Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 16, 2014

How to make an HTML5 developer smile: A Google Web Designer wish list
Of course, exactly what Google Web Designer will be when it is released is still a mystery. At it's core, Google is a company that is interested in advertising dollars, and every project they promote has padding the bottom lineas the primary, if not sometimes obfuscated, directive. Despite what the development community might be wishing for in a new web design studio from Mountain View, Google Web Designer may be nothing more than a cross-platform plugin that simply makes it easier to drop DoubleClick ads into Android and iPhone applications

The 26 UX Axioms
The set of UX axioms has gone through an evolution over the last year as we iterated through the concepts, refined and combined ideas. We started with 150 concepts and ideas that were combined and synthesized into an initial set of 50 axioms presented to IxDA Grand Rapids in Nov 2012. Over the course of 2013, Erik presented the UX Axioms several times and further synthesized the set down to 21 Axioms. We recently added a few more axioms to the set we felt were missing. The current set stands at 26 UX axioms.

When did Passion for Your Work Become Passé?
Is it out of style to be vocal about your passion for your work, your profession or your firm? Perhaps. At least when it comes to articulating how excited you are to be doing what you are doing, it’s better to show than tell. And while the use of the term may generate a bit of a cringe factor for a variety of reasons, including the suspicion that someone is making it up, showcasing your passion for your work never goes out of style!

Reaping The Benefits Of Diversity For Modern Business Innovation
Diversity is critical for organization’s ability to innovate and adapt in a fast-changing environment. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs and most admired leaders will tell you the same thing. Diversity is essential to growth and prosperity of any company: diversity of perspectives, experiences, cultures, genders, and age. Why? Because diversity breeds innovation. And innovation breeds business success. Don’t believe me? Take a look:

Google stages coup against Windows 8 with Chrome OS-like update for 'Metro'
Google has made no secret of its push to subvert devices running rivals' operating systems and turn them into pseudo Chromebooks by shifting features from Chrome OS to Chrome the browser. A year ago, for example, Google started baking parts of QuickOffice, a popular iOS and Android app substitute for Microsoft Office, into both Chrome OS and the Chrome browser. Analysts have viewed the strategy as part and parcel of Google's desire to insert itself and its core services -- search, mapping, email and others -- onto as many systems, both PCs and mobile devices, as possible to optimize traffic and associated ad revenue.

Our CIO Is Leaving — Now What?
Confronting CIO succession in this competitive environment is rarely easy. Approaching the problem strategically and systematically helps identify priorities, issues to be mitigated and options that may not have been readily apparent at the outset. Furthermore, such an approach maximizes the chances that the widest pool of appropriate candidates will be considered and that once a candidate is chosen, he or she will be able to meet and surpass the expectations of the CEO and the board.

Data visualization tools may be glamorous, but focus on business value
Data visualizations are about more than just how pretty the information looks, according to Cindi Howson, founder of BI Scorecard. At their best, visualizations help users retain information and make better-informed decisions. Graphic displays can be understood much more quickly than simple data dumps, and well-designed visualizations do this even better, enabling collaborative data discovery.

Massive denial-of-service attacks pick up steam, new nefarious techniques
Today, Prolexic issued its quarterly global DDoS attack report, noting that even Android-based mobile devices are being spotted as instruments to launch DDoS attacks. In the report, Prolexic says its response team “uncovered evidence of the use of mobile applications launching DDoS attacks against enterprise clients, including one of the world’s largest financial firms.” Prolexic says signatures matching AnDOSid, a DDoS attack tool for Android devices, were observed in DDoS attack campaigns.

18 great uses for an old Android device
As we move multiple generations into mobile technology, more and more of us are building up collections of old, dated devices. And more often than not, those devices do little more than take up space and gather dust. Here's a little secret, though: Your abandoned Android gadgets are actually virtual gold mines. You just have to find the right way to tap into their potential and give them new life. So grab the nearest DustBuster and get ready: Here are 18 ways to make your old phone or tablet useful again.

Discover and Diagnose Java Concurrency Problems Using Contemplate's ThreadSafe
Contemplate's ThreadSafe Solo is a commercial static analysis plugin for Eclipse, designed specifically to discover and help diagnose difficult concurrency bugs lurking within Java programs. By being focussed on concurrency bugs, ThreadSafe can find bugs that other static analysis tools, both commercial and freely available, often miss or are not designed to look for. As far as we have been able to determine, none of the defects in the examples below are caught by any other Java static analysis tool.

