Blog Currents – 2011 Nov 30

My article is a little late this week. It is however longer than usual so enjoy. I had intended to write this one using my new computer but I had forgotten just how much work is required when you have a 5 year old computer and multiple hard drives.

The new computer itself is quite nice. A Gigabyte Z86A-D3-B3 motherboard with a nice Intel multi-core i5 CPU, GTX570 Graphics card with 1.2 GB of RAM, 8 GB of main memory, 120 GB solid state drive, Blu-Ray combo drive, a SATA drive hot swap caddy and the other usual bits and pieces. I also went for a 27” monitor. Windows 7 Professional 64 bit as the operating system. I was advised not to go for the i7 due to some hyper-threading issues.

Setting up the computer was not difficult. I loaded Office,  Vipre Anti-Virus, SQLServer 2008 R2, AvyDVD and WinRAR. Apart from the normal computer work I do it will be used to backup my HD-DVD collection so having a nice graphics card will help. There is also HDMI out so I can play Blu-ray disks to my TV. I will load in some other software later of course. Note to those installing SQLServer 2008 R2 when the connection request appears use localhost as the target if you did a default setup.

The real work and time came after that as I started to move data files from my hard drives to another to be used as my permanent data drive. It is amazing how much stuff you collect over time. Some of the collection is from older computers. My first data drive is a 1.5 TB unit and there is nearly 1TB of collected information that I have and still need to move before I turn my old computer off. 

The sheer time it takes to move lots of data, with lots of small files, from one place to another can take a lot longer than you might expect. Block out a lot of time. As I type this files are still being shuttled around. The biggest job is deciding what to take and what is no longer useful. As a general rule of thumb you do not need any old system files or any of the old system folders.

I must admit that the boot and reboot time when using a SSD as the primary OS and Apps drive is very nice. There are some issues with solid state drives but they will always be faster than the current mechanical alternatives. Make sure you leave 10-20 GB of empty space for temp files, more if you plan to rip a HD video disk.

As usual I will or should not look at a computer pricing catalogue for at least 3 months. My new machine does not have Sandybridge 2 or any other new technology that will magically appear in the next week. One of the great banes of the computer world is that the change and updates are constant and these days fairly rapid. This means that you can be sure a new CPU, less expensive hard drive or even a completely new technology will be announced just after you buy you new computer.

In the latter category enter the latest PCIe 4.0 interconnect specification. In this case the new transfer rate is 16 gigatransfers per second. While this is no surprise it was announced almost immediately after I took delivery of my new computer hence supporting my point above. 16 GT/s was chosen because it is still possible using copper. There were those that suggested that 8 GT/s under PCIe 3.0 is plenty fast for normal humans, ever. These luddites have of course forgotten the first rule of computing, well mine at least, “it is never fast enough.”

The new news for those considering buying a computer is that the latest spec will not hit a computer near you into about 2014 or 2015 so spend away. PCIe 4 will backwards compatible with earlier architectures and can be built using existing technology. The power requirements will be compatible with PCIe 3.0 as well which should keep the Church of Global Warming alarmists happy as well.

Industry News

Electronic Art's Battlefield 3 has been outlawed in Iran to the point where police are arresting shop owners that secretly stock the game. The ban is not that surprising since the latest iteration involves a US invasion of Tehran. Countries ban games all the time, just ask Australia for example that has banned a Mortal Combat game on the PS3, including for imported online sales.

The real story here is that EA issues the following statement "In that Battlefield 3 is not available for purchase in Iran, we can only hope the ban will help prevent pirated copies reaching consumers there." There are two parts to this and once you pick yourself off the floor from laughter they are quite evident. First of all banning a game is guaranteed to promote piracy. In the case of Iran given that shopkeepers were selling them then those who don’t have one in Iran will only be able to get one by piracy. It is a supply and demand issue, no supply with demand means alternative supply channels. The naiveté of the digital providers never ceases to amaze me, you’d think I’d be use to it by now.

