Blog Currents - 2012, Feb 1

The IT world is continually changing and the IT professional either adapts and learns or falls behind. There are a number of ways to keep up to date. IF employed by a large organization there are training courses for the latest versions of SQLServer 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010 to attend. The next level is video based training in particular subjects. Then there are the books and online lessons.

I was recently thrown into a position where my knowledge level was lower than the requirements for the position, in this case as a DBA managing a large number of servers. My response was to work my way through a SQLServer 2008 Administrators video course and put my hands on some books on the subject for reference of required. So far this has been enough to allow me to do the role but the one thing that all courses seem to miss out is what to do if something goes wrong.

This is the flaw with all training that I have ever attended, well there are two, the first is that the courses are rarely linked to each other so you are left to figure out how two modules relate or connect together. The other is that in all courses you are shown the ideal state of the product. The installs go perfectly, every example works first time and the IT world is never a problem.  In the real world things are different. Databases get locked, backups fail, reports don’t get run, the automated processes have problems, disk space runs out, too many users are added and system resources become low, etc., etc., etc. The training courses never cover any of these problems and the real world worker is left with a lot of information that is only useful if nothing ever goes wrong.

All the answers to the problem issues are hidden in MSDN papers and more often out in cyberspace where someone has faced the problem and managed to find a solution, perhaps not the best but at least it worked.

For my part I am also working my way through a fairly think book on the subject of the Microsoft Business Intelligence methodology and tools for the SQLServer 2008 range of products. In reality mouch of it is what many went through during the full system development lifecycle projects over the years but employers seem to only want people familiar with the MS BI suite. So it is back to the books for me and hours at a desk working my way through the Microsoft terms so that I can use them in interviews.

I recently had an operation that put me at home for a few days. I had another look at Skyrim Elder Scrolls and found a bunch of quests I hadn’t even know about so that has also taken up part of my time lately. I still think that maxing out Archery and Sneak is the best way to go. As usual I am disappointed with the value of magic spells versus a good bow and arrow combination. In comparison the Shouts suite of powers is a lot better. Still the best value for money game I have ever played in terms of how much is in it.

Industry News

Hard drives are expensive these days. If you can hang out a few more months then prices will drop but for the moment they are about twice as expensive as they were before the Thai floods.

On the subject of the Land of Smiles it gathered a world first recently being the first proposing the censor and block the Tweets of Twitterers. That Twitter has bowed to this is disgusting on its own but once again Thailand has led the way in digital censorship. The reason for all of this is fairly obvious, Twitter is an excellent way to organize protests and there are still a huge number of countries that don’t like or allow protests, in any form. Last year for example Thailand worked with Facebook to remove over 10000 pages deemed insulting to the Thai Royal Family as so called violations of the lese majeste law. It should be pointed out here that it is government officials that make these decisions not members of the Royal Family itself. The ICT permanent secretary Jeerawan Boonperm recently told the Bangkok Post that Twitter's censorship scheme was a "welcome development" that the Thai government wanted to apply locally. Given that last year the opposition Democrat Party tried to secure support for a complete ban on accessing Western social media websites, praising the Chinese model this is not an issue on one side of politics.

If you pay money to the uploading, and subsequent downloading, sites then you face the same thing that the Megaupload members do, loss of all their data. A day or two after I publish this data will start to be removed from the service. Even if you uploaded data like personal photos and the like you have been blocked for the past month or so as lawyers and other bottom feeding denizens have been scouring your data for anything they deem illegal. It is the nature of the industry that any common storage area will contain items of dubious origin, that private data can also be scanned by the authorities simple highlights how unsecure such systems are. It also begs for some kind of encryption technology to be standard for such services.

Firefox 10 is now out. A child of the six week development and release cycle version 10 comes with some new developer tools aimed at simplifying life for website operators. There are eight security fixes, better add-on upgrade support and HTML 5 support for full screen viewing API's. Anti-aliasing for WebGL and CSS3 3D-transforms are also included in the new release.

Neil Young still hates digital music but likes that the pirates spread the music around, I guess to people who would not normally listen to Neil Young. He is interested in uncompressed high quality digital sound, no matter how big the files get.

In a related story the man behind Angry Birds has admitted they would have done a lot better in the market if they had simply left the pirates alone. He says that piracy allowed the product to penetrate further and would have generated more revenue for them if they had simply stepped back.

If you are in France and use Amazon then you may have noticed a couple of new iPad 3 books listed for sale starting on March the 29th. Is this a hidden release date notice? Who knows, the French have been wrong before on this kind of thing. About the only details about the iPad 3 that might be right include a faster processor, a better display, a better battery and LTE wireless connectivity, Four essential items in any new pad device for the future so no real news here.   

