Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

February 05, 2013

Analysis: Microsoft To Shift Its Focus to Tablets and the Cloud
Microsoft is responding to the mobile threat posed by Android and iOS devices by putting its Windows 8 and Windows RT operating systems on tablets, with the Microsoft Surface Windows 8 Pro device expected to arrive on Feb. 9. The company is also revving up a faster software release cadence, especially for its Office 365 cloud-enabled products.

Busting the Top 5 Myths of Cloud-Based Authentication
Analysts predict that more than 50% of enterprises will choose cloud-based services as the delivery option for new or refreshed user authentication implementations within the next few years. However, as with many ground-breaking innovations, this trend has also brought about some common myths. During this live webinar you will hear Jason Hart, VP Cloud Solutions, de-mystify the top 5 most common myths about migrating to cloud-based authentication

SSD onslaught: Hard drives poised for double-digit revenue drop
HDDs overall will maintain market dominance because of their cost advantage over SSDs, particularly when higher densities are involved and dollars per gigabyte are calculated, iSuppli said. HDD costs and pricing are significantly lower than SSDs. And, the average selling price for HDDs is expected to decline further 7% this year.

NextGen CIO mentor Q&A: Henry Shiner
Starting out as a McDonald's crew member at Yagoona, New South Wales, then moving on via an honours degree in chemical engineering and several senior business management gigs, Henry Shiner "came home" to McDonald's ANZ in 2007 as VP/CIO. In this video, Shiner--a mentor in ZDNet's NextGen CIO program--shares his passions for business, mentoring McDonalds' staff, cooking, and for exploiting technology to improve the McDonalds customer experience.

Aligning a cloud computing project with your enterprise mission
Companies adopting a cloud model make the mistake of opting for a vendor with the lowest price for their chosen type of cloud service. This is a big mistake; an enterprise needs to align its mission with the best cloud service provider, taking into account three aspects of the provider's offering: software, application availability and data requirements.

Consumerization of IT is Bigger Than Mobile
One of the challenges that IT faces today is the ability to control departments inside the organizations from going to Amazon-like providers, swiping their cards and getting instant access to a virtual machine that they can then use for whatever business initiative they have. When told not to do that, they ask for a similar service from IT, one that is as quick, effective and seamless, one which IT cannot deliver today.

Implementing a Generic Object Pool in .NET
Object pools are everywhere. Every database provider have its own ConnectionPool for managing and reusing connections, .NET framework is provided with a robust built-in ThreadPool for managing and reusing threads, sometimes a Memory Pool for buffers is used to save allocations, and the list goes on. Whenever a part of an application performance is bound to its resources, specifically creating and destroying them, Object pool can offer a significant performance boost.

Operational Intelligence – Is This the End Game for Big Data?
You could say that for the past 20 years we talked the data analytics talk but didn’t really walk the data analytics walk. It isn’t that companies didn’t do data analytics; they did. Many people were employed as data analysts or used data analyst tools as part of their job. In truth though, it wasn’t until Google that we had a company run by data analytics. And let’s not kid ourselves on this: intelligent business innovation drove much of what Google did, but data analytics drove a good deal of their activity and innovation.

Who is the Decision Coach on Your Business Team?
The best leaders I’ve worked with and for are not only good decision-makers, they are effective decision-coaches. They understand the importance of teaching their teams how to navigate the pitfalls and complexities of decision-making in pursuit of the best results for the organization. ... At the end of the day, we are all evaluated on the efficacy of our decisions and those of our teams. Good managers and leaders deliberately teach their teams to navigate this complex, trap-filled environment in pursuit of the right decisions and ever improving outcomes.

Outsourcing management "as a service"
The companies that succeeded had invested in building a business-led strategy, strong governance, investments in mature outsourcing competencies, and dedicated outsourcing management organisation (Program Management Office, PMO). Most importantly, they recognised outsourcing management as a key differentiator and core competence.

Quote for the day:

"To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day." -- Laozi, Chinese philosopher

February 04, 2013

Privacy groups call on U.S. government to stop lobbying against EU data law changes
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)—including more than a dozen others—are seeking a meeting with the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the U.S. Acting Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank, to ensure that new European data law proposals are bolstered and not weakened.

Cloud Infographic: Big Data and The Future Of Healthcare

The healthcare industry has been making its move toward technology, putting iPads and tablets into the hands of healthcare professionals and now, the latest big move has been adopting the concept of cloud computing to organize, share data and protect patient information and healthcare data from being tampered with or lost. Some might be wondering why medical professionals have waited this long to “hop on the cloud.”

