Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 24, 2013

Enterprise Apache Tomcat 7 Clustering
This blog is not a step-by-step tutorial on cluster creation, but we will provide you with the tools you can use to implement a cluster rapidly and effectively. Hopefully, by the time you finish reading this blog you should be able to create your own cluster. Whether you have created many clusters in the past or this is your first attempt, we hope that you will be able to learn something, whether it be basic or advanced, from this blog

State of Open Source in The Enterprise
Of late we see pressure on the CIOs to cut costs where possible and that is a good sign that Open Source Software is getting a fresh look, more so in the Government sector. Those doing business in and around IT are building the needed skills and talent in house and embrace open source solutions. We see this more in the areas of configuration management, build automation, automated testing and other tools which aid in building and maintaining systems and infrastructure.

Why move to SaaS (software as a service)?
Amazingly, consumer SaaS really only has one major benefit: convenience. And yet we all use a half-dozen consumer SaaS apps every day. On the other side, enterprise SaaS has a whole host of benefits beyond user convenience—and yet it faces adoption struggles across a sadly laggard IT industry. What benefits, you ask? Read on, intrepid cloud adventurer!

Lucene.Net ultra fast search for MVC or WebForms site => made easy!
So, while technically possibly, though somewhat challenging, you can integrate original Apache Lucene into your.NET application, and it will give you insanely fast search. But it will take quite a while, and will probably force to cut corners here and there, thus making your site way too complex and error prone. So, unless you absolutely have to have the fastest search on the planet, you shouldn't go this way

Why it’s way too early to dismiss big data’s economic impact
A more accurate criticism of big data is probably to say it’s suffering from a case of being over-hyped — vendors says their technologies do lots of things, but they don’t always spell out how much work that’s going to be. As I’ve written before, anyone now getting upset that big data isn’t a perfect set of technologies and methodologies probably wasn’t paying much attention to what experts have been saying for years.

How to Align Analytics with Business Strategy
With these challenges in mind, this article highlights and explores the fact-finding that needs to be accomplished in order to surmount the challenges surrounding analytics adoption. There are five steps that ensure that analytics is not an afterthought, but an integral part of any business or technology investment decision. The steps include:

IBM Develops Liquidity Risk Dashboard for Bank CFOs
To give the CFO an enterprise-wide view of business credit risk, IBM has remade software it acquired with its purchase of Algorithmics, Algo Credit Administrator, into a product called IBM Signature Solution risk management. The software provides dashboards and reports for risk managers and CFOs alike. Liquidity risk and capital costs have come to the forefront of many banks' risk agendas, MacDonald says, partly due to rules stemming from Basel and the Fed's annual Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review.

IT Security Considerations for Departing Employees
If current employees are a potential security risk (purposely or naively), consider the larger risk that a departing, potentially disgruntled, employee might be. Whatever company loyalty an existing employee might have had soon disappears when the employee is gone. Especially in this time of ever increasing security risks, continued company layoffs, and economic turmoil, it is important to make sure you have your IT backs covered against the mischief a departing employee might cause.

The Great Stagnation?
The problem isn’t stagnation or the loss of opportunity. The problem is that we have created new paradigms, that go beyond the “Information Revolution”, and we lack the structures to think about these new paradigms. We are waiting for new cultural and social rules, new parenting and educational standards, new laws and tax systems. We are going to have to wait a long time, because the gap between technological change and societies capacity for change is growing.

Amazon Reportedly Tested Wi-fi Network in New Spectrum
"The trial underlines how Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company, is moving beyond being a Web destination and hardware maker and digging deeper into the underlying technology for how people connect to the Internet," according to the Bloomberg story. "That would let Amazon create a more comprehensive user experience, encompassing how consumers get online, what device they use to connect to the Web and what they do on the Internet."

Quote for the day:

"If you listen to your fears, you will die never knowing what a great person you might have been." -- Robert H. Schuller

August 23, 2013

Using social media to secure a new generation of customers
We firmly believe that by using gamification and personas like MoBo and Gyaano, we can engage customers and provide a financial learning experience that is both fun and friendly. We’re introducing young people to financial concepts while avoiding jargon and helping them understand complex scenarios. Evidence to date shows that our strategy is working.

Researchers create wallpaper that listens and measures
They are capable of taking in environmental data and wireless communication. “We originally built this for energy management in a smart building,” electrical engineering assistant professor Naveen Verma said in a release. “Temperature sensors and occupancy sensors communicate with a central management system using distributed radio arrays that are patterned on wallpaper.”

