Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 01, 2014

Decoding common virtual data storage terms
Sometimes we get carried away, and many times it's difficult to decipher virtual data storage terms, especially when you are comparing technologies or systems before a big purchasing decision. Just what is a "value-added, impactful solution" anyway? In this podcast, analyst firm Storage Switzerland LLC's senior analyst Eric Slack breaks down some common virtual data storage terms to help you decode sales and marketing gibberish and determine which technology and product is right for your environment.

Deadly Downtime: The Worst Network Outages Of 2013
No company is immune, no matter how sophisticated its technology. In 2013, some of the largest and most well-known technology companies in the world experienced downtime because of network failures. Companies such as Google, NASA, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and others all reported outages stemming from some problem in the network. Whether downtime is caused by a faulty piece of hardware, a software bug, a configuration error, or a denial-of-service attack, it causes the same response in customers, employees, users, and the IT professionals responsible for that network: Sheer panic.

Drake Baer: How To Create A Sustainable Culture Of Innovation
At Fast Company, Baer covers the intersection of psychology and work. He interviews the foremost minds in business for a living, including Clay Christensen, Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb. He also has a special interest in companies and bands on the brink of breaking big and the methods by which they do so. In this interview, he talks about why companies struggle with innovation, why leaders become irrelevant when they aren’t thinking forward, which companies are able to create sustainable innovation, sources of creativity and his career advice.

The security industry finds a dream enemy -- government spy agencies
The security industry has the enemy it always dreamed of to help it make the case for encryption adoption, but users looking to secure their data and communications need to be wary of claims made in marketing messages. Securing data in motion is the priority, experts say, and some large Internet firms are already making progress in this area, but encrypting data at rest without losing its usefulness will prove a greater challenge.

Rule Engine with Generic UI
A business rules engine works by separating execution code for business rules from the rest of the business process management system. This allows the end user to change business rules without having to ask a programmer for help. When a change is made, the engine will evaluate the change's effect on other rules in the system and flag the user if there is a conflict. Generic UI engine is a UI components that are common to various kinds of User Interfaces. That means: having generic UI Components that can be accessed using common Interfaces. Generic UI engine can be mapped to custom rule engine.

Enterprise mobility management: Embracing BYOD through secure app and data delivery
Given the paramount importance of security in IT’s mission, the natural instinct may be to try to limit peoples’ choice of devices or otherwise constrain the endpoint environment, even if it means sacrificing the benefits of greater productivity and flexibility. But simply barring the door to consumer device usage and BYOD is neither realistic nor desirable—it is inevitable that IT will face increasing pressure to provide access to any kind of app, anywhere, on any type of device. Simply put, IT has no choice but to enable and support consumer devices and BYOD; the only remaining question is how.

Four SSD best practices for efficient virtual machine storage
When solving the IOPS problem, IT managers have the choice of either server-side flash (basically, cache) or storage-side solid-state drives (SSDs). Either choice can deliver thousands or tens of thousands of IOPS (depending upon quantity) but they are not interchangeable; this is where the issue of latency comes in. Server-side flash has no more latency than other system cache, assuming the data is flash-resident -- meaning the data accessing the flash has to reside on the server as the flash does. If the system has to issue a read command to the hard disk drive (HDD), then there is no benefit to flash.

5 IT Hiring Trends In 2014
In a survey of 860 tech-focused hiring managers and recruiters, 73% reported planning to hire more candidates in the next six months, and 24% percent said their additional hiring will be substantial. That's good news for anyone looking to make a change in 2014. But expect the IT landscape to change, too. Here's a look at five predictions on hot skills, evolving roles, and how social media will change recruiting.

U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace in Delivering Broadband Service
The Obama administration effectively agrees. “While this country has made tremendous progress investing in and delivering high-speed broadband to an unprecedented number of Americans, significant areas for improvement remain,” said Tom Power, deputy chief technology officer for telecommunications at the White House. The disagreement comes over how far behind the United States really is in what many people consider as basic a utility as water and electricity — and how much it will affect the nation’s technological competitiveness over the next decade.

How the Financial Services Industry Should Use Big Data to Regain Trust
Analysing the usage of the many products that financial services firms have explains a lot about the behaviour of the customers. Although banks do not do this, or at least they say they do not do it, they have the possibility to understand customers better than customers understand themselves. The payment information explains a lot about customers. For that reason, when payment provider Equens (the largest pan-European payment processor) decided to sell the transaction data lot of negative reactions appeared and Equens had to withdraw their plan.