Finally this week another rumor this time about the iPhone 5. It could contain a wireless payment chip that allows for payments by waving at the right device in a store using near-field communication (NFC). Not new, the system that has been around on Android phones via Google Wallet for a while, but has yet to take off with customers. According to MasterCard they have more than 150,000 merchants who offer its PayPass tap-to-go systems that the iPhone will leverage off. I guess this will result in a new bump and pay system?

Blog Currents - 2012, Jan 25

When was the first time you heard about biometric sensors like fingerprint readers and iris scanners? It has been a long time but note that we still use passwords. In 2011 IBM predicted that in five years devices will replace passwords. This was one of a number of predictions including that the digital divide will vanish and that mind reading would become a reality, I guess they mean through technology. Enter Microsoft's Cormac Herley and computer science professor Paul van Oorschot. They claim that the password technology itself has not really changed much in the past 20 years and the succession of technology solutions have not done very well. This leaves us stuck with memorizing strings of characters and numbers or as most people do writing them down.

Most of us have seen movies where people put DNA under fake skin for testing, hands and eyes removed to fool the scanners. The top end devices look for blood flow, temperature, signs of stress and other indicators to stop being fooled. The other problem according to the two mentioned earlier is that the PKI (public key systems) and biometric solutions are not performing as well as expected so people revert to passwords. If you have to carry a digital key then someone could steal it or hack it. People are as yet unable to hack your memory and so a strong password is generally safe. Bad passwords like password, god, dog, not so much.

Industry News

There’s a honour code in the hacking community. You don’t take credit for someone else’s hack and you don’t accuse another group of doing something that they didn’t. AnonyUpload, the supposed Anonymous alternative to MegaUpload is one such example. AnonyUpload appeared a few days after Mega was taken down due to anti-piracy actions in New Zealand. Yes there was activity against the government the and entertainment industry websites linked to the take down and this was organized by Anonymous, but AnonyUpload comes from elsewhere.

The new service promises 100% free and 100% anonymous hosting and file sharing services. The site asks for donations to provide Russian based servers. It even warns people about safety of any files they might put there.  The smart money says that this is a con of some kind to get money out of people.

According to Juniper Research, an organization that watches the IT marketplace in the UK, Ultrabooks will not outsell tablets for at least five years. The research company iSuppli thinks that tablets will outsell regular notebooks by then as well. The theory is that Windows 8 will help with the Ultrabooks but that the cost of licensing the trademark and meeting what Intel wants will keep prices high. Windows 8 will also support tablets.

Here is why I think iSuppli is wrong. Tablets cannot do as much as a notebook. Since they don’t have the power and the storage for any application types they cannot replace any kind of business notebook and that is the primary market. The biggest problem is input technologies. Keyboards and a mouse are still the best options and until something new comes along that is it.

According to research firm Ovum Android will pass Apple as the mobile development platform of choice sometime in the next 12 months. In the past twelve months it jumped from 5th place to second place behind Apple's iOS. As Android's market share grows so will developer interest it is after all mostly about how many units can be sold for what price. Developers will therefore target the largest market so once Android has the numbers it will attract the developers. The outright winner will be the one that provides the best integrated development experience for the most devices.

It is that time of year (or is it just all the time) when the music industry is blaming pirated downloads for dropping sales. CD sales are down three percent, digital music sales up by eight percent which is mostly good news for the iTunes store. The IFPI said that sales fell from $16.7 B to $16.2 B overall. I don’t know about you but most people would be happy with anything over $16B I would have thought.  Of this figure $5.2 B is digital music sales which when you think about it isn’t too bad given that the current model in general just plain sucks. Subscribers rose by 65 percent in 2011

They then went on to suggest that 28 percent of all Internet users access unauthorized services on a monthly basis, half of them through P2P networks. Not sure what the word "access" means here but that number seems a little high. You might visit a P2P site but download nothing, or download something that you never listen to, or listen to once, decide it is rubbish and delete it. Others will download, listen and then purchase using the "hear before buying model." Most of the latter options are not factored into the statistics and some surveys suggest that more buy after listening than organizations like the IFPI and BSA are willing to admit.

France has a three strike rule when it comes to downloading media and the IFPI loves it. If they get three warming letters in a single year they can have their connectivity suspended for a month and there are also fines. In the first year 736,000 people received the first letter,  62,000 their second letter, and 165 their third. So it must be working right? P2P transactions have fallen, by 26 percent according to the IFPI, the numbers have also been creeping back up. Normal torrent usage was never designed to avoid copyright detection. There are better forms and the real situation is that more people are shifting to options like cyberlockers that are much harder to detect. Given that the real market has not improved then the results hardly suggest that anything is "working."