Connectivity issue caused trading problems, Nasdaq says
When Nasdaq ran into the connectivity problem Thursday afternoon it immediately issued a regulatory halt on all trading in Nasdaq-listed securities in order to protect the integrity of the markets, the statement noted. It went on to add that the technical issues with SIP were identified and resolved within 30 minutes. "For the remaining period of time, NASDAQ OMX, other exchanges, regulators and market participants coordinated with each other to ensure an orderly re-opening of trading in NASDAQ-listed securities,".

EBook: Continuous Improvement with Cycle Time
Great teams are constantly striving to improve the way they work in order to innovate and deliver faster. Meaningful, actionable data helps teams make informed decisions about what and how they can improve. Cycle time is one of the most important and helpful metrics for teams who are striving to continuously improve. In this ebook, we will discuss what cycle time is and how it can help your team improve their process and deliver faster.

Big Data Generates Some Interesting Jobs, All It Takes is a Little Creativity
In the process of exploring the avenues by which big data will deliver value to businesses, some interesting new job titles and descriptions are emerging across the industry. The new generation of jobs being spurred by Big Data are often a blend of stats-savvy and business-savvy skillsets and activities. Here is a sampling of a few of these blended positions that have recently appeared at online recruiting sites:

A Cleaner Cloud?
Google built a data center in Finland out of an old paper mill that uses a high-tech cooling system to filter cold sea water from the Bay of Finland to properly cool their servers – read more about this in Chilly Climates Ideal for Data Center Locations. Our Michigan data centers also benefit from our chilly winters and moderate temperatures, cutting down our cooling bill. Another way may be the use of renewable energy sources such as wind power.

Chinese microbloggers arrested over online rumors
Yang Xiuyu and Qin Zhihui, who each oversees a Web marketing company, were hauled in by the police which said the duo had deliberately spread rumors and defamed celebrities in a bid to generate profits, according to a Sina report Thursday. The authories added that both were paid by other companies to fabricate rumors on their Weibo accounts to damage the reputation of other competitors.

The Case for Software Lifecycle Integration
As we’ve previously noted, the tools used within the software delivery lifecycle are isolated from each other and there are an abundance of manual processes where automation should prevail. The resulting manual process for creating status and traceability reports takes time and requires the involvement of people. On large projects or projects that are spread out geographically, the amount of time required ultimately reduces the value of the information.

How Master Data Management Improves Your Understanding of the Customer
Until recently, master data management (MDM) had been regarded as one of those techie functions, deeply internal to enterprise infrastructure. As it turns out, MDM is very much a business asset that has a growing role in many areas that should matter to enterprises: strong brand presence, multichannel customer interactions, right-fit content and information, and highly variable buying journeys.

Quote for the day:

"Vision is the art of seeing the invisible." -- Jonathan Swift

August 22, 2013

CIO considerations for SMAC fusion
The disruptive trends of social, mobile, analytics and cloud, often termed “SMAC” or the “Nexus of Forces”, are well-recognized as essential elements of next generation IT applications. They represent a desirable, future end-state for IT applications and architectures due to their characteristics of collaborative functionality, ubiquitous access, and intelligent insights, all delivered via a flexible and scalable delivery model.

Better data center planning tactics from the Open Compute Project
One ambitious area under development, Data Center Technology, considers those physical layers that tend to be taken for granted in data center planning and operations, including mechanical and electrical specifications. Project members defined an approach to data center cooling that could apply to a wide range of data centers with similar environmental conditions.

Culture wasn’t built in a day
Building a shared culture and sense of common purpose can take many years, said Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, the utilities giant. “In an organisation like ours, it takes a long time,” he said. “The culture didn’t grow up overnight.” That doesn’t mean to say it’s impossible to change an organisational culture, he said. “We’ve been shifting the culture here quite considerably in the past five or six years — with some success.

Tame the Tiger in Your Network
Managing a large estate of specialised security devices from many different manufacturers is a sure fire way of multiplying the number of active security policies. In contrast, deploying a suite of complementary systems from the same vendor reduces operating costs by enabling easier and more responsive management with less policies, higher performance and better overall security.

Testing the Partition Tolerance of PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB and Riak
Partitions can occur in production networks for a variety of reasons: GC pressure, NIC failure, switch firmware bugs, misconfiguration, congestion, or backhoes, to name a few. Given that partitions occur, the CAP theorem restricts the maximally achievable guarantees of distributed systems. When messages are dropped, "consistent" (CP) systems preserve linearizability by rejecting some requests on some nodes.