Quote for the day:

"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last." -- Marcel Proust

December 31, 2013

Spreadsheet governance tools make corporate finance Excel use feasible
In fact, the event that led the company to share its story was the discovery of a "material deficiency" that allowed an incorrect number to appear in a quarterly earnings report, a clear no-no, given that the company is publicly traded and thus regulated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. "Even though we had people eyeballing that stuff, we still published a wrong number," the source said.

The firm behind Healthcare.gov had top-notch credentials -- and it didn't help
Though CGI Federal got something of a black eye from the rollout, the CMMI certification it had did not come under fire , and no one has made a case that it should. Project requirements were changed late in the development cycle, warnings weren't heeded, and time for testing was cut short. Those actions are all anathema to CMMI's careful and measured development processes. If a project that's based on CMMI runs into problems, process defenders will usually cite issues with management and decision-making.

2014: Time to Rethink Privacy
In 2014, IT executives are going to have to make some very difficult decisions about privacy. Quite often when we talk about difficult decisions, we mean that we know what the right thing to do is, but it's just hard to bring ourselves to do it. In this case, though, part of the difficulty will be knowing what the right thing to do is. For that reason, every industry -- nay, every company -- will come to very different decisions based on the concerns of their employees and customers.

Raspberry Pi and Raspian, hands on
What could be better at Christmas than a shiny new gadget? Perhaps a shiny new gadget that runs Linux? One that reminds me of Heathkit, and TRS-80, and days of experimenting and playing with computers for no reason other than curiosity, and joy, and learning? That's what I got, a Raspberry Pi! What I intend to write here is "Jamie's Excellent Raspberry Adventures": it will document my own experiences, discoveries, successes and failures with this little gadget.

eBook: Keep only the data you want.
In today’s information economy, organizations are facing unfathomable data growth rates. In fact, Aberdeen Group estimates that data is growing at a rate of 56% year over year. And now, the big data phenomenon means data is growing in every single operational and analytic application. In fact, data is growing to the point that many organizations are facing impaired performance of their mission-critical applications, along with increasing costs associated with storing all of that data.

MDM vs. MAM: Comparing enterprise mobile security management options
IT teams must be able to successfully address the mobile device management challenge to adequately protect organizations while still allowing enough flexibility to reap the rewards of mobility. The landscape of mobile management products is dynamic and large. A common query is, "Which product is right for my organization, mobile application management (MAM) or mobile device management (MDM)?" The answer can be both and perhaps neither, depending on the use case.

Big Data: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Big data contains a virtual treasure trove of information about customers, trends and countless other valuable insights which may have the potential to transform businesses. However, in the race to unlock this promise, many enterprises now find they have more data than they are capable of handling. Here’s how CIOs, data warehouse managers and others can build the business case for data volume management to help them more effectively manage this data deluge.

An Innovator's Resolutions
Nothing prepares us more for a a journey into a new year, ripe with new promise and new opportunity, more than setting out the goals for the year, creating agreements with ourselves as to how we'll conduct ourselves in this new year. We start by reducing or eliminating cynicism about our organizations, recognizing that as innovators we are the spark of creativity that will lead others to better ideas. We decide now that developing interesting ideas into new products and services isn't easy but is possible, given the right sponsors and demonstrating the right possibilities.

Technologies To Look Out For In 2014
Spotting the next innovation, that could benefit customers or challenge the success of existing products, is top-of-mind for every company. Keeping a finger on the pulse of every innovation that could bring such a disruption can be daunting. At Cisco, a self-nominated team of enthusiasts, unaffiliated with any particular function or business unit take up the challenge of identifying technology developments worldwide. Technologies identified by this team are assessed by a panel of Distinguished Engineers, Fellows, Directors and VPs and a few are selected as novel and most relevant to Cisco.

Can Robots Better Spot Terrorists at Airports?
Aviation and government authorities are starting to use machines in lieu of people to verify the identities of fliers by scanning their faces, irises or fingerprints. Dozens of airports in Europe, Australia and the U.S. already employ such technology so passengers can pass immigration checks without showing identification to, or talking with, a person. Now, several major airports in Europe have started using these automated ID checks at security checkpoints and boarding gates.

