Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

December 25, 2013

An Artificial Hand with Real Feelings
Now researchers at the Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University have developed a new kind of interface that can convey a sense of touch from 20 spots on a prosthetic hand. It does this by directly stimulating nerve bundles—known as peripheral nerves—in the arms of patients; two people have so far been fitted with the interface. What’s more, the implants continue to work after 18 months, a noteworthy milestone given that electrical interfaces to nerve tissue can gradually degrade in performance.

Building a Feedback-Rich Culture
Even people who aren’t interested in or skilled at giving or receiving feedback will participate in the process (and improve) when they’re working in a feedback-rich environment. And the most ardent and capable feedback champions will give up if the organizational or team culture doesn’t support their efforts. So as leaders, how do we build a feedback-rich culture? What does it take to cultivate an ongoing commitment to interpersonal feedback? Here are four essential elements:

String externalization practices and considerations for UNIX shell scripts
In this article, we provide practical "How-Tos" and experiences on externalizing shell script messages in a product. Also, we provide suggestions on what to consider before and during translation enablement from a globalization perspective. The target audience is product developers who would like to enable their shell scripts for translation. After reading this article, readers can understand the considerations for externalizing shell script messages, realize the end-to-end process of string extraction and translation, and be aware of some known issues and their solutions.

The End of Data Scientists and Other Predictions
"We don't have a crystal ball at CMSWire — but we're curious about the future. So we’ve collected predictions from some our favorite analytics firms like Tableau, Splunk, Alteryx, Alpine Data Labs and SAP, as well as insights from the Music Industry Association and Ad Age. We’re sharing a few of them with you. For the record, these prophesies do not belong to us, nor do we"

45 Useful JavaScript Tips, Tricks and Best Practice
In this article, I’ll share a set of JavaScript tips, tricks and best practices that should be known by all JavaScript developers regardless of their browser/engine or the SSJS (Server Side JavaScript) interpreter. Note that the code snippets in this article have been tested in the latest Google Chrome version 30, which uses the V8 JavaScript Engine

Best Web Designing Frameworks for 2014
These are frameworks that can help you build fully functional web templates within minutes and with extremely minimal knowledge of CSS and JavaScript coding. There are great expectations for the year 2014. Responsive websites are already the Next Big Thing. Visitors from mobile and tablets have become an important factor for all websites. Every website has to look good and work well in every device. In this article, we will list some of the best CSS frameworks that will help web designers and developers to explore their potential to build responsive and beautiful web applications in 2014

XMLFoundation
If you are building an application that does not use XML and never will..... XMLFoundation is still a very valuable tool available to solve many very common development tasks. The data structure classes alone ( List, Hash, Stack, Tree, Array, QSort ) are very useful. They all have "Iterator" objects so that data structures can be read-referenced by multiple threads at the same time without blocking. The interface is standard to all data structures.

Blurred lines: Online file-sharing services vs. ECM software
With greater control over corporate data in the hands of users, the traditional enterprise content management (ECM) software market has been disrupted. Traditionally, ECM software has been costly and more complex, requiring user training and users logging into a corporate virtual private network (VPN) to access company files. While files are secure, ECM software hasn't been user-friendly or designed for mobility.

28 Design Principles for an Enterprise Architecture SharePoint Community
Naturally this proved to be a very powerful and compelling technique and allowed many of the design decisions to be taken simply and collectively by exploring the sensibility and applicability of each principle. Not all principles will apply in all scenarios, but those below will provide a useful starting point / thinking frame should you be presented with a similar problem. They should (of course) also be supplemented with SharePoint design best practices.

The Role of Governance in Project Management
From an organisational project management perspective, the word Governance could be interpreted as managing, controlling and administrating the organisation’s initiatives for changing and developing the business. Examples of initiatives may be to develop new or modified products and services, develop new markets, or change the organisation and its support in the form of IT systems. This also applies to contractors or engineering firms who take on projects and assignments on behalf of clients.

Quote for the day:

"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

December 24, 2013

Don’t jump the SQL ship just yet
Times are changing. RDBMS are continually evolving and embracing new features, standardising them in ANSI SQL, obsoleting JPA 2.x. In these times of change, JPA standardisation seems limiting to those who innovate in the data storage market. EclipseLink’s recent flirt with supporting MongoDB through JPA extensions shows that the standards people are not quite sure where we’re heading. But one thing seems certain. We won’t get rid of SQL so quickly. So why not start embracing it again?

Target hackers try new ways to use stolen card data
Fraud experts say the location information will likely allow buyers of the stolen data to use spoofed versions of cards issued to people in their immediate vicinity, Krebs wrote. "This lets crooks who want to use the cards for in-store fraud avoid any knee-jerk fraud defenses in which a financial institution might block transactions that occur outside the legitimate cardholder's immediate geographic region," he said.

For cloud providers, fraud detection is integral part of business plan
"All of the advantages of the cloud for enterprises are the advantages for the bad guys," said Jeff Spivey, international vice president of ISACA, a founding member of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and president of Security Risk Management Inc., a Charlotte, N.C., information security consultancy. "It's that anonymity and scale that's attractive to the fraudsters." Without proper cloud-based fraud detection and prevention practices in place, cloud providers can become unwitting hosts for cybercriminals.

