Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

March 21, 2013

The Perfect (Data) Storm: Moving from Automation to Leverage
We are now reaching the limits of automation-based benefits and will increasingly look to data leverage as the new source of these benefits. Data, of course, plays a huge role in both of these concepts and advantageous data management correspondingly becomes a necessary but insufficient precondition to success. Information architecture patterns such as Master Data Management (MDM) provide "how’s" that correspond to business objective "wants".

The CIO role in cybersecurity: Advice from a former White House CIO
As cybercriminals take on bigger, more high-profile targets, businesses are beginning to pay much closer attention to issues of security. They are and will be looking to the CIO and IT for answers. How can CIOs best prepare for these boardroom conversations? Former White House CIO Theresa Payton, now CEO at Fortalice LLC, a cybersecurity solutions company based in Charlotte, N.C., sat down with SearchCIO.com to share some advice. First up: Stop doing what you're doing.

DoD security panel calls for new cyber-defense, offense
The task force recommended that the Department of Defense (DoD) take the lead by building "an effective response" to cyberattacks that would harden public and private IT systems from attack. It called for development of a "ladder of capabilities" to defend against known vulnerabilities -- up to and including a nuclear option -- as part of an American response.

Characters Wanted: Fostering Varied Project Management Teams
Newsflash: there is no known cure for the human personality. Thankfully. we are complicated, confounding and wonderfully different people. The team or project leader’s responsibility is not to find a way to squash the variance in personalities, but rather to foster the right environment for people who are different, to come together and perform. Here are a few key mistakes to avoid as you seek to align your collection of challenging personalities around your project and pursue great performance.

Enterprise software and the curse of vendor sameness
A revolving door of personnel across the major vendors makes this copying almost unavoidable: executives often leave one vendor for another, sometimes even returning to the original company. All of which creates homogeneity in marketing messages, product positioning, and use of language across the enterprise software industry.

FAQ: Inside Microsoft's cloud ERP strategy
"Our target is to be the best provider at volume, at scale," he said. Some hosting partners have specialized offerings, such as for local legal requirements, a higher service-level agreement, or extensive hands-on support; Microsoft won't try to supplant them with Azure, he said. "That's where the partner hosts have a long-term model." "We have some partners that host today, but there's nothing really special about it," Ehrenberg added. "We expect most of them to transition [to Azure]."

A Quick Guide for Building KPI Dashboards: Part 2
The second part of this quick guide to dashboard construction will focus on the meat of dashboard creation: filling it with meaningful information that will make your data much easier to understand and spot trends from. Like the previous part, this guide will divide the process of filling your dashboard with meaningful information into three more easy steps, so that you can get on with creating your own brilliant KPI dashboards in no time!

Computer Networks in South Korea Are Paralyzed in Cyberattacks
The Korea Communications Commission said Thursday that the disruption originated at an Internet provider address in China but that it was still not known who was responsible. Many analysts in Seoul suspect that North Korean hackers honed their skills in China and were operating there. At a hacking conference here last year, Michael Sutton, the head of threat research at Zscaler, a security company, said a handful of hackers from China “were clearly very skilled, knowledgeable and were in touch with their counterparts and familiar with the scene in North Korea.”

DBTool for Oracle - Part 1
DBTool allows you to browse the contents of an Oracle database, but it's certainly not a replacement for PL/SQL Developer and other similar packages. You can also execute queries against the database. The primary purpose of DBTool is to generate code for a multi layered data access framework. DBTool is in itself an example of how to use the generated code, since it is implemented using Reader classes generated from various views in the SYS schema.

Cisco Inadvertently Weakens Password Encryption in its IOS Operating System

The new encryption algorithm is called Type 4 and was supposed to increase the resiliency of encrypted passwords against brute-force attacks. "The Type 4 algorithm was designed to be a stronger alternative to the existing Type 5 and Type 7 algorithms," Cisco said Monday in a security response document published on its website.

Quote for the day:

"The hard part is implementing the decision, not making it." -- Guy Kawasaki

March 20, 2013

Use a tiered storage model to achieve capacity utilization efficiency
Storage expert Jon Toigo discusses the challenges associated with implementing a tiered storage model, and how it can help manage storage capacity demand and lead to a more efficient data center. Storage tiering is not a new idea. It refers to configuring data storage infrastructure as a set of "tiers," where each tier comprises a collection of media (memory, disk or tape) having distinctive performance, capacity and cost characteristics.

Microsoft extends Azure Hadoop, mobile app development functionality

To simplify the roll out of big data applications, Microsoft is offering a public preview of the new HDInsight service for Windows Azure, according to Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in Microsoft's Server and Tools Business. HDInsight lets users deploy, manage and use Hadoop clusters running on Windows Azure, he said in a blog post.

