Latest News from Apache Developer's Journal

Where’s My SSP!? Introducing the SharePoint Services Architecture

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:45:00 EST

Shared Services Provider. Gone!

The concept of the SSP is no more. It has been replaced with a new concept called the Services Architecture. Your SharePoint installation will not have a separate SSP site like you had in the past. You now manage all of your familiar services like Search, the BDC, Excel Services directly through Central Administration on the new Manage Service Application page. This is where you will go to find familiar screens like Search Administration, User Profiles, and the Business Data Catalog (now BCS). The trick to getting to them, click on the item in the list and then use the Manage button on the toolbar.

I’m not going to go into a lengthy explanation of how it all works (because honestly I don’t understand it all), but I’ll give you a quick run down. Before we start, the term Service is highly overused. In this case it does not refer to a WCF, Web, or Windows service. In this case, Service refers to the actual program be it Search or something that you write yourself. A Service Application is an the configuration of your service on the farm. The provider of the Service will provide you the developer with a Service Application Proxy. This is basically some type of assembly that interacts with the service via WCF. If the Service Application is installed on multiple servers in the farm, a built-in load balancing scheme will be used to distribute request among servers. From my understanding, all of the existing API calls for things like search have been updated to fit into this model.

Effectively the Services Architecture is a new pluggable architecture which makes it possible for third parties to create their own services. I’ll also point out that you can now publish specific services and consume specific servers from remote farms which gives you quite a bit more flexibility. As opposed to the all or nothing we had with sharing SSP services between farms in MOSS 2007. Andrew Connell has a post that goes into more detail on why they shifted to this new architecture. It’s definitely worth the read.

Since the SSP is gone, you may be wondering what’s going to happen with all my code that references the SSP. If you using something like the UserProfile object and using the ServerContext object to reference the SSP, it may or may not work. ServerContext has been marked as deprecated. If you do try to use ServerContext, Visual Studio will tell you to use ServiceContext instead. If you do have SSP specific code, be sure and test it specifically during your upgrade process.

BTW, the start of this post was an obscure reference to another presentation on a completely unrelated topic. I’ll be truly impressed if anyone gets it. :)

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The Cloud Opportunity Window is Now Officially Open

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:14:00 EST

Having gone through a couple of decades worth of technology conferences, a familiar cycle occurs. For the first couple years, technology-related conferences are attended by engineers and operations people. Only after the technology has passed a couple of feasibility gates and begun to hit the business cycle do sales and marketing people take over. Cloud is now officially past the engineering phase, well into the sales phase – and the business community is scrambling to understand the implications of a virtualized world.

Immutable Service Containers @ Amazon EC2

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:10:00 EST

Just in time for the OpenSolaris Developer Conference, we were able to publish new Immutable Service Containers images directly to the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. Previously, I talked about creating ISCs using our security enhanced OpenSolaris 2009.06 AMIs. Today, I am happy to announce that we have taken the next logical step by making available AMIs that fully incorporate the ISC changes.

MPLS Conference 2009

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:49:00 EDT

Yes indeed, we had an awesome panel that I moderated at the MPLS Conference 2009 held in Washington D.C. on October 26 2009.

The panel entitled, “Emerging Technologies and Business Architectural Impact: Cloud Computing, P2P applications, Social Networking and Infrastructure Required to Scale”

Vijay Gill, Google
Donn Lee, Facebook
Benson Schliesser, Savvis
Raymond Zhang, BT
Prof. Ashwin Gumaste, India Institute of Technology-Bombay-Visiting Professor at MIT Multimedia Labs
Hokuto Sanematsu, KDDI-America
Paul Geraci, Technology Survey Group
Kireeti Kompella, Juniper Networks
George Swallow, Cisco

Seemed that everyone wanted to be on this panel; so to structure the discussion, I prepared a set of questions for the panelists as follows [with their inputs] - [each question could have been a topic for a separate panel session]:

