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Technology and trends, practical usage

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How things change …..

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Well, today I decided to get back to my good old desktop PC for a while. I usually use my hep laptop (courtesy,my employer). Today my kids wanted to install Harry Potter’s latest movie trailer and that needed really sophisticated Quick Time installs and they demanded, persuaded, cajoled and pestered me using ‘Saama Daana Beda Dhanda’ principle fully and I lent my laptop to them just ‘this time’. I returned to my dear old PC, seven years old, 256KB memory, slow CD writer and a flickering monitor.

I was about to do my daily routine of visiting the same web sites, tech blogs, reviews and same articles. I changed my mind then and went to Windows Explorer. I was amazed! I opened temp first – man, it had so many files which were lying in stateless session for half a decade. Friends’ resumes,bank statements, school leave letters. letters written to odd credit card companies admonishing them for charging me the annual fee for a supposedly free card etc. I deleted some of the files and moved on to My Documents and My Music! There was a treasure waiting there. I found old .wav files recorded out of songs sung by family members and by my kids. I didn’t have an MP3 codec then and they remained .wav files hogging disk space. I played some of them and felt extremely nostalgic. Songs and stories narrated by kids with really sweet tones, completely innocent and full of bliss that you would not get from a meditation music from a famous spiritual organization.

Then I went to the real junk yard which is My Bookmarks. Most bookmarks were irrelevant. I had changed bank accounts, so those links to bank sites did not matter!. There were lots of links to project and product related information related to my work. I smiled to myself about two things. One about how technology, information sourcing and information rendering had changed. All those bookmarks were invalid. All the data and information needed to decide something was being pulled now in a ‘one stop’ portal which had regions, rich UI, dancing bar charts (dynamic data 🙂 , alerts …blah blah! The second was when I realised that today the kind of information I needed was way different from what I needed six years back.

How life changes! We rarely see how unconsciously we throw away old baggage and keep adapting to new ones. Well, we can change our operations, our life style, our profession, our interests. But there was one folder I just grabbed and transferred to my memory stick AND copied on to a CD using CD writer AND emailed to my gmail account as a backup. This was my ‘friends’ folder. It had a friends.txt file which contained addresses, email and phone numbers of friends and relatives. It also had my personal folder which contained scanned copies of my late mom’s letters to me.

Technology changes but soul to soul equations don’t change……

Let me know if you agree with me.
Widdy

This post originally appeared on an external website

Evolution of software developer

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Life is becoming easier with technology, rather for the Application developer! About a decade ago, a good developer was one who invariably came from computer engineering background. Usual interview questions would revolve around order of an algorithm, traveling salesman problem or graph and automata theory! I was a proud engineer who reveled in all of these. Not for long. I slowly became witness to the software world leaning on the ‘next door boys (or gals)’. No, not all jobs really needed brilliant computer engineers. We needed ‘average’ guys for jobs that did include development, testing, technical writing, sample writing, porting…etc. And sooner than later it was proved that all these guys who came with an MCA degree or Electrical engineering or Mechanical Engineering degrees were really valuable since they picked up stuff pretty fast. Of course, the job did not require them to know discrete mathematics and regular expressions.

The software world looked towards developers who understood the domain, who could quickly draw up screen designs using tools like Visual basic or Oracle Forms, who could rapidly write business logic using standard functions and packages and who did not have to bother about writing tuned and performant database queries because there were tools already for that!

Now, the situation has become even easier! Yes, with declarative development, all that the developer has to do is…’DO’! He (she) does not have to know the intricacies of code, syntax. If the application needs a calendar date to be picked up by a calendar, well no code needed. Use the Rich UI component library, drag and drop the calendar component. Do you want an on demand audio player to be developed? Who really needs to store media files (those songs) in binary format, retrieve those as streams, parse… Come on, are you in Stone Age? DRAG and DROP, rather DnD! Hey, haven’t you heard of life cycle components?

Leave alone silly things such as changing colors, report layouts, page breaks- they are all done declaratively.

No, again, don’t worry about memory consumption, bandwidth consumption – after all how will storage management and performance companies survive? Or router companies innovate? Give them a chance, write n-tier architecture code, compile them in a ‘Team development’ environment, and deploy them on a heavy web server and hog memory and bandwidth. No problems.