Tips for making use of the Google Web Toolkit
The goal of GWT is to enable productive development of high-performance web applications without the developer having to be an expert in browser quirks, XMLHttpRequest, and JavaScript. The overview and description will cover the built-in tools found within the kit, and will highlight the Plugin for Eclipse, Speed Tracker, GWT Designer, and GWT SDK.

Templating in Javascript
The most common way of defining a template is to use a script tag. By giving it a type of “text/template” (some engines use different types, but it shouldn’t make too much of a difference), you tell the browser that it shouldn’t consider the contents of the script tag as javascript, so it won’t try to run it and go boom. In fact, it will quietly ignore the element, allowing you to define your template inside

BIDS Templates Come to Visual Studio 2012 in SSDT Update
SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) encompasses a bunch of integrated services and enhancements to improve database development entirely from within the Visual Studio IDE, such as incorporating functionality found in BIDS and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), among a host of other features. Prior to this, the BI templates were available only in Visual Studio 2010, SSDT 2010 or SQL Server 2012.

Microsoft Excel tips from Mr. Excel
Bill Jelen, publisher of MrExcel.com, explains one of his favorite Microsoft Excel tips for finance in this video from CFO Rising East 2013. He also discusses the benefits of PowerPivot and explains how to obtain it in different versions of Excel.

The CIO and CMO: An Integrated Approach
Technology now underpins and shapes the entire customer experience, from the delivery of marketing campaigns to the aggregation of analytics and insights. The amount of raw consumer data now available is a major challenge for today’s CMOs; making sense of it, while trying to justify their marketing spend to guarantee ROI, is even harder – especially without a strong bond to the CIO.

With shared infrastructures, security must move with the data
“Really it comes back to security,” Karmel said, “which has to be baked in, not bolted on, at all the different layers of compute, network, storage, and the hypervisor.” IT administrators have to put a set of software-defined security controls around the information that has to be protected. ... The security rules move across physical and virtual infrastructures, giving administrators a single place for enforcement of security controls across DOE and national laboratory environments.

3G and 4G USB modems are a security threat, researcher says
Most 3G/4G modems used in Russia, Europe, and probably elsewhere in the world, are made by Chinese hardware manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, and are branded with the mobile operators’ logos and trademarks, Tarakanov said. Because of this, even if the research was done primarily on Huawei modems from Russian operators, the results should be relevant in other parts of the world as well, he said.

Quote for the day:

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

March 19, 2013

Measuring the ROI of Governance, Risk and Compliance
Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions enable organizations to manage risk and compliance initiatives across the enterprise, helping to reduce loss, improve decision-making about resource allocation, and optimize business performance. ... In this webcast, Nucleus Research will present a Return on Investment model based on the usage of software to centralize the management and identification of enterprise GRC initiatives such as operational risk, financial risk, and IT governance.

Use open source software - it makes things better, says UK
"Use open-source software in preference to proprietary or closed-source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, web servers, databases and programming languages," says the section for service managers, entitled When to use open source. The UK government has discussed increasing its use of open source since October 2004, when a study of its open-source software trials concluded that computers running Linux generated substantial long-term software and hardware savings.

Zombie Explorer : A N-Tier application from top to bottom
In this award winning article Sacha Barber narrates good and bad things of working with WCF/WPF, some of the bad things being: Ridiculous amount of methods on a service, which become quite unmaintainable quite quickly; Everything is its own service, where you have about 30 WCF services all trying to call each other. Nightmare man; Bad seperation of concerns, where the dependency graph is all screwed up, and your UI inadvertently ends up knowing way to much as it is forced to reference things it has no business knowing about

7 Reasons Why Scrum Fails
Quite often software development projects are set up to execute work using agile methodology, like Scrum, but not setting things up in the right fashion often leads to chaos. Although there is ample information on Scrum (and it’s not exactly rocket science), there are cases where projects have been paralyzed. This article discusses common reasons for such failures and how to avoid them.

The Evolving Role Of Business Architecture
As Brian Hopkins put it – they suffer the common IT problem of “doing it to the business” not “with the business.” Gordon Barnett and I are concerned that as much as 75% of the clients we’ve met had a fear of going to the business to discuss issues – they didn’t see that co-developing capability maps could really help them in engaging their colleagues. They were creating capability maps and present them, often without any real business context. It’s not that business folks don’t see the value in capability maps; it’s that to be relevant, business capability maps have to help solve a problem (that they care about). The two key takeaways:

Internal-use SSL certificates pose security risk for upcoming domain extensions
The advisory was finalized by ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) last week and warns that existing SSL certificates which have been issued for non-public domain names like those used to identify servers inside private networks, could be used to hijack HTTPS traffic for real domain names as new gTLDs become operational. ICANN oversees the Internet's top-level domain name space.

