Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

November 03, 2012

Hitting back at cyberattackers: Experts discuss pros and cons
The questions are being asked more often: When a cyberattack hits your network, is it right to launch a counter-attack of some type to try to at least identify the source if not stop it? Since the wheels of justice do indeed grind slowly, should frustrated IT professionals with security skills take matters into their own hands or hire others to do so?

Try the solid, configurable firewall distribution Sphirewall
Out of the box, you get advanced information for your network and traffic usage as well as the ability to glance at network traffic according to user, address, device, and much more. Unlike most Linux-based firewalls, Sphirewall doesn’t use iptables — it uses a kernel module that hooks into the packet stream and passes the packets to the Sphirewall core, which tracks and manages the packets based on user-configurable rules and events.

The Power of Persistence for Leaders
In the world of business leadership and entrepreneurship, persistence is often touted as one of the key success attributes. In a 2011 study conducted by professors at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, persistence was found to be one of the strict criteria for successful CEOs.

jQuery Modal Dialog with Dynamic Content
Here is a demonstration of how to implement a jQuery dialog window (modal or normal) that can contain truly dynamic content, in which the contents are loaded from a totally different aspx/html page.

Back to Basics: Ensuring Strong BI Software Selection
Key differentiators that used to exist between vendor capabilities are becoming harder and harder to decipher, with branding and market penetration becoming a key factor in many software evaluations. Now, in software selection, time to value and scalability are becoming more important success factors than simply providing common features and functions out of the box.

Firefox to force secure connections for selected domains
To force secure connections between the browser and a server, Mozilla uses HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security), a mechanism used by servers to indicate that the connecting browser must use a secure connection, wroteMozilla's David Keeler in a blog post.

The Most Urgent Security Risks in 2012
The state of IT security is constantly shifting. Keeping up-to-date with the latest trends and practices is vital to protecting your organization. Faronics unveils the latest results of the State of IT Security Study conducted by the Ponemon Institute – a leading research authority on data security.

The Amazon Outage in Perspective: Failure Is Inevitable, So Manage Risk
The most recent Amazon Web Services outage left customers (and rival cloud providers) blaming Amazon. Instead, CIO.com columnist Bernard Golden says, everyone needs to accept that cloud computing is not immune to failure.

Google Wallet Gets Real
The Google Wallet Card is intended for circumstances when customers cannot use their software-based, mobile phone-bound Google Wallet, due to a merchant's lack of support for NFC payments.

Now, it's BYOA (bring your own application)
That's the prediction of Edwin Schouten, who points out that along with doing a lot of their work on their own smartphones, tablets or laptops, employees also will soon be selecting the application they are most comfortable with. "This is the whole 'app' culture nowadays," he points out. "Although everyone has a preference, which app you use does not matter, as long as it gets the job done."

Quotes for the day:

"Vision is a picture of the future that produces passion." -- Bill Hybels

"When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier." -- Roy E. Disney

November 02, 2012

Windows 8 uptake remains listless after public launch
The poor-thus-far showing of Windows 8 doesn't preclude it from eventually thriving, of course. Microsoft is reportedly ready to spend between $1 billion and $1.5 billion on advertising the new operating system, its Windows RT spin-off, and the also-new Windows Phone 8.

Intel researchers work on new way to display, share images
Vara demonstrated the project, dubbed Display without Borders, with a laptop, a Microsoft Connect sensor and a projector. Intel didn't give a timeframe for when the technology might go to market..

TDWI Checklist Report // Using Location Information for Geospatial Analytics
In this TDWI Checklist Report, we review the alignment of geospatial information with the business intelligence environment and provide suggestions for capturing location information and differentiating between deliverable addresses and geolocations.

arrayDB, a New and Easy PHP ORM
arrayDB ORM library has only 5 classes. You mostly use a singleton of one, while others are used internally, that's all. Caching and keeping cache synchronized with the database is all automated, you don't need to keep track of these.

The difference between a weakness and a fatal flaw
Having this significant weakness most often counters or negates the positive impact of profound strengths. In every case we have examined, fatal flaws appear to pull down the effectiveness of a leader. These cases are not rare or unusual. Statistically, we find that 28% of the population of leaders has one or more competencies at the 10th percentile or lower.

An enterprise-wide vision for social business: SAP's new take
Earlier today software giant SAP unveiled their latest vision for enterprise social software, along with an integrated set of functional offerings that focus on delivering targeted business value. Is it enough?