Silanis Brings e-Signatures to Amazon Cloud Computing

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:45:00 EDT

Server is now available on the Amazon EC2 service. The compelling economics of the ApproveIt Web Server on the cloud give unprecedented access to a fully customizable, electronic signature solution. This enables organizations to gain a competitive advantage by offering differentiated electronic transactions for their customers over the Web, through a call center or in person. Organizations can choose the optimum deployment model for their needs today with complete confidence that they can then adapt the model in the future using the identical production implementation by simply choosing from a public cloud, a private cloud or on-premise Enterprise class solutions like the Silanis ApproveIt Web Server running on the Cloud offer financial service providers a compelling alternative to current delivery models Enabling organizations to rapidly scale critical business applications provide the necessary edge to stay afloat in a highly volatile market. Montreal, QC (PRWEB) October 29, 2009 -- Silanis Technology, the leader in electronic signature process management, today announced at the IBM Information On Demand Conference that its ApproveIt® Web Server is now available on the Amazon EC2 service. This new cloud-based delivery option enables organizations in financial services, insurance, government and other industries to deploy the enterprise-class, electronic signature process management capabilities of the ApproveIt Web Server as rapidly as competitive SaaS-based offerings, while benefiting from the most cost-effective computing infrastructure available today. Using a public or private cloud, ApproveIt Web Server can be easily deployed to enable electronic execution of legally-enforceable and compliant documents required for contracts, loans, insurance, account openings, government services and other business transactions. News Image "The compelling economics of the ApproveIt Web Server on the cloud give unprecedented access to a fully customizable, electronic signature solution," said Tommy Petrogiannis, President and Chief Executive Officer of Silanis Technology. "This enables organizations to gain a competitive advantage by offering differentiated electronic transactions for their customers over the Web, through a call center or in person." The Silanis cloud deployment is offered with IBM's Websphere application server and DB2 database server to provide a complete solution on the Amazon EC2 service. A fully functional solution can be enabled for use on the cloud in the same time needed to setup and configure a competitive SaaS-based offering. Unlike competitive SaaS offerings, however, flexibility and customizability are not compromised in order to deliver a lowest common-denominator solution to all customers. The cloud-deployed ApproveIt Web Server allows each organization to have its unique instance of software that implements their specific business, legal, compliance and IT requirements. Silanis offers both a licensed and a services model for the software to allow customers the flexibility to start on the cloud and migrate the exact same implementation to an on-premise infrastructure if needed at a later date. Alternatively, a services model provides flexibility in buying only as much capability as you will use. "Organizations can choose the optimum deployment model for their needs today with complete confidence that they can then adapt the model in the future using the identical production implementation by simply choosing from a public cloud, a private cloud or on-premise," said Petrogiannis. ApproveIt Web Server on the cloud has identical features and functionality as the on-premise deployments being used by Fortune 500 companies and government organizations. Integrated as a part of mission-critical, production applications, ApproveIt Web Server reduces transaction cycle times, costs, errors and downstream risks of processing paper-based customer transactions. Additionally the solution has been recently certified for use within the IBM Insurance Accelerator Framework. "Enterprise class solutions like the Silanis ApproveIt Web Server running on the Cloud offer financial service providers a compelling alternative to current delivery models," says Dave Mitchell, Director of Strategy and Emerging Business, IBM. "Enabling organizations to rapidly scale critical business applications provide the necessary edge to stay afloat in a highly volatile market." About ApproveIt Web Server As an electronic signature process management solution, ApproveIt Web Server goes beyond simple e-signing to manage, execute, control and monitor customer transactions electronically from start to finish. The solution: * Fully controls the electronic execution of transaction documents * Automates enforcement of business process and compliance rules * Automates the monitoring and reporting of live transactions * Enables updating of documents , data and processes during a transaction * Captures the entire Web transaction producing better legal evidence than paper ApproveIt Web Server provides a highly flexible, customizable and scalable enterprise solution that facilitates integration with any services-oriented architecture, business application and e-commerce infrastructure. The solution supports common business applications and services such as document generation; electronic forms; Web applications and portals; content management; and third party identity verification.