Quote for the day:

"Education is more than a luxury; it is a responsibility that society owes to itself." -- Robin Cook

January 15, 2014

Continuous security monitoring: What enterprises can learn from CDM
With the CDM program, DHS is focusing on getting agencies to implement a six-step CSM process: installing and updating network scanning sensors, automating the search for known system flaws, collecting the scanning results, triaging and analyzing the results, initiating mitigation of the biggest or worst flaws, and reporting progress. The objective is to enable civilian agencies to fully diagnose their networks within 72 hours of sensor deployment.

Computer science: The learning machines
With triumphs in hand for image and speech recognition, there is now increasing interest in applying deep learning to natural-language understanding — comprehending human discourse well enough to rephrase or answer questions, for example — and to translation from one language to another. Again, these are currently done using hand-coded rules and statistical analysis of known text. The state-of-the-art of such techniques can be seen in software such as Google Translate, which can produce results that are comprehensible (if sometimes comical) but nowhere near as good as a smooth human translation.

Why Cognition-as-a-Service is the next operating system battlefield
CaaS will enable every app to become as smart as Siri in its own niche. CaaS powered apps will be able to think and interact with consumers like intelligent virtual assistants — they will be “cognitive apps.” You will be able to converse with cognitive apps, ask them questions, give them commands — and they will be able to help you complete tasks and manage your work more efficiently. For example your calendar will become a cognitive app — it will be able to intelligently interact with you to help you manage your time and scheduling like a personal assistant would — but the actual artificial intelligence that powers it will come from a third-party cloud based cognitive platform.

Geraldine Hamilton: Body parts on a chip
It's relatively easy to imagine a new medicine, a better cure for some disease. The hard part, though, is testing it, and that can delay promising new cures for years. In this well-explained talk, Geraldine Hamilton shows how her lab creates organs and body parts on a chip, simple structures with all the pieces essential to testing new medications -- even custom cures for one specific person. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less)

Why you should care about Net neutrality (FAQ)
The basis for the Net neutrality regulation that the FCC implemented is predicated on a centuries-old legal concept known as "common carriage." This concept of "common carriage" has been used not just to regulate telecommunications but other industries as well. It was developed to ensure that the public retained access to fundamental services that use public rights of way. In the case of the Internet, it means that the infrastructure used to deliver Web pages, video, and audio-streaming services, and all kinds of other Internet content, should be open to anyone accessing or delivering that content.

The future of shopping: When psychology and emotion meet analytics
Welcome to the future of retail, which is quickly moving beyond somewhat silly questions about whether tablets will run on Android, iOS, or Windows, and becoming much more focused on actual applications and sales. The best part about the retail sector is that it combines four fun areas: Business, technology, and human behavior and psychology. Here's a brief tour of technologies that range in maturity from those that are implemented today to ones that'll take awhile to be adopted.

Financial malware focuses on hiding malicious traffic, localization
The battle between security professionals and cybercriminals has become a cat-and-mouse game in recent years, Baylor said, as Microsoft and other botnet trackers have had success taking down malware by targeting the command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure used to relay instructions to infected machines. Microsoft led a major operation against the Citadel malware in June 2013, and reportedly took down up to 88% of the Citadel botnets, though it has since rebounded.

Of Internet-connected Crock-pots, cars, smartwatches
The Crock-pot uses Belkin's WeMo technology to connect the slow cooker's IP address to the Internet through a home Wi-Fi router. The company also showed a Wi-Fi-ready Mr. Coffee automatic coffee maker. ... Users can control both devices over the Internet, to turn on the coffee or heat up Irish stew from pretty much anywhere in the world, just as can already be done with a Nest thermostat and other devices. The Wi-Fi capability allows an office manager to turn on the morning coffee pot in the break room before arriving or a catering firm to fire up the cooker at a remote location.

Fifth of enterprise BYOD projects doomed to fail by 2016, claims Gartner
“Whether via a formal BYOD programme, or just via devices coming in the back door and being configured to access corporate systems, the use of consumer technologies in the work environment presents a threat to IT control of endpoint computing resources,” said Dulaney. “Given the control that IT has exercised over personal computers by developing and deploying images to company-managed PCs, many IT organisations will implement strong controls for mobile devices.”