Okay, what the heck is the developer supposed to know? Well, he should surely know how to pick those exact tools he needs given that he is spoilt for choice. He should know usability and aesthetics and customer behavior patterns. For example, if you want the customer to install your software, are you going to ask hundred questions to fill up before that? Or would you err on the side of courtesy? Or on the side of security? Ease of use versus effectiveness? Do you provide a heavy rich client and provide him everything on the thick client or do you have to develop servlets to send the logic back to server and keep the client thin?

So, the developer has at once developed into a super developer. He has to think so many things ahead of design, which his geek-predecessors did not bother about. Let us give the devil it’s due.

Did you enjoy reading this?

This post originally appeared on an external website

Evolution of software developer

In reply to Evolution of software developer

Just because the code-level tech has shifted out from under you at YOUR
job, doesn’t mean it has for everyone else. Who do you think writes
those handy little drag n drop components you talk about? Code-level
development still happens; it’s still critical, and it still requires
deep technical understanding.. Linux, to take an obvious currently
popular example, was not written by a button down chap with a business
degree dragging and dropping objects…

Which is not to say that the type of development you describe isn’t
also critical. But don’t forget that you achieve what you achieve
because you “stand on the shoulders of giants”…

Evolution of software developer

In reply to Evolution of software developer

Drag & Drop Dev Kit for Semantic Web Application?

Good article and equally good comment.

Nice to know that there are drag & drop development kits for super-applications but I still find the need to learn and use “Lengthy mono-spaced Courier font code” for Semantic Web Applications—XML, RDF, OWL ….. Are there any drag & drop development kits for such applications?

I find it futile to use search engines to find the answers for this kind of queries. In fact my need for drag & drop dev kit is the super-application: Fetch Engine.

Putcha V. Narasimham
putchavn@yahoo.com

SOA and ecommunity

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Today I’m wondering what drives an e-community! The need to socialize in a structured manner hasn’t gone away. Well, most of us want friends or acquaintances who have something in common with us. May be interests or hobbies, maybe similar age groups and similar challenges in life, or similar life or behavioural patterns. Is an e-community service just for the hippie and funky? Definitely not – no service can really take off if it is not for the overall benefit of the larger society.

Most of our activities are centered around discovering services which are available in a directory. This is essentially what an UDDI registry based service does. For example, find those trains that travel via a particular route, are tickets available, what kind of food will be availabe at the train stations and can I get that information based on my eating profile, and during my transit stays can I get some movie tickets – again please look at my profile to see what movies I like and I would like to meet some of my friends from my alumni located at my destination city. Can i meet them? They aer all buddies in different e-communites some in AOL, some in Yahoo, some of google – can I see them all in one place and can I establish a meeting between us and book a restaurant table too?

The options are mind boggling. It looks like an utopian dream. But when businesses and services structure their data representation abstracted for web services and if they can register their services in a standard fashion and publish them, it’s going to be much easier to do many routine things we spend time on today.

Let us wish good luck for overselves!
Widdy 🙂

This post originally appeared on an external website

Ideal Browser world and rich applications

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Today I experienced a very current and relevant problem. I was looking for a software with which I could design virtual homes. Basically I needed an app that would draw a house plan, take my inputs for furnishing, structures etc and give me a 3D view of the whole thing. I needed it to be simple to use yet have complex (not complicated) functions. For e.g. I need a moon roof which should not slope down but be flat!

I searched the internet and found two options. One, there were tools that provided this functionality over the browser. That is, I subscribe a hosting fee and I can draw, paint and dar and drop through an applet on a browser. The second option, was to buy a software on a CD that would install as a desktop client. I used both and my pain points were all relevant to what problems we have in the industry today.

The issues in the browser based tool were these: The internet with great broadband is still not that fast esp. with latency and variable speed. So, if I drag and drop a refrigerator object in my bed room plan, it got dropped after a good 30 seconds. So, request and response with HTML and HTTP was good but it did not match my creative abilities.