Establishing a Process to Evaluate Ideas
Innovation is one of the keys to business success. If you don’t innovate, your business will suffer. If it isn’t made obsolete by competition, it will likely end up as a commodity business with little to distinguish it from competitors. And yet, not every new idea that a business comes up with is going to be a good one. As companies mature, many establish a process to evaluate ideas. It might be about coming up with new products or it might be finding new ways to create customer engagement.

JSFeat - JavaScript Image Processing Library
Modern JavaScript is fast, fast enough to do real time image processing. JSFeat is a JavaScript library that implements some advanced image processing and the demos prove it does it in real time. JSFeat is an open source library (MIT License) that you can download and use in almost any browser. ... What is even more impressive is that JSFeat doesn't just implement the simple image processing you find in other libraries - it also does some cutting-edge object tracking and detection.

Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives - A Toolbox of Retrospective Exercises
This pocket book contains many exercises that you can use to do retrospectives, supported with the “what” and “why” of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they can bring you, and advice for introducing and improving retrospectives. Agile retrospectives are a great way to continuously improve your way of working. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve.

When Agile BI is Not Agile
The spirit of Agile isn’t meant to enforce rules enterprise-wide. BI projects in particular are very different than operational applications. General operational applications (and I’m sure I’m even generalizing those) seem to benefit a little more from a cookie-cutter, standardized approach. You can imagine a mobile application where you want to add a feature that allows users to tap an icon that display a customer’s shipping address. It’s relatively straightforward to know what the user wants, update the tables and code to provide that feature, and then demonstrate the existing app to a user.

Requirements, Estimation and Planning: Steps to work with Agile software development projects
This article is about requirements, estimation, and planning in agile software development projects. Agile estimation is often seen as being invaluable, yet others dismiss it as waste. The reasons for this disagreement can be traced to disparities in the Scrum and Lean-Kanban ways of working. Everybody in software development has the same goal: rapid, reliable, low risk delivery of high-quality, valuable functionality to users. So what will help them to achieve their goal? Just coding?

Vectorization, SIMD Architecture: What You Need to Know
One of the approaches to parallel programming is vectorization, which is a way of performing batch operations all with a single assembly language instruction. In the first article of a new series, Jeff Cogswell walks you through the basics of vectorization with the Intel processors. ... To fully understand vectorization, you have to know a bit about processor architecture and assembly language.

Security researcher cancels talk at RSA conference in protest
The researcher said he didn't expect EMC or the conference to suffer as a result of the alleged deals with the NSA. Nor did he expect other conference speakers to cancel. Most of the speakers at the conference are American so why would they care about surveillance that's not targeted at them but at non-Americans, Hypponen wrote. Surveillance operations by U.S. intelligence agencies are targeted at foreigners, he added. "However I'm a foreigner. And I'm withdrawing my support from your event," the Finnish researcher wrote.

Quote for the day:

"The best thing workers can bring to their jobs is a lifelong thirst for learning." -- Jack Welch

December 23, 2013

IPv6 will allow them to track you down. Not!
It is true that IPv6 will change addressing on the Internet. Many of us hope it restores the ability to identify an actual network endpoint -- a feature that we lost a number of years ago in IPv4. But some appear to be imagining a future where each machine has its very own address, and that these addresses will be easily traced whenever a person visits a website, plays a game online, or even opens an email. In fact, IPv6 actually has features that are designed to foil these sorts of plans.

Five trends that will affect your cloud strategy
Over the next three years, we expect this trend to accelerate, with an expanded set of providers and offerings. Deploying cloud services will involve substantial integration work, and many CSBs will deliver integration services and employ business process management suites (BPMSs) to address this complexity. Steady investments by IT distributors and communication service providers (CSPs) for cloud aggregation brokerage offerings will help small or midsize businesses acquire, leverage and maximise investments involving multiple cloud services.

The IT industry must come clean on software licensing
Software publishers want to sell organisations an enterprise agreement, according to James Moy, assistant vice-president for IT asset management at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. “They love to sell their software, but if you ever ask any of the software suppliers how they keep compliant on their own software, they will have no response,” he says. Moy says most software is coded with executable file and revisions. “How does a user or company actually keep count? Take into account upgrades, patch versioning, enterprise agreements and select agreements and your head is spinning,” he adds.

Quanex halts its SAP rollout, citing a strategy shift
"This is a business planning issue," said Michael Krigsman, CEO of consulting firm Asuret and an expert on why IT projects go awry. "It has nothing to do with the technology. Any time a company changes its strategy mid-stream there are going to be mopping-up costs, which is what this is, and if they don't need the capabilities of an elaborate ERP system then they are wise not to continue with it."

CEO Says CIOs Need to Be a Source of Energy and Innovation
"Suren Gupta, our EVP of technology and operations, sits 20 feet down the hall from me, and we interact continuously. He's on our strategy and reinvention committee, which approves strategy for all our businesses. I walk down the hall to get his thoughts--not just on technology matters but also on business matters--because he's one of the architects of our business innovation. CIOs who aspire to Suren's level of impact need to learn about the business, own the transformation and teach the organization how technology can improve customer satisfaction."

eGuide: Application Integration in the Cloud and On-Premises
Application integration has always been an afterthought for buyers enthralled with the latest new app, and the pain of integration is continually forgotten. This E-Guide provides expert tips and best practices on deciding between on-premises vs. SaaS and dealing with the application integration woes that follow.