NTFS Logical Drive Deleted After Using Fdisk

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:15:00 EDT

A hard disk can be divided into at most four primary partitions, one of which can be an extended partition. The extended partition can be further subdivided into multiple logical drives. The following reading describes an issue when you can lose an NTFS formatted logical drive in a dual-boot system using Windows XP. While such problems, you should make sure to have a valid data backup to restore it. But if it is unavailable for any reason, you need to use a powerful Windows Partition Recovery utility.

Cloud Computing: Separating Hype from Reality

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:45:00 EDT

Enterprises large and small are drawn by the advantages of cloud computing - pay-for-use, self-service, elastic scalability and the elimination of hardware management – resulting in very low barriers to entry and exit and high agility. However, according to keynote speaker, Richard Sarwal, enterprises are also concerned about security, quality of service, integration, compliance, lock-in, and long term costs of public clouds. Private clouds for the exclusive use of one enterprise can mitigate these concerns by giving the enterprise greater control.

Google Liberates Your Docs

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:31:00 EDT

In a note to the CCIF list, Sam Johnston informed us that Google too has continued on its promise to liberate our data as part of their Data Liberation Front project. This latest Google effort introduces a new feature that makes it much easier to get your content back out of the Cloud using a tool that lets Google Doc's users easily "Convert, Zip and Download." It's interesting to note that both Microsoft and Google released completing "open" initiatives today with Mircrosoft announcing they are opening the PST format for Outlook. It's great to see both companies actively battling it out for "Open Cloud" supremacy.

The Reason Enterprise Architects Should Study Economics

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:42:00 EDT

Thus, it is here that Enterprise Architects, especially those we call Chief Architects, truly show their mettle. It is their experience, coupled with the ability to focus on the right set of variables, understanding the impact of change of those variables and being able to communicate that in a way that allows the business to make effective business decisions, which sets top notch practioners apart from Sr. Software Engineers that the organization placated with a title to keep them happy so they wouldn't leave.

Exploring Policy-Enabled Clouds for the Enterprise

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EDT

If you are looking to implement a fully distributed cloud storage infrastructure, then this session is for you. In his session at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Ed Beauvais, Senior Product Manager in the Cloud Infrastructure Group at EMC, will demonstrate how to roll out an enterprise storage cloud with EMC Atmos infrastructure and how you can leverage storage policy to increase manageability.

CSC's VP of Cloud Computing to Discuss Orchestration in the Cloud

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:30:00 EDT

Managing various providers and ensuring data and processing are safe, compliant, and trustworthy is a growing concern. In his session at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Brian Boroff, CSC's VP of Cloud Computing and Software Services, will discuss how organizations can manage off- and on-premise data, lower operational costs, provide transparency and enable collaboration effectively across public and private networks with trusted, orchestrated cloud services.

Application Transformation Case Study

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EDT

The ongoing impact of the reset economy is putting more emphasis on lean IT -- of identifying and eliminating waste across the data-center landscape. The top candidates, on several levels, are the silo-architected legacy applications and the aging IT systems that support them.

Crowdsourcing: Testing the Limits with John Winsor

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:00:00 EDT

Having grilled some of the top minds in the software business, this installment of Testing the Limits will deviate slightly from the norm. With us this month is John Winsor – author, entrepreneur and crowdsourcing expert. After a successful career as a journalist and magazine publisher, John founded Radar Communications in 1998, where he implemented a [...]

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Uncle Sam Still Matters in Asia and the World

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:30:00 EDT

So, after decades of economic decline, withering criticism from all corners of the world, initial weakness in assuming the role of "the world's only superpower," and a recently completed eight years of unilateral policy that alienated much of the world, the United States remains the country in which much of the world continues to place its hope. Not the UK, not France, not Japan, not China, and certainly not Russia.

Google Trends: Microstock Agencies

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:30:00 EDT

I often mention Alexa Rank to make a comparison among microstock agencies, as you can see in Stock Agencies page. In this post I want to show another tool that can be used to follow the trends in the stock photo market, Google Trends, that lets you compare the world’s interest in some particular topics. [...]

microstock agencies Google Trends is a post from My Stock Photography sponsored by Lookstat - You Create the Images - We Do the Rest

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Homeland Security Information Sharing and Social Media

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:28:00 EDT

Experimenting a bit with Pipes, Twitter, RSS feeds to LinkedIn, etc....follow a nicely "curated" Internet Media collection of Homeland Security/DHS information and tweeting at @dhsinfosharing - and find it under news in the similarly-named Homeland Security Information Sharing and Social Media LinkedIn group.