If you were to ask a Web developer what media content they go for, the majority would respond Flash, those not of the Apple persuasion at least. It is hard to open a Web site these days and not see at least a small Flash example. With HTML 5, the broader specification not the language, this appears to be changing. Apple and Microsoft are moving to HTML 5 and there is a movement away from Flash.

Flash started in 1993 as SmartSketch. Animation elements soon followed. By May of 1996 Netscape had an API plug-in called FutureSplash Animator that Adobe was not interested in. Microsoft and Disney were early adopters prompting Macromedia to buy FutureWave in December 1996. They changed the name to Macromedia Flash 1.0 soon after. So started the Flash wave with nearly all web users having Flash installed by the end of 2000. Due to speed issues, primarily of the delivery bandwidth, Flash was not popular with all the most, including myself, were quick to click on the Skip the Intro link on home pages.

Flash it appeared was here to stay with Flash apps soon following. The problem for the average developer was the development tools, they were not so friendly and so Flex was born in 2004. This tool allowed the coding of web sites using XML and ActionScript the Flash scripting language. This was also the time where Microsoft was playing for Web dominance and brought out XAML and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). This was also the time where HTML floundered under Internet Explorer, deliberately, and it looked like the Web would become a proprietary platform.

Video Flash was also popular and was introduced in 2002 with Flash 6. At the time it was the most reliable alternative and was the reason for the early success of YouTube that arrived in Feb 2005. Adobe bought Flash with the purchase of Macromedia at the end of 2005 and immediately began to incorporate it in moat of the development tools. These days you can embed Flash in a PDF for example. The cloud-based Acrobat.com features a Flash-driven online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation editor. 

By 2005 Flash was king. With HTML stalling it filled in many gaps in issuing technologies. Still bent on world dominance Microsoft introduced Silverlight in Mar 2006. OK to be technically correct they introduced WPF/Everywhere, a cross-platform and browser-hosted WPF that was renamed Silverlight. This prodded Adobe to update Flash to HD and by December 2007 had full 3D support and other nice features. With Adobe AIR and the 2008 Open Screen Project Silverlight faded into computer history.

This month however it all changed. Adobe announced that they were no longer developing on Flash for mobile devices, that they were moving to HTML 5, and were cutting back on the LiveCycle platform. Why?

Mobile Flash was effectively killed off by Steve Jobs and the Apple iOS that will not support it. This had an impact on mobile advertising, fine as Flash on the PC but without a universal platform for the mobile market. Another reason is that HTML finally started to get going again after 2005. The standards bodies woke up from their self induced sleep, browser makers have also pushed the graphics capabilities forward using tools like those from the WebKit project. All in all Flash is becoming less relevant particularly because Gen Y is the mobile generation.

So is this the end of Flash? No, not really because there are workarounds even for Apple’s iOS e.g. using AIR to compile Flash into a native code format. HTML 5 looks like it will be the future of Enterprise Apps though. As usual time will tell, hence the history lesson above.

Blog Currents – 2011 Nov 23

Have you ever noticed that when you shut down your computer there are some items that simply will not terminate requiring you to manually handle them? I think of these programs as viruses and at the top of the list are social networking products like Skype and Yahoo the most prevalent offenders, on my PC at least. I’m running version 5.5. of Skype and 10 of Yahoo. You would have thought that by this level of version number they would be able to handle a simple terminate request from the Windows Operating system. Of course in this case I am still using XP Pro as my main Os so perhaps the later versions are more geared towards something like Windows & instead? Still no excuse.

I just ordered a new PC. My current one is about 5 years old now and having some problems with products like Star Craft 2, well a lot of problems actually. I would like to tell you the specs but I walked into a computer wholesaler and had them figure out a spec based on what I was going to do with my PC. This is the way you should buy a new computer i.e. what are you going to use it for. I wanted to be able to at least play the new games and run SQLServer without any problems. I wanted USB 3, 6 SATA ports to attach drives to and a removable drive slot that I could load with any drive I wanted. I asked for 8 GB of RAM and a SSD drive for the OS and Apps. No monitor, no other drives except a Blu-ray combo drive. I also wanted HDMI out with audio carried on that connection. The rest I left up to them. The price will be around 45,000 Baht ($1,500) ad when it is ready I’ll let you know what I ended up with, the specs and the performance. I also forgot to mention that it comes with a real version of Windows 7 Pro. 