Windows Server 2012 R2 kicks Hyper-V up another notch
One of the more interesting new features is the ability to choose the VM generation: Gen 1 or Gen 2. Gen 1 is the same as what you've known in previous Hyper-V versions. Gen 2 brings with it the ability to have secure boot, to boot from a SCSI virtual hard disk or DVD, and to PXE-boot using a standard network adapter, as well as UEFI firmware support.

Oracle survey examines evolving CFO role, cooperation with CIOs
This does not necessarily mean that CFOs need in-depth technical knowledge or be able to manage technology on a day-to-day basis. For Ms. Washington of Gilead, it is the application of technology that matters. “Thinking about how to leverage technology is certainly vital,” she explains. “But more importantly, I need to focus on implementing effective business processes because, as we grow, it is my job is to ensure that we continue to do so profitably.”

Poison Ivy, used in RSA SecurID attack, still popular
Poison Ivy is a remote access trojan (RAT) that was released eight years ago but is still favored by some hackers, FireEye wrote in a new report released Wednesday. It has a familiar Windows interface, is easy to use and can log keystrokes, steal files and passwords. Since Poison Ivy is still so widely used that FireEye said it is harder for security analysts to link its use to a specific hacking group.

How Technology Complicates, Benefits Innovation
Innovation is a crowded space where it’s difficult for a person or business to come up with something unique and yet, valuable. Nevertheless, innovation is the talk of the town. It’s hard to find an article without the word in it and impossible to find a company not looking to be part of the conversation. The problem is, the term is often glorified and misused. And, innovation itself is suffering because its friend, technology, made things a bit harder.

Buying server hardware for a scalable virtual infrastructure
Organizations may opt to purchase small numbers of new, powerful servers -- in a scale-upstrategy -- that allows a few servers to handle large workloads while consuming less energy. Alternatively, they can choose a scale-out approach that uses large numbers of less-powerful commodity machines, which allow for clustering and redundancy, and this architecture may be less expensive up front.

Quote for the day:

"If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind goes when it wanders" -- Bernard Byer

August 21, 2013

Internet of Things: The next big thing after cloud, mobility and big data
Well the Internet of Things( IoT) makes all these possible and that is why it is being labeled the next big thing in the tech world after Cloud , mobility and Big data. Adaire Fox-Martin, senior vice president, Industry, Value and Solutions , SAP Asia Pacific Japan speaks on how organization can leverage IoT and Machine-to-Machine( M2M) interaction in the future to spearhead new benchmarks of productivity.

The Death of WebSphere and WebLogic App Servers?
We got to thinking that this might be interesting data to provide for other languages that we support too, such as Java. So…we decided to take a look at our top 1000 Java customers to see what versions of Java they are using and what app servers are most commonly deployed. ... What about app servers? What are folks using? The answer was intriguing so we thought we’d share it via a new infographic…

The Great Java Application Server Debate
Well, sorry Wikipedia, but for the sake of this report, we don’t care about pedantic definitions and full Java EE implementations, we care more about what a developer wants and uses. Most developers work on web applications and rarely use all of the bells and whistles that come with the EE specification. In fact many of the application servers available today with only the basic functionality are the most used, as our Developer Productivity Report section on application servers recently showed

Cloud Is Actually Expanding The Role Of Information Technology Departments
Rather than viewing IT as marginalized, 76 percent of respondents see IT as taking on a new role as a “broker,” or intermediary, of cloud services, orchestrating the planning and procurement process for lines-of-business (LOBs) across internal and external clouds while managing third-party complexity. ... the survey also finds that LOBs are funding 44 percent of total IT spending globally, and 69 percent predict that this share will only increase over the next three years.

IBM targets bank CFOs with credit, risk analytics
Specifically, IBM launched an integrated credit lifecycle management suite designed to boost profits, manage risk and meet various regulations. The risk management suite, dubbed an IBM Signature Solution, aims to give CFOs a view into credit risk from every corner of a company. Rory McClure, associate partner of risk solutions at IBM's global business services unit, said the credit risk management suite is built from various parts such as Cognos, IBM's business process management software and analytics tools via the 2011 Algorithmics acquisition.

Managing big data: Four critical practices for getting started
"Following principles of information stewardship encourages you to take a proactive approach to … managing the data through its entire lifecycle -- from its acquisition to what you decide to do with it at end of life," said John Burke, CIO and principal research analyst for the Mokena, Ill.-based Nemertes Research. Burke breaks information stewardship into five categories: information protection, data quality management, disaster resistance, information lifecycle management and compliance.

