Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 30, 2012

Illustrated Design Patterns: More real-time examples in C#
In software engineering, a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern isn't a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.

Three Schools of Thought for Enterprise Architecture
Mostly the online discussion focused around the role of the newest domain of Enterprise Architecture… the domain of Business Architecture. Depending on how Business Architecture is understood, the role of EA can be dramatically different.

Setup of ThinApp Factory in vSphere
The following article was published on the vmWare Blog and outlines the steps to install the ThinApp Factory Appliance in a vSphere environment using the Setup Executable.

Homemade tech to reduce India's cyber threats
Cybersecurity analyst calls on government to promote use of local IT products to prevent cyberespionage caused by foreign-made equipment.

Chores to consider before and after upgrading to OS X Mountain Lion
A prominent Mac storage developer recently pitched its software as the path to "a smooth upgrade to Apple's Mountain Lion." Whether or not one buys the program, the recommended list of chores — both before and after the OS upgrade — make sense, especially for the new SSD-only MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs.

Is Windows 8 a catastrophe or a success?
Windows 8 is basically, in my humble opinion, Windows 7 R2 with a new interface dubbed 'Metro.' Admittedly, I wasn't a big fan of '8' in the beginning. I've changed my mind--in spite of what some fanboys think--without a penny coming to my bank account from Microsoft.

In Columbus, a hospital designed for purposeful distraction
A thoughtful design strategy that is not meant to be noticed is placing computer stations, work areas, and educational spaces away from the patient rooms. This reduces foot traffic and stressful distractions directly around patient rooms.

Fraudsters tempt Olympic fans with bogus streaming websites
"Other fake live streaming sites when clicked will redirect to another site requiring an email address," wrote Maela Angeles, a fraud analyst with Trend Micro. "As such, cybercriminals can harvest email addresses, which may be used for their spamming activities."

Apple earns a place on Chinese blacklist
Guangdong's watchdog has placed Apple on a "company integrity" blacklist due to after-care and policy concerns.

Custom Functions in Excel: Part V, XLL-RTDs
Why would you want to call an RTD from an XLL? Recall that the way to call an RTD is through the RTD function in Excel, so the user needs to somehow remember how many parameters your function takes and in what order to supply them and even what the function is called. Good luck explaining that to your users!

How to set up and use the RTD function in Excel
Just in case you wonder what is RTD and how to have it setup, here is the microsoft knowledge base article on the subject.

Quote for the day:

"Enduring setbacks while maintaining the ability to show others the way to go forward is a true test of leadership." ~Nitin Nohria

July 29, 2012

Can Creativity be Automated?
Music lends itself naturally to being parsed by algorithms—mathematics is mixed up in every chord, beat, and harmony that we hear. But can computer programming hack something as subjective as grading English papers?

Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
Andrew Munsell is having tough time with CAPTCHAs. Read on to see how it is and may be we all are experiencing the same trouble.

Vertical Is The New Horizontal: How The Cloud Makes Domain Expertise More Valuable In The Enterprise
While there are still a few providers for whom the “all-things-to-all-people” approach is quite successful (Microsoft, Oracle), the vast majority of successful cloud solution providers have struck gold by picking one thing and doing it extremely well.

Human Error Cited in Hosting.com Outage
Hosting.com said human error was responsible for a data center power outage that left more than 1,100 customers without service. The downtime occurred as the company was conducting preventive maintenance on a UPS system in the company’s data center in Newark, Del.

University of Groningen Offers Repertory Grid Tool for Capturing Architecture Decisions
Dan Tofan from the University of Groningen provides the open source software tool RGT (Repertory Grid Tool) to software architects for capturing and evaluating their architecture decisions. Using the tool architects can better document their decisions and reflect about them.

The Titleless Leader
Leading without a title is about taking personal responsibility. We—the world—is in desperate need of people who will choose to lead whenever and wherever they can.

