Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

May 31, 2013

The Decorator Pattern in .NET
The components of the decorator pattern are the component interface, concrete component, decorator interface and the concrete decorator. The component interface defines the operations and properties for the component. The concrete component is the primary class you want to extend that implements the component interface. The decorator interface defines the contract for the functionality that will be added to the concrete component.

6 Practical Predictive Analytics Tools
Many tools promise to make predictions but, in reality, tend to do more of a historical analysis of data. The following six tools have a tighter focus: They use predictive technology in a tangible, practical way and, compared to other analytics tools, possess a "wow" factor that puts them over the edge.

Start menu isn't back in Win 8.1, but some key features are
The OS update also will allow users to boot directly to the traditional desktop interface, whereas before the Modern interface was the default and primary one. It will also be possible for users to have the same background image or pattern both on the Start screen of the Modern UI and on the traditional desktop interface in order to smooth the interplay of the two interfaces.

Pauseless Java Virtual Machine Integrates with WebSphere
The Zing JVM is optimized for Linux and x86-based servers, and the company bills it as the most scalable JVM for enterprise Java workloads. Zing can support very high memory allocation rates, and the company also claims that it's the only JVM that supports application instances exceeding 512 gigabytes of memory with pauseless operation.

The Clock Is Ticking For The Ad Cookie--With No Sure Alternative In Sight
The hard work is really to figure out the alternative to the cookie, said Tawakol. It will need to have a functioning opt-out that works over multiple devices. There also has to be transparency as to who is placing the cookie and what data is being tracked. And they need to be more closely connected to privacy policies.

Disruptions: At Odds Over Privacy Challenges of Wearable Computing
Deal with it, wearable computer advocates say. “When you’re in public, you’re in public. What happens in public, is the very definition of it,” said Jeff Jarvis, the author of the book “Public Parts” and a journalism professor at the City University of New York. “I don’t want you telling me that I can’t take pictures in public without your permission.”

Rackspace floats virty router and firewall into its clouds
"With Vyatta, customers can now get industrial-strength firewall, routing, and VPN into the cloud," says Engates, and in such a way that integrates with the Cloud Networks multi-tiered virtual Layer 2 networking service that is part of the public cloud as well as the RackConnect service. The Cloud Networks service is based on VMware's NVP OpenFlow controller and Open vSwitch virtual switch, which plugs into the XenServer commercial-grade hypervisor from Citrix Systems that Rackspace uses to underpin its OpenStack-based public cloud.

CFOs Open to Improving Tech Literacy
The technology-related responsibilities of CFOs are for the most part still focused on more passive activities, respondents reported, such as measuring returns on IT investment or scrutinizing IT-infrastructure purchasing decisions. Fewer claim responsibility for aspects of technology that are more suited to driving business change, such as data analytics and the purchase of IT services.

Federal CIOs Must Embrace Hybrid IT in Shift to Cloud
"Make no mistake. It's not cloud in isolation. It's cloud in the mix of a series of disruptive trends that you really have to address," Cearley says. ... He argues that cloud computing, in the non-diluted sense of the term, must entail a layer of abstraction that casts whatever the function at issue -- software, business process applications, infrastructure, etc. -- as a service.

Cloud computing SLA failures: Preparing for the aftermath
When an SLA violation occurs, it's safe to say that providers will be dealing with unhappy customers. If a provider breaks one of the promises in a cloud computing SLA, the consequences can threaten the profitability of the customer's company. Luckily, there are ways to make the post-violation process less dire for all involved.

Quote for the day:

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable." -- Charles Darwin

May 30, 2013

Beyond privacy policies: Practical privacy for websites and mobile apps
In this environment of growing attention to the risks of data security breaches, and in the midst of an explosion of mobile applications that make data storage an increasingly far-flung proposition, many organizations assume that the first line of defense for a company with a website or a mobile app is a good privacy policy.

Evernote beefs up security with two-step verification and access controls
Evernote also states they will give you a set of one-time backup codes in case you are traveling or do not have access to your phone and need to enter a verification code. Two-step verification is optional and before you enable it make sure you have access to your selected secondary verification method or you could be locked out of your account. This security level is available to Evernote Premium and Evernote Business user only. As they refine and establish the process, they will open it up to free account users.