R, the Integration Language?
Integration with R now appears to be a sine qua non strategy for analytics tool vendors. I’m currently investigating KNIME, an open source “user-friendly graphical workbench for the cradle-to-grave analysis process: data access, data transformation, initial investigation, powerful predictive analytics, visualisation and reporting.” KNIME is architected as a visual workflow metaphor and has much the look of a data integration tool, with drag-and-drop node folders such as IO, Database, Data Manipulation, Mining, Reporting, Statistics, etc. An R node is easily added.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it." -- Warren G. Bennis

January 14, 2014

Enterprise master data management and big data: A well-matched pair?
"Applying MDM against raw, unstructured content is of questionable value," said Evan Levy, vice president of business consulting at analytics and data management software vendor SAS Institute Inc. "But distilling that content down to have some sort of meaning and then linking it to a specific customer -- that's where MDM can come into play." Companies are starting to see -- or picture, at least -- a connection between enterprise MDM and big data, according to survey results published in November 2012 by The Information Difference Ltd.

C++ String Toolkit (StrTk) Tokenizer
Tokenization in the context of string processing, is the method by which a sequence of elements are broken up or fragmented into sub-sequences called tokens. The indices in the original sequence that determine such breaks in the sequence are known as delimiters. There are two types of delimiters, normal or thin delimiters which are of length one element and thick delimiters which are of length two or more elements. Even though tokenization is primarily used in conjunction with strings, any sequence of types that can be iterated in a linear fashion can be tokenized, examples may be list of integers, a vector of person classes or a map of strings.

Scaling Storage Is Hard To Do
How do you add capacity and performance without drastically re-architecting storage systems? For the last decade, enterprise storage vendors have relied on clustering as a means to scale. Each clustered controller is locked in a “mind meld” with every other, sharing precious data maps and caches in real time, enabling customers to add whole arrays for greater capacity and performance.

Bridging Big Data and the Personal Data Ecosystem Through Privacy by Design
In order to make the interactions between Big Data and individuals more sustainable—in other words, to effectively transform this “new oil” into a renewable resource—the concept of the personal data ecosystem (PDE) has been proposed.4 The PDE is the emerging landscape of companies and organizations that believe individuals should be in control of their personal information and directly benefit from its use, making available a growing number of tools and technologies to enable such control.

Intel Announces Death of McAfee Brand. Will it be That Simple?
The decision is not entirely unexpected despite the fact that it has taken Intel longer than normal after the acquisition to resolve to drop what remains one of the two or three most famous security brands in existence. Intel is banking that attaching its own brand to the word 'security' will more than offset any loss in recognition. McAfee cost Intel $7.68 billion (at the time around APS5 billion) in August 2010, still a record price for a pure security firm so it might feel it has the right to impose its own identity.

Defining Responsiveness
When people say that something is responsive, what do they mean? I’m not being facetious. I think many of us think we know what is meant, but when you dig deeper, there is disagreement about what it means for something to be responsive. ... So by definition, Google Plus is not a responsive web design. It may look like one, but it doesn’t contain the three technical pieces necessary to be a responsive web design.

Considerations for Data Center Owners When Partnering With Modular Builders
Modular data center companies appear in all forms, from modularity at rack levels to modularity at building levels to modularity at infrastructure levels. A data center owner needs first to decide at what level they would like to engage in modular deployment. If the path chosen is a fully modular data center, it becomes significantly more important to engage your potential partner at the very early stages of concept and design.

Don't panic: The Internet is not collapsing, despite a spike in global 'attack' traffic
The Internet isn't about to collapse or crumble, despite two long threads on popular technology site Hacker News and news-sharing site Reddit suggesting (in some cases) that it might. Pointing to Akamai's Real-time Web Monitor, which tracks "global Internet conditions around the clock," many drew concern from the meter showing that attacks were — at the time — up as much as 98 percent. At the time of writing, the meter showed attacks were up by close to 107 percent above normal.

All About TransactionScope
In the real world any one you will find exceptional scenarios, exceptional issues where only a knowledge of how to useTransactionScope is not good enough. To resolve transactional issues like deadlocks, timeouts, etc., you must know each and every concept directly/indirectly related to a transaction. There is no alternative. So the concepts of a transaction and its related components need to be clear.

Intelligent Evolution: Making Change Work
When these organizations try to change, they frequently fail because we forget that they are complete creatures and need to be changed in depth. Trying to improve the practices of the engineering department without paying attention to the rest of the organization is similar to trying to change an organ within a body without understanding the impact on the rest of the body. Imagine that a surgeon performs a liver transplant without considering whether there is a potential difference between the livers of different people. We would have a high probability of organ rejection and potentially death of the patient.

Quote for the day:

"Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre." -- Chet Atkins

January 13, 2014

MDM program needs business sense to be successful
Companies pursue MDM as a technology-driven affair. "There are far too many efforts where the IT team is pushing the MDM idea, and there isn't enough pull from the business side because there isn't a clear articulation of what the business outcomewill be," said Gartner analyst Ted Friedman. "Somewhere along the way, the project fizzles out." Aaron Zornes, chief research officer at The MDM Institute, a consultancy in Burlingame, Calif., made the same point.