Industry News

Lots of Amazon Kindle news this week. The new Fire tablet is being touted as the big challenger to the Apple iPad but they are in somewhat different market spaces and there is a large gap between them in prices as well. The first data coming back from the market appears to indicate that it is Apple’s rivals that are being hit hard by the new Amazon device. In a recent survey carried out by ChangeWave nearly twenty percent of those asked responded that they were considering a new Fire tablet. Two percent had already ordered one with five percent in the very likely category. There were still three times as many people considering the iPad than the Fire. The latest data does show that about a quarter of those going for the iPad have changed their mind to the Fire however so there is some challenge to Apple but nothing major at the moment.

With the surveys out of the way there is a rumour of a new 8.9 inch version of the Fire coming out, early in the second quarter of 2012. The smaller Kindle Fire is already selling very well in US stores and the first 6 million brought in are already sold out. I’m guessing that this was unexpected for Amazon.

The Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet has been rooted by the same people that did it to the Kindle Fire. This means that a user can install applications beyond those that manufacturer is offering. Like the Fire the Nook is an Android device. Like any process that pushes the boundaries of the device this is not a simple or guaranteed process and to date there has been mixed results. The Nook is only available in the US at the moment so to get a Nook would require a mail order process for those living elsewhere.

In a take apart process performed by iSuppli they have worked out that manufacturing the Kindle Fire costs $201.71. The unit sells for $199. The company worked out that is $185.60 in parts and $16.10 for assembly. There have been claims like this made before and Amazon is in the business of making money so I suggest they are getting better bulk prices than the single breakdown costs these things work out to. As far as the buyer is concerned who cares? They get a unit for a price they are willing to pay and would have paid more. If Amazon had added say $30 to the price I’d be willing to bet that they would be selling just as fast as they have been.

If you are after a Western Digital drive at the moment then the flooding in Thailand means drives by that manufacturer will be more expensive until they get back on a better manufacturing footing. As if to mock WD a recent court decision in the US has them paying Seagate $525m because of a misuse of confidential information case. Let’s see how the appeal goes. During the summary lawyers stated that the decision will not affect the recovery and recommencement of our Thailand operations so I guess they are staying. Western Digital is also still going ahead with the acquisition of Hitachi GST.

Google is targeting security application makers that are working on anti-viral products. Chris DiBona, Google's open-source programs manager, is calling the organisations “scammers" and “charlatans”. Why? He claims that the Android smartphones and those running under iOS do not need any anti-virus protection. He does admit that there has been some malware hit these devices but that these instances have been few and low impact. So while Windows and Mac machines are subject to attack he claims that Android and Linux boxes do not.

I have been working on computer for a long time and I remember the early days of many of the platforms that have both evolved into what they are today or fallen by the wayside. What I did notice was the more popular a platform is the more likely it was to be attacked. The more popular the platform the more attention the malware writers focus upon it. Android is really only just starting to emerge as a popular platform and the instances of a Trojan attack, rather than a plain virus, is on the rise as the focus switches to the Android. According to Kaspersky the Trojan DroidDream has already infected 100,000 users.

The reason the numbers are small at the moment is simple, they started from zero and are just starting to rise. Compared to infections on the very mature Windows platform of course they look small. The more someone like DiBona say it is not going to happen the sharper the focus of those who can make it happen becomes. It boils down to a challenge and the gauntlet has now been thrown down. The growth is exponential but the numbers are still quite small, give it a bit of time and we will see just how wrong DiBona was.