Welcome to Platform 3.0
Over the past few years, we have witnessed the birth, evolution and use of a number of such changes, each of which has the potential to fundamentally change the way we engage with one another. These include: Mobile, Social (both Social Networks and Social Enterprise), Big Data, the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing as well as devices and application architectures. Now however, these once disparate forces are converging – united by the growing Consumerization of Technology and the resulting evolution in user behavior – to create new business models and system designs.

World-Class EA: The Agile Enterprise
The concept of “agile” has recently come to the fore, typically in connection with technical activities, such as software development. Subsequently, the agile approach has been extended and applied to, for example, solution architecture activities. However, we suggest that agile is in fact a way of working, a mindset. It applies to more than just software development, or architecture, or any other one area of activity. The real benefit comes from applying an end-to-end agile delivery approach throughout the enterprise.

McGraw: Mobile app security issues demand trustworthy computing
McGraw, noted application security expert and chief technology officer of Cigital Inc., said improving the many mobile app security issues enterprises face today involves applying the same trustworthy computing philosophies that have helped improve desktop computer security. In this video, recorded at the 2013 RSA Conference, McGraw explains his "trusted on busted" concept and the three biggest fundamental issues affecting enterprise mobile security, his ambivalence on the use of enterprise app stores and his analysis of today's Java security issues.

Losing your Google Reader? Try Tiny Tiny RSS instead
Installing TT is not difficult at all. You just need any Web hosting account with PHP support and access to one MySql or PostGreSql database. Sure, if it is the first time that you try something similar you’ll likely need more than ten minutes, but between the official installation instructions and the extra explanations below you shouldn’t have any problem.

Quote for the day:

"Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching." -- Satchel Paige

March 18, 2013

A Guide for BI Marketers: The Landscape for BI Tools and How to Dominate It
Organizations don't need to purchase nine different tools from nine different vendors. Some large vendors offer suites of BI tools that span multiple technologies. Thus, it is possible for a company to standardize on a single BI vendor whose toolset encompasses all nine technology categories. But this may not be the best strategy since an "all-in-one" solution does not necessarily deliver "best of breed" products.

Big data analytics can help gamemakers be 'next Angry Birds'
The Sogamo platform--which stands for social games analytics, monetization and optimization--is targeted mainly at both social and mobile games, including those created by independent app developers, Li said in an interview. Games form the bulk of the most popular apps at app stores, and social game developers are also moving from Facebook to the mobile space, he added.

The immutability paradigm – or: how to add the “fourth dimension” to our data
Nathan Marz tells us to have a base layer of incoming data. Nothing here gets updated or changed. New records are just attached. From such an immutable data source, we can reconstruct the state of our data set at any given point of time in the past; even if someone messes with the database, we could roll back without the need to reset everything. This rather unstructured worm is of course not fit to get access to information with low latency.

Samsung plans high-end Tizen OS phone
During the New York unveiling, analysts noticed that Samsung barely mentioned that the Galaxy S4 runs on Android. Some speculated that Samsung was setting the stage for greater use of Tizen as an OS. In a Bloomberg news service interview from Seoul, Lee Young Hee, executive vice president of Samsung mobile, said the Tizen smartphone "will be in the high-end category" and "the best product equipped with best specifications."

Windows Blue could give Microsoft's tablet strategy a much needed boost
The reason is that the Windows 8 app ecosystem is starting to finally grow, which would make a clamshell like this much more acceptable to the low end consumer market. And of course, it would be able to runs the tens of thousands Windows applications already on the market.The low end of the market is not a place every OEM is positioned to succeed in, but it is unfortunately the road it looks like Microsoft needs to go down.

Why Consumers Should Care about LTE

LTE’s faster upload and download speed, in turn, will give application developers more options for creating better user experiences on mobile for gaming, banking, socializing, shopping, watching videos and more via the Web or apps. So, in the future when you use mobile banking, you’ll be able to have a live video chat with an advisor about which loan is best for you, or doctors will be able to use telepresence on their mobile to provide consultation to patients anywhere on the globe.

Debunking the Top 10 I.T. Usability Myths
There are a number of common misconceptions as to why the problem persists, according to Nancy Staggers, RN, a professor of Informatics at the University of Maryland’s School of Nursing, and Lorraine Chapman, Director of Use Experience Research at Macadamian Technologies, a user experience design and software development firm that does work in the health care field. But if the IT community is going to solve its usability issues, it must first acknowledge, and then dispel, these wrongly held beliefs.