The new Samsung NX200 compact system camera comes with a 20.3 Mp APS-C CMOS sensor, a boosted ISO range of 100-12800 and high-speed performance including 7fps continuous shooting. Aluminium frame, very fast auto focus, 1080p HD recording and a nice range of interchangeable lenses and that is quite a camera in a small package. This model has a fixed LCD panel probably so that they can bring out a moveable one with the NX300 model sometime in the future. This middle of the format range is starting to grow quite well. Shutter range is 30 seconds to 1/4000, there is a built in flash and you can save to RAW format. I looked at some of the demo shots on the review sites and even at 6400 the resolution is quite nice. All for under $1000. Oh, there are about 9 lenses in the range so far.  

Blog Currents 2012, Jan-18

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 sounded like such a good device then on closer look I found that Samsung, the idiots, have gone and done a Apple. If you have followed my columns in the past then this cam mean one of two things, how you get your software or the feature set that is part of the device. Ignoring for the moment how crappy Kies is the issue here is the ports. No SD support (micro or regular)  and, wait for it, no regular USB port (mini or micro). If you are a fast thinker then you will realize this means a non standard (i.e. proprietary) charging mechanism. 

The question here is why would such a forward thinking organization like Samsung take a couple of giant steps backwards by introducing proprietary connectors and dropping off useable, and expected, pieces from their new products. Apart from the ability to play Flash the 10.1 instead of standing out from the iPad is trying to be like one. Lots of negative point for Samsung on this one, if they haven’t done an Apple then they have definitely done a Sony. Fail

As I type this in under 21 hours Wikipedia will go off the air for 24 hours. No it is not being hacked, or facing any kind of legal action. This is a decision by Wikipedia to voluntarily take the site down to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act currently making its way around Washington DC. This rather nasty piece of legislation will pit online providers against ISPs, search engines, and a range of others. A tweet from a founder Jimmy Wales to students he recommends finishing those assignments early. Actualkly it read "Student Warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday."

With over 25 million hits per day 24 hours is going to have some affect on users who seem to rely on it for answering every question. Supporters are being asked to contact the Representatives supporting the bill and "melt their switchboards." There are those against it so it will come down to the biggest lobby as the usual way that things get done there. According so some in the Obama Administration "While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet." There is another acout out there with the rather long name of "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act" or PROTECT IP.

Industry News

So what were some of the big items at the latest CES show?

Wi-Fi. The first news was the new gigabit standards. You would think they have some cool names but they are just 11ac and 11ad. After that came the usual range of new tags like ZigBee, WHDMI, WiMAX/3G, WirelessHD and some new additions to Buletooth. There was also something called  wireline cables that sounded a lot like a LAN cable to me so I'll have to do some research on that one.

Next comes smart TVs that are rapidly turning into just another peripheral on the network with companies like Sony and Samsung making big inroads into this space. My TV has this capability and so far I haven’t used it beyond taking a look. How successful this becomes will depend on what services are and can be connected to it for what kind of price. The more it costs the less likely that people will use it.

There was a lot more on Cloud technology, another one I am not convinced about. The push this year was towards the more mobile devices started by Amazon and the Kindle Cloud and quickly picked up by the likes of Acer, HTC, Sony, Google, Apple and others. Like most areas of technology there is rarely room for more than two or three at the top with the rest just following on behind. Google is well positions to be one of the three so it remains to be seen who the others may be.

As an aside here Amazon has released an application that will let Kindle users synchronize and view Microsoft files held in cloud storage via their devices. The PC application is called “Send to Kindle” and adds a right-click option on any Windows application that then adds a Send to Kindle option to the Select Printer list in the Print dialog. Send to Kindle then converts the file to the Kindle’s .azw format, boots the image up into cloud storage via email, and synchronizes with the device. Sorry but PDFs need to be converted separately.

The Web book range did not do so well, low power, low functionality and sloooow. To try and entice you once again we have the advent of the ultrabook, a big display item at CES. Every year there needs to be at least one new form factor and this year it was the ultrabook. Success here will depend on what they can really do once the demos have stopped running. I suspect that they will go the way of the Web books but as usual time will tell. They seem to be too close to the iPad or the Mac Air to distinguish themselves in the marketplace.