Hackers exploit Ruby on Rails vulnerability to compromise servers, create botnet
"It's pretty surprising that it's taken this long [for an exploit] to surface in the wild, but less surprising that people are still running vulnerable installations of Rails," said Jeff Jarmoc, a security consultant with security research firm Matasano Security, Tuesday in a blog post. The exploit that's currently being used by attackers adds a custom cron job -- a scheduled task on Linux machines -- that executes a sequence of commands.

BSNL launches enterprise cloud services in India
BSNL will be leveraging the relationship it struck three years ago with Datacraft – which later became consolidated under the Dimension Data brand – to set up six new internet data centres (IDCs) in 2010. BSNL is providing connectivity and Datacraft is managing the cloud service and data centres. According to COAI, India’s GSM industry body, the carrier is currently the fourth largest in the country in terms of mobile subscribers, but has struggled to grow its user base in an increasingly competitive market.

How to successfully implement the principle of least privilege
The key is to give employees access only to what they need and when they need it, so that they can best perform their job in a safe manner. ... IT security has no chance of fully enforcing least privilege without complete buy-in from their non-IT colleagues (yes, this is true for all security initiatives). To maximize your chances of successfully implementing least privilege access, I suggest incorporating these critical steps:

Infographic: Mobile Payments Going Mainstream for Meals
According to the latest industry projections, mobile payment transactions are projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2017. Not surprisingly, the food service industry will claim a large portion of this burgeoning market as worldwide physical goods sales from mobile devices will account for 30% of all retail within four years.

Great CEOs Roll With the Punches
According to the Board’s study, dismissals were on the rise because of increased accountability of directors and a greater scrutiny from shareholders and activists. The Conference Board suggests that the pressure of serving as the CEO of a large company in an increasingly competitive global marketplace has resulted in more voluntarily shorter tenures, implying that CEOs are leaving on their own terms after fewer years on the job. This is a case of “jump” before you are “pushed.”

Tech Career Advice From Google’s Women
“It’s a disruptive industry,” Ms. Wright said. “You, too, might someday be unemployed on your father-in-law’s couch. What matters is the energy and tenacity with which you pick up your next job.” Another piece of advice Ms. Wright gave, which helps explain her rise at Google, is that employees should seize opportunities, and managers should ask employees about their desires and believe they can achieve them.

Open source: Its true cost and where it's going awry by Monty Widenius
"Now the problem is that you have companies that are heavily using open source but refuse to pay anything back because they don't have to," Widenius said. "The whole problem with not having to is kind of new because the open-source movement doesn't go forward if nobody is prepared to pay. You actually make it harder for new companies to form around open source," he said.

Top 10 Ways to Blow Up an Agile Project
Everyone knows agile is better. But if you do it just right, agile can be fragile, too. Follow these 10 'tips' and your project is bound to come off the rails. In the spirit of David Letterman's "Top 10 Lists," it's time again for a list of worst practices that can make even the best agile team melt down. Here's David Taber-man's newest Top 10 List of things you can do to make that a reality.

Quote for the day:

"A man's accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail." -- John Foster Dulles

May 29, 2013

3 CIO Strategies for Going Global
When these companies went global, they leveraged IT to unify, localize and lay the foundation for future growth ... The CIO Executive Council talks to CIOs about the role IT played when their companies went global. Here are three lessons you can learn about unifying, localizing and laying a foundation for growth.

Taiwan faces resistance over SOPA-like anti-piracy proposal
Taiwan's intellectual property office only wants to go after major offenders, said Li Mei, vice director for the government body, on Tuesday. These piracy sites would include those that "specialize in copyright infringement activities," like Megaupload, a file hosting service that was known to provide links to bootleg movies and software. Last year, U.S. authorities shut down the popular site.

Software Development: How the Traditional Contract Model Increases the Risk of Failure
... the Contract Model compounds the effects of poor management, and that poor management is often based on the flawed thinking underlying the Contract Model. We have found that even if an IT project is resourced internally, the organisation tends to apply quasi-contractual relationships between its internal departments for the purchase of IT services. And we find the principles of the Contract Model in evidence here too.

A Great Product Will Fail Unless You Price it Right
The revenue model you select is basically the implementation of your business strategy, and the key to attaining your financial objectives. Obviously, it must be grounded by the characteristics of the market and customers you choose to serve, the pricing model of existing competitors, and a strategy you believe is consistent with your future products and direction. Here is a summary, with some of the pros and cons or special considerations for each:

Becoming a World-Class Innovator
A common misconception today is that innovators are innately creative people. Specifically, many people think that innovators are born with intuitive skills and views of the world that differsfrom the rest of the population. This is simply not true. Innovators aren’t born, they’re made. But we can learn from a few key attributes that leading innovators share.