The quality of the GUI – well, how much rich can you make an object that is brought (or dragged) all the way from the server thousands of miles away? So, the app designer does have to make a trade off. Can’t the object just look ‘like’ a fridge-comeon, after all this is just the plan..not your house! So, the component called refrigerator is rectangular in shape and has a grid across it and user is expected to decode that as a refridgerator. Colors? Well, just keep a default color for now, okay.
Can I have many GUI components – may be different carpets, diff tiles, diff tap fittings, diff draperies……whew..no way. They are really fat components and do you want to hog bandwidth dragging them all the way? They will hog memory too.

So, my GUI components are BLAFed (Basic look and Feel) and are not really comprehensive in variety.

Third, what about storage, reuse and reliability? If my internet disconnects, does it journal it? Can I start from the same point that I left off? Can I reopen my plan, copy it, version it, have some security and authentication on it………………….hey hey comeon, you are talking all things that you want in an enterprise software!
No, the browser based ‘host’ did not provide any of these.

But yes, I had advantages such as I could manage with lesser memory. I just needed a terminal with internet connection and a printer.

Okay, I shifted to the CD based client software. Boom, it installs so beautifully! But, wait how many files does it need to install? oops, so many picture files,whooooooo- so many .jar files…..oh man, why is it downloading another JDK version- I have a compatible one here, can’t it detect? So, I finally run the executable and there si it. I gape at the client- wow! So beautiful. Such easy to use wizards, so many options that I can use. I just drag and drop a fully furnished bathroom and lo, I can see it on 3D. It looks beautiful.

But it suddenly vanishes-what happened? I go to task manager and open processes. It’s hogged about 512MB RAM and there are about five or six processes running. I start again after killing the processes myself. I do this many times, struggling with rebuilding it every time it does the vanishing act. Then I look up internet and buy a even better, more reliable software. Now I try to open my old house plan with my new software (what a dumb thing to do, whoever said that apps work from one software to another) and it core dumps.

My requirements for this browser BLAF-Rich Client software developers is just the same set. I need a standard way of rich components on a browser, rendered via request and response, with all the functionality that the rich client provided plus the convenience of using it over any-PC have-internet technology. I will not do any installation, configuration on my PC. I need to move over and drag over components like a glider. The components have to look life like – if I say I want a teal sofa then it should look like the teal one. If I want veneer finish, well it better look like what I saw at the store. I need to get a REAL feel of it. I definitely want failure restoration (cold failover and hot failover), versioning, team development (I might be developing one room, my friend could be developing another room from his PC) and be able to save certain features as my ‘styles’ or profiles.

And last but not the least, I need to be able to see same kind of file type, component types, XML tags…..(standards :-)) so that I can open this, save this using any vendor’s software as long as I pay the subscription fee.

SO, how does this look? Am I demanding? Not really, make it all simple!

Let me know what you think by sending me an email.
Widdy

This post originally appeared on an external website

What should a SOA enterprise server do for me

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

While SOA as a technology may not be mature enough, and primitive still at adoption levels, the concept behind it is promising. As I understand SOA better and better, I begin to have more and more expectations.

Let us talk about ‘pulling’/’pushing’ data . Data or information on a case by case basis may exist in various forms in heteregenous applications. I can get my data stream via messaging queues such as railways ticket bookings, online lottery engagements, the most often used example being stock and forex quotes.

Or I could have my information coming through SMTP systems (our dear email in Simple Message Transfer Protocol) which according to me is really a content managed workflow system that has been time tested and working very reliably.

Or from the traditional RDBMS APIs or database webservices which follow open standards of SOAP and WSDL.

Or via real time feeds such as a patient’s heart beat, pulse, BP, lung saturation etc from the monitors in an Intensive Care Unit in a hospital on to the doctor’s real time monitoring system

Or via Applications and information from enterprise systems such as SAP or Siebel based applications where data is got just from SAP(abstracted to the app level and not about APIs or depper layers of data storage and persistence).

Or from the hugely invested silos of information available in mainframes such as CISC where data sometimes need to be just got from screens and not from data layers.