The True Cost of Integration in the World of BI
According to Loraine, “When it comes to the cost of a BI deployment, it’s not the software that will get you; it’s the miscellany -- the miscellaneous integration work, in particular.” She is referring to Forrester analyst Boris Evelson, who focuses on application development and delivery, who recently published a report that explored how to estimate the cost of a BI deployment.

Cyberattacks, not economy, could cripple banks in the future
Although investment health is still only half of what it was in 2005, lending and deposits grew in the first half of 2013. Cyberattacks and the threat of digital warfare mean that financial institutions may be left unprotected and vulnerable -- which in turn places consumers at risk and could potentially damage these signs of growth.

5 Steps to Fixing the Problems with Your Problem Solving
Problem solving is actually pretty simple though. All you have to do is follow five simple steps. I promise if you’re rigorous about the problem solving method you use, you’ll improve your chances of solving the right problem, generate solutions that address the true root cause, and select the ideas to pursue that will have the greatest impact.

Researchers outwit Apple, plant malware in the App Store
Those code gadgets -- and the app's true control flow and operation -- were disguised in such a way that it would be virtually impossible for Apple's current review methods to discover the app's real intent. "Even with a longer time [to analyze the app] they can't find that it's malicious," said Wang in an interview Monday.

Quote for the day:

"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope & confidence." -- Helen Keller

August 20, 2013

Full calendar – A complete web diary system for jQuery and C# MVC
This article describes using the very fine open source JQuery plugin “FullCalendar” by Adam Shaw to develop an appointment booking system. ... The aim of this article is give you almost everything you need, that you can tweak immediately, to bring diary/appointment functionality to your MVC application. This is a complete walk-through including setup of a linked EF database in SQL. I am going to use the Twitter Bootstrap framework to help speed things along.

Blaster worm: Lessons learned a decade later
Worms like Blaster are bad for their business, and I think thats why we havent seen similarly-sized incidents since. The underlying technology problems have not been solved. The root cause of Blaster was a vulnerability in Microsofts operating systems. But the contributing factor which exponentially increased the impact of the worm was the fact that Microsoft's customers were not properly managing their technology infrastructures.

'Brain in a Box' Gets Us One Step Closer to the Borg

Those would be "neurosynaptic chips" stemming from IBM's SyNAPSE project headed by Dharmendra S. Modha, unveiled in August 2011. In a video, Modha called the new system a "brain in a box." Now IBM is sharing with the world its vision of a new programming language and surrounding software ecosystem to take advantage of the chips, partially in response to the Big Data phenomenon.

5 Points to Consider before choosing a Security SaaS Solution
Most large enterprises have not quite adopted cloud all the way yet because of this very reason and also because not all enterprise applications are available through the cloud but are trending that way. The optimal way to look at this situation is to do a total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) analysis, factoring in the risk of remote employees not keeping their systems up to date with security.

3 Major Trends in New Discovery Analytics
Conversations about visual discovery are beginning to include data discovery, and vendors are developing and delivering such tool sets today. It is well-known that while big data profiling and the ability to visualize data give us a broader capacity for understanding, there are limitations that can be addressed only through data mining and techniques such as clustering and anomaly detection. In this context, we see a number of tools with different architectural approaches tackling this obstacle.

Database administration best practice: Balance DBA team skills
DBA direction comes from the implicit business needs of the company, said Michelle Malcher, DBA team lead at DRW Holdings, a Chicago-based trading organization. If the business is looking for more production support from the database administration system, the group should probably be categorized under operations. If there is a need to pursue more new programming projects, then the team needs to work under the aegis of a development group, Malcher said.

Set the right Linux extended attributes, enjoy better file security
Linux extended attributes are a useful security addition to complement or counteract default functionality in the file system. To continue the example above, applying "i" extended attributes as an extra layer of protection to files in a user's home directory will prevent the user from removing all files from their home directory, even if the user has permission to delete these files by default.

What wearable computing is really all about
We'll see a wide variety of wearable devices that clip onto clothing. Sony, as an early example, will soon ship its Sony Smart Bluetooth Handset SBH52, a clip-on device that relays audio to and from any Bluetooth device. You can use it like a phone (as in hold it up to your ear and talk). It also has an FM radio. Think of this device as a halfway technology between a Bluetooth headset and a clip-on wearable device.

NPulse adds full indexing to 10g packet capture appliance
At high data rates like 10 Gbps, writing all packets to disk is only the first challenge, Frey said. Retrieving those packets and recreating sessions is just as difficult. "Finding the right data requires fast access if you want to get an answer to your problem in the next 15 minutes." The amount of packets a CPX appliance captures and writes to disk -- typically on a NetApp storage array -- grows quickly for some organizations.