PyParallel: A Fast Parallel Version of Python
Python’s asynchronous support is somewhat problematic. It is designed around the Unix/Linux idea of synchronous, non-blocking I/O. This is where a thread continuously polls for incoming data and then dispatches it accordingly. While Linux is tuned for this pattern, on a Windows machine this is disastrous for performance. It is really expensive to copy the data from the polling thread to the thread that will actually process the work. So what PyParallel delivers instead is true asynchronous I/O using the native I/O Completion Ports (IOCP).

Information technology and corporate governance
Control objectives in IT (COBIT) is an IT governance framework and supporting toolset that allows managers to bridge the gap between control requirements, technical issues and business risks. One may visit the ISACA website for a detailed discussion and guidance on IT governance and COBIT. At the end of the day, IT governance has to create value for the business over and above associated costs. ... This requires companies to have people who understand both business and IT.

What I've Learned from 3 Years in the Gamification Industry
"According to Google Trends, the first news article citing the term gamification appeared in August 2010. Badgeville officially launched in October 2010 (at TechCrunch Disrupt.) As a marketer helping grow a new industry, beyond making sure people knew about our product and the value it adds to their businesses, our team had to carefully help explain what gamification was and wasn't."

Seven Tips for Stress-Free Project Leadership
An essential component of the art of stress management is the ability to realize that anxiety, for all its negatives, is not the problem; the problem is how we often choose to deal with it. “When you have just enough anxiety though, you have the productive energy you need to turn your thinking and feeling into positive action,” says Robert Rosen, author of Just Enough Anxiety: The Hidden Driver of Business Success.

Quote for the day:

"Disruption is about risk-taking. But then you become a Fortune 500 co., which is about risk mitigation" -- @SteveCase

December 22, 2013

Advanced Persistent Threats Now Hitting Mobile Devices
"Just when many IT security practitioners were hoping to get their endpoint security risks under control, the exploding growth of mobility platforms and public cloud resources has turned these dreams into a security nightmare," the survey report asserts. The respondents perceive "mobile devices such as smartphones" to be the greatest potential IT security risk in the IT environment, more than PC desktops and laptops.

When You Criticize Someone, You Make It Harder for that Person to Change
Barbara Frederickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, finds that positive feelings enlarge the aperture of our attention to embrace a wider range of possibility and to motivate us to work toward a better future. She finds that people who do well in their private and work lives alike generally have a higher ratio of positive states to negative ones during their day. Being in the positive mood range activates brain circuits that remind us of how good we will feel when we reach a goal, according to research by Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin.

Brave New (Dell) World
Dell has started a $300 million fund to explore new technologies and fund companies doing that work. A more cynical person might think that Michael Dell is using the new-found freedom to offer an incentive to other startups to avoid the same kinds of issues he had – answering to single-minded masters only focused on dividends and stock price. By offering to invest in a hot new startup, Michael Dell will hopefully spur innovation in areas like storage.

Oculus Primed: Meet the Geniuses Who Finally Mastered Virtual Reality
As processor power has progressed, various head-mounted displays and VR sets have claimed to have solved the latency problem at various thresholds: 100 milliseconds! 40 milliseconds! Those thresholds might do away with the most frustrating delays, but they can’t guarantee comfort. “It’s easier to get sick from latency than it is to perceive it,” Luckey says. “People in the VR industry have been disagreeing on what humans can perceive—and that number always seems to match up to what their system is just barely able to do.”

Thinking in Silicon
A new breed of computer chips that operate more like the brain may be about to narrow the gulf between artificial and natural computation—between circuits that crunch through logical operations at blistering speed and a mechanism honed by evolution to process and act on sensory input from the real world. Advances in neuroscience and chip technology have made it practical to build devices that, on a small scale at least, process data the way a mammalian brain does.

Target Sees Massive Customer Data Hack
Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, director of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at the University of Washington told TIME Magazine that hacking “is a business. The general public would be shocked and amazed by the size of the problem.” She added, “People who run companies are not aware that they’ve actually become software companies. We’re headed toward the internet of things, where we have embedded software in every product. What we’ve done is open up a whole host of vulnerabilities.”

2013 Top 10 SDN Stories
In 2013, Cisco and VMware launching SDN and networking virtualization strategies stole much of the spotlight, organizations like the Open Networking Foundation and OpenDaylight made real progress on OpenFlow development and a common controller. This year marked real progress for open networking and SDN standards development, here are top 10 SDN stories of 2013.

Expert Describes SQL Server 2012 Licensing Pitfalls and Strategies
DeGroot offered some strategies to reduce SQL Server 2012 licensing costs. One of the strategies relies on using the true-up process with SQL Server 2008 R2 licenses to gain additional core entitlements. A true-up is licensing lingo for contract renewals under Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements. DeGroot noted that true-ups will cost the least during the third year of an agreement. The idea behind a true-up is that organizations can add software during the year and pay for the additional licensing later at the annual true-up assessment time.