Database Security Testing In the Light of SQL Injection Attack
This article basically focuses on providing clear, simple, actionable guidance for preventing SQL Injection flaws in the database applications under test.

How Companies Will Googlefy Your Career
Global giants like IBM, Amazon and Google have already begun importing predictive performance analytics to manage their human capital portfolios. Their efforts are arguably more sophisticated than these new college tries.

Introduction to Security Troubleshooting
This post is the first part of a multi-part series (I haven't decided how many parts there will be) on effective Cisco security deployment troubleshooting. While later posts will focus more on either a particular device or technology, I'll cover some general guidelines and concepts here.

Quote for the day:

"Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed." ~Brian Tracy

July 28, 2012

GPS accuracy to improve in EU with new augmentation service
EGNOS, a system providing data that makes GPS readings even more accurate, can now be used through the internet as well as via satellite

Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller
Bad news: With less than $50 of off-the-shelf hardware and a little bit of programming, it’s possible for a hacker to gain instant, untraceable access to millions of key card-protected hotel rooms.

Hate Small Talk? These 5 Questions Will Help You Work Any Room
Do you love going to events, but find yourself stranded during happy hour, tongue-tied and tucked in a corner? Initiating and maintaining conversations while networking is a necessary skill, and one you can easily improve with these simple tips.

Format a ESX & ESXi VMFS file system manually
Recently I came across a query in the VMware communities, the query was “How to reformat a VMFS file system or Datastore manuallly” The preferred method of reformat the VMFS file system is from a console or SSH session as you can simply recreate the file system without having to make any changes to the disk partition.

No Silver Business Intelligence Bullets, But Still a Bright Upside
Likewise, the BI market finds itself awash in really cool reporting tools (seriously!) whose ads imply quick results with little effort. The reality is that success on the scale envisioned by many customers requires the planning, coordination, and integration associated with an IT project.

Leadership: It is not about you! Get over it.
What a leader needs to remember is that they are not the most important person in the organisation. A great leader is more concerned with the vision and cause of the organisation

Is Apple taking a financial interest in Twitter?
The New York Times reports that the two companies have talked in recent months, but they are not in talks at this time. Apple could potentially invest several hundred million dollars into Twitter, which has already gathered close to $1 billion in funding

Microsoft Paid $1.2B for Yammer, But You Can Have It for Free
According to Sacks, Yammer will stick with this “freemium” model as it moves under Microsoft’s wing, and it will use the strategy to encourage adoption not only of its own products, but existing Microsoft tools as well. Microsoft declined to comment for this story, but clearly, the company is working to change the way its core business operates in order to keep up with the latest wave of tech outfits.

Predictive analytics might not have predicted the Aurora shooter
Certainly any law enforcement officer who knew of the pattern of activity for this individual would have flagged it as suspicious and investigated. But data mining, also called machine learning, doesn't work the same way.

Ask The Entrepreneurs: 15 Ways to Incorporate Fitness Into Your Company Culture
Ask The Entrepreneurs is a regular series where members of those involved in the Young Entrepreneur Council are asked a single question that aims to help Lifehack readers level up their own lives, whether in a area of management, communication, business or life in general. Here’s the is what the entrepreneurs say for the question related to the topic

Quote for the day:

Success is not built on success. It's built on failure. It's built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe -Sumner Redstone

July 27, 2012

Will Enterprise Architecture Ever “Cross the Chasm?”
While the field has grown, the proliferation of voices, methods, frameworks, and generally inconsistent advice in the field of EA has also grown. The number of “EA Frameworks” has grown to include a wide array of overlapping bodies of work.

OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell
... Our standards making process is broken beyond repair. This outcome is the direct result of the nature of the IETF, and the particular personalities overseeing this work. To be clear, these are not bad or incompetent individuals. On the contrary – they are all very capable, bright, and otherwise pleasant. But most of them show up to serve their corporate overlords, and it’s practically impossible for the rest of us to compete. ...

