Daily Tech Digest

August 12, 2012

Amazon launches social game development studios
"Amazon Game Studios is exactly what it sounds like: a new team at Amazon that's focused on creating innovative, fun and well-crafted games," the Amazon Games Studios team said in a company blog post today.

10 Programming Languages That Can Redefine IT
Here are 10 latest programming languages which approach the art of software development from a fresh perspective, tackling a specific problem or a unique shortcoming of today's more popular languages. Many of them are capable of changing programming in subsequent years.

New BI Demands Pushing Data Architecture Limits
change is both constant and fast-paced. Don't get left behind: With "big data" increasingly taking hold, the five-year future is going to bring major transformation in the way information systems are built to support business intelligence (BI) and analytics applications.

How to Create High Impact Leadership
Delegating is the path to exponential impact, seizing opportunities, flattening organizations, and leadership development. Why do so many find delegating so difficult?

Canvas Control Library & New Forms Based System for building Web Pages & Websites
Canvas Control Library with all the common controls and advanced ones like TreeView which due to the nature of canvas allow for great control over the graphical presentation of the controls and their item contents.

The 7 Traits of Great Sellers
Competition is intense, and if you don't take a leadership role in producing results for your clients, someone else will. In Lead, Sell, or Get Out of the Way, Ron Karr outlines a repeatable process based on the powerful idea that great sellers lead relationships in the same way that great leaders sell ideas.

The one-minute entrepreneur
If you're the kind of person who prefers to sit back and think about stuff, entrepreneurship will be quite a challenge. The default in the world of... humans... is that nothing happens. It takes hard work, energy, focus, determination, impatience, in short, an urge to make things happen right now, to make anything at all happen.

Protocols and Metaprotocols: What is a Personal Event Network?
This blog post sets forth several important naming conventions for personal event networks and also motivates and explains them.

Interview on Rust, a Systems Programming Language Developed by Mozilla
Rust is a systems language for writing high performance applications that are usually written in C or C++ but it was developed to prevent some of the problems related to invalid memory accesses that generate segmentation faults.

The Tactical and Strategic Art of Economic Models
Don Reinertsen outlines the need for using an economic model for development, explaining what that is emphasizing the cost of delay, how an economic model looks like, how to build and use one.

Quote for the day:

"A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks." --Oscar Wilde

August 11, 2012

6 Things Hiring Managers Don’t Get About Recruiting
You could have had great success in finding candidates but could have encountered many obstacles in trying to place those candidates because often many hiring managers mismanage the hiring process. Read on to know the five issues hiring managers must consider when trying to fill their open positions with superstar candidates.

The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s Changing the Rules of Business
One consequence of this data-driven revolution is that the whole attitude toward writing software, or even imagining it, becomes subtly constrained.

The Biggest Cloud Computing Security Risk Is Impossible to Eliminate
Despite all that noise, it's odd to realize that the incident with the greatest potential to cause a change in attitude among users and IT is the hack of a single reporter's backup account on Apple's consumer-oriented iCloud storage service.

Social still can't beat search in online shopping
Although the amount of site traffic generated by social media has more than doubled, it's still no match for search engines or e-mail referrals.

Enterprise Architecture – How a lack of planning can trip up your business
Without a clear view of an ideal future state of the enterprise, it becomes easy for businesses to fall into the trap of implementing disparate business capabilities, applications and infrastructure components which do not optimally relate to each other.

The Future of HTTP and the Controversy over SPDY
IETF has discussed the future of HTTP, and the next version is to be using SPDY as a starting point. There is a controversy though: Microsoft claims SPDY is no better than HTTP/1.1 with all optimizations turned on, while SPDY’s inventor says Microsoft’s tests actually confirm SPDY’s advantage in a real world scenario.

Google Open Sources Leak Finder, a JavaScript Tool for Detecting Memory Leaks
Currently, Leak Finder works with Closures but it can be configured to work with other libraries. Closures is an open source JavaScript library containing widgets, an event framework, tools for DOM manipulation, a unit testing framework, animation tools, and other components, being used extensively across Google services such as GMail, GDocs, GMaps and others.

Achieving True Business Analysis Competency
Want to improve business analysis competency but don’t know where to start? Need a way to make sure management will support the effort? This offering from DEA can help. Many forward-thinking organizations have begun dedicated efforts to increase business analysis competency. But getting started is one of the biggest challenges these efforts face. Success requires an understanding of current business analysis practices, careful planning, and clear measureable goals against which progress and success can be gauged. Without a solid business case to support the effort, work can lose momentum, focus and management backing.