5 Methods for Visualizing Unstructured Data
What can anyone possibly do with so much data? It's not even a question of quantity anymore - it's more a question of feasibility. One can put up a thousand powerful computers in parallel and crunch huge data sets to derive results. But what if the data is also unstructured? What if the problem is not in finding the solution but in finding the correct questions to be asked in the first place? Everybody can obtain a huge data set, and almost anybody can acquire the right set of tools to analyze that data, but very few “somebodies” possess the right mindset to use the data to begin solving business problems.

Hyping Artificial Intelligence, Yet Again
A.I. is, to be sure, in much better shape now than it was then. Google, Apple, I.B.M., Facebook, and Microsoft have all made large commercial investments. There have been real innovations, like driverless cars, that may soon become commercially available. Neuromorphic engineering and deep learning are genuinely exciting, but whether they will really produce human-level A.I. is unclear—especially, as I have written before, when it comes to challenging problems like understanding natural language.

Agile Database Development
Agile database development is particularly hard because databases contain state and must ensure data integrity. They are harder to upgrade or roll back than the front end of a website and so are more amenable to up-front design than continual refinement. Lastly, database developers and DBAs tend to have less experience in Agile practices, leading to additional struggle in the early stages. This article will explore the history and principles of Agile development with an emphasis on how we can apply Agile practices successfully to databases.

Demand For Fully Automated Static Analysis Solutions To Grow In 2014 Says Asaph Schulman
Application Security has become a key aspect for all organizations assessing their overall risk exposure. The reality is that due to significant historical investments made by enterprises to bolster their network security, the easier way for attackers to hack these days is through the "main door" – the application layer. By pretending to be regular users of the attacked web or mobile application, hackers abuse insecure application coding to gain unauthorized information such as the administrator's or user's credentials. This can lead to some disastrous results, including the hacking of entire networks.

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience
Designers say the computing style can clear the way for robots that can safely walk and drive in the physical world, though a thinking or conscious computer, a staple of science fiction, is still far off on the digital horizon. “We’re moving from engineering computing systems to something that has many of the characteristics of biological computing,” said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, one of many research centers devoted to developing these new kinds of computer circuits.

What the Heck Is a RAM Scraper?
First it’s helpful to remember that payment systems — the cash registers and credit card terminals you see in stores and restaurants every day — have a lot of strong requirements for encrypting data, pretty much end-to-end during the transaction process, as well as any records that are stored afterward. But there’s one particular moment when that data is vulnerable, and it occurs during the milliseconds that it is stored in the system memory — a.k.a. random access memory, or RAM — of the back-end server that processes the transaction.

Android vs Windows: Now the battle for the desktop really begins
As ZDNet's Larry Dignan points out, Android could break through on the desktop as it has on mobile if the cost is right and security improves. There are plenty of hurdles in the way of Android becoming a real threat to Windows on the desktop, but it's still a headache for Microsoft. If people don't buy Windows, they probably won't buy Office either, and they're less likely to buy into the whole ecosystem from Windows Phone to Azure. And the desktop is Windows' redoubt: that Android dares to advance upon it is reflection of how the battle of the tech ecosystems has gone so far.

Why innovators need a word other than failure
An experiment is an attempt to test a hypothesis, and gain new learning. The problem with the word "experiment" is that experiments are not meant to be permanent solutions, but rather short trials in which we test a solution, hopefully with a hypothesis, and then compare the results to expected or anticipated results. But what we are often talking about when we talk about "failure" is more akin to experimenting - testing, learning, reworking, testing again and finally implementing.

Emergent Change: Shifting to a complexity paradigm
The traditional approach to organizational change has been a tightly planned process with objectives established by top management. This planned approach to organizational change is reinforced with the publication of numerous best practice case studies for change, detailed guides for leading the neophyte through the change wilderness, and studies of what is needed to remove barriers (mainly employee resistance) to proposed change. Yet the majority of these change efforts fall far short of the objectives that were set by the proponents of the change

Quote for the day:

"A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier." -- Tom Stoppard

January 12, 2014

The Ever-Increasing Importance of Predictive Analytics
Pretty much anywhere you look, you can find countless examples of how this trend is manifesting itself. As just one, Forbes recently reported that Google is making numerous changes to its Google Analytics platform and a number of other search guidelines and algorithms, which will have a colossal impact on the operations of content creators in 2014. However, few things in the big data and analytics space are likely to have the overall weight that predictive analytics are expected, by many experts, to possess.