Payment terminal flaws shown at Black Hat
Criminals can also leverage these vulnerabilities to trick store clerks into thinking that a transaction was authorized by the bank when in fact it wasn't, allowing them to buy things without actually paying.

Avoid These 6 Recipes for Business Disaster
Why would anyone want to know the formula for failure? Because you may be blind to the fact you are already following it, at least in part. And if you know the ingredients to avoid, you'll save your business before it's too late.

4 Reasons Why IT Matters More Than Ever
The argument that IT no longer matters has resurfaced. In this age of consumerization, BYOD and the cloud, IT departments are, in fact, vital to any business, able to create value and sort the wheat from the chaff as stakeholders eye new investments or money-saving ideas.

Lithium-Air Batteries Get a Recharge
Lithium-air batteries work, at least in theory, by exposing a lithium anode to an electrolyte that grabs its positively charged lithium ions and drives them toward the cathode, made of a different, porous material that allows oxygen from the air to form the crucial lithium peroxide.

LaCie 2Big NAS offers 6TB of network storage
If you think that LaCies latest network attached storage product, the 2Big NAS, looks like something youve seen before, youre right. But beneath the familiar appearance (the basic design of the 2Big has been around since 2007), there are a number of differences under the hood.

How To Be A Horrible Leader – 50 Bad Leadership Traits
Of course this is done in the hope that one can avoid the ill effects on an organization from any of bad leadership behaviors. We cannot all be perfect, but all it takes is a few of these in the right combination to kill moral and create a horribly run organization.

Losing Can Be Useful, If You Learn To Get Good At It
Successful entrepreneurs are crazy risk-takers, right? Not so much. The best know precisely how much they can lose--and what they can gain from the process.

Microsoft announces finalists for startup accelerator programme in India
Microsoft has unveiled the names of the 11 tech startups that will be incubated at the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure in Bangalore. The program was announced in May this year and received more than 200 applications from startups.

Enterprise & IT Architecture Global Excellence Awards 2012
Check out the nominees to the various categories of Enterprise & IT Architecture Globa Excellence awards 2012 for the year 2012 instituted by iCMG and hope to have the winners published out there soon.

Quote for the day:

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely." -- Auguste Rodin

July 26, 2012

Third Largest Botnet Ring Shut Down
"The takedown, while long overdue, is another welcome example of what the security industry can accomplish cooperatively and without the aid of law enforcement officials," said Brian Krebs, a computer security expert and blogger.

Warning: New Android malware tricks users with real Opera Mini
The devil is in the details: in the background, the malicious app sends expensive international text messages to earn its creators revenue. The malicious app does the dirty work to incur costs on the victim.

Windows Azure now offers HIPAA BAA compliance for healthcare-industry users
Microsoft is offering healthcare users and partners needing HIPAA guarantees the ability to store more information in public and/or hybrid Azure clouds.

Apple looked to Sony for iPhone design inspiration, court documents show
Apple founder Steve Jobs' admiration for Sony isn't a secret, and the court filing appears to show that as part of the design process for the first iPhone, Apple asked one of its designers to answer the question: "What would Sony do?"

Physician robot to begin making rounds
With a video screen for a head, a microphone and speaker for a mouth and two high-definition cameras for eyes, RP-VITA offers a more human-like interaction for physicians who can't be on site.

Building a Performance Analytics Environment
It quickly became clear that, while most of the recent data surrounding program growth, enrollment, and faculty loads existed, access was very paper-centric — little or none of this historic information existed in electronic form. Mining this information would be a challenge, but the overarching problem was rooted in access, reliability, and the amount of time required to have each academic office search for, gather, and summarize their own data.

IT careers: Do you need an executive coach?
CEOs have long used executive coaches to take their leadership to the next level. Now IT pros are following suit.

Programming languages even a business analyst can use
A key advantage to this type of DSL is that business analysts who speak the jargon of the business, but who are not necessarily programmers, can write business rules on their own.