Test Your Mobile Website With DeviceAnywhere For Free

Recently Keynote has released a free tool for remote, real device interactive testing; giving users a real view of their mobile websites on select smart phones in real-time via a simple Web interface. DeviceAnywhere Free combines the ease of the cloud with the power of Keynote's global infrastructure of remote devices for mobile and Web testing and monitoring, so that Web developers, testers and content owners can begin testing immediately on real mobile devices.

Anonymous posts over 4000 U.S. bank executive credentials
A spreadsheet has been published on a .gov website allegedly containing login information and credentials, IP addresses, and contact information of American bank executives. If true, it could be that Anonymous has released banker information that could be connected to Federal Reserve computers, including contact information and cell phone numbers for U.S. bank Presidents, Vice Presidents, COO's Branch Managers, VP's and more.

5 security risks of moving data in BYOD era
Ammar Hindi, Asia-Pacific managing director of SourceFire, pointed out that new technologies such as the enterprise cloud, cloud-based apps, social media, and high-powered mobile devices offer more ways to access corporate data. In turn, moving data across different devices and networks is increasing security risks to the corporate network and opens sensitive corporate data to leaks and attacks.

Scary Big Data, Cool 3D Analytics and More

In the future, your credit rating might be determined by what you post on social networks. Douglas Merill, Google’s former chief information officer and the founder of ZestFinance—a startup that leverages "big data" to provide credit scoring information—told the New York Times last year that “we feel like all data is credit data, we just don’t know how to use it yet.”

How The Bing Team Built Apps For Windows 8
Microsoft's Jigar Thakkar writes, "Several members of the Bing team formed an apps team approximately one year ago to deliver a set of apps powered by Bing for Windows 8. The focus of these apps is to keep users informed by delivering fast and fluid experiences, with content from multiple sources." He further added that all these apps were optimized for touch as well as tablet devices.

Podcast: Kabam founder on scaling globally and designing for different platforms
Online game company Kabam may have scaled globally too quickly, admits the company’s founder, Kevin Chou, in this podcast interview. But startups looking to take on the world could learn a lot from this chat with Chou who explains what companies need know (hint: don’t just lump everyone outside the U.S. together). Chou also talks about the role of design as his company changed from being Facebook-centric to more mobile.

12 Ways to Fuel Your Own Fire
Burned-out is easy. Neglect your energy and you’ll go out like an unstoked fire. Fire always cools without fuel. Ten years ago, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz wrote, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. It still sells like hotcakes. They wrote: “The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not.”

Microsoft Tells Big Data Programmers to Try F#
The language is geared to data-oriented programming as well as parallel programming and algorithmic development. F# 3.0, featuring support for large-scale schematized data and APIs, was released last year along with an update to Visual F# tools in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2012 IDE. ... InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke to Syme for perspectives on what Microsoft is trying to achieve with the language.

Quote for the day:

"It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up. " -- Vince Lombardi

February 03, 2013

Introduction to WebSockets
Chris Beams - a senior technical staff member at VMware and a core Spring Framework committer, Gunnar Hillert - a member of technical staff (MTS) at SpringSource and Rossen Stoyanchev - a Spring Framework developer make a thorough introduction to WebSockets and provide practical advice on using it in applications.

Creating a Simple Bloom Filter

You may have never heard of a bloom filter before but you've probably interacted with one at some point. For instance if you use Chrome, Chrome has a bloom filter of malicious URLs. When you visit a website it checks if that domain is in the filter. This prevents you from having to ping Google's servers every time you visit a website to check if it's malicious or not. Large databases such as Cassandra and Hadoop use bloom filters to see if it should do a large query or not.

Cloud computing law puts Canadian users at risk of snooping by American spies
In a report commissioned by the European Parliament, former Microsoft chief privacy adviser Caspar Bowden reveals, “it is lawful in the U.S. to conduct purely political surveillance on foreigners’ data accessible in U.S. clouds,” operated by U.S. firms such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM and others. One sweeping provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the targeting of, “foreign-based political organization(s)... or foreign territory that relates to... conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States.”

How Oracle Uses Big Data to Improve the Customer Experience
Customer experience management (CEM) programs are no stranger to the use of data. CEM professionals use data to gain insight about their customers to help improve the customer experience and optimize customer loyalty. Not surprisingly, CEM programs typically rely on customer feedback as their main data source (e.g., social media, customer emails, tech support notes, formal customer surveys). Customer feedback data, however, are only one type of business data that are used to improve business decisions.

Executive Insight: Breaking down the walls of the data centre
Martyn Warwick talks with John Dunne, the CTO of pioneering Irish start-up Intune, about how Software Defined Networks (SDN) will provide the means to simplify and control complex switches in the age of Big Data and will bring together the IT and telecoms worlds in ways never seen before.