5 Tips for Agile Enterprise Architecture Innovation
More and more, IT is focused on reliability while the business side is pushing for tech innovation and new tech adoption. Enterprise architects and tech execs are right to be cautious about latching on to the next-big-thing, but there’s also little good done by ignoring this unprecedented wave of business interest and “shadow” adoption. Forrester Research analyst Brian Hopkins recently highlighted a handful of areas enterprise architects can stay grounded in their needs while reaching for innovation and agility. Here are five tips for fostering innovation and agility in EA development as adopted from Hopkins and Forrester’s “Emerging Technology playbook.”

Architecture and Agility: Married, Divorced, or Just Good Friends?
Does agile development need architecture? Does architecture need agile development? Is it possible to even answer these questions without a polarizing debate typified more by caricature and entrenched cultural views than by clear definitions and open reasoning—a debate more closely resembling two monologues streaming past each other than a dialogue? Perhaps rephrasing the question in more general terms offers a better place to start: instead of focusing specifically on agile approaches, we should consider development processes more broadly.

Quote for the day:

"Thus to be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great." -- G. W. F. Hegel

December 21, 2013

Password Cracking Revisited: Rainbow Tables
Rainbow tables are chains of hashes and reductions. A reduction matches a hash to plain text. These tables start with a plain text value. The value is repeatedly hashed, reduced (which is not the same thing as an inverse hash), and then rehashed. However, the table itself only stores two values -- the starting plain text and the ending hash. As such, a chain consisting of millions of values can be stored as two values -- essentially the start and end points.

Innovation: Are You a Gardener or an Architect?
The architects do blueprints before they drive the first nail, they design the entire house, where the pipes are running, and how many rooms there are going to be, how high the roof will be. But the gardeners just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up. I think all writers are partly architects and partly gardeners, but they tend to one side or another, and I am definitely more of a gardener. ... the same idea applies to innovation. There are people that work hard at building a good structure to support innovation.

The only effective way to ensure quality is with continuous verification
The hygienic approach proposed in this article is to apply verification techniques continuously as the work product is developed. Figure 1 shows the development of requirements models. In Figure 1, you can see the places where verification is performed. Notice that the inner loop (fromDefine the Use Case System Context down to Verify and Validate the Functional Requirements and back) is a nanocycle and is run every 20-60 minutes. So you take some small set of requirements, realize them in the model, execute and verify them, and repeat.

Time is Money: Milliseconds Matter
Did you know just a one second increase in Amazon's page load time could potientially cost the retail giant $1.6 billion in annual sales? There's no question consumer online shopping expectations are at an all-time high. But did you know the time they spend on your site is at an all-time low? This means finding ways to improve your website usability has never been more important. ... For other interesting stats see the infographic

Major computer security firm RSA took $10 mln from NSA to weaken encryption
The National Security Agency arranged a clandestine US$10 million contract with computer security power RSA that allowed the spy agency to embed encryption software it could use to infiltrate the company’s widely used products, Reuters reported. Revelations provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and first reported in September showed that the NSA created and perpetuated a corruptible formula that was ultimately a “back door” into encryption products.

Intel Readies 18-Core Xeon “Broadwell-EP” Microprocessors for Launch in 2015
The Xeon chips due in the next couple of years will not only get new micro-architectures along with innovative capabilities, but will also demonstrate unprecedented core-count. Based on slides from Intel’s roadmap published by VR-Zone web-site, Intel is currently working on Xeon E5-2600 v3 “Haswell-EP” with up to 14 cores due in late 2014 as well as Xeon E5-2600 v4 “Broadwell-EP” with up to 18 cores chips due in the second half of 2015.

Target data theft fuels new worries on cybersecurity
The data breach underscored the evolving sophistication of cybercriminals and the persistent vulnerability of retailers and consumers despite dozens of past incidents at major retailers. “How do you get 40 million credit cards and no one knows about it?” said Ken Stasiak, chief executive of SecureState, which investigates cybercrimes. “That's a hell of a lot of credit cards. There should have been someone inside the company who spotted this much sooner.” The Target attack appeared to be well thought out and executed with great precision.

BYOD Became the 'New Normal' in 2013
"A big shift in attitude for BYOD in 2013," says Aberdeen Group's Andrew Borg. To understand what happened with BYOD this year, we need a starting point: An Aberdeen Group survey in January found that three out of four respondents had a BYOD program in place. Yet two-thirds of those with a BYOD program had an "anything goes" philosophy, not enforcing compliance or security policies. BYOD was also a way for business users to revolt against IT, which traditionally threw up roadblocks to new technology, especially consumer tech.

Top Technology Trends for 2014
IEEE Computer Society journals, magazines, and conferences are continually at the forefront of current technology trends. That's just one of the reasons that IEEE Computer Society is the community for technology leaders. As a technology professional, keeping on top of trends is crucial. Below are a list of technology topics that Computer Society magazines, journals, and conferences will be focusing on next year:

End of an era? What's holding back the new digital enterprise
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run" to quote Amara's Law, but I would argue long term cultural digestion and absorption to find value models are the reason why a technology takes off rather than Canadian philosopher of communication theory Marshall McLuhan's idea that 'the medium is the message' which is is much beloved by those keen to sell you software seat licenses before the end of their quarter.