And when I do successfully get the continous data out of these sources, I should have the facility for me to define how different types of data are to be validated (for e.g. the doctor should be able to say, ‘Attend to the patient, don’t validate,if it is an emergency without bothering to register him/her to the hospital repository), to be computed (for e.g. no taxation for income levels lesser than a certain amount), to be transformed (‘Get all those long binary strings and convert them to giga object types).

I should also be able to inherit validation, transformation or security rules because they have all been already defined and running in all my heterogenous systems for years!

I understand that 80% of SOA effort is towards Exception Handling. That’s logical because SOA itself requires an integration layer inbetween the model and presentation layer and due to the variety of different interfaces and due to their complexities the exceptions can be plenty. But they all need to be handled as beautifully they were handled in their original stand alone systems earlier if not better.

The whole thing looks very promising but as I sit down with the requirements, I’m bogged down because it looks complex. User experiences will dictate a lot of design in this area and the end-user is the King!

This post originally appeared on an external website

How things change …..as technology changes

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Saturday, July 16, 2005

How things change …..

Well, today I decided to get back to my good old desktop PC for a while. I usually use my hep laptop (courtesy,my employer). Today my kids wanted to install Harry Potter’s latest movie trailer and that needed really sophisticated Quick Time installs and they demanded, persuaded, cajoled and pestered me using ‘Saama Daana Beda Dhanda’ principle fully and I lent my laptop to them just ‘this time’. I returned to my dear old PC, seven years old, 256KB memory, slow CD writer and a flickering monitor.

I was about to do my daily routine of visiting the same web sites, tech blogs, reviews and same articles. I changed my mind then and went to Windows Explorer. I was amazed! I opened temp first – man, it had so many files which were lying in stateless session for half a decade. Friends’ resumes,bank statements, school leave letters. letters written to odd credit card companies admonishing them for charging me the annual fee for a supposedly free card etc. I deleted some of the files and moved on to My Documents and My Music! There was a treasure waiting there. I found old .wav files recorded out of songs sung by family members and by my kids. I didn’t have an MP3 codec then and they remained .wav files hogging disk space. I played some of them and felt extremely nostalgic. Songs and stories narrated by kids with really sweet tones, completely innocent and full of bliss that you would not get from a meditation music from a famous spiritual organization.

Then I went to the real junk yard which is My Bookmarks. Most bookmarks were irrelevant. I had changed bank accounts, so those links to bank sites did not matter!. There were lots of links to project and product related information related to my work. I smiled to myself about two things. One about how technology, information sourcing and information rendering had changed. All those bookmarks were invalid. All the data and information needed to decide something was being pulled now in a ‘one stop’ portal which had regions, rich UI, dancing bar charts (dynamic data 🙂 , alerts …blah blah! The second was when I realised that today the kind of information I needed was way different from what I needed six years back.

How life changes! We rarely see how unconsciously we throw away old baggage and keep adapting to new ones. Well, we can change our operations, our life style, our profession, our interests. But there was one folder I just grabbed and transferred to my memory stick AND copied on to a CD using CD writer AND emailed to my gmail account as a backup. This was my ‘friends’ folder. It had a friends.txt file which contained addresses, email and phone numbers of friends and relatives. It also had my personal folder which contained scanned copies of my late mom’s letters to me.

Technology changes but soul to soul equations don’t change……

This post originally appeared on an external website

I Tech, therefore I am

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Gadgets- can they get better, soon?

I recently read an article about how gadgets (read technology) have changed our lives and

made everything easy. But the cynic in me doesn’t completely agree. The dreamer in me dreams of the following to name a few:

I want to throw away my cell phone – can’t my watch, a small sized watch do the same functions?

Wait, I know of bulky watches which also function as a PDA, mobile…etc but thats not what
I want. I want a completely voice-interfaced phone. So, if I have to make a phone call, I
just whisper to my watch ‘Call John’. Ofcourse John’s number was earlier stored in my phone
using voice again with a command whispered to it such as ‘Store John Mathew five five
six…..two two’. How do I listen and speak to a person using the watch – I will lift my
wrist close to my ears and mouth. Don’t I do this with my mobile in any case. I don’t need a
blue tooth attachment to my watch, remember I’m talking about making life easier with
gadgets not chaining my whole body with gadgets. Every other PDA function can be
voice-commanded. The watch can have a small adapter, almost invisible, which I can plug in
to a computer once in a while to get reports, lists, schedules etc printed. I’m ofcourse
thinking of only the able persons and not about American Disabilities Act section 508.