5 ways to find your team's hidden talents
Even if you're leading an overqualfied crew, you're best served by trying to match people with work that requires as much of their brainpower as possible. Unchallenged workers are often unhappy workers, and unhappy workers leave when they get a better offer. Here are some ideas for finding and using your team's hidden talents.

The Big Data Challenge: 10 Tips for Telcos
The overall theory is that by extracting useful information from the information that is currently hidden and untapped in many systems and networks, CSPs can provide a better customer experience, develop more targeted and intelligent marketing programs and develop new business models that will ultimately enable them to maximize their top and bottom lines.

ASP.NET: Truly Understanding ViewState
Yet, here is a very good, in-depth article on ViewState that doesn't even mention it! Then there's this W3Schools article on ViewState that seems to indicate that posted form values are maintained via ViewState, but that's not true. (Don't believe me? Disable ViewState on that textbox in their example and run it again). And it's the #1 Google Search Result for "ASP.NET ViewState". Here is ASP.NET Documentation on MSDN that describes how Controls maintain state across postbacks. The documentation isn't wrong per say, but it makes a statement that isn't entirely correct

Breaking Down the Kinds of CIOs
According to the infographic below, there are five types of CIOs namely The Enforcer, The Mediator, The Evangelist, The Dinosaur and The Strategic Consultant. Take a look at the infographic which comes courtesy of Brogade to get a glimpse of the characteristics of each type as well the survival rating.

Four essentials of a good single sign-on strategy
Organizations implementing SSO, particularly to systems that hold sensitive data, should implement risk-appropriate authentication methods with the SSO system. Solutions aren't 'one size fits all' and solutions which provide SSO to all target systems may be deemed too expensive. Therefore, a best practice is to identify the tactical and strategic approaches that reduce enough of the problem space over time and within budget.

Sharing Code in WCF without Code Generation
The basic design pattern is so simple it is a wonder why the proxy generator even exists. (Well not entirely; proxy generation is still needed when consuming a non-WCF service.) As you can see, all you need to do is subclass ClientBase with the service interface you wish to implement and expose the Channel property. The constructors are recommended, but optional.

Quote for the day:

"Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger." -- Arnold Palmer

February 02, 2013

HP's Building an Avatar to Manage Your Mobile Connections
Their idea is to give individual users an identity that transcends the many smartphones, tablets and other devices they may carry, as well as all the Wi-Fi and cellular networks they use in different situations. HP's avatar would pick the best combination of hardware and network for each situation and automatically set up and take down connections, said HP Fellow Paul Congdon, who works in the company's Networking & Communications Lab.

The Datomic Information Model
Datomic considers a database to be an information system, where information is a set of facts, and facts are things that have happened. Since one can't change the past, this implies that the databaseaccumulates facts, rather than updates places, and that while the past may be forgotten, it is immutable. Thus if someone 'changes' their address, Datomic stores the fact that they have a new address without replacing the old fact (it has simply been retracted as of this point in time).

Predictive Modeling Now “Essential” to Insurers
Findings from a new Towers Watson survey indicate that P&C insurers are seeing those opportunities in their data; and according to the “P&C Insurance Predictive Modeling Survey” of small, midsize and large personal and commercial lines carriers, the capture and transformation of data into useful information has turned into a critical differentiator of performance within the marketplace.

Cyberwarfare evolves faster than rules of engagement
As the rhetoric heats up over cyberwar -- including warnings that attacks on the U.S. are imminent and alarms that the U.S. has escalated the risk via malware attacks on Iran's nuclear program -- the rules of engagement are missing in action. The current framework of international law and treaties doesn't adequately address cyberconflict, Jody Westby, CEO of Global Cyber Risk, said Monday at the Techonomy 12 conference.

IronKey Workspace review: Windows 8 PC on a stick
IronKey's new USB is certified to use Windows To Go -- an enterprise feature of Windows 8 -- to deliver a fully portable desktop. Windows To Go can be booted up from a USB-connected external drive on PCs that meet the Windows 7 or Windows 8 certification requirements, regardless of the operating system running on the PC. While Imation doesn't promote this feature, users can also boot up this USB on any Intel-based Apple computer.

Enterprise software wars: 5 points of advice for CIOs
In short, software is eating the world. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services--from movies to agriculture to national defense.

IBM Connect – Impactful Ideas, But Messaging Still in Motion
What IBM has not yet been able to do – even as it develops and promotes concepts like “Social Business” – is be consistent in its communication of those concepts. If 30 or so customers and partners at IBM’s own defining event cannot articulate or agree on the meaning of IBM’s core themes, that suggests that IBM has room for improvement in its communication and consistency.