Sun To Cut 3,000 Jobs, Blames EC

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Sun said late Tuesday that it will be forced to cut 3,000 jobs worldwide over the next 12 months because of “the delay in the closing of the acquisition of the company,” laying the blame squarely at the doorstep of the European Commission and its prolonged investigation into whether Oracle should be allowed to acquire the Sun-owned MySQL open source database.

SharePoint 2010: 12 Hive + 2 = 14 Hive

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:15:00 EDT

If you’re a SharePoint person, you of course have the following path burned into your memory forever.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extension\12

Well pretty soon, you can replace that with:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14

Apparently, Microsoft thought the number thirteen was unlucky. Now, I know they are trying to rebrand this as the SharePoint root (or something like that), but we all know that is never going to sick, so I’ll just call it the 14 hive. Anyhow, this is the new place you’ll be doing a lot of your work. Although with the new Visual Studio 2010 tools, you’ll find that you won’t need to come to this folder nearly as much. In this post, I thought I would take a brief moment to point out what I noticed in the 14 hive and make any comments as necessary. None of the underlying folders really have changed but a few things have been added.

In the root of the 14 Hive, I noticed three new folders

UserCode – files used to support sandboxed solutions
WebClients – used for the client OM I believe
WebServices – many new .svc files

If you are interested in what assemblies are present in the ISAPI folder, here is a quick list. It sounds like some classes have moved to different DLLs, but I haven't encountered any yet.

Microsoft.Office.DocumentManagment.dll
Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.Udf.dll
Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.WebServices.dll
Microsoft.Office.Policy.dll
Microsoft.Office.Server.dll
Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.dll
Microsoft.Office.UserProfiles.dll
Microsoft.Office.Workflow.Actions.dll
Microsoft.Office.Workflow.Tasks.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Runtime.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.SingleSignon.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Security.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Administration.Common.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Administration.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Administration.ResourceStorage.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Administration.Matching.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Administration.Query.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Security.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.Intl.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow.Actions.dll

I believe all of these are registered as version 14.0.0.0. There is a lot of new things in the hive including features, site templates, etc, but not that many structural changes from what I can tell.

Social CRM Capabilities of KANA 10

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:35:00 EDT

Social CRM employs the wisdom of crowds to improve service delivery. As customers search, shop, browse and work in forums, that information found to be most pertinent can be used to drive success for those that follow. The integration of Baynote CIP and KANA 10 allows KANA's clients to capture and analyze customer experiences, and then to use that information to quickly enhance the service experience. The combined platform allows the enterprise to automatically change, reprioritize and improve information presented to a customer based on the collective input and insight of the crowd.

SOASTA Named “Silver Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Conference & Expo

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:15:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced that SOASTA, a leading provider of cloud testing, was named "Silver Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 1,500 developers, engineers, architects, IT managers, and hardware and software professionals of every stripe.

Google Goes on Offense against Office

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:30:00 EDT

Google is doing something very un-Google. It's stooping to advertise. What started a few months ago with "Go Google" billboards on 101 in Silicon Valley, the West Side Highway in New York, the Mass Pike in Boston and the Ike in Chicago touting Google Apps went international Monday in France, Japan, the UK, Canada, Australia and Singapore at train stations and airports as well as print ads in the Economist, the New York Time, Forbes and the Daily Telegraph and web sites like FT.com and Times Online. Google's trolling for frustrated, cash-strapped Microsoft and IBM business users and claims to have converted two million businesses - up from 1.75 million in June - and 20 million people - up from 15 million - in over 100 countries and over 40 languages to its cloud-based applications.

Akamai Named “Silver Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced that Akamai, the leader in web application acceleration and performance management, was named "Silver Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 1,500 developers, engineers, architects, IT managers, and hardware and software professionals of every stripe.