Finger printing has been talked about as a pretty big thing in industry but the scale is
really small yet and if that does take off, I can just have my finger and get away with ID
card to my work place, the keys to my house, keys to my office. If I extend this fantasy,
some day maybe next century, there would be no passports, no logins, no bank account numbers to remember or jot down. The possibilities are stupendous. And I do know that someone can
cut my finger off and have everything that’s mine but everything really has a risk. I can
book air tickets, draw a bank draft, sign an online cheque, pay bills …all at the drop of
a hat,rather drop of a finger.

The laptop – the industry has toggled on and off the network enabled slim PC (rather dumb
terminal that just acts as an interface to all-knowing all-powerful remote server). The
laptop is a pain to carry, a pain to recharge and a pain to to be connected to Wi-Fi terminals esp. if a VPN network has to work through it and a whole big bunch of collaborative tools depending on it. For example while I’m on a meeting, sitting in an airport (aha- isn’t this the ideal usecase for a collaborative tool), drawing my plan on a net meeting like white board, I suddenly find that my wi-fi connection got disconnected for 0.5 seconds. A tier-1 user who uses the internet network will not observe this since the network immediately reconnects in a transparent fashion. But see, I’m a heavy tier-2 or tier-3 user. My VPN firewall, very secutiy conscious goes off with the smallest change in network, and my whole lot of Workplace tools (my drawing on the white board, my messages, my control of another’s desktop is all gone with the wind! I have to negotiate my VPN again, reconnect to the meeting and do everything again. Now tell me, this is not a remote possibility, or is it?

Most ads for networks, tools, grid or utility computing, storage management, journaling of lost work,backup, disaster recovery etc make it look very simple on TV and magazines. They really are not.

The list can go on…I will stop here. Thanks for reading.

This post originally appeared on an external website

Simple yet Secure login (albeit SSO)

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Today I was attempting to convey my needs/requirements for an application that will essentially capture a software release oriented details in an incremental fashion. For eg. what percentage of new features are really requested by customers as enhancements and what percentage of new features are influenced by competitor product or both and the cost of staffing for the same. I had to source data from twenty different managers, from thirty different applications from a very heterogenous background and I needed a simple yet secure way for information to be entered.

I began my design for a good single sign on system. Industry has so many providers, including those SAML specific open source solutions. But what would influence my purchase of a good secure single sign on system?

Will my secure authentication (rather THAT one login and password) work across the legacy systems of accounting, financials, training-competence skills repositories? I understand there are ‘connectors’ to all these kind of systems based on .NET, Cobol, C, Windows, Mainframe, Visual Basic etc. Will these connectors connect and be the single gateway to get into all these systems? Is security inbuilt into the system which will check for multi-access such as accessing the database via backdoor using SQL script when a robust SSO sits waiting for users to authenticate?

If some of my data sourcing applications are upgraded, will my security gaurd still be able to work without a recheck and a cold failover? If I add a few more data sources, then again can they be ‘hot pluggable’?

It is possible that legacy systems were not coded with secure coding practices – for example exposing possible access information as external parameters, URL parameters, hardcoded strings dumped in log files etc. Can my SSO software detect, poll and find out for me? In essence I’m asking not just for a security guard but a CIA advanced agent who will also do security guard duty for me? Too much? Well, there is another popular term for ‘you are asking for too much’ and that is ‘out of the box’.

Has the software been tested with scaled users? How’s performance when 500 users login at the same time? I have seen numerous industry specific benchmarks but you rarely get that kind of performance when you deploy it. This is much like an automobile’s mileage under ‘test’ condition!

Finally, do SSO deployments handle authentication such as identity cards with the same robustness as pure login authentication. No, no, forget biometrics for now. I want simple yet fully secure systems.

This post originally appeared on an external website

Eyes on the Prize?