Fail Fast Or Fail Smart?
The practice of being able to conduct quick, cheap and relatively painless tests, experiments or research exercises in order to gain invaluable insights, feedback, solutions to hypotheses and the like becomes vital in order to rethink, close the loop and ultimately “pivot” or change course based on integrating the new lessons into the model.

Visual Studio Gets Git

This past Wednesday Microsoft announced native support in Visual Studio for the Git distributed version control system (DVCS). Git has long been familiar in the open source world since it was created by Linus Torvalds to support the development of the Linux kernel. Since its release in 2005 it has grown in popularity and can be found supporting countless private and public projects.

The CTO Role Broken Down
There is a big misconception about who should be a CTO. A CTO shouldn’t necessarily be the smartest code developer because, as a CTO, they must by definition be an integrator and a manager of people. CTO’s have to understand the entire organization. Specifically, they need to understand what all of the technical parts of the team are up to, what all the players in the organization are up to, and what the programs are that are underway.

Quote for the day:

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, American writer

February 01, 2013

Realities of the Enterprise Data Scientist
An ideal data scientist – it’s always hard to find an “ideal” anything – would for me have four equal parts: 25 percent business knowledge, 25 percent analytics expertise, 25 percent technological capabilities and 25 percent visualization. You need someone who understands the business issues and the questions business is asking; that’s where it should start. Then, basically, the same person should be proficient enough to understand what techniques we should be using to address that business concern. ... There’s obviously a challenge to find someone who has an experience or background in all four.

A Smart Card Framework for .NET
This article demonstrates how to use the interoperability features of .NET and use them to write a simple framework to use a Smart Card in your applications. A Smart Card is a small embedded device that receives commands through a card reader using the PC/SC Win32 API. If you want to use this API, you will need a Smart Card reader to use a Smart Card such as a SIM card.

An Introduction to a Multi Structured Ecosystem
In this video, Teradata CMO and a chief data scientist discuss how to make sense of the new paradigm shift called big data. They discuss how a multi-structured ecosystem will allow data scientists and companies make sense of new these new sources of big data.

2013 CIO Playbook - 5 Ways IT Must Work Differently in 2013

In today’s world, more and more CIOs are starting to take on broader roles within the business. In fact, according to a recent Gartner survey, 77% of CIOs have significant responsibilities outside IT. This stands in stark contrast to the situation even a few years ago when most CIOs had no responsibilities outside IT. The CIO and IT have an opportunity to have a much broader impact on the business in 2013 and beyond, but taking full advantage will require working quite differently than in the past.

S'pore banks resisting NAF signup due to hassle, control
According to Chai Chin Loon, COO of Assurity Trusted Solutions, the subsidiary of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) set up to oversee operations of the NAF, only two banks--RHB Bank and ICICI Bank--have signed up for OneKey, the 2FA token of the NAF so far. This is because banks have security and regulatory "concerns" when it comes to signing up for the NAF, he explained, speaking to ZDNet in an interview Friday.

12 Common IT Hiring Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Bringing a new hire into you IT department is a double-edged sword. ... That's why finding the right candidate is so important. As a hiring manager, you need to do everything you can to minimize the risk throughout the hiring process. Here are 12 common mistakes IT managers make, along with advice on how to take a more successful approach.

Sterile and messy lessons in corporate strategy
As A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin write in Playing To Win : “Far too few companies have a clear, choiceful and compelling winning strategy in place.” Worse, executives who do come up with a successful approach often become trapped. To quote from another business book, Strategic Transformation: “What was previously a source of strength becomes the opposite – the invisible bars of a prison from which it is very hard to escape.”

Android's (quiet) killer feature

Android's sharing capability, known to developers as a form of "intent," is about more than merely sharing in the social-oriented sense of the word. It's a way for you to quickly and easily pass data between applications -- anything from a Web page to a chunk of text or even an image.

US government debates action over Chinese cyberattacks
It is not just China which is of concern as a number of cyberattacks are also traced back to Africa and Russia. Newly-discovered Red October, for example, targets very specific organizations in order to steal data and gather intelligence. The high-profile targets and origins of the code have led Kaspersky Labs to "strongly believe" it originated in Russia, and may have been state-sponsored.

13 useful add-ins for Excel and Word 2013 -- most free
For some reason, Microsoft has taken to calling the mini-programs that you can install into their Office applications“apps.” Functionally, though, most of these are similar to web browser add-ons -- in the sense that they add to or enhance the feature set of the main program. Here are the most useful ones for the latest versions of Excel and Word. Unless specifically noted, the apps are free as of Feb. 1 (some are only free for a limited time) or have a free as well as paid version.