A Visual History of Linux

Linux started out life as a Minix clone built as a hobby by some guy over in Europe. (OK, it wasn't exactly a Minix clone. But it was built by a guy. And he was in Europe.) Since then, Linux has had a lot of different looks. Let's take a look over a few of the most interesting. Enjoy this slideshow visually narrating the Linux History

Next Steps In Data Center Security
When IT security is a focal point of the State of the Union address, as it was in President Obama's February speech, government IT pros had better take notice. Foreign adversaries are "seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions and our air traffic control systems," the president warned. "We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy."

Nasscom fights to stay relevant in India's tech renaissance

This tension culminated recently when startup think tank, iSpirt--comprising 30 software vendors--announced it was splitting from the services mothership to advocate for the rights of software developers. In an era when the full power of technology is perpetually within consumer hands, there is no doubt future growth will come from indigenous app developers with the resources and skills to build billion-dollar tech businesses, the building blocks of India's own Silicon Valley.

Quote for the day:

"Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors." -- African Proverb

March 17, 2013

Disruptive Technologies – a closer look
Big Bang Disruptions throw many enterprises out of business. Enterprises need to have a strategy to face these disruptive innovations. In this presentation we will go over some such disruptive innovations happened in the past to understand what it is and how some companies have faced these disruptions successfully. We sill also have a look at some of the potential disruptive technologies that are in the making.

AMD's New Laptop Chips Inspired By Mobile Devices, Gaming Consoles
The chips are aimed at laptops and other devices in which screens can be detached for use as tablets. The chips will compete with Intel's Core existing processors based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture and its future chips based on the Haswell microarchitecture, which will be introduced for laptops and tablets this year.

Rising Above the Tide of Emerging Technologies
“How to not only stay afloat, but ahead of emerging technology trends” As an IT professional how do you keep your head above water when the rising tide of technology keeps rolling towards you, wave after wave. In this session we will take a look at some of the key emerging technology trends and drivers that are impacting the “business” of IT and help you find a safe harbor to not only help you stay on top of, but ahead of these fast moving technology waves.

Design Pattern Automation
Software development projects are becoming bigger and more complex every day. The more complex a project the more likely the cost of developing and maintaining the software will far outweigh the hardware cost. There's a super-linear relationship between the size of software and the cost of developing and maintaining it. After all, large and complex software requires good engineers to develop and maintain it and good engineers are hard to come by and expensive to keep around.

How Ford is Putting Hadoop Pedal to the Metal
“For us, it all boils down to functionality; big data is a problem that we need to get over to get to the analytics, but we need flexibility and ease of use so we can just get right to extracting the data and applying our analytics on the backend.” At the core of this statement is what will really differentiate vendor offerings for Ford’s Hadoop engine;

Why Is Apple’s Stock Falling?
The market scene purely reflects the sentiments from Apple's shareholders. Investors are dumping their stock as financial pundits and growth investors are predicting that Apple's growth seems far too limited, given the current scenario. While several investors are still keen on seeing Apple enter and revolutionize another product category. So when some investors dump their stock (and these are the big ones), someone else must take it and these are - more of price conscious buyers - who won't put a great price tag on the stock.

Project Management and Portfolio Management: The Balance of Your Business
What’s more important to your business, project management or project portfolio management? The simple answer is that they both matter, of course. But don’t brush the question aside – the precise balance between project management and project portfolio management (PPM) in your business can make all the difference to your bottom line.

CSOs must adopt new risk management trends
Security managers are working with senior executives in all divisions across their organizations to move away from compliance-focused thinking towards a risk-based approach to information security. The shift requires senior management and C-level executives to think about risk strategically versus simply crossing off regulatory check boxes.

Interview and Book Excerpt: Mastering the Requirements Process
Suzanne and James Robertson authored the 3rd edition of their book Mastering the Requirements Process. This edition includes material focused on the challenges of requirements in modern project environments, including agile and outsourcing relationships. They present a number of Fundamental Truths which underlie their approach.

Walmart Makes Big Data Part of Its DNA
Walmart started using big data even before the term big data became known in the industry and in 2012 they moved from an experiential 10-node Hadoop cluster to a 250-node Hadoop cluster. At the same time they developed new tools to migrate their existing data on Oracle, Netezza and Greenplum hardware to their own systems. The objective was to consolidate 10 different websites into one website and store all incoming data in the new Hadoop cluster.

Quote for the day:

"The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind." -- Wayne Dyer

March 16, 2013

Hackers can cause traffic jams by manipulating real-time traffic data, researcher says
If, for example, an attacker drives a route and collects the data packets sent to Google, the hacker can replay them later with a modified cookie, platform key and time stamps, Jeske explained in his research paper. The attack can be intensified by sending several delayed transmissions with different cookies and platform keys, simulating multiple cars, Jeske added.