3Tera Named “Silver Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:45:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced that 3Tera, the innovator of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, was named "Silver Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 1,500 developers, engineers, architects, IT managers, and hardware and software professionals of every stripe.

EMC Named “Gold Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:30:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced that EMC, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, was named "Gold Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California.

Bycast Named “Gold Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:15:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced that Bycast, the leading provider of storage virtualization software for large-scale digital archives and storage clouds, was named "Gold Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California.

Adaptivity Named “Gold Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced that Adaptivity, the IT transformation company, was named "Gold Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 1,500 developers, engineers, architects, IT managers, and hardware and software professionals of every stripe.

Yahoo! Named “Platinum Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:15:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced that Yahoo!, a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide, was named "Platinum Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California.

Unisys Named “Platinum Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced that Unisys, the leader in high-value technology and business solutions to global enterprises, was named "Platinum Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California.

Cloud Computing Journal Continues To Publish World's Best Cloud Analysts

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EDT

Only one publication in the world has been tracking Cloud Computing 24x7 since December 6, 2006, when we first mentioned the concept in an article: Cloud Computing Journal. Since then worldwide interest in the Cloud paradigm of massively scalable IT resources and capabilities delivered as a service using Internet technologies has been mushrooming at a breakneck pace.

Don’t Say a Word

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EDT

This will probably be a short post since there are not that many security terms that begin with the 17th letter of our alphabet. However, keeping Quiet is a common theme in security. As mentioned numerous times, locking passwords, logins, and other sensitive information in your mouth vault keeps them from leaking to others. Social Engineering has always been about compromising that vault. Recently there was a post by Roger Thompson, AVG’s Chief Research Officer, which actually suggested to Write Down your passwords, especially complex, hard to remember passwords.

CIA's Jill Tummler Singer Newest Ulitzer Author

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:30:00 EDT

Jill Tummler Singer, Deputy Chief Information Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is now a Ulitzer author. Appointed in November 2006, Ms Singer is responsible for ensuring CIA has the information, technology, and infrastructure necessary to effectively execute its missions. Prior to her appointment as Deputy CIO, she served as the Director of the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service (DTS), United States Department of State, and was responsible for global network services to US foreign missions.

Using ASP.NET MVC Action Filters to Declare Reference Data for Views

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:17:00 EDT

When we all build websites, usually we're concerned with figuring out how we're going to get the major entities into the view. We want to know how we're going to handle the shopping cart or how we're going to get the customer record onto the page, etc. But, one of the little details that almost always comes back to bite us in the ass is the use of reference data. Reference data is data that rarely changes, is frequently queried, and shows up in multiple places throughout the application. This might be anything from the list of companies currently trading on a particular stock market if you're building a financial web application or things like the list of countries, states, cities, counties, tax rules, and shipping tables if you're doing fulfillment of orders online.

Brad Windecker Launches "Open Source for Small Business" Topic on Ulitzer

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Brad Windecker launched today "Open Source for Small Business" topic on Ulitzer. A topic for open source software specific to the small business marketplace. Small and midsize companies can today take advantage of the maturity in open source applications. This topic will collect stories that relate to both the open source community and small business.

CA Should Offer the CEO Job to Ken Cron

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:00:00 EDT

The round of applause that greeted the suggestion that Ken Cron be promoted from Interim CEO to full CEO of Computer Associates International (renamed as CA as one of the first action items by John Swainson) left a smile on the face of Chairman Lewis Ranieri at the company's annual shareholder meeting in 2004. Ken had one of the toughest jobs any CEO can imagine: that of following Sanjay Kumar and Charles Wang. Yet under Cron's leadership CA's net income returned to the black after three consecutive years of losses and under very difficult circumstances.

No Charge for One-Click Backup Encryption with Comodo BackUp

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:56:00 EDT

Comodo Backup 2.0 provides convenient one–click backup of email accounts, Windows registries and system partitions. Comodo Backup allows administrators to schedule backups to fit work timetables, create customized backup routines with a range of filters and macros, and configure the backup protocol with Comodo’s intuitive interface in minutes. Backups can be scheduled daily, weekly or synchronously. In its synchronization mode, Comodo Backup will conduct rolling backups a pre-specified intervals, ensuring that files are always current. Comodo Backup logs all backup information, and sends information to team members about the status of backup jobs.