Quote for the day:

"The most important thing about goals is having one." -- Geoffry F. Abert

January 31, 2013

Turning to Big Data for Security
IBM isn't the only company looking to Big Data for security help. Security firm RSA also announced this week the availability of RSA Security Analytics. In PR tongue, the new offering is "a transformational security monitoring and investigative solution designed to help organizations defend their digital assets against today's most sophisticated internal and external threats."

Optimizing the cloud for the BYOD movement
To build a browser-based BYOD cloud strategy, all applications must be exposed using URLs. Most modern software tools and nearly all cloud services work this way, but legacy applications that are hosted on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms may include nonstandard interfaces. Some companies have also adopted Web services interfaces (using SOAP), which can be difficult to support on mobile devices, particularly if you can't target a single device type.

Could Security Woes Eventually Kill Client-Side Java? Analysts Weigh In...
"It's like all Java developers were just diagnosed with a devastating, incurable disease," Gualtieri said. "What are you going to do? Bite your tongue, keep your head down, and keep writing code." Al Hilwa, program director at industry analyst firm IDC, points out that any add-on to a browser is going to increase the surface area for security attacks. And Oracle complicates things by bundling the Java browser extension with the Java runtime environment (JRE).

JMS Message Delivery Reliability and Acknowledgement Patterns

During the coordination of message delivery, to ensure that the messages are delivered without problems acknowledgements for messages are very important. Thus there is a close connection between message acknowledgements and delivery reliability. In this article we will explore message acknowledgement and delivery reliability patterns with respect to Java Message Service (JMS). The scenarios are described using WSO2 Message Broker as the intermediate broker.

9 steps that help defend against DDOS
Attacks can be launched from multiple platforms, creating a distributed denial of service attack, or DDOS. Although they usually do not damage the target systems or compromise data, they can damage reputations, cost money and interfere with carrying out missions. Specifics will vary with each attack, but the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team notes that, “In general, the best practice for mitigating DDOS attacks involves advanced preparation.” Here are some recommendations for advance preparation from US-CERT

Be a More Gracious Leader: 12 Ways
Today's business environment demands people to step up and be aggressive, strong leaders, in order to get ahead and drive their companies and careers forward. In that powerful march to success sometimes there is so much focus on being strong and assertive, people forget the human side. Here are 12 leadership qualities paired with their gracious counterparts. I'll leave it to you to find the combination that works in your world so others can perceive and respect you as a gracious individual.

A Practice Aid for Records Retention
Bits, bytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes all are common terms and, according to IT research firm IDC, data are doubling every 18 months. The decreasing cost of storage space (e.g., hard drives) has encouraged people to keep more data. However, the hidden cost of data storage comes with the entire infrastructure necessary to ensure the availability, security, confidentiality and privacy of the data stored.

10 Absolutely Free Project Management Softwares For SMBs
Software Project Management is the art and science of planning and leading software projects. There are countless tools/software's available in the market that makes project management simple and more efficient. Here is a list of 10 Project Management tools that are completely free for the benefit of SMB's who are on a shoe string budget. Some of the tools are Open Source and have a very accomplished feature set. So go ahead and pick the one that suits you the best.

Govt CIOs to be a reality soon in India
If the recommendations of the recently-formed expert committee, headed by Nandan Nilekani, chairman of UIDAI, are to be seen, CIOs may very soon assume the charge in different states and play an instrumental role in bringing efficiency into the government's e-governance plan. The Expert Committee was formed to look into the modalities of HR crunch faced by the NeGP plan.

What Is Executive Presence?

In today’s world, the results that were good enough last year aren’t good enough this year. This year’s results won’t be good enough next year. For leaders, then, it’s a continual state of getting different results. As Einstein would likely tell us, different results require different actions. That means that leaders need to be aware of when they need to pick up and let go of skills, behaviors and mindsets even if they’ve worked for them in the past.

Quote for the day:

"Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses." -- George W. Carver

January 30, 2013

Is the public cloud the best place for legacy applications?
If an application is due for a refresh, why settle for just a facelift via an incremental hardware upgrade or new GUI? Instead, why not go whole hog and re-platform the application on a state-of-the-art cloud platform that delivers scalable performance, flexibility and resilience—not to mention an operational expenditure (opex) rather than capital expenditure (capex) model?

Using FileTables in SQL Server 2012
FileTables is a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2012. It's a unique table that reflects metadata of files in a specified folder. The file attributes can then be modified either through SQL queries or via Windows Explorer. The two primary benefits of FileTables are the ability to dynamically access file attributes via DML, and to perform FullText search on files in the specified folder. The FileTable feature builds on FileStream and HiearchyID, which were introduced in SQL Server 2008.