Finally for this week some science stuff. Scientists at California's HRL Laboratories have developed what they claim is the world's lightest material, a nickel structure that is a hundred times lighter than Styrofoam by volume. Yes a metal structure that is lighter than foam. The group managed to build something that is 99.99 per cent open volume leaving a minute 0.01 per cent left over as solid. A few possible practical uses include thermal insulation, battery electrodes and sound-proofing. I love science.

Blog Currents – 2011 Nov 16

This week was one of those where a long standing problem in an application was finally solved. The problem was simple, the solution easy but it took me a long time to find it because the calling procedure was correct and the values being passed where also right. In the end it was a line of code that had been deleted not causing an error message but an undesirable result in a database table.

This is a classic case of problem spinning. This is a programmer with a problem that they keep looking at but do not see. Usually someone else comes along looks over their shoulder and says something like “should that line of code really say that?” In this case it was someone running a trace program to see what was causing the data to change.

Ok it’s official, I hate Microsoft. I tried to upgrade from SQLServer 2005 to 2008 R2 and I ended up with no database server at all. Sure I had a lot of services and tools and all sorts of other things but no actual database server I could use to create say, a database. Of course I tried uninstalling and then starting over but by that time it was impossible to get a working version of SQLServer on my computer. Microsoft installation, upgrade and uninstall processes are mostly useless. The only remaining option is to do a complete os reinstall of find some kind of utility that will clean out all traces of SQLServer, any version, so that I can do a clean install. Yes, that last one was of course a joke.

What do large applications, financial institutions and a rapidly changing regulations mean for IT systems? Well not to put too fine a point on it, a big mess. Large systems and large organizations, at least the traditional financial ones, have never been very fast to make changes to their systems. Let’s face it most of them still run either COBOL or RPG based systems, yes even today. Most of the world’s stock exchanges are running 30 year old systems and banks are mostly running on old mainframes.

Sure we keep hearing about “innovation” and “better customer service” but once you strip away the platitudes and marketing speak the It systems are still old and creaking under the weight of change. ATM’s are mostly low bandwidth point to point networks. The database schemas have been modified so many times they can be mistaken for Australian Labor Party policy diagrams and the poor systems staff must surely be all bald by now with all that hair pulling. Every upgrade is a careful and hopefully process that will hopefully still have running systems at the end of it.

Now add in those older managers attending presentations from organizations like Microsoft and others that promise the latest and greatest solutions to all their problems. It may be the Cloud or a new kind of database platforms, a fast San network or a development platform like SharePoint. These managers return to their organizations and ask their system people to get cracking on using the tool of choice to fix all their problems, yesterday. If you think that I am joking peruse your current It job ads and check out how many times legacy data migration is mentioned. OR how many times experience with the latest Microsoft development platform is requested.

Industry News

You may have noticed by now that hard drive prices are rising. In particular the Barracuda range from Seagate. One example is the 3Tb drive that has moved up nearly 70 percent in some places around the world. The reason? Simple, the floods in Thailand, that submerged the Seagate factory cutting production down by a large percentage. The real question is if Seagate will refurbish the factory or simply up sticks and build one in a country nearby. With the changes in government treatment of foreign investors over the past few years I’m guessing that Seagate and a number of others flooded out will be moving out of the country.

Yap, no not the island, the voice recognition company, has been purchased by Amazon. The strange part of this news is that Yap merged with Dion Acquisition Sub Inc. and moved to 410 Terry Avenue, North Seattle, i.e. Amazon. This all happened quietly under the cover of darkness, no not really but it did happen without any announcement from Amazon. It was the CTL Blog that picked up on it because both it and Yap are and were, based in North Carolina. The company has a nice suite of voice to text services and the new organization will be called Yap Inc. The smart money seems to be on voice based searching and it will be interesting to see where this somewhat secret acquisition goes in the future.

Many devices have fingerprint scanning and security that can be based on the technology. My Samsung S2 phone has an app that will pick up fingerprints. What is can’t do is detect the presence of opiates, cannabis, or cocaine in the sweat on a user's fingertip. But what if you recently shook hands with someone who was using, you ask? This unit works on output from the sweat pores themselves and so it will avoid most of the false positives. So your ID and your drug content in a single scan I guess this will soon be coming to a police check near you.