Be a “Karma Yogi”- The Leadership of Thoughts and Action
What really causes people to follow leaders to the journeys unknown, to pledge lives, to follow without a second thought?

Why the Latest Senate Cybersecurity Bill is a Joke
A new version of the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protect Act (CISPA) is about to be put to vote in the U.S. Senate., and it could very well pass. But the modified bill is no better than earlier versions, according to CIO.com blogger Constantine von Hoffman. Here's why.

Quote for the day:
Receiving is good but giving is much better. Nevertheless, sharing is the best. -- Shahrizad Shafian

July 25, 2012

Is Big Data big hype?
Management guru Peter Drucker saw increasingly available IT as a threat to corporate decision making, not due to cost or some perceived evil, but because IT made it so easy for management to focus on the past rather than attempting to determine and react to future trends.

NSW Govt SAP roll-out to be cloud test case: Ovum
Ovum Asia Pacific research director for IT, Steve Hodgkinson, said that government departments around the country (Australia) would be watching the deal to see if cloud services will be a better way of providing shared services.

Silicon Valley Says Step Away From the Device
“If you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it’ll boil to death — it’s a nice analogy,” said Mr. Crabb, who oversees learning and development at Facebook. People “need to notice the effect that time online has on your performance and relationships.”

EC opens cybersecurity consultation
The EC is seeking the views of governments, businesses and citizens about their experiences and possible EU responses to cyber incidents that disrupt essential networks and information systems.

Compliance In The Cloud Era
The bad news is that we can't get too comfortable. The dynamics of compliance are changing as we grant third parties more access to sensitive and critical data, and the damage if there is a major security breach at one of your key external partners.

Top 50 Innovation Tweeters of 2012
We knew we follow a lot of great innovation people on twitter (including a lot of the great Innovation Excellence authors) and were curious to see whom should be followed to learn most on innovation. Read on to see the list.

The Future of Customer Relationships: Where is all this heading?
Dr. Michael Wu, Chief Scientist, of Lithium Technologies, has been doggedly trying to uncover the meaning of influence, its impact on relationships, and ultimately corporate profit structures. Target the influencers, and you can move the crowd. There are seemingly vast opportunities in understanding and leveraging influencers within networked communities.

Java Vulnerabilities Increasingly Targeted By Attackers, Researchers Say
One clear trend is that Web exploit toolkit developers are increasingly focusing on Java exploits, Jones said. They are also integrating exploits for new Java vulnerabilities at a much faster pace than before.

5 Features in Android Jelly Bean To Drool Over
Google has released a worthy successor to Android 4.0, which brings improvements in fluidity and responsiveness, a cool predictive keyboard, better notifications, offline maps and Apple Siri's nemesis --Google Now

5 Things That Keep App Developers Up At Night
Compounding the stress: The ever-present possibility that a bug will be detected by a journalist, potential investor, or a celebrity with a large Twitter following.

Quote for the day:

"Playing it safe is the most popular way to fail" --Elliott Smith

July 24, 2012

ASP.NET - Password Strength Indicator using jQuery and XML
ASP.NET Password Strength Indicator somewhat similar to AJAX PasswordStrength extender control behavior and implemented by using jQuery and XML.

Flexibility: A Foundation for Responsive Design
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past year or so, you know that responsive Web design is one of the biggest trends these days. Introduced by Ethan Marcotte, the concept is simple: develop a site using methods that enable it to adapt and respond to different devices and resolutions.

Why does the IT industry continue to listen to Gartner?
Another day, another provocative research report from Gartner, which has a long track record of spectacularly wrong predictions. I've collected some of their greatest hits. Er, misses.

After Infy, TCS, Cognizant in fray to buy Lodestone
TCS and Cognizant have joined Infosys in the race to take over Swiss firm Lodestone Management Consultants, a management and technology consulting firm.