Tablets Get More Sophisticated, with Bigger Screens, Dual OSes and Car Access
German car maker Audi unveiled an Android device that it plans to bundle with its cars. The Audi Smart Display connects to a car via Bluetooth and can be used to remotely access and control the vehicle's music, radio, and navigation systems. The 10-inch tablet can also become a typical Android device with access to the Google Play app store. Audi is calling the tablet a next-generation in-car entertainment device that Audi buyers can choose to purchase as an additional feature. However, the company wouldn't name a ship date, only saying the device would arrive in the near future.

The Relationships between MOOD/QMOOD Metrics and External Software Quality Attributes
Empiricalstudies have been conducted to evaluate these metrics as indicators of external software quality attributes (ESQAs). However,there has been no attempt to systematically review and report these empirical evidences. To identify the relation ofMOOD/QMOOD metrics with ESQAs, we have performed a systematic review of empirical evidences published in the literaturethat support or reject MOOD/QMOOD metrics as indicators of ESQAs. Our search strategy identified 413 papers, out of which15 papers were identified as reporting empirical evidence showing relation between CK metrics and ESQAs.

Using Scenario-Based Architecture Analysis to Inform Code Quality Measures
Scenario-based architecture analysis offers a broad understanding of how a software-reliant system evolves over time and can form a basis for assessing the amount of rework that may be necessary in the foreseeable future. Using the architectural risks identified during scenario-based architecture analysis, we clarified the level of system decomposition where code quality metrics reveal relevant information

Reasoning and Improving on Software Resilience against Unanticipated Exceptions
Exceptions are widely used in prac- tice [6]. To us, the resilience against exceptions is the ability to correctly handle exceptions that were never foreseen at speciﬁcation time neither encountered during development. Our motivation is to help the developers to understand and improve the resilience of their applications. This sets a three-point research agenda: (RQ#1) What does it mean to specify anticipated exceptions? (RQ#2) How to characterize and measure resilience against unantic- ipated exceptions? (RQ#3) How to put this knowledge in action to improve the resilience?

The Internet of Things outlook for 2014: Everything connected and communicating
IoT isn't just a fancy buzzword that describes how your refrigerator can let you know when you need to replace your spoiling milk or your rotting vegetables (although it can), it is so much more. How much more is only left to your imagination and to your budget. You can do as little or as much with IoT as you want. For example, if you operate food distribution business, you could install sensors in your trucks that send temperature, humidity, and dock-to-dock travel times back to your home office for analysis.

Naming and Classifying: Text Analysis Vs. Text Analytics
Analysis is an examination of structure, composition, and meaning that provides insight to advance some purpose. Analysis may be heuristic, informal, and/or qualitative. Contrast with analytics, which is algorithmic rather than heuristic. I define analytics as the systematic application of numerical and statistical methods that derive and deliver quantitative information, whether in the form of indicators, tables, or visualizations. Analytics is formal and repeatable.

The Future of Business Intelligence: An Impending Realization
What once appeared as two opposing trends that could potentially cancel each other out has merged into a synthesis in which formal education in the field – in addition to developments in automation, Data Discovery tools, Cloud computing and Big Data – is readily used to simplify the process of leveraging BI for laymen. BI’s crossroads has become a solitary path paved by the consumerization of (and burgeoning familiarity and comfort with) IT, which Gartner describes as “how enterprises will be affected, and how they can take advantage of new technologies and models that originate and develop in the consumer space, rather than in the enterprise IT sector.”

Windows Azure Security Guidance
In cloud applications more responsibility lays on the shoulders of the application developers to design, develop, and maintain their cloud applications to high security standards to keep attackers at bay. Consider the following diagram (from J.D. Meier's Windows Azure Security Notes PDF): notice how the infrastructure part is being addressed by the cloud provider--in our case by Windows Azure--leaving more security work to the application developers:

Data Integrity, Physical Security and REST APIs Contribute to Tape's Ongoing Relevance
Other benefits which tape still holds strong are its security and reliability. Data backed up to tape is typically more secure than data stored on disk or on the cloud because, in part, tape can make data more difficult to access and then retrieve. The average hacker is more likely to spend time trying to hack data stored in a cloud or on disk than to go to the trouble of breaking into a storage facility where tape backups are stored, retrieve those tapes, load them into a tape library, and then go through them linearly to find and access the data they store.

Quote for the day:

"There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience." -- Archibald McLeish