Computer Currents Blog – July 27- 2011

Did you know that Facebook runs on MySQL? For some this is a great success story of a free database. For others it raises all kinds of warning bells in their minds. Enter Mike Stonebraker, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He helped to develop the Ingres and Postgres databases so he is a little biased.

At the same time he has the right kind of experience for people to listen to him. He is saying that the ordinary relational database, like MySQL and Postgres, can no longer keep up with the needs of large net systems. Facebook runs about 4000 MySQL instances and expanding to 9000 to handle the load and recovery needs. Mike Stonebraker is telling those who will listen that the future is in a new kind of distributed in-memory database designed to handle exponentially larger amounts of information. He is more recently associated with VoltDB and has drawn criticism from Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels and a core database engineer at Mark Zuckerberg's social networking outfit showing how jealous the networking and system guys are.

The critics may have forgotten that Stonebraker exposed the flaws of the MapReduce distributed number crunching platform that underpinned Google's backend infrastructure. The argument really comes down to disk versus memory. Yes, in memory databases are faster but if they crash that instance is lost. If the DB is running on drives then the info is rarely ‘lost.’ Also remember that Facebook uses Cassandra for its inbox search tool, and it went with HBase for its new messaging platform. These are distributed databases that are not the traditional SQL model in favour of distributed non-relational architectures that can readily scale. The reason is the ease of scalability.

So the future, for Web based systems at least, appears to be the non-SQL databases something between the NoSQL and NewSQL models. Stonebraker favours the latter model but many others prefer and are using the former. Don’t get me wrong SQL is still a major player and of major importance in the wider database world. There is no database that can do it all in all situations. There are some that perform better in a given situation and when you are choosing one remember that the standard relational database models are not the only ones out there. Time will tell how this debate ends up and it won’t be too long before a new technology and a new database engine is developed and used.

This week I have been writing a lot of SQL, T-SQL in this case. Basic SQL is quite easy, the simple forms of the SELECT, UPDATE and other statements are easy to learn and use. Things get a little easier when you have to dig a little deeper. It starts with some simple sub-selects then two or more levels of these.  Doing an UPDATE to modify some existing data is Ok until you have to use a correlated subselect to update the data. The problem is that there is little documentation on really advanced SQL and the only decent source are discussion boards of those who may have tried different combination until something works.

For example today I was writing a difficult UPDATE sequence that worked off both a subselect and a correlated query. It took me a bit of experimenting with both the brackets and the syntax until I managed to get it working. Even then I had to try a few different suggestions from a few different Web search results before I started to zero in. Then there is the whole exercise of moving from an Access automatically generated SQL statement across to the SQLServer realm.  

But wait you point out, they are both from Microsoft. Yes my young Padawan but it appears that the two teams were kept not only in different rooms but on different continents and they never spoke to each other, not once. Syntax is different, structure is different, behaviour is different and things you can do in Access requires a lot of creative thinking to translate into the more bland T-SQL world. Bottom line if you are going to get into the world of SQL be prepared for a bit of a learning curve, especially if you want to get creative.

My brother dropped by on the weekend and started using my computer. After a few minutes he said “you really need to get a new computer.” My PC is over 4 years old now, it is getting slower, has too much junk installed on it, some of the ports no longer work very well and most importantly it doesn’t play Starcraft 2 very well. The good news is that you can get a very good computer these days for around $1000 or 30K Baht. For the average person you don’t need tri-state DDR RAM and you don’t need an eight core CPU. The basic middle of the road units are great. If you are going 64-bit Windows 7 then get lots of RAM, many new computers come with 8-12 GB these days.

For my purposes the middle level graphics cards with 1GB are enough and one of those. I’ll still get a good ASUS or Gigabyte motherboard with USB3 and as many SATA hard drive ports as possible, including a couple that will support the faster drives. I also like the idea of a solid state boot drive where I will store and run programs. Not sure on the size yet but as usual the longer I wait the less expensive the final purchase will be. I’ll let you know when and what I get.

Industry News

There are now a lot of book sellers who are hoping that Android crushes Apple in the eBook segment in the near future. Booksellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo have been forced by Apple to remove all links to their own web-based stores from all their apps for the iPhone and iPad. The Google Books app has vanished completely. It took five months but the February edict that all must bow and genuflect to Apple finally took hold.  All that is left are some announcements from the book sellers about an app change and the need to separately go to their stores.