4 key takeaways from Samsung's Galaxy S4

Samsung took the wraps off the Galaxy S4 last night, giving the world its first peek at the device in what can only be described as an odd theatrical circus. ... No matter how you look at it, though, the Galaxy S4 is a significant new phone -- and there's a lot to digest about it. But don't get overwhelmed: Beyond all the marketing glitz, these four takeaways will tell you everything you really need to know.

Locating the Health Care Value in RTLS
Location systems can automatically document intervals of time:-when a patient was put in a waiting room, how long until the triage nurse visited, when the patient was moved to radiology or an inpatient bed. "We do all that tracking behind the scenes," Deady says. If a milestone isn't completed or is taking longer than usual, it's tracked both retrospectively, to help fix chronic workflow problems, and in real time, so that staff can intervene for the patient.

How to Redefine Architecture for Real-Time Data
We’ve been using the term for years to talk about a wide range of things, from embedded C to extreme, low-latency analytics, but all of these miss what the business is really after — the ability to use more information more quickly to take rapid action in response to unanticipated changes in their environment. Companies like Barclays Wealth Management, Sears and USAA are redefining their architecture with new tricks ...

Introducing IT chargeback to meter private cloud use

The downside of the all-you-can-eat approach is that while a few entities will make out well -- namely the primary users of the private cloud services -- the cost moves to entities that may have very little use for the private cloud, but are billed for it nonetheless. Kind of like gym memberships after everyone has given up on their New Year's resolutions.

Catch 22: To avoid IT, end-users need IT's help
"To a large extent, leveraging the true power of an Enterprise API today in the form of an app for a mobile device requires the skills of a developer. Not many of the end-users that are able to create MS Access databases for their own purposes have the required skills to code HTML5, Xcode or Java and are not familiar with how to interpret a JSON payload."

Former Tribune staffer accused of conspiring in Anonymous hack
Matthew Keys, who according to his LinkedIn and Twitter profiles is deputy social media editor at Thomson Reuters, has been charged with one count each of conspiracy to transmit information, transmitting information and attempting to transmit information to damage a protected computer, according to a federal indictment filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.

Big Data Analytics and Data Science at Netflix (Video)
Chris Pouliot, the Director of Analytics and Algorithms at Netflix: “…my team does not only personalizations for movies, but we also deal with content demand prediction. Helping our buyer down in Beverly Hills figure out how much do we pay for a piece of content. The personalization recommendations for helping users find good movies and TV shows. ...

Cisco: Cloud Is A Fundamental Shift In Way IT Is Delivered
“There is no doubt, the cloud has come of age,” notes Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research. “While investments in cloud outsourcing are small in comparison to internal IT/data center spending, they are growing each year, with the number of enterprise organizations turning to cloud technology to manage budgets and transform service delivery increasing significantly in the last two years.”

Data Visualization and BI Tools Selection
Data Visualization plays a very significant role in the world of Business Intelligence (BI). By efficiently identifying trends and patterns, Data Visualization helps the user quickly understand and relate to the data, without having to painstakingly sift through it. However, there are many factors to consider when evaluating a BI tool in this regard.

Quote for the day:

"The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." -- Lao Tzu

March 15, 2013

The BYOD focus is shifting from security to strategy
Partly, it’s that smart IT teams have realized they’re fighting a losing battle – with employees who are just trying to get their job done. “They’ve gone through the – entirely necessary – defensive thinking and they’ve realised ‘The more I say no, the less secure I become’.” ... “The conversation moves beyond BYOD to the ‘bring your own tools’ phenomenon,” says McQuire ... That means a strategic approach that’s not just about security and turning things off; it’s about taking advantage of these devices.

How You Can Benefit from All Your Stress
As Crum, Salovey, and Achor discovered, people have different beliefs about stress. Some people — arguably most people — believe that stress is a bad thing. They agreed with statements like "The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided," and the researchers called this the stress-is-debilitating mindset. Those who instead agreed that "Experiencing stress facilitates my learning and growth" had what they called a stress-is-enhancing mindset.

US NIST's Vulnerability Database Hacked
Last Friday, a NIST firewall "detected suspicious activity and took steps to block unusual traffic from reaching the Internet," said spokeswoman Gail Porter. "NIST began investigating the cause of the unusual activity and the servers were taken offline." The National Vulnerability Database is a comprehensive repository of information that allows computers to conduct automated searches for the latest known vulnerabilities in hardware or software computing products, Porter said.