The Digital Capabilities Your Company Needs
In-depth interviews with 157 executives in 50 large companies found that the most fundamental technology requirement for digital transformation is not particular skills or particular technologies. It is a core set of four digital capabilities. These four capabilities revolve around technology but typically not all of them reside in the IT department.

Leadership Perspectives: What Is Your Intention?
There are so many avenues we could take in this conversation, and The Lead Change Group has done that in their new book, The Character Based Leader: Instigating a Leadership Revolution….One Person at a Time, written by 21 authors who believe deeply in this concept of character based leadership.

The software creation literacy crisis
Amid the great wall of noise the digital world is today stands a stark reality: fewer and fewer people have the ability to read and write the basic code building blocks of the internet and mobile world. Ismael Ghalimi of STOIC provocatively writes

Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments
So CIOs will be relegated to the backoffice, back-room server stuff, while the CDO gets all the fun, get-the-attention-of-management stuff, such as cloud, social, mobile and Big Data? Gartner says there is a highly visible role for CIOs as well: "CEOs want their CIOs to make their impact felt where the enterprise meets the outside world.

Quote for the day:

"A competent leader can get efficient service from poor troops, while an incapable leader can demoralize the best of troops." -- John Pershing

November 01, 2012

Cloud adoption in India rising
The bigger growth is happening in private clouds - enterprises using the cloud concept internally - rather than in public clouds, where companies use third-party shared data centres to access computing resources. The Zinnov study estimated that 70-75% of the $4.5 billion cloud market in 2015 would come from private cloud deployments.

EMC to Buy Web Intelligence Provider Silver Tail Systems
EMC plans to use the purchase to beef up its RSA security division in the rapidly growing Web fraud detection market. The software will "complement" RSA's anti-fraud solutions that help leading banks and retailers thwart sophisticated cyberattacks.

The Battle of the Titans: What it all means for IT managers caught in the middle
The sands are rapidly shifting in enterprise IT but the quick witted IT professionals will understand that they are no longer a provider of technology for their company but a broker. It’s not for them to decide what mobile platforms to use but for their execs, line of business owners and end users to decide.

The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration
That night, my more experienced director wrote up 100 lines of Perl script to replace the few thousand lines of Java code. The point isn’t that Java was bad, it was that just in this particular case, Perl was more efficient for the problem at hand. People still use Perl, they still use Cobol, but they also use C, C++, C# and of course Java.

Cross-platform development tools boost Windows Phone 8
This is the first time so many open-source and cross-platform frameworks are on board with Windows Phone on the first day of a new SDK version release, according to a blog posted by Olivier Bloch, technical evangelist at Microsoft.

2012 Top Scary Trends in Tech
In previous years, the monsters were such awful ghouls, ghosts and goblins as Unreliable Clouds, IT Consolidation, Virtual Workplaces, The Never-Ending Workday and Cyber Bullies from Hell. This year, I've got a bunch of new ones for you, so let's crack open a fresh bucket of chilled monkey brains and get our B-movie rolling.

Business Processes are Still a Manual Affair
Less than half of business processes are automated and manual tasks for BI and reporting are especially burdensome as IT leaders can’t carry through on their interests with a lack of enterprise capabilities, according to new survey findings.

A Vote for Constructive Office Politics
In the world of negotiation, there’s a profound difference between focusing on your own position … the “I want” versus your opponent’s “I want.” Negotiating around the “I wants” is not much different than engaging in a playground squabble. The playground approach offers no rational mechanism for going from disagreement to agreement, short of who’s bigger and tougher.

Lack of Abuse Detection Allows Cloud Computing Instances to Be Used Like Botnets
Some cloud providers fail to detect and block malicious traffic originating from their networks, which provides cybercriminals with an opportunity to launch attacks in a botnet-like fashion, according to a report from Australian security consultancy firm Stratsec.

How to Delegate – 7 steps
You’re snowed under; you have too many meetings to attend and not enough hours in the day to get the work done. Does that sound familiar? You also have a team of pretty capable people and know that you should delegate more; in fact, you keep saying to yourself “I must delegate more” but never quite get around to it.