The draconian Apple imposition also means that people can no longer manage their accounts easily while in the Apple sphere at least. Understandably the book sellers are not happy and it also means that the moment Apple no longer become necessary for any significant sales figures that they will be justifiably cut off. The only concession from Apple is that items or subscriptions sold through the App Store must no longer cost the same or less than the same content offered from the provider's own website.

Apple has also shown its might in the country of China forcing two ‘Apple’ stores to close down. From the Chinese point of view it was because they did not have the correct trading permits. From Apple’s perspective they were complete copies of a real Apple store, to the point that the local Chinese thought they were real and the staff believed that they were employed by Apple. They were even buying the products from authourised resellers so no fakes were involved in this instance. The real issue was that Apple has four real stores in China in Beijing and Shanghai  along with 13 authorised resellers in Kunming. The five stores involved, even though they meet all of the normal Apple requirements are in ‘competition’ with the real Apple stores so they had to go.

Truly Apple as an organization is now the epitome of the overbearing computer organization.

Blog Currents – 2011, July 20

Internet shopping. Some people in some countries have been complaining about people shopping on the Internet. OK to be fair these have mostly been department stores that have seen a slight drop in sales. I’m more concerned with online retailers marking up their product lines depending on where the shopper is located. Application developers have been guilty of this in the past and AtuoCAD springs to mind.

One of the biggest suppliers guilty of this practice is Apple. This “Apple Tax” as it has been called by people in places like the UK and Australia has even been up in parliament in the latter country. As shoppers have become more Internet aware they have worked out that buying off an International site and paying the shipping, and even import duties, can result in a much less expansive purchasing price.

When the product is digital and digitally supplied it is a lot easier for companies like Apple to detect the buyer location and add the mark-up. Recently Apple started to cut off a few cents from their low end purchases that had some people all gushy at how wonderful Apple was. In reality all Apple was doing was making a few minor adjustments for where the A$ is not above the US$ in relative strength. At the same time it was bumping up prices in the UK. In real terms the Apple Tax still sits at over 20 percent up to around 40 percent mark-up for Oz and UK customers.

When the real costs are measured the fact that Oz, UK, and European customers are willing to pay such a premium for exactly the same service divides people, in my mind at least, into three camps, the drooling Apple lover camp, the savvy non-Apple user, or the just plain idiot. It is also one of the many reasons that the iTunes store will never grace any of my computers.

So Australia made the joke of the world status recently when a South Australian company made the news. The DNA testing company Medvet left their online customer accounts system open to being indexed by Google. This may not sound like a problem on the face of it but some of those pages contained individual DNA testing information. This included  customer invoices for items like paternity testing that included not only addresses but names. In true CYA mode the MD of Medvet sought out info from the organisations software suppliers rather than chasing after whoever left robots.txt on its Website. The company is government owned and seems to be running around in typical chicken head cut off mode. At the time of writing for example they had not approached Google to get the search results removed and are still in the Google cache. The only good news in this story is that results were not indexed.

This story is top of my list today because yet again it highlights how any information kept in a digital form and remotely associated with the WWW is liable to be hacked, cracked, exposed or just plain made public. It also makes a mockery of any privacy laws that happen to be in effect and believe me Australia has plenty of them.

Industry News

The iPhone 5 is coming out in a while and the question being asked will it be a real iPhone 5, i.e. a proper upgrade or just a rejiggered iPhone 4 with a new label. According to the Chinese the answer is the latter because Apple can’t figure out how to fit the iPads’s A5 processor into an iPhone box. It is not so much finding the space but keeping the phone from turning into a hand warmer, i.e. keeping it cool. Others have looked at the CPU and don’t see a heating problem so the real story is as yet unclear. Either way the thinner and lighter claims from Apple about any new phone would indicate there will not be an A5 inside. There is of course the A6 that is coming down the pipeline and this may be the real reason for the delays. There arelso the rumours of a new iPhone case design that will appear soon after the next model released, or not if there is a delay.

As my readers know I just love new technology whether it be a really big laser (BFL) that messes around with electrons in their orbits or any other out here discovery I just love reading about them. This week it was the memory circuit that may be able to bridge the man machine gap. Some scientists in California have been working with a soft and pliable memory circuit, of if you prefer a squishy memristor with the properties of Jell-o or jelly for those in non-US locations. For the technically minded this is a liquid alloy of gallium and indium, set in a water-based gel. Initially the goad would be to have such a device collect biometric data.  This technology is as you might expect, or that they are willing to admit, in its infancy. Some suggest that the memristor could act somewhat like a synapse that in quantity could then learn or even mimic a living brain. I for one will welcome our new squishy overlords.