Heads up Apple, here comes Samsung's 8-core chip
The Exynos 5 Octa uses technology from chip designer ARM called big.LITTLE. In other words, there are four "big" high-performance cores (up to 1.8GHz) and four "little" power-efficient cores (up to 1.2GHz), referred to as Cortex A15 and A7, respectively. ARM describes the Cortex A15 as suited for "heavy workloads," like gaming, and the Cortex A7 for doing more mundane workloads, such as managing operating system activities.

Google BigQuery is now even bigger

With the latest updates — announced in a blog post by BigQuery Product Manager Ju-kay Kwek on Thursday — users can now join large tables, import and query timestamped data, and aggregate large collections of distinct values. It’s hardly the equivalent of Google launching Compute Engine last summer, but as (arguably) the inspiration for the SQL-on-Hadoop trend that’s sweeping the big data world right now, every improvement to BigQuery is notable.

Time for an Architectural Reckoning
Architectural Reckoning is about which platform works best for which purpose. The synthetic architecture (the New Synthesis) that is its product won’t be organized or managed – won’t be understood – primarily on DM-like terms. Architectural Reckoning is a multi-disciplinary project, involving stakeholders from different factions across IT and the line of business. That this entire article has assessed this project from a DM-centric perspective is testament to just How Hard of a task it is. Who’s up for it?

Coming soon: Self-healing chips for smartphones, computers?
"It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself," said Ali Hajimiri, a professor of electrical engineering at Caltech, in a statement. "It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits. We had literally just blasted half the amplifier and vaporized many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able to recover to nearly its ideal performance."

How to Adjust to the Changing Face of Software Testing
Part of that transformation, Klain continues, means developing a "culture of professional testing" that drives how Barclays first recruits and then develop testers. This culture focuses our training, coaching, and mentoring programs that, in turn, hone in on testing skills such as heuristic test strategies, visual test models, exploratory testing and qualitative reporting.

Android vs. iOS: User Differences Every Developer Should Know
With Android and iPhone now combining for nearly 90 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, many app developers are concentrating their efforts on serving the majority of smartphone users through these two platforms. But there is an inherent tension when resources are limited and developers must choose one over the other, or decide which platform to develop for first. As a result, every app developer should be armed with some basic facts around the differences between Android and iPhone users when making these decisions.

UK scraps government CIO in tech project shake-up
While CIOs are expected to use the flows of information and data from that technology and across business systems to inform strategy, according to Bracken, this is tough in government because so much of that information and data residing in outsourced services and proprietary software. "Unfortunately, this means that many of our CIOs are performing as quasi-procurement and contract managers, rather than really driving business performance based on meeting user needs. The result? An uneven playing field, with the CIO role in government varying hugely by department and agency."

Quote for the day:

"The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players." -- Blaine Lee

March 14, 2013

How cloud computing, tablets will reshape the desktop
There are a number of advantages to deploying virtual desktops. First, users can access applications and data on their desktops from a variety of devices, including tablets. Second, in the case of VDI, user data resides in a company data center, and in the case of DaaS, data resides in a cloud provider's data center. This frees up on-premises storage space and ultimately saves enterprises money. And finally, users are not dependent on mobile-designed applications for tasks that are best done with full desktop applications.

Managing Software Risk
On March 14th at 11am EST, please join Dr. Bill Curtis, the Director of CISQ, and Chris Dressler, VP Technology Architecture, Cablevision for a webinar presentation about managing IT software development and maintenance by using metrics. Chris will cover some of the software risk drivers in the IT industry today, how business treats software risk and what types of measurement frameworks are used to manage risk today.

To Be Agile, Beware the Comforts of Ritual
Any task or process, big or small, can become a ritual. When we were doing eXtreme Programming, we eventually realized that pre-iteration planning and iteration planning had become rituals. We were doing them because the process said to do them. We learned about Kanban, which allowed us to jettison these rituals and the overhead associated with them.

Making innovation second nature
The only way to gain deep and capable skills for innovation is to practice and develop the expertise and muscle memory to make innovation seem more innate. Sometimes when we are asked why innovation seems so natural an activity to us as consultants, we can easily answer: because we do it so regularly it becomes almost second nature.

PayPal Acquires Mobile App Development Studio Duff Research
As PayPal CTO James Barrese wrote in a blog post today: ... As PayPal continues to be a leader in mobile payments, we are looking for talented engineers with proven mobile experience to help us imagine, develop and deliver products our customers love. Today, I’m pleased to announce that Duff Research – a group of award-winning mobile app developers – has been acquired by PayPal. This talented team of engineers will be joining the PayPal technology team to help us build creative and simple ways for our customers to use the PayPal digital wallet.

Demand for IT Security Experts Outstrips Supply
Demand for security professionals is growing at almost four times the pace of other roles in IT, and has consistently outstripped the supply of experts, according to new report. During the past five years, the number of job postings for IT security positions went up 73%, according to a study conducted by Burning Glass Technologies, which develops job-search and resume-parsing software. By contrast, the study showed that job postings for general IT positions went up just 20% in the same time period.