Quote for the day:

"Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right, decide on what you think is right and stick to it." -- George Eliot

December 30, 2013

Managing Cyber Security Threats from Inside
In addition to NetFlow, security information and event management (SIEM) provides additional information about anomalous server or network behavior. SIEM solutions gather logs from various devices and systems, aggregating them into a correlation server. An event correlation application then mines unusual patterns or patterns known to be related to malicious behavior. Questionable activity is reported to security via email, SMS, or a Web portal.

Breaking down an IPv6 address: What it all mean
Let’s take a long hard look at an IPv6 address. Amazon supply IPv6 addresses with their EC2 cloud computers. ... There’s a lot of meaning packed into that strange-looking identifier. A few companies have tackled IPv6 but to most it’s just plain confusing. Why is it so confusing? And how can you decipher what it means? Connect to your AWS EC2 instance, find your network interface and its IPv6 address, and let’s do some serious IPv6 breakdown.

Introducing Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 4.1
Many customers across the world now include EMET as part of their defense-in-depth strategy and appreciate how EMET helps businesses prevent attackers from gaining access to computers systems. Today, we’re releasing a new version, EMET 4.1, with updates that simplify configuration and accelerate deployment. EMET anticipates the most common techniques adversaries might use and shields computer systems against those security threats.

Software License Audits: Myths, Facts, and Microsoft
In this report, you’ll learn how ITAM and SAM in the Cloud “reboot” Microsoft software license audit preparation. By “reboot,” we mean shuttering some processes, optimizing others, erasing the problem, and starting a fresh new approach to audits. You’ll get a step-by-step action plan to prepare for an audit now. and you’ll learn the specific areas in which ITAM and SAM on the Cloud slash time- to-compliance-position while increasing accuracy and reducing organizational angst. With the ease, speed, and agility provided by Cloud-based ITAM and SAM, Microsoft audits become just “sheep in wolves’ clothing.”

Top 5 IT security webinars in 2013
2013 was the year IT security grew up. Leaks and prominent hacks were the focus for major news outlets and adoption of mobile and new targeted attacks were on the minds of IT security teams. ... The best IT security teams have moved from chasing security to proactively developing risk-based approaches and integrating their security practice with the business priorities of their organizations and the tools and services in the market have begun to reflect that. Without further ado, here are the top 5 IT security webinars in 2013:

Know your storage needs before installing a solid-state drive
With SSDs, Martin said, different drives are suited to different workloads, so it is important to select the right drive for your organization's needs. "SSDs, random, sequential, depending on the make, some of them are better than others, some it's the other way," he said. "It's a different animal." And, he noted, hard disk drives do well with sequential reads. So, depending on the workload, traditional disk may suit your needs.

2013: The tech year in cartoons
From Tim Cook's 'pay cut' to Steve Ballmer's 'retirement,' here's a look at some of the year's biggest IT stories from the pen of Computerworld's editorial cartoonist, John Klossner.

Carey Smith, on Becoming the Team’s ‘Hyperlink’
"I’m sort of a peripatetic manager, and I sometimes describe myself as a “hyperlink.” I have an office, but most of the time I just walk around and try to determine if we’ve got any problems. It might be a minor thing, but I’ll take that and then try to track it back. Sometimes you step on people’s toes, but the point is that everything and everybody are connected in some fashion. And they’re connected, if nothing else, through me doing this sort of thing."

Meet Business Demands by Making BI Effective and Relevant
To realize the full value of BI, businesses need to acknowledge how a solution fits with key business processes. The goal is to equip business users with consistent and specific information throughout all levels of the organization so each group or business unit can best understand and apply the information. The full spectrum of users—from the executive team to line-of-business managers—can use solutions that are relevant to their day-to-day responsibilities.

What does it take to transform an organization before a crisis hits
What can leaders do before the depth and scope of their companies’ crises come into focus? How can they initiate major transformations proactively? As researchers and managers who have been involved in numerous corporate transformations in recent years, we have learned that applying standard formulae to corporate transformations is, at best, ineffective and, at worst, dangerous. What’s needed is a new approach that enables executives to transform organizations proactively without resorting to fear.