Quote for the day:

"Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it." -- Brian Tracy

August 19, 2013

Facebook to test new mobile payment service
"We continue to have a great relationship with our payment processing partners, and this product is simply to test how we can help apps provide a simpler commerce experience," Randall said. But if Facebook scales out the program, it could become competitive with PayPal and other e-commerce businesses from an end user perspective, said Greg Sterling, senior analyst with Opus Research.

Why Are There No Jobs for Hadoop in the Federal Government?
A more likely reason is that government agencies have not fully embraced “big data” because government leaders still do not fully understand what it can do or how it can help them operate more efficiently. For example, text mining can be applied to financial fraud detection, research paper classification, student sentiment analysis and smarter search engines for all manner of government records, and machine learning can be used for decision support systems for healthcare,model generation for climate science, speech recognition for security and mobile data entry across agencies.

Commbank promises more tech innovation
"With the project now completed, we are focused on continuous innovation for the benefit of our customers," Narev said in the bank's 2013 financial report. "We believe we are still only at the start of our long-term effort to apply world-leading technology for the benefit of our customers." As proof of this claim, Narev pointed to the bank's real-time settlement and banking, mobile banking app Kaching — which has handled more than AU$9 billion in transaction to date — and its point-of-sale platform Pi, and devices Albert and Leo.

How to Support Mobile App Development in Your Organization
"I view this as the yin and the yang of mobile apps," says Roger Baker, chief strategy officer at Agilex, an IT solutions provider with an enterprise mobility specialization. "As a CIO, you really want to say to users, 'Yes, you can develop mobile apps.' But at the same time, you have a responsibility to control security, data access and data integrity—all the way up through the brand.

Research: What CEOs Really Want from Coaching
Blind spots are less obvious when things are going well. It is very easy for executives to become almost strictly inward looking, especially when they have been very successful. But these blind spots can become devastating when performance moves in the other direction. A good, neutral third party assessment is a clear reality check for executives.

4 Time Management Tips For The Chronically Overworked
These days, "overworked" is the new normal, and learning to manage your time wisely is the key to getting ahead in today's 24/7 work environment. The truth is, you won't ever have more hours in a day, or fewer tasks to fulfill, but if you master your time and use it efficiently, you'll feel less pressure and less overwhelmed. Suzana Simic, manager of career services at Computer Systems Institute, provides these four key time-management tips to help you tackle the daily grind.

UK Serious Fraud Office suffers biggest ever data breach
Similarly, this was also the case with the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, a government body roughly equivalent to the US Department of Justice. This week they admitted to sending a staggering 32,000 documents and hundreds of multimedia files related to a criminal investigation of the defense contractor BAE to the wrong people. The files came from over 50 different sources and even though the breach occurred last year, the SFO still hasn’t recovered all of the information.

New Technologies Map Human and Machines Relationships
"In making the overriding theme of this year's Hype Cycle the evolving relationship between humans and machines, we encourage enterprises to look beyond the narrow perspective that only sees a future in which machines and computers replace humans. In fact, by observing how emerging technologies are being used by early adopters, there are actually three main trends at work. These are augmenting humans with technology

Companies Neglect Physical Threat in Cyberattacks
"People will put their finger on a biometric fingerprint reader, but they're still willing to hold the door open for the guy behind them," says Dan Berger, president and chief executive of Redspin Inc., a cybersecurity firm. Physical intrusion is a threat companies have to guard against as U.S. regulators step up efforts to make companies guard against and possibly disclose attacks on their computer systems.

CIOs Rise Again on the Coattails of Cloud Computing, SaaS
When the chief marketing officer, the human resources manager, the vice president of sales and the chief finance officer all tore off chunks of the technology budget, the obituaries for the chief information officer position were many and morbid. A corporate executive without budget is soon a corporate executive without a job went the thinking. And for a while as organizations, including Gartner, proclaimed that the marketing department would soon wield a bigger tech budget than the CIO, the predictions of the demise of the CIO’s role appeared prescient.

Quote for the day:

"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." -- Andy Warhol

August 18, 2013

Dependency Principles for SOA
Ganesh believes that an organisation which follows the rules will end up "achieving SOA". Of course we have many other examples over the years of where SOA has failed or succeeded, with corresponding attempts at principles and rules to follow to make SOA successful. The principles that Ganesh outlines can be classified into the four layers on which they operate:

IBM And Big Data Disruption: Insider's View
What's IBM's take on Hadoop as the new enterprise data warehouse and disruptor of data-integration and mainframe workloads? Bob Picciano, appointed in February as general manager of IBM's Information Management Software Division, says there's no doubt that Hadoop will displace certain workloads, but he's more dismissive about NoSQL and upstart databases including SAP Hana.