SAP CTO to Speak at 4th International Cloud Computing Expo

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Sal Visca, CTO of Technology Development for SAP, will be presenting at the upcoming Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.cloudcomputingexpo.com) this coming November 2-4, 2009, in Santa Clara, California. His session will be entitled “Next-Generation On-Demand." The SaaS pioneers have given us a taste of the potential of On-Demand, however, we've only scratched the surface in terms of what's to come and the future model for how the next generation of enterprise software will be delivered.

1st Annual GovIT Expo: Letter from the Technical Chair

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:15:00 EDT

Within a few short months, we have seen a whirlwind of change across the government IT industry landscape. The appropriation of $7.2B for broadband Internet access nationwide, the launching of USASpending.gov, the appointment of Mr. Vivek Kundra as the nation’s first ever Federal Chief Information Officer and the rapid adoption of cloud computing are only a few examples of this historic change.

Apps.gov Will Help Federal Agencies Embrace the Cloud: Vivek Kundra

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:30:00 EDT

"Like a utility such as electricity or water, cloud computing allows users to only consume what they need, to grow or shrink their use as their needs change, and to only pay for what they actually use," wrote U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra in his official blog this week, as he announced the launch of Apps.gov "to help continue the President’s initiative to lower the cost of government operations while driving innovation within government."

Intel & EMC Touch Off Race for their Top Jobs

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 06:00:00 EDT

EMC has poached Pat Gelsinger, the head of Intel’s enterprise chip business, and made him president and COO of its storage products. It’s also promoted Howard Elias to president and COO of storage and cloud services, touching off a two-man race to succeed incumbent CEO Joe Tucci. Gelsinger has CEO-itis, an itch that wasn’t going to get scratched at Intel.

Oracle-Sun: Gartner Suspects EC of Ulterior Motives

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:45:00 EDT

Gartner database analyst Donald Feinberg and his colleague George Weiss told Cnet that the only reason the European Commission is holding up the Oracle-Sun deal on the pretext of investigating Oracle’s intentions on MySQL is “political” and “protectionist” – as though the rest of us didn’t know that already. Feinberg says either the EC knows zip about open source – since the Maria DB MySQL fork would take over for MySQL if Oracle neglected it – or there’s “another agenda” – and introduces the specter of Oracle abandoning the deal, leaving Sun in the devastating lurch. And “Who would benefit?” he’s asked. Well, “All the hardware companies out there, including the European hardware companies.” He suspects that the EC is acting at the bidding of Oracle rivals like IBM and HP and to protect European vendors such as SAP, Bull, Software AG, even Fujitsu with its large European presence. And he’s pretty sure the EC really wants to “stop this deal.” Feinberg suggests that because Sun had negative 40% growth last quarter – and with every Sun competitor trying to raid its installed base – “at some point Oracle has to ask the question, do they still want to buy the company?” He also suspects that the EC will drag the investigation out as long as possible unless it’s forced to “yield to market pressure.” “You have to ask yourself,” he says, “if Larry Ellison and Charles Phillips just get so fed up with this whole thing that they throw their arms up in the air and say it’s not worth it. I would suspect the frustrations have to be running pretty high inside Oracle right now.” He doesn’t think Oracle will stand for any demand to divest MySQL or much of any other concessions, leaving Sun to dangle in the wind and the longer the deal is up in the air the more Sun users will bolt.

I Like Ants - Grand Masters of Business Opportunity

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Since this is my first blog post I though it should be memorable and so I will share a secret passion of mine.

I like ants, I really do. Compared to Avega I might even like ants a little bit more. Compared to my wife, well, she’ll always win big, but only because I know my priorities in life – not because of the ants.

Fastest path

Even though I’ve first read about ants five, ten, fifteen years ago, I still enthusiastically teach others about the beautiful fastest path algorithm that ants use to optimize their harvest – and sometimes I also do this against peoples will (like when they get stuck with me in front of a white board). I think it’s the emergent behavior that arises from doing simple things tens of thousand times or more that still amazes me.