Quote for the day:

"You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations." -- Zig Ziglar

December 29, 2013

5 Top Social Media Trends For 2014
"It's no longer passed over as a fad or something that's going away any time soon," he said. "Social media is now part of our fabric of society, like mobile phones and computers -- it's a staple of our everyday life." In 2014, expect a shift in priorities: a bigger focus on social media monetization, user-generated content, a great acceptance of sharing information, and more. Here's a look at the big trends for next year.

The Three Power-People You Need on Your Team
The enemy of success is isolation. The higher you go the easier isolation becomes, but, it’s a devastating problem at all levels of leadership. Isolated leaders fear conspiracies and feel misunderstood. Worse yet, ivory-tower leaders resort to control through authority. Us/them thinking destroys influence. Defeat isolation and enhance success by developing a high-power inner circle.

Proposing Architecture and Process Governance for Risk Mitigation in Organizational Change
Transformation does present new and complex challenges entailing the need for a number of changes, mainly organizational and governance processes. It is therefore necessary to study and analyze the potential risks which may arise from such changes and transformations. This thesis proposes an integrated approach to managing the risks associated with both outsourcing and the transformation of the FTC into a civilian entity mainly in terms of change management, organizational and governance process, using Enterprise Architecture (EA) as leverage, supported by other disciplines and methodologies.

The Chief Data Officer: An executive whose time has come
It takes more than a steep investment, however, to squeeze business value out of data. Companies have to establish an entire system to use data to drive competitive advantage. I believe that the head of this system should be the Chief Data Officer (CDO), an executive whose time to shine has finally come. The sooner businesses can empower a CDO, the sooner they can turn data into a business weapon to achieve business success similar to the aforementioned companies.

Probability and Monte Carlo methods
A common use of the Monte Carlo method is to perform numerical integration on a function that may be difficult to integrate analytically. This may seem surprising at first, but the intuition is rather straight forward. The key is to think about the problem geometrically and connect this with probability. Let’s take a simple polynomial function, say

to illustrate the idea.

The Big Lie of Strategic Planning
Strategic plans all tend to look pretty much the same. They usually have three major parts. The first is a vision or mission statement that sets out a relatively lofty and aspirational goal. The second is a list of initiatives—such as product launches, geographic expansions, and construction projects—that the organization will carry out in pursuit of the goal. This part of the strategic plan tends to be very organized but also very long. The length of the list is generally constrained only by affordability.

Monty Taylor and Jim Blair on CI and Test Automation at OpenStack
The OpenStack community has a team working on CI and test automation for the OpenStack developers submitting code. They run their own infrastructure - an OpenStack cloud by itself. Given the complexity of the project, with dozens of dependent projects and over 300 contributors submitting patches every month, standard CI systems simply wouldn't work. We talked with Monty Taylor and James Blair to investigate the build and test challenges they face, and how they managed to tackle them.

Data protection and privacy law for developers
Data protection in EU countries is based on what's known as a "directive" - in this case, its 95/46/ec. The directive is prescriptive in some areas, and in others leaves things up to the interpretation of the national government. This means that in general, data protection and privacy legislation across the different countries of the EU is more or less the same, with some local differences. It's difficult to get things perfectly right in all jurisdictions, but if you start with the core rules, you are most of the way there.

Big Data and the Role of Intuition
Major big data projects to create new products and services are often driven by intuition as well. Google’s self-driving car, for example, is described by its leaders as a big data project. Sebastian Thrun, a Google Fellow and Stanford professor, leads the project. He had an intuition that self-driving cars were possible well before all the necessary data, maps, and infrastructure were available. Motivated in part by the death of a friend in a traffic accident, he said in an interview that he formed a team to address the problem at Stanford without knowing what he was doing.

Establishing Enterprise Architecture Metrics: Seven Essential Steps
Today, the value of EA has become preeminent for most companies integrating their enterprisewide business applications. Many practitioners realize that in a rapidly changing and evolving business environment, an enterprise must measure, manage, and improve its flexibility in successfully deploying integration initiatives. EA can engage both the business and IT teams from the beginning, and EA metrics can present a consistent vehicle to measure most of the critical elements of business value.

Quote for the day:

"Goals are like stepping-stones to the stars. They should never be used to put a ceiling or a limit on achievement." -- Denis Waitley

December 28, 2013

Aaron Levie: The most refreshing voice in the enterprise
At a time when enterprise IT is laboring under constant pressure from reduced budgets, outsourcing pressure, and escalating security challenges, Levie stands out as one of the most refreshing voices in the technology industry. He still believes there's a lot of great work to be done in the enterprise and he's not just a talking a good game. At Box he's leading a team that is hyper-focused on solving enterprise problems.