Top 10 consumerization definitions IT pros should know
This list counts down our top tech terms related to the consumerization of IT, and explains how they affect IT. The rankings are based on our most popular terms, and the 10 definitions that made the cut say a lot about where IT has come from, where it is now and where it's headed.

Java's security problems unlikely to be resolved soon, researchers say
"It's difficult to say what has been going on internally at Oracle for the past years, but based on an external impression I feel they could have reacted sooner," said Carsten Eiram, chief research officer at consulting firm Risk Based Security, via email. "I'm not sure Oracle really took the predictions of Java being the next major target seriously."

Beyond the BPM Culture Wars
Fragmentation and categorization is not always a bad thing, since it can help software buyers and decision makers better understand which solutions best match their business requirements and desired business outcomes. However, the fragmentation in BPM sometimes overlooks the primary purpose and value proposition of BPM – to help support creating a sustainable business change program.

Failed update to blame for outage of Microsoft cloud services
The failed firmware update occurred in one of Microsoft's datacenters, in a "core part" of its physical plant, subsequently leading to a "substantial temperature spike in the datacenter". The heat was "significant enough" causing the "safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the datacenter". In that area of the datacenter Microsoft houses "parts of the Hotmail.com, Outlook.com, and SkyDrive infrastructure".

Quote for the day:

"Without a struggle, there can be no progress." -- Frederick Douglass

March 13, 2013

Microsoft reverses IE10's Flash blocking in Windows 8, RT
Rather than block all sites using Flash except those handpicked by Microsoft -- a "whitelist" strategy -- the company will revert to a "blacklist" that bars only some sites. All others with Flash will be rendered by the browser in Windows 8's Modern user interface (UI) -- still called "Metro" by many -- as well as Windows RT's Modern and desktop UIs.

Singapore Swings Ahead in 2013 Trends
Singapore has been uniquely placed to take advantage of the data surge. The new data stimulants of cloud services, mobile content, personal content, social media and the big data demands of MNC-driven sectors are set to take us to new data consumption highs in 2013. We spotlight the key themes facing the Singapore market.

Techniques for Mobile-friendly ASP.NET MVC 4.0 web sites
In this article, we will not attempt to create a new user interface for mobile devices in this article. In many cases if you have a complex web application it will make more sense to create an entirely different user interface with a different UI flow. However if you have a simple web application, a few minor changes will make a big difference in terms of usability for users on mobile devices without rewriting the UI completely.

iOS will surrender top tablet spot to Android in 2013, says IDC
The iPad Mini won't keep Apple in the driver's seat this year, Mainelli said. "The trend has been there, but this will be the first time Android overtakes iOS in the market," he said, citing his team's forecast for 2013-2017. For the year, Android-powered tablets will account for 48.8% of all devices shipped, edging iOS' 46%. During 2012, IDC pegged Android's share at 42.7%, iOS' at 53.8%.

SQL Encroaches on Big Data Turf
A few weeks ago GigaOM explored the subject with an article titled "SQL is what's next for Hadoop: Here's who's doing it," and just yesterday a PluralSight course on the topic was announced, described as "An investigation into the convergence of relational SQL database technologies from several vendors and Big Data technologies like Apache Hadoop." And there are plenty more similar things going on out there. So rest easy, SQL data developers, your future is still bright.

NIST, Stanford Team to Rescue Early Tetris From Digital Oblivion
In this 18-month project, NSRL will copy and dissect a software library of 15,000 titles from the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing, held by the Stanford University Library. Considered to be one of the largest collections of obsolete software, this collection came into Stanford's possession in 1998 as part of its ongoing effort to preserve digital materials for research purposes.

Leadership and the Art of Struggle: 5 Things You Can Do
Struggle is a part of any human endeavor and leadership is no different. The problem is we view struggle as a negative. But struggle is how we grow. Without them we can’t reach our full potential as leaders. We like to think of our leaders as flawless. We like to be perceived as flawless—or at least we like people to think we have everything under control. But as Joe Badaracco has pointed out, “leadership is a struggle by flawed human beings to make some important human values real and effective in the world as it is.”

Get Microsoft "Data Explorer" Preview for Excel today
"Data Explorer" supports a wide range of data sources, including relational databases (SQL Server, Windows Azure SQL databases, Access, Oracle, IBM DB2, etc.), file formats (Text/Csv, Excel, XML, amongst others) and some other non-traditional data sources like Web (HTML tables, XML/JSON APIs, etc.), Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), OData feeds, Active Directory, Facebook, etc. In addition, "Data Explorer" also provides Online Search capabilities over millions of Wikipedia tables ...