Quote for the day:

"For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead…" -- Thomas Jefferson

December 20, 2013

CloudSigma makes IaaS security easier with network policies
The new network policy system from CloudSigma, a Zurich-based IaaS provider, will allow customers and providers to configure and control both inbound and outbound traffic through the CloudSigma IaaS Web interface or directly over the provider's application programming interface. The policies can range from a single rule that blocks all external public IP traffic to complex configurations allowing connections to certain ports from a specific range of IP addresses.

Want To Really Be Agile? Swarm!
In order to all be working on the same feature without running into dependency problems, we have to all work on the same story, known colloquially as swarming. That means that the team has to discuss the story, divide it into tasks and have each pair work on a task. Close collaboration is incredibly important since we want to make sure we are all working toward the same goal. We know from reality that not everyone on the team will be able to work on the same story. So how do we share our code changes quickly?

4 ways network virtualization improves security
Add network virtualization to that dynamic environment, and the operational model for networking changes completely. Profound changes of this sort tend to make security professionals nervous, but in reality, network virtualization includes several built-in network security advantages. These include isolation and multitenancy; segmentation; distribution firewalling; and service insertion and chaining. Network virtualization platforms can combine these features with other security functions to streamline security operations in a software-defined data center.

New cybersecurity boom arrives in Silicon Valley
The result is a digital arms race against wily hackers that has Silicon Valley battling to provide the weapons to the good guys. Venture capital firms are pumping funding into security startups, which are getting gobbled up by big companies that see cybersecurity as a source of new revenue. In a region where tech trends go in cycles, cybersecurity is a particularly mouthwatering investment prospect because no matter how much security equipment or software gets sold, the problem never gets completely solved

From the Brink of Disruption to the Year’s Top Corporate Comebacks
In 1991, LL Cool J rocked MTV Unplugged, rapping to the audience, “Don’t call it a comeback.” He didn’t wish to dwell on the flops of the past or to jinx the future. Today, three companies – Best Buy (BBY), Delta Airlines (DAL), and General Motors (GM) – could say the same thing. Only a few years ago, each was dismissed and left for dead. But each has since come back and now stand as the turnaround story of 2013.

VDI is the Primary Enabler of BYOD, Say ITDMs
Handa says, “While the initial phase of implementation looks similar, the extent of investments and the IT infrastructure deployment at the back-end differ from one to the other.” He argues that BYOD has its own set of operational challenges that may not exist when one is deploying thin client/uniform end-computing devices. In the case of Essar, Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Services India says, “In our case, desktop virtualisation has become one of the primary enablers of BYOD due to its core ability to stream data to mobile devices in an encrypted and containerised manner.”

Big Data, Little Happiness
Can data make companies intelligent? Sure. Can it data make companies more profitable, more efficient, more customer-centric and more strategic? Possibly. Of particular concern is the rate of growth of data capture. More data is collected in one day now than existed in the world just a few years ago. Unfortunately, this speaks only to our ability to capture data, rather than to its inherent utility. This dramatic surge in data is essentially caused as the number of connections that can be made is increasing geometrically between content, users, apps and activities.

JavaScript spin-off asm.js brings web even closer to native performance
asm.js is a subset of JavaScript that is optimised to maximise performance. asm.js is JavaScript and so will run in any browser but to get the best performance a browser's JavaScript engine needs to have been written to take advantage of the optimisations asm.js makes possible. Currently the only browser to support asm.js optimisations is Firefox, since Firefox 22, although Google has expressed interest in adding support to Chrome.

Being Nice to New Hires Is Good for Business
Overall, a consistent pattern emerged. Higher levels of support from both co-workers and supervisors led to new employees’ having more positive attitudes, trying harder to integrate with the group, and being more committed to their job. On the flip side, higher levels of negative behavior by co-workers and bosses led to new hires’ feeling excluded from the workflow and made them more likely to skip work or show up late.

The Rise of the Developer: Why Programmers Are Kings
Collison sees the roots of the developer-is-king trend in the growth of such developer communities. "Over the past few years the online developer community has been getting increasingly verbal, thanks to companies like GitHub, which amounts to a modern day version of a Home Brew Computer Club (where Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac met)," he said. "One of the advantages for all the companies here is that they nurture an ever growing audience...The developer communities are very close knit. If the product is good enough, the word gets out."

Quote for the day:

"First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people." -- Leo Rosten

December 19, 2013

New DDoS malware targets Linux and Windows systems
"From the analysis we were able to determine that there are four types of attack possible, each of them a DDoS attack on the defined target," the researchers said. "One of the possibilities is the DNS Amplification attack, in which a request, containing 256 random or previously defined queries, is sent to a DNS server. There are also other, unimplemented functions, which probably are meant to utilize the HTTP protocol in order to perform a DDoS attack."

4 Ideas to Build a Culture of Critical Thinking
The reality is that training middle managers on critical thinking skills is much like teaching an adult to ride a bicycle. It takes patience, training and practice to be able to master the art of critical thinking which, in turn, leads to good decision making. The starting point of building a culture of critical thinking is to incorporate critical thinking in organizational training programs.

How CIOs And CMOs Can Be Better Partners
A hot topic over the past year in business and technology circles has been the relationship between the CMO and CIO. And for good reason. We're in the middle of one of the most transformative evolutions of digital technology adoption of our time. But while CMOs and CIOs know they need to find ways to work together more closely in what Forrester is calling the "Age of the Customer," many executives see it as an alliance of necessity more than a exciting relationship. Why? In a word: territory. For years, the two worlds were silos, separated by corporate boundaries.