Testing Basics May Have Averted Obamacare Health Site Fiasco
According to CBS, the security testing was never completed. Fox uncovered a testing bulletin from the day before launch which revealed the site could only handle 1,100 users “before response time gets too high.” The Washington Examiner revealed, via an anonymous source, that the full testing was delayed until just a few days before the launch and instead of the 4 to 6 months of testing that should have been conducted it was only tested for 4 to 6 days.

Welcome to the Lean Service Desk, Part 4: Root Cause Analysis
Lean encourages a structured, disciplined problem-solving approach that is more like informal scientific inquiry. For that reason, we are interested in identifying the root causes of the problem as a precondition to trying to identify solutions. By separating these activities in a very deliberate way, it’s possible to gain enough understanding of the problem to increase the chances of finding solutions that in fact address it.

The Ideas that Shaped Management in 2013
Compiling extremely long lists, struggling to shorten them, and over-thinking it all, when the point should just be to gather some really good reading for you for any free time you happen to find over the holiday. So this year, instead, we thought about the pieces that most surprised us or provoked us to think differently about an intractable problem or perennial question in management, we reviewed the whole year of data to remind ourselves what our readers found most compelling, and we looked for patterns in the subjects our authors raised most frequently and independently of our editorial urging

Do You Know What Life Will Be Like In 5 Years? IBM's Top Scientist Does
In the 5 in 5 report IBM’s top scientists report on what the world, supported by smart sensing and computing, will look like in five years. ... In five years, cities will be sentient. More buses will automatically run when there are more people to fill them. And doctors will use your DNA to tailor medical advice and smart computing to diagnose and plan treatment for big diseases like cancer not in months, but in minutes.

Merchant Warehouse Provides Visual Overview of the State of the Payments Industry
Focused on 4 main quadrants, the Merchant Warehouse State of the Payments Industry will examine and provide up-to-date information covering all aspects of the payment industry from consumer credit trends to important information on regulations and technology. While individual sections will be update regularly as new information and data become available, each quarter Merchant Warehouse will deliver a new report highlighting major updates and trends ensuring that our audience is fully aware of where the industry is and more importantly where it is headed.

Global Stock Exchanges Band Together on Cybersecurity Initiative
In addition to developing cybersecurity best practices, the Cyber Security Committee will focus on establishing a communication framework among participants based on mutual trust and, notably, facilitating information sharing, including threat intelligence, attack trends and useful policies, standards and technologies. Part of that will also be enhancing dialogue with policy makers, regulators and government organizations on cyber-threats and supporting improved defenses from both external and internal attacks.

Establishing Data Governance Policies: Four Issues to Get Them Right
A first-rate data governance policy improves an organization’s ability to demonstrate regulatory compliance, respond to legal inquiries, reduce risk and increase data quality and business process management for increased employee effectiveness and better decision-making. ... Faced with rapidly growing data volumes, varieties and obligations, it is imperative that organizations have data governance policies and technologies that support them in place. The following four steps can help any company manage their data assets

COBIT 5 and the Process Capability Model Improvements Provided for IT Governance Process

Starting from a general overview of this framework, the structure of the Process Capability Model will be analysed in detail in this paper. Then, a comparison with the Maturity Model of the previous version of the COBIT framework will be discussed. At the end of this paper, it will be seen that the new Process Capability approach results in an improvement of the assessment process; and in particular, in the formality and the rigor of the assessment.

Retrospectives Applied as “PROspectives"
Don’t worry if the PROspective needs more time than planned. As long as the participants - the owners and beneficiaries of the PROspective - are willing to continue, it is fine. You, as the facilitator, are responsible for keeping the process on track to enable reflection, learning, and inventing actions for improvements. If you think the team has lost track of that and the meeting has become a waste of time then share that impression with the participants. If they want to go on anyway, it is their decision. You are the enabler, not the director.