Cloud services can save you money -- if you're careful
Sounds like many of the other IT projects you've shepherded, right? But it turns out it's incredibly complex to determine whether a move to the cloud will pay off for a given application. When done in haste, that analysis can lead companies to adopt the cloud for the wrong reasons, leaving them with higher costs or an inferior product when compared to an on-premises installation.

The Principles of Java Application Performance Tuning
In this fifth article I will explain about the principles of Java application performance tuning. Specifically, I will explain what is required in order to tune the performance of Java application, the steps you need to perform to identify whether your application needs tuning. I will also explain the problems you may encounter during performance tuning. The article will be finalized with the recommendations you need to follow to make better decisions when tuning Java applications.

Quote for the day:

"When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills" -- Chinese saying

March 12, 2013

RSA reports security shift toward monitoring and response capabilities
Customers' habits are maturing in the face of 100,000 new malware threats a day. The scale of this threat is impossible to manage unless businesses can improve their ability to understand what is happening in their networks, Tom Heiser told Computer Weekly. The need to get ahead and improve understanding of new and emerging threats is what is driving RSA product offerings, he said.

Indian startups go abroad to win at home
In an interview with ZDNet, Manju Gowda, co-founder of Nasscom's IP4Biz program, said the industry body had made some progress, but he believes it will be several years before the attitudes of Indian CIOs can be changed. "In India, to sell to your neighbor, you have to go through the United States," said Gowda, who previously sold his IT security startup to BlueCoat Networks.

New HIPAA Rule Has a Short Compliance Deadline and Lots to Do
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, which administers and enforces the HIPAA/HITECH rules affecting privacy and security, not only made business associates liable for the security rule safeguards for PHI (which the HITECH Act required), but also extended the definition of "business associate" — and the liability — to subcontractors all the way down the business chain.

Creating Custom Tooltips with jQuery UI
While native tooltips are perfect for quick textual tips, their behavior and appearance can’t be customized, and this means that they don’t scale well to the complex requirements of modern Web applications. The 1.9 release of jQuery UI includes a new tooltip widget that’s intended to be an accessible, customizable and themeable replacement for the native tooltips provided by the browser.

Is Virtualization Stalled On Performance?
IT architectures that blindly optimize for maximum utilization, and subsequently make it hard to figure out who is really doing what, are unsuitable for hosting performance-sensitive applications -- which is to say, most mission-critical applications. But the situation is not hopeless. There are solutions in the marketplace today that aim to help IT with performance-focused management in dynamic IT infrastructures.

Public Cloud Backup: Is It Right for Your Enterprise?
So far, only 15 percent of its capacity is being used for backup and recovery, according to Steve Erdman, Acronis senior VP and general manager for global business development. "It's still a low percentage of capacity," Erdman says. "We work with our customers to get them over the natural hesitation, but it's not an exploding market yet." Steve Fairbanks, data management VP at CA Technologies -- which has added support for AWS and Microsoft Windows Azure to its popular ARCserve software -- agrees. "We're seeing an uptick, but it has been slower than we had expected," Fairbanks says.

Difference Engine: Hackers' paradise

In a sense, though, the victims of such attacks have only themselves to blame. Many organisations have a false sense of security, complacency even, as a result of having invested heavily in security tools in the past. Yet “non-agile” defences like passwords, firewalls and antivirus software, as well as intrusion-detection and prevention systems have become less than effective now attackers have started using encryption and other tricks to evade them, notes Deloitte & Touche, a management consultancy.

Artificial intelligence: Job killer or your next boss?
The power of man and machine working in unison was at the heart of a speech about intelligence augmentation by Ari Gesher, engineering ambassador with Palantir Technologies, at the recent Economist Technology Frontiers 2013 conference in London. "The idea is to have a very well defined division of labour between the computing machines and the humans," he said, spelling out the complementary skills of men and computers.

Don't let consumerization be the free lunch that eats you

There's a pretty good chance that replacing what you have with cloud-based alternatives would end up costing you more. ... Here's one valid reason to move to the cloud; astonishingly enough, various industry pundits got it right. Sorta -- they got it right in the sense that someone who bought a great horse but put the saddle on backward got it right. It's consumerization.

RegEx Lab.NET
Regex Lab .NET is a full-featured application for editing regular expressions. The application features a modern, highly functional UI allowing increased productivity when writing or debugging regular expression patterns. Features include: Supports all regex operations: matches, replacements and splits; Detailed match analysis with group breakdown; Syntax-highlighted editor with unlimited undo-redo buffer; Live highlighting of matches as text is typed and more.

Quote for the day:

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure." -- Mark Twain