Putting capabilities to use
A capability is simply the ability to do something: it literally has no function until it’s placed together with a function-interface – the external interface to a service – and with the various other elements that make up and identify and drive the actual service. The ‘service-content‘ frame, from modelling with Enterprise Canvas, summarises where capabilities sit in context of all those other elements in a service:

Implementing Oracle RAC on Extended Distance Clusters
A special implementation of Oracle RAC lets you add an extended distance cluster, also called a stretched cluster, metro cluster, campus cluster, or geo cluster. With an extended distance cluster, components are deployed across two or more data center locations, allowing them to continue to function if one location fails. In normal operation, all nodes at all locations will be active. The distance for an extended Oracle RAC is determined by the type failure against which the Oracle RAC should be protected.

How an Involved CIO Can Help Your Organization Embrace Innovation and Avoid Disruption
The precise role of the CIO will depend to some degree on the technology-driven pressures facing any given company. For some, incessant advances in technology are a blessing. Their companies or perhaps industries are embracing change and innovation and reaping the rewards. Here, the role of the CIO is to help stay at the forefront of technology or at the very least, not lose any ground to competitors.

Top 8 Ways Banks Will Spend Their 2014 IT Budgets
Generalities and industry numbers fail to take into account the specific conditions at individual banks. For instance, at Capital Bank in Raleigh, N.C., the IT budget for 2014 is flat in comparison to this year. Chief Operating Officer Zahid Afzal, says the bank will increase its investment on mobile, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and more convenient products and services for customers. IT purchases will include sales and service tools, cybersecurity and fraud management software, mobile and payments products and services, storage solutions, and big data and business intelligence related tools,

The 9 hardest things programmers have to do
A recent discussion thread on Quora got developers to share what they felt were the hardest tasks that the job requires. Using the input and scores from that thread, and another, older one on Ubuntu Forums, ITworld has compiled a list of the 9 hardest tasks for programmers. As you’ll see, it turns out that actually writing code isn’t one of the harder parts of programming. If you develop software for a living, see how of many of these tasks are on your list.

Change the organization or change the organization
It used to be that old-school, industrial-age organizations could accommodate stepped change. For purposes of this article we will consider the mechanical approach to forcing change through (described in Post 1) to be Change Management 1.0. However, with the rate of innovation and competition accelerating, pressure is on organizations to change far more rapidly. Consider organizations such as Kodak, Nokia, or, more recently, Research in Motion, who seem to be failing to keep up. Consider the external environmental pressures such as:

Dell committed to computing solutions
Dell Venture is dedicated to the success of tech entrepreneurs and is aligned with Dell's own strategy and growth objectives. The model is an investment relevant to Dell's strategic objective sand priorities, investing $5 million-$15 million, averaging $3 million-$5 million. Dell Ventures' model is to co-invest with venture capitalists and other strategic actors, servicng as a board adviser and making the full breadth of Dell resources available to the portfolio company.

Quote for the day:

"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure" -- William Saroyan

December 18, 2013

Chief Digital Officer to be Asia's hottest senior tech job in 2014
The hottest job will be the Chief Digital Officer because digital transformation touches nearly every market, especially in retail and travel, and will require executives who can navigate the move to digital and mobile platforms, said Yap. The consumerization of B2B requires the creation of a digital experience that matches what customers experience in the real world, she added. The rapidly evolving CMO role is the third in demand, and will see them increasingly using analytics to show that marketing is actually driving revenue and growth, explained Yap.

Creating Test Objects With FakeModel
There are more mature test data creation suites available, but none that I know of that will recognize DataAnnotations and handle them appropriately, its great for creating data if using an ORM. FakeModel will pay attention to the data annotations attached to a property and react accordingly. But as I say, it is in it's infancy, currently at Version 0.0.5, as of last night. FakeModel was recommended to me by a University Lecturer when I moaned that it was difficult to find a test data suite that wouldn't ignore my annotations. I don't know how he came about it.

API vs. SOA? Are they different?
A few weeks back we were at the Gartner AADI Summit at Las Vegas. Some of the best minds in the industry gathered and the focus of the conference was the impact of “The Nexus of Forces” (aka SMACT – Social, Mobile, Analytics (Big Data), Cloud and the Internet of Things) on application development and integration. At the center of this discussion were APIs and SOA. The key take away – APIs have their merits from being more open, easily consumable, mobile friendly, being more business oriented, but from an infrastructure, manageability and governance perspective, APIs are more like SOA.

Security Threats And The Business Network
According to Symantec’s 2013 Security report, there was a 42% increase in targeted attacks on businesses in 2012, with 31% of these aimed at companies employing less than 250 workers. There were 14 zero-day vulnerabilities found and one waterhole attack infected 500 organisations in just one day. This highlights the fact that internet security remains one of the biggest challenges that face modern businesses, especially as the use of the internet and cloud services become increasingly important to the enterprise.