There's no free lunch when it comes to Google's Gmail
"I think the real issue here is naive users thinking that they can get something for nothing," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. "Providers don't do anything for free. There's always an angle they're playing to either increase their revenue or profitability. And Google takes a back seat to no one when it comes to figuring out and exploiting all the angles. One of the best angles is using email contents to aim specific ads at users."

Do stakeholders fear EA taking over? They do.
The reality is that few EAs are able to come with that integrated and navigable architecture of the enterprise that would serve all stakeholders since most EA frameworks help little. This leaves a lot of space for pretenders that come with a few loose diagrams, plans and plenty of grand strategic talk. To compensate, the architects talk about EA as a strategy, operating model, business model

Ahead Of Their Time: Noble Flops
Ironically, the best flop of the period was Steve Jobs’ NeXT “Cube” (1989). This powerful personal computer, designed for the academic research market, bombed for two reasons: It cost $6,500 (close to $13,000 in today’s dollars), and it had a novel but painfully slow optical hard drive–a flop within a flop.

The Cloud and Business Innovation: The Implications of SMAC
Here is an edited down / extracted version of the Information Management weekly Research Alert. Key topics explored include: the evolution toward, and implications of, the “SMAC” stack (as in social, mobile, analytics and Cloud); the changing nature of ITs contribution to the business; and how SMAC is helping to change the value proposition to the customer (across a variety of industry use cases), as well as in the creation of “smart products.”

Infrastructure 2.0: As a matter of fact that isn't what it means
The biggest confusion out there seems to be that dynamic infrastructure is being viewed as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Dynamic infrastructure is not the same thing as IaaS. IaaS is a deployment model in which application infrastructure resides elsewhere, in the cloud, and is leveraged by organizations desiring an affordable option for scalability that reduces operating and capital expenses by sharing compute resources "out there" somewhere, at a provider.

What are you doing to prepare your company for the new style of IT convergence?
All this requires a new style of IT so that you, as a data center leader, can turn on a dime, flex capacity on demand, meet your company SLAs, and serve up information to the right audience in whichever device they desire. But the question remains: How do enterprises not only accommodate all these tectonic shifts, but also remain nimble enough to stay competitive? A new style of IT is where HP’s priorities lay and where convergence comes in

Test Driven Development
Bottom line is that nobody can teach you a programming approach like this by writing or making videos about it. They can only get you started and they can tell you why you should do it. The real power comes by you actually digging into it. The more you do it the more you master it and the more you can actually feel the benefits of it. I didn’t believe when people said it was addictive, in matter of fact I opposed to the whole idea.

Quote for the day:

"Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

August 17, 2013

Big Data Security: 5 Questions You Need to Ask
"Big data provides an important opportunity to deliver value from information, but an enterprise will be more successful in the long run if policies and frameworks, such as Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), are put into place first." To guide CIOs, ISACA identified 16 important questions enterprises must answer to assess their environments. In particular, these key five questions, if left unanswered, could expose their companies to greater risk and damage:

Understanding Predictive Analytics: A Spotlight Q&A with Eric Siegel
You need to predict significantly better than guessing, and that’s what makes it valuable. So if there’s a needle in the haystack issue for law enforcement, for fraud, for customers who are going to be extremely valuable or for a rare disease in healthcare, what you’re doing is you’re making the haystack much smaller. Business is a numbers game, and you play that numbers game much more effectively by tipping the odds in your favor by saying, “This customer is three times more likely than average to be an extremely poor credit risk.”

3 Key Skills Of Successful Data Scientists
According to Dr. Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer at FICO and head of FICO Labs, three of these characteristics are most important, and every organization in the market for a data scientist should know what they are. In a phone interview with InformationWeek, Jennings revealed this holy trio.

12 hard truths about cloud computing
This isn't to say there's no truth to what the cloud companies proclaim, but there are plenty of tricky details that aren't immediately obvious. At their core, the machines aren't miracle workers, just the next generation of what we've been using for years. The improvements are incremental, not revolutionary. If we dial back our hopes and approach the machines with moderated expectations, they're quite nice. To keep our expectations in check, here is a list of what to really expect from the cloud.