Samsung adopts Windows Azure for Smart TV cloud structures
Samsung announced on Monday its decision to use Windows Azure technology to manage the Smart TV system through cloud-based technology. The company cited a reduction in costs, increased productivity and a flexible, scalable model which can be expanded to meet its growing customer base.

Harley-Davidson deal win spurs Infosys to open new US delivery centre
Outsourcer Infosys has decided to open a delivery centre in Milwaukee, after it won a five-year deal with motorbike maker Harley-Davidson to supply tech services such as applications management

Facebook's Zuckerberg wins privacy patent, 6 years on
The patent, number 8,225,376, was first applied for on July 25, 2006. Zuckerberg and Facebook's former chief privacy officer Chris Kelly are credited as inventors for the patent, which is titled "Dynamically generating a privacy summary."

Microsoft's Lync: Unified Communications Made Easy
Microsoft Lync offers Instant, Messaging Audio/Video Conferencing and Telephony Services, making it the complete unified communications tool SMEs need, says Microsoft's Sukhvinder Ahuja

How to Handle Relational Data in a Distributed Cache
Although distributed caching is great, one challenge it presents is how to cache relational data that has various relationships between data elements. This is because a distributed cache provides you a simple, Hashtable-like (key, value) interface ...

Robert's Rules: The Four Commitments
Here are Robert Thompson's four leadership traits rather commitments.

Quote for the day:

"Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." -- Albert Einstein

July 23, 2012

Applying 'Fail Fast' in development
This is a very good read for all developers and it is about how the 'fail fast' approach can help you produce reliable systems.

The 6 People You Need in Your Corner
Nothing incredible is accomplished alone. You need others to help you, and you need to help others. With the right team, you can form a web of connections to make the seemingly impossible practically inevitable.

The 11 Leadership Secrets You've Never Heard About
The old distinctions between leaders and followers are gone. Great followers follow by leading. Here’s 11 ways to make sure you do just that.

Google Glass controls and Artificial Intelligence detailed
Google’s cautious approach to allowing people to play with Project Glass means the UI of the wearable computer is something of a mystery, but a new patent application could spill some of the secrets.

The art of transparency
In a CGMA survey of CEOs from 21 countries, 87% of respondents said they view transparency as an opportunity. The CEOs sharing more information could help burnish a business’s reputation with customers, improve decision making and lead to greater innovation. Still 13% of CEOs said they view transparency as a threat.

Apple foe Proview finds itself sued by own legal counsel
Grandall Law Firm, which represented the Chinese company in its action over the iPad trademark, sues for its 4 percent of the $60 million settlement.

Multitasking's Real Victims
It's a well-cited observation that juggling two or more things at once depletes our health and harms our productivity. As we clock in more hours on smartphones and social networks, we've ushered in the "provisional conversation": a face-to-face discussion that falls apart as one or more participants default to checking their phones, only to restart as the handsets are put back away.

Rackspace: OpenStack could be the Linux of the cloud
OpenStack has the potential to become to the cloud what the LAMP stack is to servers, Rackspace's chief has said, while blasting VMware and Amazon for not participating in the scheme

Is ‘Big Data’ good or evil? New survey exposes growing debate
Tech experts believe the vast quantities of data — so-called “digital exhaust” — that humans and machines will be creating by the year 2020 could enhance productivity, improve organizational transparency, and expand the frontier of the “knowable future.”

Quote for the day:

"Lead and inspire people. Don't try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people must be lead." —-- Ross Perot

July 22, 2012

HostGee Innovates Cloud Hosting with Cloud Servers in Saudi Arabia
Designed to give users the power they need rapidly, Cloud Servers in Saudi Arabia combines convenient control panels, a strong infrastructure and frequently used features, like firewalls and load balancers – all at a fraction of the cost of other services.

VMware Clusters – Scale up or out?
Is is it better to Scale up or out? The answer is of course, it depends. First lets define the two terms. Put simply, Scale Up is having larger hosts, and less of them. Scale Out is having more smaller hosts.