Fake antivirus program uses stolen signing certificates
The samples of Antivirus Security Pro collected by Microsoft used stolen certificates issued "by a number of different CAs to software developers in various locations around the world," the company wrote. The certificates were issued to developers in the Netherlands, U.S., Russia, Germany, Canada and the U.K. by CAs such as VeriSign, Comodo, Thawte and DigiCert, according to a chart. Using stolen certificates is not a new tactic, but it is usually considered difficult to accomplish since hackers have to either breach an organization or an entity that issues the certificates.

Microsoft Lync vs. Cisco UC: What the decision really comes down to
Selecting the right UC vendor also requires careful consideration of the operational costs a deployment could incur, he noted. "As much as Cisco and Microsoft like to talk about their differences, they have very similar architectures," said Kieller, who represented the Microsoft perspective on the panel. "The solutions that you [choose] must be aligned to your specific business objective. Whether it's Microsoft or Cisco, things like training and change management are going to be important for your success."

The great boss as a visionary leader
Developing this kind of visionary leadership team is a boon for both the organization and the employees who participate. When you develop your top talent, you are putting in place a solid succession plan, thus assuring that your future leaders will be ready when they are needed. Moreover, it’s healthy for the bottom line when investors see that a company has a vision and is preparing for the future by retaining its best talent and providing them with exciting opportunities for personal and professional growth.

Spreading CMMI Practices among Agile Teams in Big Organizations
Although often unaware of it, most teams use good practices in their daily work; at the same time, they tend to ignore others that could add value to their solutions. The main reason for failure is the first CMMI principle, known as establishing. “Establishing” and “maintain” have strong meanings in CMMI, and they generally appear together. Summarized, the two terms mean that any involved artifact or practice shall be defined, documented, and used. All level 2 and 3 process-area specific goals contain one or more “establishing and maintain” practices.

Requirements, estimation, and planning: How these work
Estimating work that is creative and unpredictable is just plain hard. Yet we are asked to give estimates for our software projects up front and early—and despite all our efforts to remind management that these estimates are rough. But…… too often our initial estimates turn into commitments.Estimates add value where scope is uncertain and there are associated risks to be managed. That's why Scrum teams engaged on projects typically make use of them, but Lean-Kanban BAU teams generally don't.

Computers with brain-like intelligence are getting closer to reality
Scientists are looking to create advanced computers with these neural chips, which replicate the brain's circuitry and can retain information and make decisions based on patterns discovered through probabilities and associations. Projects funded by the U.S. government, European Union and private organizations are attempting to re-create the manner in which the brain's neurons and synapses work by redesigning the memory, computation and communication features of traditional circuitry.

Quote for the day:

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." -- Vincent van Gogh

December 17, 2013

Oregon health exchange technology troubles run deep due to mismanagement, early decisions
The deadline to create a functioning exchange was always tight. Federal requirements repeatedly changed or were issued at the last minute. And the project was no simple task, requiring a site that interacted securely with state and federal agencies, tribes and a dozen insurance carriers. But questionable management moves by the state and Cover Oregon also played an undeniable role.

How Strategic Agility Can Lead to Denial
You know what it’s like on the field of play. (Some of you even know what it’s like on the field of battle.) Once things have started to come undone, it’s very hard to think clearly. It feels like the sky is falling. I know this from my own undistinguished career as a high school quarterback. (I remember thinking about one chaos-raining cornerback, why don’t we just make this guy a permanent part of our backfield.) It’s hard to think at all, let alone strategically. Now it’s all damage control, all the time. Now, it all denial, all the time.

IBM reveals its top five innovation predictions for the next five years
“We try to get a sense of where the world is going because that focuses where we put our efforts,” Meyerson said. “The harder part is nailing down what you want to focus on. Unless you stick your neck out and say this is where the world is going, it’s hard to you can turn around and say you will get there first. These are seminal shifts. We want to be there, enabling them.”

State of the CSO in 2013 shows an improved outlook
Not surprisingly, considering the number of enterprises with budgets on the rise, staffing levels are also expected to grow. Fully 34 percent of respondents expect their organizations' full-time security headcount to increase. Also, fewer expect to cut full-time security staff this year—only 8 percent compared to 14 percent last year. Once again, it is the larger companies that are most likely to be increasing their security resources, with 42 percent planning staffing increases, compared to 37 percent of midsize and 26 percent of small organizations.

Wal-Mart CIO's Advice For Women In IT
A mentor is somebody who stays with you over a long time. You have that trusting investment in each other. The sponsor is key for any talent to have. They will speak on your behalf in a compelling way. There's no messiness. A sponsor doesn’t worry about being second-guessed. Their credibility in their peer group is a really powerful counter-effect on subliminal bias in an organization. The sponsor can say "Why can’t she?"

CIO role in innovation begins with foresight
Too often, operations acts as a black hole, and IT gets sucked into it and that's where we spend all of our time: in the back office, keeping things up and running. If we outsource that, then we can truly spend that time getting aligned with the business, understanding the business, and helping the business to grow and to become more profitable.

CIOs: Be aware of the ever-increasing IT table stakes
Like differing table stakes, businesses and markets all have different expectations for technology. It's a given at a manufacturing company that the CIO has a firm grasp of ERP systems, but perhaps the stakes are lower when it comes to marketing automation and CRM software. While this is fairly obvious, one of the dangers I've noticed in IT leaders is not observing how table stakes are increasing around them, while they maintain the status quo in their own organization.