The company is Intelligent Fingerprinting and the testing device is sensitive enough to pick up some reasonably small compounds and while the focus is on illegal drugs there are possibilities that the same system can be used to detect hormonal markers like pregnancy, cancer and other possibilities.

Sony is planning to increase the production of its image sensor chips by as much as fifty percent in the next couple of years. This would seems to support the trend that the bigger Asia consumer electronics makers of Asia are moving away from PCs and televisions into the portable market. Gen Y is fixated on the portable and mobile devices and they after all are the emerging buying generation.

It appears that there has been some excitement over the release of the Amazon Kindle Fire. Not only amongst the consumers but also the developers. In a recent survey from IDC and Appcelerator globally the Kindle Fire came in second behind the Samsung Galaxy Tab even though the Fire was not yet released. In the US it ranked number one just beating out the Samsung device. One key thing to take away from this was amongst Android developers. Given this level of interest it could be a good thing for Android tablet makers in general. They key factor for the interest? Price. At $199 and with the range of content Amazon can provide the Kindle Fire could be a great product not only for Amazon but for the Android platform in general.

The same survey found that Blackberry interest had waned and the movement of developers to the latest PlayBook platform was not encouraging, for RIM that is. Interestingly as Rim drops Microsoft is picking up their figures due to the partnership with Nokia and the interest in Windows 7. This is mostly in Europe and some in Asia. I guess if, as some are predicting, Europe crashes in the near future these figures will change rapidly. Then there is Windows 8 that seems to promising a lot more for the mobile market as well. We will just have to wait and see.

Blog Currents – 2011 Nov 09 – After Holidays Edition

Yes - I'm Back

So I am finally off holidays and for much of the time I was away from the Internet.

At first thought you may think that this is not that much of a problem but the first thing I noticed was not being aware of what was happening around the world. I had plenty of news on say the Thai floods but all my information was coming from controlled sources like local and international news agencies. In the modern world this means heavily biased and censored news stories.

I use the Internet or more importantly reliable Blog sources to find out what the back stories are and to find out what is rubbish, conjecture, lies and finally some underlying facts. The number of underlying facts found from the Western mainstream media these days is very scarce. It is also interesting how any natural disaster will suck the life out of any boarder reporting, I guess misery sells more than anything else.

I also found out that when it comes to technology places like Thailand continue to outstrip places like Australia. Banking and currency in exchange sucks compared to Thailand. Try exchanging money in a US bank. Try transferring money between say bank accounts in Australia compared to the instant online services available in Thailand. I use SCB but many of the other major banks are just as efficient. Internet services are better in Thailand and faster and less expensive and not as restricted. If the NBN gets in then Australia will be even further behind.

No matter what the antiquated ideas of the Australian government wireless is used more extensively by the new generation that fixed line services will ever be. Since it is the new generation that will be theoretically investing in the NBN technology it is luck that there was never a business plan for the enterprise.

Some things will never change. Floors and floors of copied software, games, movies and TV shows are still easily found in multiple locations in Thailand. There has been a serious relaxation even on footpaths since the new government has taken power in Thailand. The most disappointing lack of progress has been in the Thai government systems. An application for a new Thai passport, unreachable for pick up because of the floods required a complete reapplication and payment at another branch. Even with a receipt and a pickup notice. Even though all passports come from a central authourity. Talking to a large number of Thais about this they all found the double payment absurd and all wondered who was really getting the money by taking advantage of Thai citizens inconvenienced by the flooding. Even with the most basic computer system payment and redirection of a passport would be a snap.

I also learned that no matter how good the technology, e.g. my Samsung Galaxy S2, unless the support network is in place the ability to communicate is missing. At one point I was away from any major population center. There was still phone communications but the nearest tower had not yet been updated to handle data. So no Internet connectivity. It did not matter that I had WiFi, Bluetooth, EDGE or 3G+ capability with nothing nearby to connect to with any of those technologies they became essentially useless.