Homeland Security: Disable UPnP, as tens of millions at risk
It comes only a few hours after a white paper was released by security researchers at Rapid7, which claimed that approximately 40 to 50 million devices worldwide are vulnerable to infiltration by hackers as a result of a flaw in a networking protocol. UPnP, or Universal Plug and Play, allows devices that connect to networks, to communicate seamlessly with one another and discover each other's presence. Devices can then connect over a network to share files, print documents, and access other shared resources.

Inside Look at Office 2013 for IT Pros: the Right Touch
All of the standard Office applications still exist, but there are some new components as well. One such component is the Lync client. The Lync client isn't new but this is the first time Microsoft has included it in Office. Having the Lync client included with the Office 2013 suite should prove to be handy for organizations that use Office 365 or which have an on-premise Lync Server deployment.

PowerShell 3 Web of Wow, Part 2
Jeffery Hicks's serioes: Last time we looked at one of the new PowerShell v3 cmdlets for working with web data, Invoke-WebRequest. This week we'll look at a cmdlet that I think you'll find even easier to use, Invoke-RestMethod. REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer is being used more and more to deliver web-based data.

New immigration bill focuses on high-skill workers
The Immigration Innovation Act would increase the number of H-1B visas available to U.S. companies from 65,000 a year to 115,000 a year, and would establish an economy-based escalator, allowing the number of H-1Bs to expand or contract, depending on market conditions. The top number of visas allowed would be 300,000 per year.

Free Tool: Automated Testing with Moles and Pex in Visual Studio 2010
Pex is a test generator: aim it at your application and Pex generates test cases for you. Pex does that by examining your code and then generating tests that ensures, among other things, every line gets executed. Pex is particularly interested in generating "edge cases": what happens at the outer limits of the ranges you've built into your code.

Informatica Recognized By Gartner as a Leader in Data Masking and by Infosecurity for Best Security Software
Both the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Masking and Infosecurity Products Guide recognized Informatica for continued innovation: Gartner states, “The data masking portfolio has been broadening. In addition to SDM technology… the market is beginning to offer dynamic data masking (DDM)… ”; Infosecurity Products Guide selected Informatica as a finalist for Best Security Software for its new cloud data masking offering.

Staggering Revelations About Big Data
The report, conveys staggering numbers about the size of our digital universe. Even more telling are details that reveal the wealth of good data out there that remains unexploited by organizations for business purposes. The report is sponsored by EMC, a cloud-based provider of information storage, management, protection and analytics services. (Note: The findings measure big data in a unit of measurement known as the zettabyte (ZB), which equals 1,000 exabytes. That's enough to store 250 billion DVDs, according to an estimate from Cisco.)

Good Technology Unveils Six BYOD Ready Enterprise Mobile Apps
Using Good Dynamics, industry’s most secure application development platform, enterprises/third party developers can build and manage secure business mobile apps that are required for true BYOD adoption by enterprises and employees. Good Technology recently announced availability of six such Mobile Enterprise Apps for iOS secured by Good Dynamics which now add to the available ecosystem of third-party business productivity applications.

Quote for the day:

"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." -- Calvin Coolidge

January 29, 2013

Shining the lights on shadow IT in businesses
The problem is that when business owners go around IT, they almost always forget to ask the tough questions experienced IT pros would ask a cloud provider ... Failing to ask those tough questions up front has resulted in some well-publicized public cloud failures, such as the Los Angeles Police Department's move to partially pull the plug on a proposed Google Gmail deployment because of security concerns, or Web-based services going down because of an outage at a cloud provider.

Try F# - A New Wave of Education and Research
The 2013 release of TryF# is an easy on-ramp into learning, creating and sharing with the power of F# 3.0 that can solve real-world analytical programming and information rich problems. Hear how University College London uses it in their leading computer science department curriculum, particularly in the financial domain. And learn about how Jim Hendler from a data scientist perspective taps into the benefit of Try F# with his undergraduate and graduate students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Oracle will continue to bundle 'crapware' with Java
The practice of offering up other software alongside Java updates, including emergency security updates to patch critical vulnerabilities, again came under fire last week as new reports surfaced of deceptive installation techniques. During a conference call with leaders of the Java User Groups (JUG) last week, Doland Smith, who heads Oracle's OpenJDK team, cited contractual obligations that prevented him from discussing the bundling deal in detail. But he hinted that no changes were in the offing.

STEC bumps up enterprise SSDs to 2TB
Flash is moving closer to the mainstream of enterprise storage, with IT shops adopting it where they need fast access to data. The capacities of flash components are steadily growing, while some shortcomings that held the technology back are being overcome. STEC's new SSDs are made using MLC (multilevel cell) flash, the type used in consumer products, which is less expensive than earlier enterprise flash technologies.