Yes there is a Kindle 4 coming out this year. Release dates vary from August to December. The specs and what might actually be coming out also vary. There is a very strong indication that Amazon will be releasing its first tablet device with a HD display of some kind. There are also rumours of one or two new Kindle eBook readers with one having a touch screen. Colour may have to wait for the next model and I think the rumours of a dual screen unit are also unlikely. I hope the touch unit does away with the keyboard and hands over more screen real estate. Either way the final announcements may not be that far off.

The tablet unit is supposed to have a 9 inch screen and come from an Asian manufacturer. It will not have a camera but will support media playback including music and video as well as being a book reader. All on an Android platform of course.  Of course Apple could not let that slide so easily and in what could be one of their most frivolous and idiotic law suits to date they are claiming the term App Store belongs to them. No I’m not making this up and yes it is only something that a Jobs could think up. App is of course a world wide and recognised abbreviation for an application aka software. It would be like trying to patent the name donut because you happen to sell them.

PayPal has brought out a new Android app (see how I used that term). It allows you to transfer money to a friend, colleague or standover person by simply tapping your phone to theirs. Yes, how could this possibly go wrong in say school, with the bullies? Kind of opens the door for electronic lunch money capture. Actually the possibilities for misuse are many.

Yes I thought they were retiring as well but Lulzsec hacked the News International website to direct readers to a fake story about the death of Rupert Murdoch. He had apparently dies after ingesting a large amount of palladium. Good one guys.

Captain Kirk or William Shatner is he is known these days had his Google + account suspended recently after he said hello to his large follower base.  Google won't say why the account was suspended but speculation is that it was because an admin person decided that the account was a fake. Good one Google.
divulge.

Finally for this week a tear for the end of the space shuttle missions. Who can not say they were awed by the first launch and flawless landing.

Computer Currents BLOG – 2011- July 13

Today we are going to look at Astroturf. No not the fake grass kind but rather the organizations that have been given that appellation and how this folds over into the IT world or more specifically Web sites.

Astroturf organizations are fake grassroots organizations, usually sponsored by large corporations, used to support any arguments or claims in their favor, or more often to challenge and deny those against them. They represent the corporate version of social movements. The aim is to influence public opinion in such a way as to create a social movement that benefits the organization or perhaps government concerned with a given target or issue. There are of course some rather serious underlying social and ethical concerns with such an approach. Right now there is no better example than the broader global warming movement.

Yes this is indeed a complex issue. On one side are the organizations identified as evil polluters who want society to see them as not as bad as other make out. On another side there are the pseudo environmental groups who were the evil polluters to be punished. On yes another side is the governments who see the benefits of overt or hidden tax dollars that can go into their coffers. Yet another side is the organizations, educational facilities and scientists who can see a way to get a slice of the money available in the process. The final side, and the one most attacked, is the scientists and researchers who have discovered that the whole thing is really a lie based on a false premise. Now carry this over to Web sites. 

In a recent study the results showed that people who used astroturf websites became more uncertain about the causes of global warming and humans’ role in the phenomenon than people who used regular grassroots websites (yes this was a US study). In this was businesses and special interest groups were able to promote their viewpoint over real environmental issues. So in addition to the ethical considerations it also threatens those groups trying to get real information out. Put more simply these groups setup fake websites to promote fake data. They use links to other fake websites and ‘articles’ without providing any references or links to supporting data. Move into the regular cyber criminal community and we find that they are creating over 57,000 Web sites per week. 

The moral of this story is if you read it on the Web, hear it from the media or your favourite organization you need to do some checking. Look for alternative sites with alternative views. Compare the level of proof they present, if they point to data sources for independent checking. Examine the backgrounds of the authors to see if they have any experience in what they might be commenting about. Of you could just believe everything you read.   

So my adventures with Access continue. I must admit to learning a few more SQL statements and since I am also working with SQLServer, what the differences are between them. There are more differences between the two of them than I thought so it is a continuous learning process.

