we tried it […]

Server Databases Clash

Online exclusive (July 2003 version 1.1 update): Dig deeper into the eWEEK Labs/PC Labs database benchmark by downloading our version 1.1 database configuration and tuning scripts, JSP code, ASP.Net code and spreadsheets containing expanded benchmark results (582 KB .zip file). This file was updated in July 2003 to add a more detailed readme.txt, include PC […]

Java Performance Tuning

A big part of tuning the performance of a Java application server is tuning the Java VM in which the application server runs. On some platforms, organizations will have a choice of Java virtual machines. Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM both produce their own VMs for several operating systems, and other platform vendors also make […]

Free Putty Client Supports SSH2

My favorite SSH client, Simon Tathams Putty, was updated in January to support Version 2 of the Secure Shell protocol, bringing it up-to-date on the latest SSH protocol. (Version 1 of SSH has critical security weaknesses, so SSH servers are best configured to allow only SSH Version 2 clients.) Putty 0.52 (available for free download […]

Is Language Choice Worth It?

Last week, Microsoft officially launched its Visual Studio .Net development tool and .Net Framework. The former is a major release, but it isnt a paradigm change. .Net Framework has the potential to be much more significant. We havent seen anything on the scale of .Net Framework and the new .Net virtual machine it introduces since […]

Palm Still Mired in the Past

Last week in San Jose, Palms new operating system subsidiary, PalmSource, rolled out a Palm OS 5 beta. As a platform on which to build a new generation of handheld devices, the beta was underwhelming—a situation Ive come to expect from Palm. Promised to ship by midyear, Palm OS 5s biggest change architecturally will be […]