Developing an end-to-end Windows Store app using C++ and XAML: Hilo (Windows)
With these resources, you'll learn: How to use modern C++, asynchronous programming, XAML, and the Windows Runtime to build a world-ready app for the global market. The Hilo source code includes support for four languages and all world calendars; How to implement tiles, pages, controls, touch, navigation, file system queries, suspend/resume, and localization; How to implement Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) and Repository patterns; How to test your app and tune its performance.

Splittable laptop-tablets: The U1 Hybrid had it right all along
The IdeaPad U1 Hybrid was a great idea, with one problem: it never arrived. After surfacing again in 2011 as a Windows/Android detachable hybrid, it again disappeared from view. That was 2010. Now it's 2013, and laptops with detachable-tablet screens are everywhere. Two recent examples reviewed at CNET are the HP Envy x2 and Acer Iconia W510.

Google stakes Pwnium hacking contest to $3.14M in potential prizes
Dubbed Pwnium 3, the challenge will pit researchers against its still-struggling-for-relevance Chrome OS, rewarding those who can hack the operating system with individual prizes of $110,000 and $150,000. Google capped the total up for grabs at $3.14159 million, giving multiple researchers a chance at prize money.

Virtualizing the Unvirtualizable

IDC put out a white paper just last April talking about the benefits of virtualization tier 1 applications. This class of applications is usually very sensitive to environmental factors and highly critical to the operations of the business. It can include components from database servers to large services like email or full business suites for enterprise resource planning.

Anatomy of HTML5/JavaScript Single Page Application in Samples
If you think of it, an SPA application is very similar to a Silverlight application, in that most Silverlight applications load all the pages at the beginning and later allow the users to navigate between the pages without calling the server. So understanding of the SPA concepts should come very naturally to Silverlight developers.

Exploratory Data Analysis: Playing with Big Data
EDA involves looking at the data from many different angles. Slicing and dicing the data along non-trivial, non-orthogonal dimensions and combinations of dimensions. Transforming the data through some nonlinear operators, projecting the data onto a different subspace, and then examine the resulting distribution. Regardless of what it involves, the number of things to try in each of these steps is infinite. Worse, it’s actually uncountably infinite, so we cannot even enumerate them and then perform an exhaustive search by trying each one systematically.

Quote for the day:

"Excellence is not an accomplishment. It is a spirit, a never-ending process." -- Lawrence M. Miller

January 28, 2013

SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
The most common reason for SaaS data loss emerged to be end user deletion. This is easy to do; SaaS providers may provide multiple warnings about making sure the data changes are desired before the application is closed, but end users will still make mistakes. The second most common cause of data loss is where one employee over- writes a data element shared by others.

Helpful Forecasting Resources
This is the last post of the series on forecasting. Up to now, subjects such as varying factors, methods and evaluation criteria have been studied. This post lists key references in the field of time series prediction, particularly using Support Vector Regression (SVR). Note that some of these resources are not free:

Convergence of data, cloud to impact sourcing strategy
"Social, information, mobile and cloud shouldn't be considered in isolation as market forces," said Linda Cohen, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner. "The convergence of these forces, which Gartner calls the Nexus of Forces, is what drives real business value. The Nexus of Forces converge in several ways: cloud, mobile and social solutions enable the distribution of information, social media usage and behavior drive mobile and information solutions, and cloud can be a foundation for information, social and mobile solutions."

Understanding Value: It’s the Perspective
Lean is a primarily a product dominant thinking methodology. Lean was based primarily on the Toyota Production Process, which was an avid follower of Dr. Deming. Lean became more problem/solution orientated and another outgrowth of Dr. Deming, Systems Thinking, moved more to the Peter Senge approach illustrated in The Fifth Discipline. A crude analogy at best but viewing implementing each method, you could either choose between the Systems Archetypes or the Lean way, PDCA/PDSA.

Big medical data
Certainly, the term was in heavy use around MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which in 2012 launched a new big-data initiative called bigdata@CSAIL. Several of the researchers affiliated with bigdata@CSAIL are developing new techniques for processing medical data, to make it more accessible to both physicians and patients and to find correlations that could improve diagnosis or choice of therapies.

Effective Leadership & Personal Success Through Scripting
Schedule an hour now to think about the poor or emotional decisions that have compromised your effective leadership or management decisions. Write down what you should say and what you should not say for various scenarios that you find yourself in. Refer to that document occasionally, and add to it as needed. Later, subtract the decisions that become second nature, or in other words, that you master.