Inline MSIL in C# and Generic Pointers
The following article discusses how to achieve inline CIL (MSIL/IL) into the C# language. Using said implementation, we can achieve things that the compiler usually prevents us from doing due to type-safety and other safety-checks. One of these things is generic pointer types which can be very useful.

Quote for the day:
"In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield." ~Warren Buffett

August 10, 2012

For Sales Forces, Big Data May Be Overhyped
We commonly see new technologies overhyped; their capabilities are promoted beyond their potential. Is big data your goldmine? Or is it a mirage that always appears a few more million dollars and months away? It depends on how you go about it. Doing it is not enough. You have to do it right.

The Open Cloud Company: A Day In The Life [Video]
To herald the era of Fanatical Support on the open cloud, Rackspace producer and video storyteller Dave Sims captured it all as part of his “Day In The Life” video series; short films shot and edited in a single day that illustrate what’s happening here at Rackspace.
Does 'shadow IT' lurk in your company?
Business divisions are bypassing the IT department, making their own decisions to buy cloud-based application services or use mobile devices, raising the specter of so-called "shadow IT" that's outside the knowledge or control of the CIO and the IT staff.

Nation-backed surveillance malware monitors Middle East bank accounts
A sophisticated cyber surveillance tool that monitors financial transactions with Middle Eastern banks was probably built by or under the auspices of a government, security researchers said today.

Apache Cassandra database upgrade due this fall
Version 1.2 of Cassandra, eyed for an October release, is slated to offer concurrent schema change and virtual node capabilities as well as JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) deployment support, Ellis said. With concurrent schema changes, multiple clients can issue schema changes at the same time and they will be merged across a cluster safely.

10 practices of highly ineffective software developers
The developer's worst enemy is really the eager technical manager who tries to deliver a project faster than possible and pushes developers to engage into ill-advised practices. In high-end enterprise and Web-scale projects in particular, that can result in wholesale disaster.

Virtual Panel: NoSQL Database Patterns and Polyglot Persistence
NoSQL database space has different databases that support different data storage patterns. InfoQ spoke with four panelists about the current state of NoSQL adoption, architecture patterns supported by different NoSQL databases, and security aspects when using NoSQL databases.

Presentation: Progressive Architectures at the Royal Bank of Scotland
In their presentation posted at InfoQ systems and data architects Ben Stopford, Farzad Pezeshkpour and Mark Atwell show how RBS leveraged new technologies in their architectures while facing difficult challenges such as regulation, competition and tighter budgets. They also need to cope with stringent technical challenges including efficiency and scalability.

The Management Upside of Mistakes
From misspeaking to making a decision that turns out wrong to a million other areas to show off your humanness, mistakes are part of the learning to lead process. How you choose to deal with your mistakes will help determine people’s perception of you and speak volumes about your leadership character.

Nimbula Adds Hadoop to Private Cloud
The private cloud operating system provider today said it is combining its Nimbula Director platform with MapR Technologies' M3 and M5 Hadoop distributions. The combined offering will lets organizations process and analyze large volumes of unstructured Big Data in private clouds.

The Mechanics of Contracting
Contracting should be pursued within a fluid context with principles, not by following inflexible rules. That said, having a framework to follow is an equally important element to success. Structure without principles is a formula for installed results, but principles without a structure usually generates more rhetoric than realization.

Quote for the day:
"Close scrutiny will show that most "crisis situations" are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are." - Maxwell Maltz

August 09, 2012

The Superhero in a CIO
Apparently, movies such as The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers provide valuable insights on leadership traits that CIOs can borrow and implement them in order to tackle the complications in their everyday operations.

Collaboration 101
Unfortunately, most CEOs/ CXOs think that if they just buy collaboration technology, a miracle will happen, and they will become collaborative organizations and CEOs/ CXOs think that ensuring collaboration in an organization is the responsibility of the CIO.

Intel Invests into Motion-Sensing Technology Developer.
Movea, a leading designer of motion-sensing technologies, has received funding in the amount of €6.5 million ($8.044 million) led by Intel Capital, together with existing Investors iSource and GIMV. Movea develops motion sensing intelligence designed for software, embedded and semiconductor solutions that are used inside the consumer electronic products and applications geared towards sports, fitness and health. Eventually, Movea's technologies may find themselves inside Intel's own solutions.