New Tweets per second record, and how!
We took Gizzard, our framework to create sharded and fault-tolerant distributed databases, and applied it to tweets. We created T-Bird. In this case, Gizzard was fronting a series of MySQL databases –– every time a tweet comes into the system, Gizzard hashes it, and then chooses an appropriate database. Of course, this means we lose the ability to rely on MySQL for unique ID generation. Snowflake was born to solve that problem.

Agents for Agility: The Just-In-Time Enterprise Has Arrived
Hear Analysts Krish Krishnan of Sixth Sense, and Dr. Robin Bloor of The Bloor Group, as they outline their competing visions for the architecture of a real-time enterprise in this episode of Hot Technologies. He'll discuss how EnterpriseWeb leverages the best ideas of service orientation, combined with intelligent agents that act as virtual hubs for the sharing of data, analytics, and mission-critical business processes

Cybercriminals add exploit for patched Java flaw to their arsenal
Two days after its release, the CVE-2013-2465 exploit was already integrated into so-called exploit kits, attack tools that infect computers with malware by exploiting vulnerabilities in outdated software when users visit compromised websites. An independent malware researcher who uses the online alias Kafeine found a live installation of the Styx exploit kit, previously known as Kein, that is using the exploit.

CIO 2.x: Champion for SaaS, advocate for business
So what does CIO 2.x look like? A few patterns have surfaced from the recent SaaS roundtable discussions I hosted with IBM client executives. One observation is that IT leadership is becoming a true advocate for business transformation versus an inhibitor to change. IT-driven initiatives such as “Cloud First” are a great example of what this type of bold transformation looks like.

Big Data Analytics Will Never Fully Replace Crative Thought
As technology improves, the power of big data analytics should only grow - but according to skeptics, this development may have its limits. By focusing on data quality and analytical philosophies, business leaders can certainly improve, but only to a certain point. Data can be tremendously useful, but it will never fully replace human thought. The data craze is reaching its apex in 2013, but there are two major areas where people run the risk of getting carried away.

Quote for the day:

"A goal should scare you a little, and excite you a lot." -- Dr. Joe Vitale

August 16, 2013

NewSQL Startup Keeps Java Devs from 'Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater'
The emphasis here, and increasingly everywhere, is on scaling out, Morris said, not scaling up. "It's all about commodity data centers," he said. "It's much cheaper to buy a hundred thousand-dollar machines than it is to buy one gigantic, steam-belching machine. A single database running on a hundred commodity servers -- and we can scale out to that kind of number -- it can run on the order ten million transactions per second, so it's an extremely fast database system running on cheap machine, and dynamically."

Google to encrypt Cloud Storage data by default
"If you require encryption for your data, this functionality frees you from the hassle and risk of managing your own encryption and decryption keys," Barth wrote. "We manage the cryptographic keys on your behalf using the same hardened key management systems that Google uses for our own encrypted data, including strict key access controls and auditing."

The Value Architect and Data Scientist: Are They Really New Roles?
As the world becomes consumed by topics and themes on Big Data, the roles of the data scientist and the value architect become ever more paramount. With social media and text data being readily accessible, the ability to understand context and what business insights might be meaningful will remain the purview of the value architect. Meanwhile, the ability to “work” the data in order to create the information necessary for these insights is the responsibility of the data scientist.

Five Arguments Against Virtualization - And Why They Are Wrong
There are many misconceptions about virtualization and its effect on applications and the existing infrastructure. Most of these misconceptions are the result of bad information, not enough information, or simply preconceived notions that are not founded in reality. This post will separate some of the fact from fiction on five of the biggest arguments against virtualization.

Defining the New Data Center Operating System
So, how does the data center operating system really different from other DC management platforms? DCOS really means connecting the logical with the physical. As the modern data center continues to become the “data center of everything” we need to evolve the way we control these vital platforms. New types of threats against the data center environment are continuing to grow. So, to combat new security needs, an ever-scaling environment, and a lot more cloud computing; we must take the next leap in data center control and management.

Researchers create battery-free wireless communication 'out of thin air'
This new wireless communication system seems like "magic," since it "provides connectivity between computers out of what is essentially thin air." It takes us a step closer to an Internet of Things reality as it lets devices talk to each other without relying on batteries or wires for power. Instead, it taps into already existing ambient Wi-Fi, TV or cellular signals to exchange information.