Exposing CQRS Through a RESTful API
Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) is an architectural pattern proposed by Greg Young that segregates reads (queries) and writes (commands) of a system into two separate subsystems. Commands are usually asynchronous and stored in a transactional storage while reads are eventually consistent and retrieved from de-normalised views. This article proposes and demonstrates an approach for building a RESTful API on top of CQRS systems.

Service Providers light up the Cloud OS
The members of the Cloud OS Network are leading service providers who will offer hybrid services that give customers greater flexibility and choice. By making a substantial commitment to the Microsoft Cloud Platform, they are able to deliver tailored infrastructure and application services that meet diverse customer needs. Customers will have greater choice in customization, data sovereignty, security, privacy and service levels.

Scaling Agile development calls for defined practices, consultant says
Some Agile software developers say that a predefined development process like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a departure from, not an extension of, the Agile methodology. Agile, they say, is about adapting to change and letting processes emerge. That approach can work well in small Agile projects, said Agile consultant and practitioner Mike Bonamassa. When he has done large development projects, practicing the Agile methodology without structure hasn't worked well.

Quote for the day:

"Make no small plans for they have not the power to stir men's blood." -- Niccolo Machiavelli

December 16, 2013

For most, tablets do not make good full-time laptops
What it won't (and can't) do is become a primary PC that meets all my needs. Like virtually every hybrid out there, the lack of a full complement of ports, the small display, and the under-sized keyboard, will not have the versatility that I require to have it serve as my only computer. I believe that is true for most folks, including many of those searching for a single hybrid device to meet all of their computing needs. I don't think there is, nor will there ever be, a single device that can be my only computer.

Is Business Agility a Product of Top-Down or Bottom-Up Resource Allocation?
Making a similar argument, Gerald Nanninga said, "Much of the new growth will come from new ventures which reapply core skills in new ways. These usually fall in the cracks between the status quo business units. Unless a corporate center reallocates resources to go after those 'cracks', they will be missed." At the end of the day, he wrote, "most investors are looking at total cash flow return on total investment. An agile corporate center can better focus on getting the total right."

SOA for Process and Data Integration
Traditionally, BI has been a process-free zone. Decision makers are such free thinkers that suggesting their methods of working can be defined by some stogy process is generally met with sneers of derision. Or worse. BI vendors and developers have largely acquiesced; the only place you see process mentioned is in data integration, where activity flow diagrams abound to define the steps needed to populate the data warehouse and marts.

Why few want to be the CIO anymore
Yet there's another reason for this shift in career thinking. Technology professionals are being recruited to work in marketing, logistics and other functions outside of IT as technology becomes more deeply embedded in virtually every aspect of the business. That trend is expanding the IT career path horizontally. Rather than one career ladder with CIO at the top rung, there are increasingly multiple career bridges across organizations.

Tech Bubble Is Stable for Cybersecurity Companies
The business of cybersecurity likely will see more stable growth thanks to this demand, but the money does not come as quickly compared to consumer-targeted websites because the technology behind cybersecurity is more complicated than social media, Ackerman explains. "If you want to get into the space because you think cybersecurity is hot but you don't have a deep background in this area, the chances to make a serious mistake by investing in a company or starting a company are magnified," Ackerman says.

The Evolution of ETL
Now, the majority of the data created is machine generated, collected in application logs and produced by sensors. The verbosity and sampling rate of these sources has exploded as computing capacity has expanded, storage has become cheaper and the business value of this data has increased. To meet these extreme challenges, a new breed of platforms has been developed including Hadoop, a wide range of NoSQL stores and cloud-enabled infrastructure.

The Best Way for New Leaders to Build Trust
Without trust, it is very unlikely you will learn the truth on what is really going on in that organization and in the market place. Without trust, employees won’t level with you—at best, you’ll learn either non-truths or part truths. I see this all too frequently. Sometimes employees will go out of their way to hoard and distort the truth. The best way to start building trust to take the time and meet as many individual contributors as you can as soon as you can. In addition to meeting customers, meeting rank-and-file employees should be your top priority.

Implementing CEBP in the enterprise
Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) streamline existing processes within an enterprise. In part one of this Q&A, Davide Petramala, executive vice president of business development and sales at Esna Technologies Inc., goes over the basics of communications-enabled business processes. In part two, Petramala explains how enterprises can determine whether they should adopt CEBP, who is responsible for implementing CEBP and how to determine cost savings.

What employers want from enterprise architects
The market for talented EAs is thriving, and demand has never been better. EA as a profession has really come of age since it emerged alongside service oriented architecture and Agile practices in the mid-2000s. Here are some snapshots from recent job listings culled from the Dice recruiting site. What do they all have in common? They all call for a role in bridging the technology and business sides of their respective organizations.

IT pros get training on their own dime
"I just kept doing it on my own because I wanted to advance, but also this is what IT people need to do to stay employed. Everything changes so fast, you can't not stay in the education stream," says Bubbers, now a senior network administrator at Craig Technologies, an IT and engineering services provider in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Bubbers is hardly alone in her approach. IT spending may be on the rise, but training budgets aren't increasing at the same pace.

Quote for the day:

"A year from now you may wish you had started today." -- Karen Lamb