Quotes for the day:

"It is impossible to win the race unless you venture to run, impossible to win the victory unless you dare to battle. " -- Richard M. DeVos

"Swallow your pride occasionally... it's non-fattening!" -- Unknown

October 31, 2012

A Detailed Look at The New File API in Java 7
This project provides a mechanism for managing file systems on remote computers. It supports operations such as navigation over the file system, and inspecting, renaming, copying or deleting files. Using the new I/O file allows us to extend the capabilities of the project to manipulate ZIP archives content and also watch for modifications.

3 health IT must-haves for natural disaster preparedness
As many healthcare centers employ a higher than average concentration of IT equipment, there are certain ways they can leverage them to cope with disasters- and things they must do to safeguard their technology as well. Mike Detjen of Arcadia Solutions speaks about some of the must-haves for HIT in disaster scenarios – ways it can be useful and things to be concerned about

ARM introduces 64-bit processors for phones, tablets and servers
The new ARM processors deliver 64-bit support, which enables a new range of hardware capabilities including more memory. The new processors also boast virtualization support, error correction, security capabilities and better floating point performance, Forsyth said.

Microsoft touts 4M Windows 8 upgrades
"In just the last three days, we have sold 4 million Windows 8 upgrades," Ballmer said during his early minutes on stage at Microsoft's BUILD Conference Tuesday. "The level of embrace from enthusiasts is very, very high.", Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said and later called the uptake "stunning."

Moving to the Cloud: Adoption, Impact, and What's Next
Clouds -- private, public, and hybrids -- have captured IT's attention. Saving data center costs is always attractive, but the technology isn't without risks. What do you need to know before you move to the cloud, and how with the technology impact your own data center? Where is the cloud headed?

MDM: It’s Not about One Version of the Truth
IT missed the point that the business wants data to support a system of engagement. The value of MDM is to be able to model and render a domain to fit a system of engagement. Until you understand and align to that, your MDM effort will not support the business and you won’t get the funding.

Google changes way emails are composed in Gmail
The new mechanism - currently available as a preview to some Gmail users - makes it easier to check previously sent or received messages while composing a new email. It also adds various other features, with more promised soon.

Indian IT companies shut offices temporarily due to Hurricane Sandy; Remain Unaffected
Several top companies such as Infosys, Cognizant, TCS, Mahindra Satyam, and HCL are closely monitoring the whole situation and working with local authorities to ensure the safety of their employees. Almost all the Indian IT companies, having operations in the Hurricane prone regions have a strong business contingency plan.

Good High-Level Enterprise Architecture Video
This animation shows the role of Enterprise Architecture starting from the perspective of a business user. That user has understandable wishes and requests, and the IT decisions made for him all make sense. But the result of all business users doing this independently is a 'hair ball architecture'. The role of Enterprise Architecture to prevent this from happening is illustrated.

DDoS Attacks Against Banks Raise Question: Is This Cyberwar?
Within the past month, crushing blasts of 65Gbps traffic, mainly from thousands of compromised Web servers, has targeted Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Sun Trust, PNC Financial Services, Regions Financial and Capital One. The attacks have effectively cut bank customers off from online services for extended periods.

Quote for the day:

"If you decide to go for it, do it with spirit: Sometimes success is due less to ability than to zeal. " -- Charles Buxton

October 30, 2012

Learning How to Swim: Making the Case for a Big Data Strategy
Most people have heard a lot of big data buzz, and a great percentage of these people are persuaded that its potential will be realized eventually. However, enterprises that could actually reap benefits from big data right now may be thinking there’s no rush to take advantage of it.

Malware hijacks your email, sends death threats
Analysis of the malware has found that a sabotaged computer can be controlled through a remote location -- a common component of such infections. Through this control, the creator is able to make threats on behalf of the infected user's PC.

Windows Store has enough apps to prevent Windows RT flop, say analysts
"This gives them a shot at success," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, in an interview. "It's a positive first showing, but they must have consistent singles, doubles, triples and home runs."

Enterprise Content Management: Become a Value Creator
Whether you’re talking about inducing better customer service or internal streamlining, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has shot onto the radar in recent months as our virtual worlds continue to impact – and hopefully relieve – our previously cluttered (and retrospectively rudimentary) offline processes.

How to Hold Productive Meetings That People Don’t Actually Hate
Meetings are an essential aspect of getting things done, collaborating and delegating, but for many they are the bane of business life. People actually leave companies because of the life draining nature of their meeting culture.