Before I continue I found a neat way to format your 2,4,8,16GB etc. thumb drives to NTFS. Yes normally they are FAT32. Try this, pop in a thumb drive, right click on it in say My Computer , Click of Format and then on the File System drop down. Yes, there is no NTFS. Now right click on My Computer, Properties, Hardware, Device Manager or however you get there on your OS. Open Disk Drives and right click on your thumb drive name and then Properties. Under the Policies tab change the selection from Optimize for quick removal to Optimize for performance. Click on OK and go back to right clicking on the device under My Computer. Now when you click on Format and the File System drop down NTFS will be there. Reformat as you like and now you can save large files on your thumb drive.

So where was I? OK, right, Access. I am now using Office 2010 under Windows 7 which is interesting if you are using the 64 bit version, set up some ODBS DSNs and decide you need to switch to the 32-bit version of Office because say your email driver does not have a 32-bit version. The first thing you will notice is that your ODBC drivers don’t work. This is because you now need to re set them up as 32-bit versions. This is not available from the Control Panel and you need to go to the SYSWOW64 directory under Program files and run the program you find there, no not under the 32 bit sub directory you find there but right from SYSWOW64. Don’t ask me why as it makes no sense to me either.  Anyway more on my Access adventures in later articles.

Industry News

On the subject of reading Yahoo! is being criticized for its new webmail rules. They give themselves the right to read your emails and make you responsible for telling anyone who may be emailing you, even if you don’t know who that might be. To be fair Google was the first to start this practice, which made some switch to Yahoo! because they didn’t do it. Not sure where those people are going to go now. This will all be part of the latest Yahoo! email upgrade and users will see a pop-up, that most ignore, when they make the change. IF you don’t like the changes then simply use the old account.

In a stroke of irony only jailbroken iPhones and iPads will be safe from the latest vulnerability. Those who have stayed with the unmodified units will have to wait around for a patch from Apple. Version 3 of jailbreakme.com that now works on the iPad can use PDF Patcher 2 to guard against the underlying flaw. The reason? Easy, jailbroken devices allow the installing of apps besides those approved by the official Apple App Store. Oh and Apple does not allow anti-virus software to be listed in the official iPhone AppStore, so there's no protection via that mechanism until a patch for the underlying vulnerability is published by Apple.

Well into the really cool category this week is the one billion pixel camera that will be used to map the Milky Way galaxy. Yes that is not a mistype 1 billion pixels making up a 1 by half meter array. It is going to map about 1 million starts over a 5 year mission. The camera will work in stereo with two sets of 51 CCD device arrays. The satellite will map the star, its position and relative motion along with colour, intensity and spectrometry. Gia as the satellite it know will sit motionless at the L2 Lagrange point a million-and-a-half kilometres from Earth. This point is the position of the balance between orbital movement and gravity that will allow the satellite to sit motionless in space providing the stable platform necessary for such detailed photography and detection. To give some idea of just how large our galaxy is the mission will map only about one percent of the stars. It will also be looking at a few distant quasars, a few asteroids and galaxies right out to the edge of known universe.

Microsoft wants XP users to move to Windows 7. XP is about ten years old now but is still a very popular OS, I am using it as I type this article for example. Support for XP will stop in about 1000 days from now. Yes that is indeed nearly three years and pushes XP out to about 2014 before current users will need to think about upgrading, to Windows 8 perhaps? So after 8 April 2014 there will be no more security patches and hot fixes so you had better start planning, for whatever OS might be around by then.

Computer Currents BLOG – 2011- July 6

I have been looking at Access code the past couple of days and I’d forgotten how crazy Microsoft had been with VBA under that platform. I’d remembered the SQL differences but not that ridiculous ! notation used instead of a simple . after objects. Me!frmOtherOne.Forms!frmStillAnother instead of using just dots everywhere. In the very latest versions of Access you can get away with it but there are still a lot of people using the older versions.

The object model is different from say Excel there are DoCmd functions and other bits and pieces to remember and relearn. When it comes down to it I suppose the Access team was different from the Excel one and the World teams. You would have thought that there would have been some kind of overall project manager imposing basic standards in notation and the object models but I guess that never happened. This is why an Excel VBA specialist will still take some time to ramp up on Access VBA and Word VBA. Remember this if you suddenly decide to ask you Excel person to build an Access app and they can’t do it right away.