Evolving Business Intelligence Ecosystems
While these trends and the associated models of engaging in business are becoming clear, we have two significant problems that need to be understood: There are a lot of different types of data available for consumption by business today; and Today, much of the data cannot be derived from the business layers directly and needs processing. This leads us to the critical question – “Big Data and Innovation – Why Bother?”

100 Top Tools for Graphic Designers
While the Adobe Creative Suite of tools is pretty much the industry standard software for graphic designers, there are plenty of other tools available online, as web apps, mobile apps, or even desktop software, to meet the specific needs of artists and designers working in any niche. The sites listed here aren’t ranked in order of quality, they are all amazing! They’re categorized and numbered for ease of use. Happy designing!

At SAP, the Other Shoe Drops
SAP will consolidate all innovation under Vishal Sikka; effective June 1, all SAP development and custom development leaders will report directly to Sikka. “By creating one single development organization under Vishal’s leadership, we will dramatically accelerate the speed of these innovations,” said Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEOs of SAP AG.

BYOD, for Buy-your-own-device policies, dampens corporate PC purchases
The expansion of BYOD -- whether approved by the business or not -- and the resulting consumerization of traditional IT practices, where the company decides what employees will use, buys that hardware, and preps it with approved software, may have begun because workers pushed for the tools they wanted, but it's also been a benefit to employers, O'Donnell argued.

A HIPAA compliance checklist for corporate mergers and acquisitions
A common problem among companies merging two HIPAA compliance programs is lack of enforcement: All of the controls have been documented and responsibilities delegated, but there's no follow-through and no internal penalties for those who ignore regulations. ... The road to HIPAA compliance is filled with potholes, but by implementing the best practices below as soon as M&A activity is underway, the combined health care organization can steer clear of most of them.

Quote for the day:

"Never give an order that can't be obeyed." -- General Douglas

May 28, 2013

CIOs Bullish on Cloud Benefits, But Worry About SaaS Data Silos
CIOs continue to grow more and more bullish about cloud solutions, with a whopping 92% saying that cloud provides business benefits, according to a recent survey. Nonetheless, IT execs remain concerned over how to avoid SaaS-based data silos. The survey was conducted by Dimensional Research and commissioned by Host Analytics.

Security Regulations: Being Compliant Doesn’t Mean You’re Secure
The problem with regulatory compliance is that, despite the best intentions they are written with, they often don’t meet the goals they were originally intended for. That said, following security standards and regulations doesn’t make your business secure.

4 To-Dos for the 'Someday' Entrepreneur
Most would-be entrepreneurs get scared off by the “business” side of things. They overestimate the skills and knowledge that are needed to run a business and assume that there are huge mountains to be climbed and learning curves to overcome before even getting started. But it’s important to confront the monster under the bed—it’s not as hard as you might think, and you certainly don’t have to have an MBA to do it.

PDF File Writer C# Class Library
The PDF File Writer C# class library PdfFileWriter allows you to create PDF files directly from your .net application. The library shields you from the details of the PDF file structure. To use the library you need to: add a reference to the attached PdfFileWriter.dll class library, add a using PdfFileWriter statement in every source file that is using the library and include the PdfFileWriter.dll with your distribution.

9 Tips for Mentoring Next-Generation Leaders
It's a low-cost and extremely effective way to prepare future leaders early on. Mentoring is as simple as a gentle push in the right direction. It's also an easy way to preserve the intangible assets of your company—the minds and capabilities of the key young people who are the future face of your brand. Mentoring increases retention of your best and brightest, builds your reservoir of talent, speeds employee growth and shortens the learning cycle. It also engenders loyalty.

Chinese hackers expose US weapon designs: report
The Defense Science Board did not formally accuse China of involvement, but governmental sources with knowledge of the breach say that the vast majority of U.S. infrastructure cyberattacks originate from the country. However, the Post does not indicate whether the data breach took place on a governmental or third-party contractor network, nor does it indicate the timeframe in which cyberattacks took place.

Do You Really Need Real-Time Data?
Big data is getting corporate executives excited. They see opportunities to gain more insight to help support better decision making, and that’s good reason to be excited. All the more reasons that data warehouse managers need to provide good guidance regarding the value of things like real-time data in the context of the cost and the value achieved.

