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