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

I read a good article on Business Week ‘Eyes on the Prize’. The author says that he “instituted a well-designed bonus program in 2004, tying employees’ pay directly to their performance and to the company’s profitability”. This is a fantastic method and in the age of capitalism, it works great.

I have always advocated performance based reward systems. But they are easier said than done. First of all, the organization should have an effective measuring and evaluation system. This cannot always be based on a formula. For number centric or quantifiable target centric organizations, it might be a shade easier but for a global organization it becomes difficult. If awards are a direct function of performance, then performance should be also highly visible and individualistic. So, in this system it is great to award a sales manager who has bagged successful accounts for a target $ sum. But we also need equally effective systems to measure and evaluate the quiet yet effective guy, ‘the behind the scene man’.

I have seen this working both ways in organizations. For effective evaluations, there should be 360 degree feedback that includes direct management, peer group, influence groups, operations group and maybe even the support staff. An employee is a part of the organization first and foremost. When there is a wide array of feedback, all facets of the employee comes to the picture and any single function or individual cannot overly influence the judgement. But this evaluation will be somewhat abstract and empherical and cannot be converted to a mathematical formula.

How often has one seen the nice and quiet yet effective guy get great performance reviews? In a 1000+ strong organization? If this indeed happens, this can be a fair indicator that performance based reviews and award systems are indeed working.

The other side of the story is this. Most large organizations have numbers skewed towards the top management not only because they are more valuable to the organizations but also there is a thinking somewhere ‘oh, well, I cannot rate this top guy low now. If I do, someone is going to ask me why I didn’t I point at his under performance before. I didn’t evaluate at all, so I better give him a good rating for performance’.

So, performance and values flow top to bottom and that should be monitored. What gets measured gets done!

This post originally appeared on an external website

Information at any layer can be used for business

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Today, I was surprised to see the local courier boy dropping off specific notice pamphlets to targeted post boxes. I did my little bit of investigation and found that he had some notices printed for a day care center. Essentially an ad and he was carefully dropping it to those post boxes that were owned by families with kids and toddlers.

I was happy to know several things. One, the day care sponsor had used an effective service to do the advertising. Second, there was no wastage in the service. It reached the right people. Third, it was using a layer inbetween the manufacturer and distributor for advertising.

It was like the Feedster model you know. Earlier we googled web sites, then we were provided with search facilities for news sites, images, printed books …etc etc. But services like Feedster searched the feeds and that’s like searching the postman for the right information while he carries loads of important mails meant for all. The revenue model is based on sponsored searches and advertisement programs based on successful usage of feeds. Feeds, not web sites will be the next order!

There, I get a pop-up asking if I want to use ‘Ad-Sense’ program and make money while you read this ..:-D

Merry christmas and Happy New Year.

This post originally appeared on an external website

My dear Biz portal- get noticed!

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

After crossing all the hurdles of creating a business portal and effectively creating it’s functional aspects, comes the real hurdle – which is to ensure that THIS particular portal is what customer’s will find when they look for one. Easier said than seen!

Broadly, this means the customer may be directed to the business portal via advertisement banners, reference links, pay-per-click programmes etc. But the largest possibility is for the customer to reach via a search engine. Again, not all search engines. According to a study, customers find a business site 35% of the time using Google, 30% of the time using Yahoo, about 15% of the time using AOL or MSN search engines and occasionally using the likes of Lycos or AskJeeves etc. While I’m not professing these claims, these figures do indicate what we know commonly about. So, it boiles down to essentially being spotted by Google, Yahoo and perhaps MSN.

So, the second requirement is that it is not enough to be just listed (or discovered) by these search engines. Most users behave like this(again, a study based data), 75% of the time the user quits or changes search criteria once he/she doesn’t find relevant information in the first page. This translates to about ten to 15 results at the maximum assuming user is using a full sized window.

So then how do you get to the top of the search results page? It’s not a staright forward formula. The parameters are varied and the web site constantly needs to optimize itself inorder to be found by these kingpin search engines.

Basic optimization is to fine tune primary key words, phrases and descriptions.

The next step is to look for the search engine’s ranking and it’s directory positioning. This will help the web site designer to optimize it for the most suited search engine.

The next step is to select the best pages or right pages and mark the content for theme-based indexing.