And so, true to my heart, I will tell you about this beautiful simple algorithm; suppose you have to travel back and forth from A to B, then when you come to a cross road, just be slightly more likely to pick the road that is traveled by most of the people that came before you. That’s it – that’s the essence of the algorithm.

Well, I’ve hidden some minor details, such as how to find out about the people before you. In my human analogy above, we can just add to the requirements that everyone wears the same perfume, which means you can use your nose to decide where the strongest odor is coming from and then go that way – much like how discotheques or school yards function (which in turn could explain why children intuitively understands the phenomena and drunk adults don’t).

Anyway – given enough people, the crowd will eventually diverge onto the shortest path (because people that choose correct will travel the path much faster and in turn leave more odors for the next person to make a slightly easier decision and so on…). In other words, it’s basically a positive feed-back mechanism (and if your control theory inclined, you can extrapolate its benefits and liabilities).

If you aren’t convinced I’ll bet you the next drink at the discotheque that if you were to spray a woman’s perfume onto one side of the entrance and observed the men’s choice entering (deciding whether to go right or left), you’ll find that more men would autonomously choose to follow the perfume – and vice versa by the way; it’s not the case that men are the only lemmings in this nocturnal game. (And if you’re a child reading this, don’t expect me to let you into any discotheque before you turn 30 or so. And since you’re reading about ants, you’re obviously clever already, so stay home, read so more, get rich, and buy your own discotheque!).

In any case, my only regret is that I haven’t found any justified reasons for using the fastest path algorithm during my programming career and therefore should probably have forgotten about it years ago, but apparently it’s a permanent resident in my long term memory.

Sorting

Well, I wasn’t being quite honest. There are several reasons why I don’t forget about ants, namely because they do a whole lot more than just finding the fastest way home from a discotheque. For instance, they can also pile stuff of equal sized objects, which is what they do when moving eggs of different maturity around the nest (and perhaps also when they do midden work outside, I’m not sure…)

I won’t bother you with the details surrounding this algorithm, but only say that it involves moving smaller piles of eggs to the approximate vicinity of nearby equal sized but bigger piles of eggs. The emergent behavior of being sorted arises from doing the task iteratively, starting with a pile of one egg, then a pile of two eggs, then three eggs and so on (much like divide and conquer algorithms such as Quick sort).

In computer science such algorithmic qualities (i.e. being distributed, iterative, map-reducible, and easy to implement) is highly sought after today – for instance, when sorting huge amount of data in a cloud-based mesh of computers (and each computer having multiple cores, just to add some locality to the example).

Recruitment

As I mentioned, there are several reasons why I don’t forget ants and here comes another one; seemingly, a clever recruitment scheme is partly the reason that ants are grand masters at exploiting new unforeseen business opportunities without managerial control. Such agile recruitment techniques should rightly be a study of its own right in every business school in Scandinavia (An MBA in Ants so to speak).

For instance, several R&D intensive trans-Atlantic companies have adopted ant-based recruiting mechanisms to harvest the ideas that flow around the corridors and hallways of their domiciles. These ideas are often cross-departmental and therefore almost always span several communities of practice. Such extreme plasticity surely means that ideas thrown in the air have a greater tendency not to be caught by anyone. And lost ideas might be lost revenue – a quality that investors dislike.

Since the mechanism involves recruitment (which is needed to evolve the sustainable ideas from infancy and into a business cases), it requires some notion of agile workforce deployment and might at first scare of smaller companies from adopting such a mechanism. This is a fallacy of thought, in that the natural selection quality of the mechanism also takes care of size differences, release cycles, etc. (much the same way that smaller ant-hills can harvest smaller resource, while big ant-hills can harvest bigger resource – both using the same recruitment scheme).

Resource allocation

Recently, I’ve just finished a book by the biologist Deborah Gordon in which she presents her collected research of the red harvester ant in Arizona, USA. She argues, among other thing, about how ant hills resource allocates their workforce in a distributed manner. Apparently, she have found a single algorithm for all sizes of ant-hills (one size fits all) that can explain how ants allocate their workforce – again without managerial control. One of the algorithm’s most interesting attribute is its use of temporal effects.