Innovation Opportunity: The Future is Co-Created
The right idea at the wrong time is still wrong. It’s entirely possible to see the future now, but to be unable to capitalise on this vision because the world isn’t ready for it yet. People often have difficulty in telling you what they need – but you can experiment together to figure out what will work. ... We build these new opportunities together with the people that will benefit from our new ideas. It’s co-creation. Nilofer Merchant coined the phrase “the future is co-created” and she’s right

The consumerization of IT: Everything new is old again
"Please don't misunderstand. I am not saying that the challenges posed by consumerization are not real, because they are. I would like to encourage you to recognize that dealing with obstacles and overcoming challenges are your table stakes. Don't earn yourself the title of Chief Impediment Officer (CIO). Instead, focus on the opportunity value of what some call a sea change and what I call the natural evolution of the complex relationship between people and their machines."

The first 4G car, the Audi S3, debuts in Europe; U.S. must wait until spring
Audi is going fully integrated from the get go. The S3 and forthcoming A3 will use their LTE chips to link its on-board nav system to the cloud with access to Google Earth and Streetview. Drivers can access social media networks Facebook and Twitter with voice commands, though its Audi Connect platform is still light on other apps. And the LTE connection can also be redistributed to other devices in the car through Wi-Fi.

Intel to customize chips for big data applications
Through hardware and software improvements, the company is trying to figure out how its chips can perform better in areas like predictive analytics, cloud data collection and specific task processing. The company has already released its own distribution of Hadoop, a scalable computing environment that deals with large data sets, and now chip improvements are on tap.

Quote for the day:

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

August 15, 2013

How Agile Methodology Works in Fixed Bid and Fixed Date Contracts
Most Project Managers think that practicing Agile methodology in FPFS projects is not possible. Watch as agile coach Tushar Somaiya providing interesting tips on Agile methodology for FPFS projects. He believes in a democratic organization & self-organizing teams. He calls himself a servant leader. Through his NueroScience based coaching & consulting, he has helped projects and organizations turn agile and become truly high performing teams.

Breach Detection Systems take aim at targeted persistent attacks
“The BDS, NGIPS, and NGFW products are similar in that all three can contain signatures and heuristics for identifying malware. However, a BDS separates itself from the pack with its ability to analyze the patterns of network traffic, identify malicious domains, and model the behavior/impact of files that are being downloaded and executed on an attack surface.

7 Sleep Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs

Not sleeping well has implications beyond feeling groggy the next day. Lack of sleep has been shown to increase stress levels and increase the incidence of depression and anxiety. It can also be a major contributor to poor food choices and weight gain. In other words, when you don't get enough sleep, you're not operating at your greatest potential. Poor sleep could even be getting in the way of your success.

Agile in Fixed Price Fixed Scope projects - Hybrid Contracts
The Fixed Price (FP) Fixed Scope (FS) contracts offer very limited opportunity for vendors to practice Agile methodology. Making either FP or FS elastic will give some room for practicing Agile methodology. Let us explore how this can be accomplished in the contracts. Both the above contracting models requires a high level of trust between both the vendors and the clients.

Your Car Can Show You How Agile Estimation Works
When I was done, I could see that I would need 4 tanks of gas for my forecasted trips. So how could we correlate this approach to software project estimation? First, in software development, our “trips” are user stories. And similar to the process we used on trips, we have the team look at each user story and determine its impact to a sprint. In software development, a sprint is our “tank of gas”.

Clouds are backing up clouds, with more choices on tap
The feature is designed to give customers more assurance that they will still be able to get to their data even if their primary cloud platform fails. Nasuni has never experienced a service outage and customers are already covered by service-level agreements, but Cloud Mirroring can give them one more layer of assurance, Nasuni said.

Big Data Security: The Evolution of Hadoop’s Security Model
Since the security redesign, Hadoop’s security model has by and large stayed the same. Over time, some components of the Hadoop ecosystem have applied their own security as a layer over Hadoop – for example, Apache Accumulo provides cell-level authorization, and HBase provides access controls at the column and family level.

Agile Testing is Not about Automation
Regardless of the nature and size of the project, an organization can adopt Agile testing to avail a number of advantages. However, many people still consider the innovative testing is synonymous with automation testing. The automation testing is, no doubt, an important and integral part of each Agile software testing strategy. But the main aim of the strategy is to ensure that Agile testing is seamlessly integrated with the entire application development process.

European Union Check-Up: Malicious Websites Hosted in the EU
Today more and more attackers are using websites to attempt to distribute malware and steal credentials. As I wrote about recently, we see that drive-by downloads are now the top threat detected in enterprise environments. Malicious websites typically appear to be legitimate and often provide no outward indicators of their malicious nature. In many cases, these sites are legitimate websites that have been compromised by malware, SQL injection, or other techniques.

Quote for the day:

"In a crisis if I had only an hour I'd spend the first 50 minutes defining the problem and the last 10 minutes solving it." -- Albert Einstein