Look for those keywords, phrases etc. that may be potentially marked by search cops (spiders) as spams although it may be unintentional.

Make keyword optimized directory submissions so that webservices can discover the right services in a jiffy.

Once these basic steps are done, the ‘get noticed’ result is achieved. However this is by no means the end of web designing because a lot goes into Traffic planning, the site mapping and navigation architecture, image structure, site structure etc.

Site hit report and analysis is a key market intelligence area.

This post originally appeared on an external website

Economies of Data Integration

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

What are the real issues or ‘real time’ issues of data integration? While we see everyday ads or
claims from companies about how their software can integrate data, there are still a lot of nitty
gritties that have to carefully considered while making a ‘one strategy for all’ decision. One of
my favourite quotes is this: 100% automation leads to ineffectiveness.
All organizations, from the smallest of SMBs to the largest enterprise have silos of data, silos
of information across finance, IT Operations, various customer or client data repositories,
internal repositories, internal workflow systems etc. Unless an enterprise is ideally designed,
most of them would have parallel streams of workflow. One stream would be the integration between
internal operations, finance, costing, auditing, compliance divisions. These are largely
Microsoft Excel based, Tally based or based on similar tools. How many of the currently available
Accounting softwares, Network monitoring softwares or Compliance checkers are interoperable with
each other and with enterprise data flow management? The internal Ops data is also highly
sensitive and protected and the typical finance manager does not know or does not believe in SSO
kind of things and he only knows authentication established locally. In 80% of the companies
according to a research site on macro economics, the most sensitive financial data is still
resting on the hard drive of the chief finance person’s laptop which is ofcourse well backed up.
The second stream that can be integrated is the inhouse knowledge and information management,
including competence building, training, market gap analysis well tuned with product analysis,
gap based skills acquisition. This stream data is not as hard to integrate as the first stream
but nevertheless difficult. If each division such as Corporate Training, Knowledge Management, IT
Management, Program Management etc have different products controlling them (which is usually the
case) as varied as Microsoft spreadsheets, Siebel based systems, SAP based systems, Tivoli based
data – well, I can hear SOAists screaming, but we still have a long way to go on that.
The least difficult of the data integration streams is the enterprise level data and information
integration. We all know that all major enterprise players have developed various adapters and
stand alone products which will recognize and discover services, understand business rules,
transform business data according to that and ‘talk to each other’.

I’m trying to gather information about how well information integration itself is working out. Readers, please pass on any web sites that publish information about the economics of
service-to-service adoption and how do their returns measure up against cost in clear
quantifiable terms.

This post originally appeared on an external website

8 terabyte desktop? For whom?

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I just read this piece of news: 8 Terabytes Desktop

It is like you can never have too much of the goodies! With such a large disk space on my desktop, I can have ‘anything’ I want stored on that. One of the first obvious advantages is that I can store videos, movies, arhcive literally everything and will ‘never need to delete but just sort’ – a la gmail.

But, think about it. This might be great for a student or a graphic designer who would need to store loads of data who works from one single place. But what about the regular IT pro? An IT pro’s profile is like this. He/She travels from home to office and back everyday and sometimes to different offices within the country or outside his/her home countey. And sometimes to other destinations on travel. So, how would he/she efficiently use the TBs of info which is situated on his desktop at one office? Will this massive data storage be augmented by massive network bandwidths, by massive backup and recovery strategies?

To me, an ideal environment would be like this. I would stash away the laptop and any dependency with the hard disk out there. I would log on to the internet – from home, office, airport, from my car (car can have a light weight network computer), from my hotel and probably from general travel lounges across the world without being bothered about disk space, backup, RAID and security.

To me, internet bandwidth and availability are much more useful than terabytes of storage on a PC.

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Software as a service (SaaS)

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

This is the newest coinage of the term which is making a new wave now with big companies like IBM hosting exclusive seminars for it. Idea-wise and technically there is nothing new here. It is simply the culmination of the software evolving from a provider providing one-size-fits-all product to a more collaborative connective world where each provider provides a solution and everything falls nicely into place with each other. ‘Live and let live’.