WiFi hotspots are also not as good as I thought they would be. Try connecting in Singapore or KL airport for example and it can be quite a hit and miss proposition. Of course trying to connect in an Australian airport is even worse. My best connectivity was in a small Bed and Breakfast in Bangkok. I easily downloaded more than 25GB of content. Try doing that at a hotel in Australia, even a major one, they all have download limits.

The Cost of Your Computers

According to China's Southern Metropolitan latest report on environmental pollution about ten percent of the country’s farmland is heavily contaminated with lead, zinc, and other heavy metals. As an early note these are Chinese government determined levels that are somewhat higher than other places. The pollution comes from industrial factories and of these the electronics industry is responsible for the majority of the problems.

Yes China is adept at playing the Green game and they do have some green factories they can parade in front of the world’s stage. The rest, and there are a lot of them, are dirty, use outdated production processes and exist because the environmental standards are not enforced. That is just for production. The next problem is the processing of electronic waste and where it ends up i.e. China, India and Africa.

You old computers have been burned to get to the copper. This process releases all kinds of interesting toxins into the air and out to a great distance. The old PCs also contain gold, very attractive to the Chinese. This extraction process involves crushing, aqua regia and by products. In some cases there is true recycling e.g. in Keyna where they buy CRTs, refit them and sell them because they can’t yet afford flat screens. 

Ye China is making tiny steps to clean things up but while is is better economically to be lax in environmental concerns this will be a long process.

Industry News

Mess with Apple? Oh no he di-n’t. Enter Charlie Miller a mild mannered serial hacker who has been responsible for exposing over a dozen critical vulnerabilities in Apple's Mac and mobile platforms. He reward for this was being kicked out of the iOS developer program. Why? Well he published an app that demonstrated a serious new bug in iPhones and iPads, InstaStock. Besides tracking stock prices in real time the app also. And here is the funny part, In reality this app included a secret hack that bypassed protections built into iOS devices preventing code from running on them unless it has been signed by Apple's official cryptographic seal. In other words his app did things that Apple publically claim they never nor cannot do. A few hours after he made this public he received the e-mail.

Technically Apple were within their rights to do so because he did indeed violate some of their conditions. That they did so because someone was trying to point out their code had flaws is a little rude. Also given that he has found a number of other problems over the years, information which potentially saved Apple a barrow load of money, he has never been rewarded once for the work he has put in for Apple. Dropping a person who finds these things in beta will not mean they may not be found until after public release. Apple The Man as struck again.

They still have no idea how to do it properly but the word is that by the end of 2012 the Compact disk will go away and be replaced by digital only downloads. CD sales will continue through 2013 but after that bye, bye according to the unconfirmed rumour. If true I could see this ruining the CD outlets and making it even easier to get pirated materials. Given how popular CDs still are I don’t see this rumour coming true any time soon.

Remember how a while back the world agencies were going to crack down on the hacker group Anonymous?  November 5 marks the anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason Plot and Anonymous celebrated this day by attacking Israel’s Mossad and the Israel Defence Force because of the detention and deportation of 27 Gaza flotilla activists. Next came five national websites in Portugal this time through  LulzSec Portugal a new branch of the crew that merged with Anonymous earlier this year. In Finland they hacked a government database and published the personal details of thousands of Finns. This one was to shame the government into improving their security. They did not however attach Facebook as some had been expecting.

Finally for this week Google is an organization run by global warming believers. They have a Google +1 program that allows anyone to uprate websites so that users can boost that site’s search rankings. It was discovered recently that Google has staff of people who actively downrate websites based on a number of factors. According to reports one of these is to downgrade sites that don’t agree with the “consensus” about AGW or those which allow for a diversity of views on the topic. One of the better sites participating in this discussion is Watts Up With That. Since Google has been making changes this site has dropped rapidly in the rankings. This makes Google not only a biased but now useless search engine that no longer reflects search activity or priority, use Yahoo or anything else instead from now.