Quote for the day:

"Men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail." -- Napolean Hill

December 27, 2013

The Big Picture for Big Data
Several weeks ago, Information Management had the opportunity to sit down for a wide-ranging discussion with Dr. Rob Walker, vice president of decision management at Pegasystems, the Cambridge, MA-based provider of BPM and CRM solutions. Walker, who holds a PhD in computer science and began his career pioneering predictive analytics at Capgemini in the 1980s, shared his perspectives on the growth of big data and the challenges faced by companies as they struggle to derive real business value from the multitude of data management technologies that ‘big data’ represents.

How application performance metrics keep healthcare software healthy
The application performance metrics you measure for a healthcare application should be focused on improving the customer end-user experience and positively affecting the quality of patient care. Metrics that measure how software applications perform is critical to improving patient care, satisfying regulatory requirements and allowing medical professionals to do a critical job without undue interference.

Top 10 Methods to Improve ETL Performance Using SSIS
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is the tool in the ETL family that is useful for developing and managing an enterprise data warehouse. A data warehouse by its own characterization works on a huge volume of data and performance is a big challenge when managing a huge volume of data for any Architect or DBA. The author in this article discusses on improving ETL performance or design a high performing ETL system with the help of SSIS.

Next step for connected devices? Connect the devices
The thinking is that the big opportunity will be for platforms, or hubs, like SmartThings, vying to tie together the so-called Internet of Things (a press friendly name for the connected device category), said IDC analyst Jonathan Gaw. With consumers actually starting to pay attention to connected products, the need will come for an easy way to manage all of them, despite their different manufacturers and ecosystems, Gaw said. To be clear, connected devices still have a long way to go before they become a mainstay, or even more than an occasional fixture, in American homes.

The first 3D printed organ -- a liver -- is expected in 2014
Advances in the 3D printing of human tissue have moved fast enough that San Diego-based bio-printing company Organovo now expects to unveil the world's first printed organ -- a human liver -- next year. Like other forms of 3D printing, bio-printing lays down layer after layer of material -- in this case, live cells -- to form a solid physical entity -- in this case, human tissue. The major stumbling block in creating tissue continues to be manufacturing the vascular system needed to provide it with life-sustaining oxygen and nutrients.

Penny Pritzker, on Hearing the Whole Story
"And when we get close to saying we want to hire someone, I will talk to them about what could get them fired. If you want to get fired, here’s what you need to do: first, lie, cheat or steal. But the other thing that will get you fired is if you have a problem and you keep it to yourself. Problems are going to happen, and it’s my job to help you with your problem. What I’ve learned is that the most troublesome people don’t tell you 100 percent of the story, and keep some facts to themselves."

2013: The Year Of Security Certification Bashing
The idea that a certification means that a person was capable of passing the test at one time is a sad statement, as it indicates stagnation in one of the least stagnant of professions. No one who worked with packet filtering firewalls has stayed in that era. The progress of the industry simply will not allow it. Most certifications require either upgrade tests or continuing professional education credits to keep the certification in good standing. This is the same method in use by other professions, such as attorneys, doctors, and accounts.

NCSU study says Android vulnerabilities are mostly from manufacturers
Researchers analyzed the customized apps that manufacturers build on top of the baseline version of Android shipped from Google. The apps provide unique features and a look and feel that's meant to make the smartphone stand out in the market. Eighty percent of the apps that come with devices are created by the manufacturers, not Google. "It is worrisome to notice that vendor customizations were, on the whole, responsible for the bulk of the security problems suffered by each device," the study said.

Data Profiling and Data Governance: How Good is This Data?
When dealing with large volumes of data coming in from a variety of sources, in different formats, and delivered by different methods a data profiling automation solution becomes a necessity to efficiently analyze data. Data profiling functionality can often be found as part of a larger data quality technology suite. Profiling tools can quickly process and analyze large data sets and automatically produce a baseline profile, thus replacing the need to run manual queries.

Building a Real-time, Personalized Recommendation System with Kiji
A typical Kiji application will include some number of KijiScoring servers, which are stateless Java processes that can be scaled out, and that are able to run a ScoringFunction using a single entity’s data as input. A Kiji application will funnel client requests through the KijiScoring server, which determines whether or not data is fresh. If necessary, it will run a ScoringFunction to refresh any recommendations before they are passed back to the client, and write the recomputed data back to HBase for later use.