The sops offered are for CTOs and CIOs. Lesser maintenance headaches, no need to go up on the application upgrade treadmill, not to bother about compatibility and adaptability and in some ways, the best of breeds put together.

Athough ASPs and On-demand hosting are cousins to SaaS, theer are subtle differences. SaaS is loosely based on SOA where you can have services (a la products) talk to each other at different levels. It could be at raw API level, architecture level or application level. All the usual demons of integration has to be planned in advance and addressed such as security, service policies (which by itself can be a service), accounting and autherization, platform dependencies…etc.

SaaS modelled application can be hosted or could be on-premise. The licensing and pricing models and rules would be different from what we have today.
Web developers today are still not trained on technologies such as BPEL to readily develop SaaS based services. Most developers would be happy to integrate services/apps using plain old XML and HTTP. And again, most old software cannot be thrown away for want of SaaS. So, the trend would be to develop wrappers around them and ‘somehow’ make them a service that others can discover, register and use.

I saw a cynic’s post calling SaaS as ‘Same old software as service’. For those of us who know Hindi, SaaS means mom-in-law and I guess this is closest to it’s meaning. ‘Put up with it’!Software as a service (SaaS)

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False Positive Emails

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Today I dug out a very important email from my mailbox from the SPAM folder. As I had guessed it, it was ‘False Positive Filtering’.

In the simplest terms, False +ve emails are those which should have hit your inbox but the spammer algo with your email provider thought it was a spam. So, how does this work? Usually most sites such as Google, Yahoo etc keep their spammer rules very secretive for security reasons.

Common possibilities are these:
– When the email’s HTML contains links to images with names remotely suggestive of porn stuff
– Many spam emails ask user to explicitly click on link ‘remove me from this list’ only to trap their email and domain names to send more spam. So, sometimes, even genuine emails with ‘remove me….’ can be considered spam
– If the sender’s email domain address does not match the ‘From’ string. For e.g. if the mail says From: Income Tax Dept’ and domain is ‘gxbvghh.com’ . Sometimes genuine emails, which are sent as mass mails using a 3rd party provider can get flagged as positive.
– Suggestive attachment names

Interestingly there is a metric to measure email deliverability and one of them is to reduce false positive emails. I believe Google has it highest at around 99%.

So, look for those missing emails in your bulk/spam folder.

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The insured testing professional

In reply to Technology and trends, practical usage

Have you ever interviewed ‘Testing professionals’ whose resume has everything under the sun under testing? While there are exceptions, I have most often seen people who appear for a testing job unprepared for a technical interview. They could answer any number of ‘process’ or theoritical problems such as what is a black box testing, or integration testing, regression testing etc but when you drill deeper into solving a day to day problem they cannot respond very well.

I’m wondering if it is a chicken and egg problem. The process of quality assurance is not the first in the software development cycle. A test spec often always follows a requirements or functional spec and at that very stage, the tester transforms to someone who is supposed to follow or validate what the developer thought of. Is the test spec always limited by the functional spec’s scope? Are we creating/developing testers who just need to validate and need not really invest in understanding the latest technology trends, the latest product vulnerabilities?

Let me give couple of examples.
Ask a question about how would the interviewee test a simple web application that submits a form with two simple fields ‘name’ and ‘address’ to a repository at server. More often than not, 90% and above, you will get the first response as UI testing. ‘Validate the input fields’, ‘check for input length’ ‘check for special characters’…. well, any tester is supposed to have already known the kinder garten stuff of testing. Okay, dwelve a little deeper, ask him/her that you want the interviewee to provide functional examples and bang will come the reply ‘check the database and see if the input entered via form is updated properly’. Ask him/her ‘do you think data can be entered by other means and you should ensure testing for those conditions’, again bang comes the reply ‘well, the form should have strict validation and from the server side the database administrator should take precautions’.

I’m yet to see testers talk about vulnerabilities in authentication, input filtering, SQL injection, transport security, error handling etc.

I hope I’m proved wrong. I think 90% of testers are people who do what they are asked to do and the functional spec is an insurance for them against customer defects or hacker attacks.

Check it out – ask an interviewee next time ‘How can my Forgot Password feature be exploited’?

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