Admittedly, I haven’t digested it all yet and can’t really say anything else meaningful about it, other than just point out, that such algorithm would prove interestingly for any industry that are resource planning or logistics intensive (like the shipping industry).

Besides delving into the resource allocation algorithm and hopefully be able to comprehend it in greater depths, I’m already looking forward to next marvelous reason why I like ants.

Footnotes

Firstly, I purposefully used the term fastest path algorithm instead of shortest path algorithm, because while it’s often the case that the shortest path is also the fastest, it’s not necessarily always the case.

Secondly, I don’t know where the pictures originated from, so if they infringe on anybody’s claim of ownership, please let me know and I’ll remove them right away.

Thirdly, my oldest child doens't like ants very much. This summer, at Trollhättan in Sweden, she ignorantly climb the biggest ant hill she could find and poclaimed to be it's queen. Being pissed on by a million angry ants, literally, cured her dreams of feudal overlordship.

References (in no particular order)

Deborah M. Gordon, Ants at Work: How An Insect Society Is Organized, W. W. Norton & Company Inc., October 2000.
Deborah Gordon, Deborah Gordon digs ants, TED Talks 2003, http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants.html.
Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer, Swarm Intelligence: A whole New Way to Think About Business, Harvard Business Review, May 2001.
Eric Bonabeau, Marco Dorigo & Guy Theraulaz, Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems (Santa Fe Institute Studies on the Sciences of Complexity), OUP USA, October 21 th October 1999.
Marco Dorigo, Ant Colony Optimization, MIT Press, July 6th 2004.
David Gordon, Collective Intelligence in Social Insects, http://ai-depot.com/Essay/SocialInsects.html.
Susan Leigh Star & Geoffrey C. Bowker, Sorting Things Out - Classifications and its consequences, MIT Press, 1999.
Susan Leigh Star, Got Infrastructure? How Standards, Categories and Other Aspects of Infrastructure Influence Communication, University of California, April 2002.
Kurt Mehlhorn & Peter Sanders, Algorithms and Data Structures: The Basic Toolbox, Springer-verlag, August 6th 2008.

Apache Software Foundation Completes 10 Years

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:25:00 EDT

Apache Software Foundation (ASF) was founded in June 1999. A list has been published that's a presentation highlighting top 11 Apache projects and also 10 projects for the future. Hadoop is the project to watch out for because it is inspired by Google Map Reduce and Big Table. 11 Apache Technologies that Have Changed Computing in the Last 10 Years 10 Apache Technologies that Will Change Computing in the Next 10 Years 1. Apache HTTP Server 1. Hadoop For building scalable 2. Tomcat Application [...]

The Art of Software Delivery

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:30:00 EDT

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Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:30:00 EDT

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Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:15:00 EDT

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Cloud Computing Drives New Engineering Need

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:00:00 EDT

Sam Gross is Vice President of Global IT Outsourcing Solutions at Unisys Corporation, where he leads the vision, strategy, technology development and implementation for Unisys innovative global IT outsourcing solutions. He is a recognized industry expert and thought leader in business and IT alignment, application management, service level management and enterprise systems management. Here's his latest Tweet:

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Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:42:00 EDT

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Don’t Keep Your Web Visitors Waiting and Guessing

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:15:00 EDT

Our supplier of video services shall remain unnamed. When you arrive at the site you have to wait for flash video to load. Although it loads pretty quickly, the presence of flash is still an unnecessary barrier to getting the information you need to make a buying decision. The home page itself lacks any description of what the company does or how it will help solve my problems. We are presented with bouncing vertical lines at the end of which are vertical navigation links which are placed on their side and thus unnecessarily difficult to read.

MailBee.NET Objects v5.6 Released

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:45:00 EDT

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EMC Wins Bidding War for Data Domain

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:30:00 EDT

Financially outgunned, NetApp found discretion the better part of valor Wednesday and dropped out of the bidding war with EMC for Data Domain. The deduplication house will go to EMC for $33.50 a share in cash.