Peter Kuper on hacktivism, the evolution of hacking and mobile threats
In this video interview, Peter Kuper, partner at In-Q-Tel, explains how hacking as evolved as malicious hackers seek to use their skills not only to make money for themselves, but also to cause financial harm to their victims. He also discusses mobile security threats and how the increasing use of mobile devices impacts enterprise security.

Google to Fund, Develop Wireless Networks in Emerging Markets
Google plans to team up with local telecommunications firms and equipment providers in the emerging markets to develop the networks, as well as create business models to support them, these people said. It is unclear whether Google already has lined up such deals or alliances. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

Documentation Guide for Teams Doing Domain-Driven Design
The most important thing is to get a shared understanding of the domain between everyone involved in developing the software, Paul Rayner, a consultant and coach, explains as a reaction to a question what kind of documentation teams doing Domain-Driven Design, DDD, should produce.

Quote for the day:

"So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work" -- Peter Drucker

May 27, 2013

Pattern-powered cloudlets (Part 2)
For the pattern-powered cloudlet environment to be complete, two more requirements need to be met: The cloudlet needs to be able to accept requests from mobile devices to find out which application to deploy on demand; and Mobile applications need to be location aware, so that latency-sensitive functions are enabled only when served from a local cloudlet.

Carr refuses to confirm China hack claims
Senator Bob Carr said that the government is "very alive" to cyber security threats, but refused to confirm the ABC's specific claims on Tuesday."I won't comment on whether the Chinese have done what is being alleged or not," he told Sky News. "I won't comment on matters of intelligence and security for the obvious reason: We don't want to share with the world and potential aggressors what we know about what they might be doing, and how they might be doing it."

Messaging Application Line Flags Sensitive Phrases in China
China exerts vast control over content transmitted on the Internet and employs sophisticated filters to monitor communications within applications, as well as requiring developers employ certain censorship capabilities. NHN could not be immediately reached for comment. However a man identifying himself as a vice president for Line based in Taiwan wrote on Facebook that the warning was required to comply with China's Internet regulations.

IBM Cloud Computing Reference Architecture 3.0 – Why does it matter?
"We have now a consistent story and asset alignment from sales to delivery. We started with the marketing and sales messages, which are structured in the well known four adoption patterns, which are: Cloud Enabled Data Center, Platform Services, Cloud Service Provider pattern and finally the SaaS pattern" -- Dr. Stefan Pappe, IBM Fellow, CCRA Overall Co-Lead and the leader of the Specialty Service Area (SSA) for Cloud Services in IBM’s Global Technology Services

Structuring Your IT Service Delivery for Maximum Profits
It is easy to see why and how the backwards structure came into existence. As a small IT shop grows and brings in its first engineer, the company is usually not drowning in profit. Money is tight and the founder knows they need help because the 80 hours of weekly work is killing the founder. So they hire what they can afford, which is generally a desktop technician or an equivalent lower-level technical position.

Technology Revolution And Risk
With all new technology comes a litany of opinions about the product, from a customer perspective, a financial perspective and a marketing perspective. And, we are seeing now that it generates a risk perspective as well. To highlight this point, here are just a few of the new stories on Google Glass that have generated a risk response.

Conversation with John Swainson, President of Dell's Software Group
President of Dell's Software Group joined us on DellShares to discuss the importance of Quest to Dell's Software strategy. We invite you to listen to John as he provides perspective on the following: Quest fit within Dell's Software strategy; Synergies between Quest portfolio and existing Dell solutions; and Platform nature of Quest acquisition and what that means

Amazon Adds More Analytics Features For Its App Developers
Following Google's footsteps, Amazon today announced new features that allow developers to keep a check on app engagements, usage and revenue. The company has added App Engagement Reports to its Mobile App Distribution Portal. These reports will be available as free usage reports. Earlier during I/O 2013, Google's annual developer event, Google had announced a host of new features for Android app developers which included some extensive analytics management tools to check app usage.

The Top 9 Things That Ultimately Motivate Employees to Achieve
To help you get the most from your employee relationships, here are the nine (9) things that ultimately motivate employees to achieve. As you read this, think of how you associate with each of them. Share your story and perspectives – and comment about it. This is a hot topic and the more we can discuss it, we can help one another become better leaders.

Quote for the day:

"I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it." -- Walt Disney