Where is cloud computing heading in 2013?
There will be more innovation in application testing and development in 2013, with new cloud applications coming out to market. “We can expect to see new types of applications delivered out of the cloud, more options for where data is hosted (and the type of infrastructure it’s hosted on) and more services offering ‘enterprise-grade’ application hosting.”

A Character-Based Leader Leaves a Powerful Legacy
If you are a character-based leader, you are making a difference, even if the evidence is sparse on a daily basis. The seeds of your leadership legacy are being planted every day, through the small, seemingly inconsequential choices you make. Those seeds may take months, or even years, to bear fruit. But they are there, ever-growing, taking root and preparing to bloom.

IT Security Survey Shows Struggle to Control Cloud Computing, Social Media and Mobile Risks
Many CIOs and chief information security officers are struggling to adapt security practices to a changing environment that includes cloud computing, social media and tablets, according to a survey of 1,850 such IT pros.

Cut Features; Add Value
The key to systematically being able to cut product scope, while still delivering a great product, is to link the value the user needs to receive to the actual features in the product. To understand that value, consider what problems the product is solving and what objectives the user has for the product. This will help you derive the most valuable features.

8 Hacks to Make Google Calendar More Useful
If you use Google Calendar, you probably add events, reminders and vacation days to it, just like the calendar that used to hang on your wall (or the day planner you carried with you before the emergence of smartphones). But, what if it wasn't just a calendar, and "events" weren't just places you had to be or items on your schedule? It turns out, Google Calendar can be useful for just about any task that is relevant to either days or times.

Quotes for the day:

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal." -- Henry Ford

"It's not what you are that holds you back, it's what you think you are not." -- Denis Waitley

October 29, 2012

Amazon suit shows Google as public cloud threat
At just a few months old, Google Compute Engine is seen as a threat to public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. At least that appears to be what Amazon thinks given its lawsuit against a former exec who is joining Google.

Top 5 Challenges for Hadoop MapReduce in the Enterprise
Extracting business value from the ‘big data’ contained in these unstructured, distributed file systems is becoming increasingly important. Distributed programming models such as MapReduce enable this type of capability, but the technology was not originally designed with enterprise requirements in mind.

Cryptography : A Basic Introduction of Hashing and HashAlgo class for beginners – Part 2
The SHA1 is one of the Commonly used hasing algorithm which provide Hashing functionality by using SHA1 classes and extending HashAlgorithm classes. The .Net Framework SHA1 hashing algorihm class uses a 160-bit hash key is extended by the SHA1CryptoServiceProvider(CSP) class and the SHA1Managed class.

Apple, Adobe called out in Australian parliament
The IT pricing inquiry is currently looking into the reasons why it is perceived that Australians pay more for technology. Research by consumer group Choice estimated that Australians pay, on average, 56 percent more for IT products than customers overseas. Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft were represented at a public hearing by the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), but have subsequently refused to appear before the committee themselves.

C++ String Toolkit (StrTk) Tokenizer
This article will present the tokenizing and splitting functionality of a simple C++ library called the String Toolkit. Tokenization in the context of string processing, is the method by which a sequence of elements are broken up or fragmented in sub-sequences called tokens. The indices in the original sequence that determine such breaks in the sequence are known as delimiters.

Data Governance: Managing Data as an Asset
The world of data governance is rife with supporters and promoters that are thrilled to be involved, but a bit unprepared to participate and execute. It’s like loading a gun and pulling the trigger before aiming – you’ll make a lot of noise and likely miss the target.

IBM brings carbon nanotube-based computers a step closer
Carbon nanotubes are very small structures made of a lattice of carbon atoms rolled into a cylindrical shape, and a team of eight researchers have figured out a way to precisely place them on a computer chip, IBM announced today. That development allows them to arrange the nanotubes 100 times more densely than earlier methods, a key step in economical chipmaking, and IBM has built a chip with more than 10,000 carbon nanotube-based elements.

How Designers Plan To Create 'The Route 66 Of The Future'
"It's about safety, creating awareness but also making roads energy-neutral in terms of lighting," says Studio Roosegaarde founder Daan Roosegaarde, "and most of all: creating the experience of an icon, the Route 66 of the future."

South Carolina breach exposes 3.6M SSNs
In the biggest data compromise of the year, Social Security Numbers (SSN) belonging to about 3.6 million residents in South Carolina have been exposed in an intrusion into a computer at the state's Department of Revenue.