OpenStack cloud backers hope 2013 is the year of user adoption
An open source cloud management platform for public or private clouds, OpenStack has spent the last two and a half years building up an impressive resume of companies that have singed on as backers. From HP, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Rackspace and others have all hitched their wagons to OpenStack. Now, the question for 2013, experts say, is seeing if customer adoption of the platform rises to the same level of interest that the vendors have showed in embracing the technology.

Government backs 8 top technologies to fuel growth
Willetts said £189 million would go to big data and energy efficient computing, to boost research capacity for analysing big data sets, in areas like earth observation and medical science. There will also be £25 million of additional funding for the National Space Technology Programme for the development of commercial products and services using space technology and data from space-based systems.

Andreessen on enterprise: has he got it right?
Having morphed from 'the man who took on Microsoft and lost' but ultimately made a pot of money to respected technology investor, we now hear him speak thoughtfully about the future of enterprise vendors. It's a salutary read and one that I suspect will fall on deaf ears for many enterprise vendors.

Hortonworks Sandbox Opens Up Enterprise Apache Hadoop To Newbies
For the Hortonworks Sandbox, a team of the original architects, developers and operators of Apache Hadoop, will regularly update the learning materials providing access to new content showcasing both partner solutions and increasingly sophisticated tutorials. Additionally, users can upload their own datasets to test and validate the use of Apache Hadoop within their own data architectures.

Quote for the day:

"A leader is not an administrator who loves to run others, but one who carries water for his people so that they can get on with their jobs" -- Anonymous

"The art of communication is the language of leadership." -- James Humes

January 27, 2013

Solution Architecture - Aligning Solutions with Business Needs
The Solution Architects should hold the key, being in close touch with the implementation teams, making themselves available for clarifications, being receptive to emerging issues around the solution design and coming up with needed improvement to the solution designs.

The Role of Ethics in Data Governance
Data governance has to take into account not only the interests of the company, but also the interests of the data owners. Data stewards have to be the trusted custodians of the data. Companies have to consider policies that not only benefit the corporate welfare but also the interests of customer and partners or face reputational risk and potential loss of business.

Twitter unveils Vine, its 6-second Instagram for video
The 6-second limitation on Vine posts appears to be Twitter's new atomic unit for video. A Twitter spokesperson said, "The team tested various video lengths, ranging from about 4 seconds to 10 seconds, as they were building Vine. They found that 6 seconds was the ideal length, from both the production and consumption side."

Top 5 Myths About Big Data
Despite how broadly Big Data is being discussed, it appears that it is still a very big mystery to many. In fact, outside of the experts who have a strong command of this topic, the misunderstandings around Big Data seem to have reached mythical proportions. Here are the top five myths.

HIPAA Violation Penalties Rise in Response to Data Breaches
One-time violations stay under $50k, but repeat violations within the same year can hold a fine of $1.5 million across all HIPAA violation categories, up substantially from the previous $250k minimum. That’s a bit of a hike. The new penalty structure aligns with recent data from the Ponemon Institute that found recurring data breaches are increasing among respondents

Big Data Brings Big Privacy Concerns
When CIOs think of big data, they might envision the technical challenges and opportunities posed by the vast reservoirs of information their companies are collecting and analyzing. But when some policy makers contemplate the same situation, their concerns turn to questions of privacy, and what steps data-rich companies are taking to safeguard consumers' personal information.

Big Data for Healthcare: Why are we collecting all this data?
All this time and investment in data and where it is leading us to? The latest news in Health IT has started to present some optimistic signs for healthcare providers and hospitals and patients too validating why healthcare organizations have boosted up their resources and technology.

Enhanced ObservableCollection with ability to delay or disable notifications
MSDN describes ObservableCollection as a dynamic data collection which provides notifications when items get added, removed, or when the whole list is refreshed. ObservableCollection is fully bindable. It implements both INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyCollectionChanged, so whenever the collection is changed, appropriate notification events are fired off immediately and bound objects are notified and updated.

Free Big Data Education: A Data Science Perspective
As the third and final part of Free Big Data Education series (following Free Big Data Education: A Management Perspective and Free Big Data Education: A Technical Perspective), Daniel D. Gutierrez, Data Scientist finishes up with the area of big data closest to my heart: data science. -- Some of the indicated courses seem to have ended.

Mobile App Dev Needs 'Omni-Channel' Perspective
Software development for mobile devices is not just about adding Objective-C or JavaScript developers, Forrester says. "We're moving to a world of multiple endpoints, hybrid-use personal and corporate devices, and lightning-fast client device turnover." The report also charges that development shops have gotten complacent building MVC (model view controller) applications and the easy days for software development shops are ending.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders become great, not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others." -- John Maxwell