October 29, 2015

Fighting Developer Fatigue with JNBridge

A better approach would be to keep as much of the .NET-based technology as possible, and start by nibbling around the margins, creating framework code in Python, and calling the more substantial .NET-based logic where needed. Later, more Python skills can be acquired and more Python code can be added, as necessary, and functionality can be migrated out of the .NET libraries if that’s what’s desired. This “go slow” approach can mitigate developer fatigue and allow you to avoid prematurely committing to new technologies that may turn out to be insufficiently robust for production use, or may soon be supplanted by even newer technologies. Note the approach described here can be used to continue using both legacy .NET and Java binaries with emerging languages.


Google threatens action against Symantec-issued certificates

Google discovered the incident because, as part of its Chrome browser policies, it requires all CAs to disclose the EV certificates they issue in a public audit log as part of a new protocol called Certificate Transparency (CT). Following the incident, Symantec determined that the certificates in question were issued during product testing and never left the organization. It also fired several employees who failed to follow internal policies. The company's initial investigation determined that 23 test certificates had been issued for domain names belonging to Google, Opera and three other unnamed organizations. However, with only "a few minutes of work" Google was able to find additional unauthorized certificates that Symantec missed, calling into question the results of the company's internal audit.


Is your information security program giving you static?

Most of us in the information technology have many responsibilities other than security. On the other hand, we fight against a growing number of hackers whose only job is to find new ways to break into our systems. Their motivations vary from the hobbyist who just loves technology and lacks ethics, to those sponsored by organized crime, to those propped up by foreign governments. Regardless of the reason, they have vast amounts of time to put into finding ways into our networks and applications. Since we can't keep up, should we just give up? While tempting, this is obviously not possible. As such, we must find ways to replace our static approach to security with a dynamic one. A few weeks ago, former NSA Director Keith Alexander,speaking at a conference, put it well stating that "We need to move now to a new approach to cybersecurity — an approach that is proactive, agile and adaptive."


Steamy Windows

Windows 10 since its launch has had lots of coverage and I've no intention of covering many of those things again. There’s plenty of excellent posts already talking about some of the user experience and consumer enhancements, everything from the start button, to continuum and universal apps. As important as I think those things are, getting the user experience across multiple devices is key to Windows10 success, those things aren’t really my area. I like many of you work with Windows 10 in the enterprise, deploying it, supporting it and delivering application to it. With that in mind, I wanted to write an article that focuses elsewhere and looks at some of the enterprise enhancements and capabilities that you will find tucked away inside this shiny new operating system and its ecosystem.


How to Advance an Organization’s Data Culture

Speaking at the recent Tableau Conference in Las Vegas, deRhodes described what he called an evolution in data culture at Kaiser, and it’s one that he believes most organizations must undergo. “At Kaiser Permanente, we thought we were going to use Tableau to create dashboards and help drive fact-based decision making,” he said. “What we didn’t expect was the impact that would have on our data culture. Using analytics is altering how we think, behave and work.” That change in the overall perception of who is responsible for analytics comes from “data democratization,” deRhodes said. “We have more eyeballs looking at the data, and with more people looking at it, we’re getting more insights than we ever did before.” To change data culture and influence other changes that need to occur to get more insights out of data requires six essential steps, deRhodes said



NIST awards three-year grant for cybersecurity jobs 'heat map'

Overall, the cybersecurity sector has struggled to fill open jobs. Last year in the U.S., Burning Glass found there were nearly 50,000 jobs posted requiring a CISSP security certification, “the primary credential in cybersecurity work.” However only 65,000 people hold that credential — and most were already employed. Rodney Peterson, the lead of NIST’s National Institute for Cybersecurity Education, told FedScoop that the map would help demonstrate where gaps lie. “The data exists, but we want to visualize it on a map, so if you are in Michigan and you apply [to a job in another region] you want to see what is the demand but more importantly what is the supply — you can start to drill down the data geographically,” Peterson said.


This startup wants to bring the Internet of things to the enterprise

The software focus gives the customer a lot of flexibility. So if the sensor is designed to measure temperature for example, the system can be changed to measure temperature once a day, and later, once every hour. An operator could also change the range when an alert might sound or otherwise adjust parameters in the software. For people used to dealing with today’s computer and mobile software this may not sound revolutionary, but for the embedded world of old-school sensors, such flexibility can still be rare because programming the sensors is so complicated. That’s where the Helium software comes into play.


Financial Services Warms Up to AI

Publicis.Sapient ‘buckets’ AI platforms into three main categories: ‘big data’ tools, which enable humans to draw conclusions from massive amounts of connected and correlated data; correlation-based platforms such as IBM Watson and Google Deep Mind, which analyze large sets of data to determine patterns and where individual data points have been statistically relevant; and causal-based platforms such as Lucid, which apply an understanding of how humans think to problem sets. “The three categories of tools collect the data, answer ‘what’, and answer ‘why’,” Sutton said. By way of background, Sutton noted that AI first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s when pioneers such as Alan Kay, Doug Lenat and Marvin Minsky conceptualized different means to simulate human intelligence and technology.


Defining Enterprise Architecture: Economics and the Role of I.T.

In any case, assuming for a moment, the bulk of IT is going outboard, why would an Enterprise need IT people in the Information Age? That is, what do IT people bring to the table to an Enterprise in the Information Age? I submit, IT people bring to the table the drafting skills... the drafting skills! They know how to describe things. They know how to build models. This is non-trivial! You send a mechanical engineer to a university... not to trade school... to university for four years to learn how to do drafting... to learn how to describe things so every other mechanical engineer in the universe can understand precisely what it is they are describing. Is this an important idea? This is a REALLY important idea.


From Imperative to Functional and Back-Monads are for Functional Languages

A pure function is a concept that equates the mathematical notion of a function with the software notion of a subroutine (often, confusingly, also called a function). A pure function is a subroutine that behaves like a mathematical function: its only input is its arguments and its only output is its return value, and it may have absolutely no other effect on the world. It is therefore said that pure functions are free of side-effects: they may not engage in I/O, and may not mutate any variables that may be observed by other pure functions. A pure functional programming (PFP) language is one where all subroutines must be pure functions. Contrast this to non-PFP or imperative languages, which allow impure functions,



Quote for the day:

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." -- Ernest Hemingway

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