Quote for the day:

"One of the most important tasks of a manager is to eliminate his people's excuses for failure." -- Robert Townsend

December 26, 2013

The top 10 cloud provider tips of 2013
Cloud service providers have had many different opportunities for growth this year, from developing cloud partner programs to building industry-specific cloud markets. Software-defined networking (SDN) was a hot topic for cloud providers this year with several of our most popular expert tips covering everything from overcoming barriers to SDN adoption to determining which model of SDN to deploy. Check out our full list of top cloud provider tips for 2013, including advice on FISMA compliance and an analysis of what "open" cloud services really mean.

Four Tech Predictions for 2014 (From PayPal’s CTO)
What happens when new products and services deliver capabilities that help innovators envision better ways of eliminating friction points that people have been living with for years? What happens is that you get the perfect conditions for the kind of rapid technology-driven transformation that has been gathering momentum in the payment industry for the past couple of years. It’s a transformation that promises to revolutionize commerce by rendering the transaction all but invisible while making the payments process itself a foundation for new experiences that connects consumers and merchants in powerful new ways.

Make a high-performance computing and high-availability datacentre
Datacentre professionals must note also that although the use of virtualisation provides a better level of inherent availability, it is not a universal panacea. Virtual images of applications, virtual storage pools and virtual network paths are still dependent on the physical resources assigned to them, and the datacentre design must take this into account. If the server running the virtual image fails, it will still be necessary to spin up a new image elsewhere on the physical server system and reassign connections.

Leading by Letting Go
The trouble was that the scripts, metrics, and rules were getting in the way. Heavily scripted representatives couldn’t form genuinely warm and empathic relationships. They sounded wooden and stilted. Real relationships are built on open, person-to-person communication, one caring human being to another. ... The results? Call-handling time edged up slightly at the very beginning, then dropped and kept falling. Likelihood-to-recommend scores doubled, indicating far more enthusiastic advocacy of American Express on the part of customers. Employee attrition was cut in half.

The reality of android soldiers and why laws for robots are doomed to failure
For Sharkey robot soldiers can't comply with the basic rules of war. They can't distinguish between a combatant or a civilian or between a wounded soldier and a legitimate target. "There are no AI robotic systems capable of doing that at all," he argues, pointing to one UK-built system that can tell the difference between a human and a car "but has problems with a dancing bear or a dog on its hind legs." A robot weapons system won't be able to judge proportionality either, he argues; that is, judge whether civilian losses are acceptable and in proportion to the military advantage gained by an attack.

SOA Best Practices in the Mobile Age
The new opportunity in APIs is BaaS, an extension to the service API model. The goal of BaaS is to convert common and useful elements of mobile application logic-storage, identity management, social network integration, photo enhancing into Representational State Transfer (REST) Web services that the application invokes as needed, making these services "back ends” to mobile apps. As a concept, BaaS is similar to Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS); it offers functionality as a Web service.

Martin: Issues to consider when using SSD
There may be a lot of benefits when you add solid-state storage to your environment: greater speed, lower costs of energy and greater efficiency. But the technology has a new set of issues you'll need to monitor. Dennis Martin, president of Demartek, discusses those variables in this Storage Decisions video. He noted that users of solid-state drives have to keep track of data writes to their drives, a practice that isn't necessary with hard disk.

Should everyone learn how to code?
Are good coders simply born and not made? Of course not. But it's true that the best are frequently self-taught and loved coding from the start. Without strong self-motivation, it's very, very difficult to slog your way through the painstaking labor and long hours required to become a decent programmer. To be an excellent one, you need a whole lot of experience, which is why I've heard hiring managers say they're more impressed by an applicant who wrote a mobile app at age 14 than one with a BSCS from a good school.

Venture capitalist proposes California 2.0, a plan for six new states
”Something’s not working in our state, and I’m convinced that it is with the existing system, the existing breadth of industry and varying interests. California is untenable and un-governable,” Draper told a sparsely attended news conference at the Silicon Valley school for entrepreneurship that he created and that bears his name. There were about 20 people in the room, although only six appeared to be reporters.

Visualizing Java Garbage Collection
Modern GC is highly efficient, far more so than manual allocation typical in earlier languages. People from other language backgrounds often focus on GC pauses without fully understanding the context that automatic memory management operates in. Mark & Sweep is the fundamental algorithm used for GC by Java (and other runtimes). In the Mark & Sweep algorithm you have references pointing from the frames of each stack's thread, which point into program heap.

Quote for the day:

"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on."— -- Walter Lippmann

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