IT spending slowdown, emerging trends reshuffles megavendor deck
The IT leaders who have been connected to large vendors for years under the guise of one throat to choke and integrated stacks are moving on. These IT leaders have already moved some infrastructure to the cloud and are looking to innovate. The big guys aren't exactly screaming innovation these days. Often, the big vendors are selling you more stacks and upping maintenance fees.

Recent Developments in Cloud Computing
Cloud computing continues to hold a great deal of promise for a variety of business and personal implementations. A lot of buzz has been generated this year with regards to the potential of cloud-based applications and web services as well as a few recent developments that highlight the direction in which the cloud computing phenomenon is moving.

Quotes for the day:

"Our greatest battles are that with our own minds." -- Jameson Frank

"Effective leaders help others to understand the necessity of change and to accept a common vision of the desired outcome." -- John Kotter

October 28, 2012

Thick Skin Thinking: How To Use Negative Feedback To Your Advantage At Work

“If you are of the belief that you never make mistakes, you probably have a narcissistic personality disorder, and it’s going to be really hard to give you feedback. Somebody who has enough self-awareness to recognize they might need feedback, that’s the person that’s going to say ‘Even when I’m on my best game, there’s always something I could’ve done to be better.’”

Configuring Database Mail in SQL Server
This is an enterprise solution for sending mails from the SQL Server database engine to SMTP servers. SQL Server database applications can communicate with users through an email system. It provides features like scalability, security, and reliability.

The Silent Killer of Big Companies
Most leaders today recognize how dangerous it can be to take a lax approach to people management. But how many leaders appreciate the risks that come with taking a lax approach to communication management — with failing to manage the way that ideas and information flows within their organization?

7 reasons why Windows RT works
But fear not: Just because Redmond doesn't want you calling it Windows 8 Lite doesn't mean it doesn't have redeemable qualities. Windows RT and the devices that run it offer some excellent, interesting innovations. Here are our top six:

BizTalk ESB Exception Handling – Consuming WCF Services – Part I
Another interesting fact I bumped into when calling a WCF service from an itinerary is that, when the WCF adapter raises an exception, the receive pipeline of the send port does not execute. The first time I saw this was when trying to authenticate a service request when the target service refused my credentials.

CIOs Talk About How Social Networking Builds Enterprise Collaboration
Over the last five years or so, more organizations have used social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate with customers. Now many organizations are taking a cue from those sites to deploy more socially minded communication and collaboration tools. Does taking a more social, collaborative approach work?

Why the New Oracle ADF Essentials is Important to JSF Developers

These news should be very interesting to developers who are currently using JSF to build their applications, as Oracle ADF Essentials is offering some unique capabilities and extensions around JSF. Here are some of the things JSF developers should know about ADF Essentials:

Data quality process needs all hands on deck
“More and more businesses need to invest resources for quality, useful information,” said Lyn Robison, another Gartner analyst. “A business that can’t produce useful information is like an airplane that can’t fly. How useful is that? Not very.”

Enterprise architecture methodology
It is hard to know which one is best EA methodology. Each kind has advantages and disadvantages, so choosing what kind of them is depending on each organization. There are twelve criteria that are most often used for comparing and evaluating enterprise-architectural methodologies.

IT, business executives don't see eye to eye on innovation: survey
"IT respondents are more likely to position themselves as driving innovation, being an expert on innovation and having the required skills to foster innovation," the report states. "Yet, business executives more quickly identified IT’s shortcomings in regard to its ability to support and drive innovation. In fact, business executives are less likely to highly rate IT’s knowledge of the business, skill sets, communication skills and more."

Quotes for the day:

"One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested." —-- E. M. Forster

"One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you." -- Dennis A. Peer

October 27, 2012

Reducing Uncertainty in the Financial Evaluation of Technology Projects
It's not uncommon for new technology projects to have little short-term impact, while having a significant effect on long-term strategic goals. Due to the discounting of these long-term benefits, they become less significant in an economic evaluation. For example, how could Apple have known the future value of the iPad when it was in development? This uncertainty poses a major problem to funding projects that don't support current product lines or markets.

Amazon Outage, Complexity and Interdependence
Throughout the day, Amazon had availability, performance and connectivity issues with most services on one of their datacenters or, as they call them, availability zones. While some people may still take this opportunity to declaim the dangers and issues with cloud computing, it should be a well-known fact that cloud services suffer failures and outages.