Another thing that crossed my field of view this week was the outrageous speed claims that some vendors make in terms of Internet speed. Consider an office building that provides an Internet service. They will tell you that they have say a 100Mbps connection. You can get a part of this for a fixed sum every week. Sounds great, faster than your average ADSL 2+ connectivity by a long shot. Stop, think. You will be sharing this bandwidth with anyone else in the building that has decided to take the offer. What of 24 other people take the deal? 100Mbps suddenly becomes 4Mbps if everyone is accessing it at the same time, not so good when compared to ADSL 2+ at those speeds. Yes, of course the will be ups and downs in speeds but what if say another 25 people join the party the bandwidth gets split even more. So when you are asking about speed remember to ask what the sharing is likely to be before you get too excited.

Silicon Valley might be the heart of US but the heart of many high tech advances do not come out of the US of A. By 2015 South Korea plans to have all school materials digitized, i.e. no more books. Students of all ages will access their materials using everything from smart phones to home computers. They have a bunch of other educational ideas queued up ready to go before then like more online classes and distance learning for those a long way from the schools or who may be ill. Even exams will be held online in the near future. 

Not all hacking is bad. If you think so then ask the engineers over at the European Space Agency. They recently managed to get a satellite back online by hacking into it. The satellite is dedicated to science and it went offline a while ago, before it was due to. Measuring the solar winds Samba is one of four that were sent into orbit in the year 2000. With one out since March the experiment was put into peril which upset the Germans. They managed to get one process running that indicated all the power switches were off. Then they managed to hack the Samba interface and got the thing started again bringing it back to normal operational status once again.

So 10Mbps is enough for most people but let’s face it if you could get more speed you would. On a LAN connection these days 100Mbps is common and 1 Gigabit  became available. More recently 10Gbps became available and these days 40Gbps is available with 100Gbps becoming mainstream by next year. The questions becomes do we really need that kind of speed. For as long as I can remember some people asked if greater speed was necessary and soon after the answer was always “yes.” Gigabit WiFi will be available soon and that won’t be enough either.

So here is one reason why the data center of next month will want a 100Gbps connection, cloud computing. As computing grows so do the bandwidth requirements. Add the growing virtualization trend and there is even more need. One box, hosting multiple machines suddenly needs more bandwidth per machine for the virtual network. More bandwidth, more scalability and faster network interface cards. The only question right now is to go 40Gbps or wait a little for 100Gbps. The latter will of course require a fibre connection which is more money. It is true that bandwidth requirements grow faster that the network can meet it. Oh, they are already planning for 1 Terabits by 2015.

Industry News

Spam is down. Spam levels hitting your inbox that is. Have botnets been shut down? No. Mail volumes are however with an estimated 90 percent last year at 75 percent now which had led to about a 60 percent drop in overall email levels freeing up the network and reducing congestion and the load on Web servers. All good news, perhaps even so for the new Office 365 but more on that later. July last year there were about 230 billion spam messages flowing around the world every day accounting for 90 percent of all email traffic. Yes, that is a lot.

The drop has been partially due to the Rustock botnet starting to be dismantled in September 2010. At the time they accounted for about 47 percent of all spam. Instead of others moving in to take up the slack others have actually dropped off their volume. At the same time the number of machines compromised by botnets has not decreased. They are instead being used for denial of service attacks. This has become the new revenue stream and less risky than spamming as it attacks less attention in the wider sense.

So now we have Office 365. This is, according to Microsoft, the latest in online business productivity services. Like other products before it in many ways this is really a rebranded BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) with some extra features. Of course to get the full benefit of Office 365 you will also need to have either Office 2007 SP2 or Office 2010 Professional Plus otherwise you will at best have access to a cut down functionality.  Microsoft claims that 200,000 people have beta tested Office 365 since November last year. They also claimed that businesses using the build had saved up to 50 percent of their IT costs. I wonder if that is the same kind of estimating technology used to work out gas bills in Australia. (For those that find this reference a little too local, think way off the real value).

It is going to cost you from $2 to $27 per use to connect. You can get connected in minutes and do everything you would expect like e-mail, document sharing, video and web conferencing and messaging. The response to this for me is “so what?’ You can do all those things easily using free tools. It appears to me that this collection is a year or two too late, Like Win 7 mobile and other recent products there is nothing there to separate it from what people already know and use. The older BPOS has had its share of outages and people who have used the services will be expecting the system to be more stable and have a better up time.

Microsoft is not claiming there will be no outages, it is Web based after all. Microsoft has already put system level agreements in place to give money back to customers if there is an outage. I don’t know about you but this fills me with confidence.  Twenty Five percent back if uptime falls to 99 percent with a complete refund if it hits 95 percent.