Approach Virtualization Management Platform Selection With Careful Eye
In a fairly recent blog, I was asked to clarify what I meant by a "careful eye" in the evaluation and selection of virtualization management platforms. (Thanks, Laurie Head, vice president, AIS Network Cloud Hosting.) A "careful eye" means buying software, not services; walking before running; documenting requirements; and taking advantage of how the software industry has changed for the better.

Little girl gets new arms from a 3-D printer
What makes this plastic version of WREX useful for kids is that it’s light, made from the same plastic that LEGO bricks are made from, and it’s easy to produce a custom model. SImply design, and print. And replacement parts are no problem, so as the child grows, new pieces can be printed to fit their bodies.

Does your email address say you're a rube?
Opinions are often formed by many subtle factors. A social media manager has to be well-connected, and certainly seem current on all the new technologies and trends. You might have a good Klout rating, you might have a lot of Facebook friends, and you might even have four or five digits worth of Twitter followers.

Microsoft to sell police analytics toolkit, with New York taking 30pc cut
The software giant has co-developed a 'Domain Awareness System' alongside New York law enforcement and counterterrorism authorities, and intends to sell it to cities around the world

Microsoft opens Office and Sharepoint up to web developers
With the next release of Office and SharePoint, developers can build add-ons that run in Windows Azure (or Amazon, or other clouds.) A bigger question is when Office and SharePoint themselves will make the transition into Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar cloud. Microsoft still isn’t saying.

Wearable technology market to exceed $6B by 2016
In four years, the market for wearable wireless devices is expected to achieve minimum revenues of $6 billion, according to new research from IHS iSuppli subsidiary IMS Research.

Mobile computing and the demise of the desktop
Patrick Gray discusses some factors that might spell the end of the desktop as we know it. Do you think tablets will eventually replace the traditional desktop?

Quote for the day:
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." ~John Quincy Adams

August 08, 2012

Agile development costly, confusing: Report
A report by Voke Inc. found that companies do not understand costs of rework and cannot identify clear benefits of agile. But an agile consultant says the study shows a "fundamental misunderstanding" of what agile is

Do procurement processes allow Agile software delivery?
Longer projects run, higher likelihood of project failure. One of the moves in recent times to reduce complexity in software development is to adopt Agile delivery approaches. The desire to build confidence and leave tangible benefits even if projects are cancelled has provided further impetus to adoption of Agile practices.

Plextor M5 Pro solid-state drive
CNET Review says: Fast and compatible with all systems, the Plextor M5 Pro would be a great solid-state drive for anyone who can afford it

How to Be a More Reliable Professional
Unreliability was recently identified as the number one career-limiting habit and it’s no surprise. After all, if the people you work for (and with) can’t depend on you, what purpose do you serve?Truth be told, unreliable people are actually dangerous to the success of the entire team.

Forrester: Bump the HTML5 effort; this isn't 2011 anymore
We're not living in 2011 anymore. This is 2012, where HTML5 can spread its wings and stretch out, thinks Forrester

New Healthcare Ecosystem Requires New Collaboration Approaches
In reading a recent article published by PharmaExec on Innovative Contracting, it was encouraging to see continued discussion within Life Sciences arena that strives to address the needs of their customers, the payers and providers.

Google spreadsheets gains lockdown feature
Google has added a new feature to its spreadsheet product that enables users to lock down particular sections. According to Google, the feature, called Protected Ranges, is intended to stop cells being modified accidentally when several users are working on the same spreadsheet.

Two Leadership Models
In leadership, there are two distinct organizational models. Since few things are quite so black-and-white, we might consider them to be two ends of a continuium, with a virtually limitless number of stops between the two

Google’s self-driving car: A long road, but now 300,000 miles shorter
Google’s self-driving car may have sounded like the stuff of fantasy and The Jetsons not so long ago, but the company is famed for getting its teeth into a number of frankly odd and fun projects. The new car is no exception — and it seems Google’s engineers aren’t doing too bad a job either.

On learning enterprise-architecture
How someone can become a consummate generalist without getting insane as there is lot out there to learn because EA is the architecture of the enterprise? How do someone bring focus(Focus to not to focus on particular thing)? How do I create a specialist in me who is generalist?

Quote for the day:

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." ~Mark Twain