Microsoft starts $40 Windows 8 upgrade sales
Microsoft will sell the Windows 8 Pro upgrade at the discounted price until Jan. 31, 2013. It's not entirely clear what the price will be after the offer expires, but several online retailers selling the $69.99 boxed copy show that price as marked down from a regular price of $199.99.

It's happening: Hadoop and SQL worlds are converging
The common thread of announcements is essentially, “We know that Hadoop is not known for performance, but we’re getting better at it, and we’re going to make it look more like SQL.” In essence, Hadoop and SQL worlds are converging, and you’re going to be able to perform interactive BI analytics on it.

Can Business Embed IT?
Organizations and their IT departments are struggling to keep pace with evolving business environments that have now added social, mobile, cloud and analytic forces to the competitive toolset. At Forrester Research’s latest Orlando conference, Kyle McNabb, VP and practice leader for application development and delivery, sat down to discuss how business outcomes – not technology – will prescribe the structures and tactics of IT support going forward.

The High Costs of Securing Identities: How to Fix the Problem Using the Cloud
The cloud serves as that mechanism to enable configuring as opposed to programmer-driven customization to provide each and every industry with a predictable cost, a predictable path (with a real light at the end of the tunnel!) and a predictable result for solving identity management problems.

Does the Rise of the CMO Threaten CIOs?
"Ten years ago, marketing was always at the bottom of IT's to-do list," says Kristin Hambelton, vice president of Marketing for Neolane , a marketing technology provider. "IT wasn't discriminating against marketing, but IT usually has five or 10 projects going at any one time, and marketing was always at the bottom of the list." As a result, marketing pros got tired of waiting and sidestepped IT.

Leadership Development - Effectively Influencing Decision Makers
The 11 guidelines listed below are intended to help you do a better job of influencing decision-makers. In some cases, these decision-makers may be immediate or upper managers—in other cases they may be peers or cross-organizational colleagues.

Google should worry less about iOS and more about Windows 8 tablets
Have you used a Windows 8 tablet yet? If Google wants enterprise traction for Android, it has more to learn from these devices than it does from iPhones and iPads.

Quotes for the day:

"A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune." -- Author Unknown

"Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming" -- John Wooden

October 26, 2012

Windows 8: Four big takeaways for business and IT
Yes, this is even bigger than the launch of Windows 95. Why? Because Microsoft is completely rewriting the idea of what it means to use a computer. The old file and folder metaphor is gone. The visual image of a desktop workspace is history (except for legacy apps).

Facebook Releases New Android SDK
Facebook announced Facebook SDK 3.0 Beta for Android in a blog posting this week. Facebook's Michael Marucheck calls it the biggest update ever for Android developers. The major change is in the area of native UI controls.

IBM Voices Support for PaaS at Cloud Forum
IBM spent much of the one-day event, attended by 100 customers and 200 other stakeholders including business partners, talking up PaaS. The company's PaaS offering, called SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS), is available in pre-release form for customers of IBM's existing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering, SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) and it will be generally available later this quarter.

Introducing TDD With The Microsoft Fakes Framework
The big issue with TDD for most developers is, I think, the database. If your tests are driven by your data, and your data keeps changing, how do you to ensure that you get the "right" answer in your automated tests? However, that's just one example of a larger problem: If the code you're testing is dependent on something else, and that something else keep changing, how do you ensure that your test results stay constant?

Delivering Large-Scale IT Projects On Time, On Budget, and On Value
Half of all large IT projects—defined as those with initial price tags exceeding $15 million—massively blow their budgets. On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted. Software projects run the highest risk of cost and schedule overruns

There’s No Data Security ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card
Maintaining data security is no longer a when-you-get-to-it project. It’s a critical step that needs to be undertaken now, particularly as the government is formulating a final rule that toughens privacy. That was the take-home message from a session on data privacy at the Medical Group Management Association annual convention, in San Antonio.

A CEO takes on the war for talent
NetSuite's chief people officer, Marty Réaume, says he started using a talent-assessment tool called TriMetrix after executives noticed that many new hires were quitting after less than a year, Jessi Hempel writes. Also, the company's CEO, Zach Nelson, began reviewing every potential hire, a strategy that he says motivates recruiters to find better candidates.