Power Pwn: This DARPA-funded power strip will hack your network
The Power Pwn may look like a power strip, but it's actually a DARPA-funded hacking tool for launching remotely-activated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet attacks. If you see one around the office, make sure to ask if it's supposed to be there.

Big Data: The Coming Sensor Data Driven Productivity Revolution
... “Boeing jet engines can produce 10 terabytes of operational information for every 30 minutes they turn. A four engine jumbo jet can create 640 terabytes of data on just one Atlantic crossing ...

Act Bigger than You Are
Not bigger in the bad sense, with the arrogance and complacency that has made some banks, for example, feel they are above the rules. But bigger in terms of having the confidence to propel growth and set courageous goals.

Whitepaper archive for Business Analysts
Here is a collection of Whilte paper archives published by DEA, which would be useful for those handling the Business Analysis functions.

Which EA tools? – and why?
Question about EA Tools… What tools do you use to help you with EA tasks and why? What do you perceive their Pros and Cons to be?

Top 20+ change management mistakes to avoid
Driving and managing change will remain the number one priority for leaders according to a recently published study. But the reality is that most change efforts fail. Many of these failures can be traced to these common mistakes:

Enterprise Spring Best Practices – Part 2 – Application Architecture
This blog presents a look at the overall application components and architecture.

Quote for the day:
"Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates." ~Don Marquis

July 21, 2012

IT: Becoming less about tech skills, more about integration
The term “enterprise architect” has become a bit hackneyed, but the analogy is a good one. An architect may not be the best person to swing a hammer, but does have a good idea of modern materials, construction techniques, and vendors who can execute their vision.

Google Keep(ing) Secrets? What is Google Keep?
We will see Google Keep I think once Google Now catches on. Google Keep will be a feature where you can select the sites you want to “Keep” updated to be in the “Now” and not some static offline version point in time.

10 Disaster Preparedness Questions to Ask Your Cloud Services Provider
While the typical cloud contract contains uptime clauses and credits for missed service levels, it often fails to adequately protect the enterprise customer. Here are some questions the intelligent customer can ask to make sure they are sheltered from potential storms in the cloud.

4 tech trends in IT disaster recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) is a subset of business continuity (BC), and like BC, it's being influenced by some of the key trends in the IT industry. Foremost among these are cloud services, server and esktop virtualization, the proliferation of mobile devices in the workforce and the growing popularity of social networking as a business tool.

hi1.4xlarge: AWS SSD EC2 High I/O Quadruple Extra Large (and a Dr Pepper)
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is crowing about its super-fast, SSD-backed, hi1.4xlarge AWS EC2 instance type. Its full name is quite a mouthful: High I/O Quadruple Extra Large, but Amazon claims it can achieve 120,000 IOPS. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers scrape together $3.10 to try it for an hour.

Time To Build Your Big-Data Muscles
McKinsey Global Institute gauges that by 2018, the United States will create 290,000 to 340,000 new big data jobs and 140,000 to 190,000 (more than half) could go unfilled because skilled candidates are in short supply.

Obama: Cyber attack serious threat to economy, national security
U.S. President Barack Obama is urging the Senate to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2012. He believes legislation will help the U.S. fight "the cyber threat to our nation," which he calls "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face."

New Analyst Report Rips Agile: Says It's 'Designed To Sell Services ...
"In spite of the specialization of resources which limits the scope of the work of developers, the Agile movement might inspire and encourage developers to push back on processes, tools, documentation, and following plans,"

Mobile App Security Techniques and Traps
Graham Lee discusses designing, building and testing a secure mobile app, detailing several vulnerabilities that can be found in such apps and ways to deal with them.

Quote for the day:

To be effective for the long haul, you have to make room for the strategy work." --Jamillah Warner, marketing coordinator at Nobuko Solutions