5 Hybrid Cloud Use Cases

Along with its private and public siblings, hybrid cloud computing has garnered quite a bit of business interest and proclamations by analysts of rampant growth over the next few years. Technical and security concerns aside, how does this option for cloud deployment fit in the enterprise IT toolkit? And where would it work for business users? Here are five examples where a hybrid cloud model may hold a particular competitive or operational advantage.

Microsoft Releases Hadoop On Windows
HDInsight Server for Windows includes core Hadoop (meaning the Hadoop Distributed File System and MapReduce), plus Pig for MapReduce programming, Hive data query infrastructure, Hortonworks' recently introduced HCatalog table management service for access to Hadoop data, Scoop for data movement, and the Ambari monitoring and management console.

Interview: Steve Howard, COO of Sustainability, IKEA
At yesterday’s BSR conference in New York, I had the privilege of sitting down with Steve Howard, IKEA’s COO of Sustainability to talk about IKEA’s take on sustainability and their new sustainability strategy, known as “People and Planet Positive”.

Will the cloud be the end of the IT department?
Cloud apps are, in a sense, even more problematic. With whom does responsibility for the environment reside? What happens if a user accidentally deletes important data or a user account gets broken into? Proper management of passwords, backup policies, access control strategies, and other issues is even more important.

Quotes for the day:

"Never tell me the sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon." -- Anonymous

"Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions. This is a dangerous mistake." -- Peter Drucker

October 25, 2012

Managing "BYO" PCs in the enterprise (including WOA)
This post focuses on managing WOA PCs, which are designed with this "consumerization of IT" in mind. Since WOA PCs only support third-party code through the Windows Store and WinRT-based applications, we set out to develop industry-leading management capabilities that support BYO or company-deployed WOA PCs.

What Are They Doing with Big Data Technology?
Clearly, much of the buzz has centered on the open source tools collectively referred to as Hadoop, and my starting point is a review of the self-reported descriptions of those organizations that are using Hadoop. Conveniently, the Apache Software Foundation provides a wiki website entitled “Powered By Hadoop,” in which organizations report what they are doing.

Enhanced Memory Protections in IE10
While socially-engineered malware is the primary way that bad guys get their code onto victims’ computers, that is largely because browser vulnerabilities have become less common and harder to exploit over the last few years. However, as more and more users upgrade to IE9 and benefit from the protection provided by SmartScreen Filter, bad guys have a renewed interest in attacking the browser and its add-ons directly.

Are You Properly Addressing the Really Sticky Issues?
Change-related sticky issues center around certain topics, information, decisions, events, circumstances, etc. that have a bearing on the outcome of important initiatives, but clients are reluctant to discuss them. Instead of exploring causes, implications, potential responses, or resolution strategies, they prefer not to bring them up at all or to gloss over things in a casual, superficial manner.

Cloudera, MapR, Splunk update Hadoop tools
This week, Cloudera and MapR both announced that they are working on new features for their Hadoop distributions. And enterprise software vendors VMware and Splunk have announced products that should help the Apache Hadoop data processing platform work more easily with other IT systems.

Identity Crisis
As a project manager, we often find ourselves asking this very trifling question – “Am I a project manager attempting to assume the role of a subject matter expert or am I a subject matter expert trying very hard to be a project manager?” I hope you are not doing this every morning when you look at yourself in the mirror.

Enterprises, evaluate Windows 8 now (even if you won't use it)
Even if you're absolutely 100 percent sure that your business or enterprise isn't going to roll out the forthcoming Windows 8, at least give it a try, says one analyst.

3 Steps to Building Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is important to earn and hard to keep. I have my favorite brands but am always willing to try a new one. That doesn't mean I'm jumping ship, but I need to know what else is out there. I usually return to those brands that have gone beyond providing a product.

Who owns YOUR data?
Implementing an effective Master Data Governance solution can be tough…you have to deal with corporate culture, getting management support, formulation policies, implementing rules and much more. However, a less commonly addressed question is: “Who will own the governed data?”

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo fix serious email weakness
The weakness affects DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, a security system used by major email senders. DKIM wraps a cryptographic signature around an email that verifies the domain name through which the message was sent, which helps more easily filter out spoofed messages from legitimate ones.

Non-volatile memory's future is in software
Server, storage and application vendors are now working on new specifications to optimize the way their products interact with NVM, moves that could lead to the replacement of DRAM and hard drives alike for many applications, according to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) technical working group.

Quote for the day:

"You have to think anyway, so why not think big?" -- Donald Trump

"You can't lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself." -- Gene Mauch