4G Smartphones a.k.a. LTE phones hit the marketplace. Pushed into the US by Verizon it won’t be long before the new technology spreads further afield. Apple has not yet entered this marketplace but they will and this may propel the new standard to a wider audience, or not. The Apple 3 is supposed to be an LTE device or at least have that connectivity built in. This will boost the iPad's ability to access the wider data network and service, where supported of course. High pixel count screen, quad core CPU, and probably at least one other version that will be WiFi only so that non-4G punters can also play with the new device. Due out in March this year it will be 1mm thicker, a slightly bigger camera lens for better pictures but all in all it will look a lot like the iPad 2 case.

On the subject of Apple the US International Trade Commission has been unable to find evidence that Motorola is infringing Apple's patents and so ruled that any ban on imports, as requested by Apple, have been refused. Apple will appeal of course but for the time being Motorola Mobility (now Samsung owned). While the ITC does not have any relationship to patents as such any favorable ruling for Apple will make any court case easier and at the very least cause an import suspension until the case has been resolved. Given the high rate of change in this market space that is what Apple wants, time to push out their products before any competitor can go on sale. This would affect the target's productivity hence the attempt to get any imports banned or suspended. More evidence that Apple has turned into the Evil Empire. Losing against Motorola has not stopped Apple going after HTC, Samsung and Nokia. In another 2 months the same kinds of claims will surface from Motorola against Apple.  

Blog Currents - Jan 11 2012

I’m still playing Skyrim Elder Scrolls, it really is huge. After playing it for some time now I have identified some bugs and annoyances with the game. When the player is sneaking you are not advised of enemies nearby. This doesn’t make sense I’m the one sneaking so I should notice them. You can’t fight from horseback, you can use a small boat to cross a waterway and with one specific exception there is no way to fly anywhere, even magically. Finally due to a bug you can’t marry Lydia.  Apart from these few things it really is a good first person fantasy game.

Yes this is why the article is a bit later than usual, still in holiday mode.

It is the latest CES at Las Vegas so what follows is some of the cooler announcements.

In the why do they need to do this? category Intel was caught out faking a demo at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The demo was an Ivy Bridge ultrabook with EA’s F1 2011 driving game running to show off the Intel graphics capability in the ultrabook. Using a steering wheel attachment the game was demoed. It turns out that the whole demo was setup beforehand and filmed. The ultrabook was simply playing the film back using VCL. An ultrabook can play back a video file but it probably can’t play a high demand game with any reliability. Intel said it was a last minute demo, of course they had to make the video, not so last minute after all. Actually to be fair Intel did demo the game to reporters some time later so the machine was able to handle it. At the same time while smaller organizations have been caught out with dubious demos it is not something the average person would expect from Intel.  

After a story on Intel what could be better but a story on Microsoft. As usual they managed to put most people to sleep at CES but there was one little ray of sunshine. The Kinect is a very popular piece of equipment that is currently partnered with the X-Box. It detects motion and reacts accordingly in a series of games. Starting in February PC users with Windows will be able to take advantage of the same technology. The aim is to see if the mouse can finally be removed as a pointing device. Actually I made that up but it is a logical extension to the Kinect being made available for Windows.

In typical Microsoft style they may have already killed the device as the rumored price will be about $250, i.e. a lot more than an X-box user pays. I predict there will be a hack to use the X-box hardware under Windows in about three days after the Windows only version is released. It never ceases to amaze me how Microsoft can come out with a good idea and then immediately shoot it down.  

Sony showed a really cool OLED TV. At 55 inches this is the biggest one yet. LG responded by showing their new crystal-LED set that contains six million "ultrafine" LEDs, three each of red, green and blue hue to create each of the full HD panel's 2m-odd pixels. The Sony unit has a 180 degree viewing angle with a very high brightness and 100 percent support for the full NTSC colour range. It uses less than 70W of power compared to an equivalent backlit LED set that uses 100W. Sony claims it will have their set out on the consumer market soon. Samsung will have their 55inch OLED model out later in the year so Sony has a fairly small window to get theirs out first.

The Samsung device was also demoed at the show and theirs had motion and voice control. Thier panel has red, green and blue light-emitting sub-pixels. It's colour reproduction is 40 per cent more accurate than an LED-backlit LCD, and its response time is 1100 times better. In other words very nice colour and no discernable blurring. The Tv comes with a dual core processor to support their Smart TV product and has a better, smoother moving picture than an LCD. Price? Why wqould you ask about price? I mean everyone knows OLED costs more and just how much Samsung is not saying but I bet I won’t be able to afford one.

Back to Intel again, this time their first smart phone. No not in the US, or Europe or Japan but this time in China. The rest will need to wait until after the middle of the year. The Lenovo K800 will have a 4.5 inch display, 720p video (yawn), HDMI out (as it should) and the ability to stream wirelessly via WiFi to a compatible HD TV (not sure which models will support this). It will use a 32nm "Medfield" Atom processor, better JavaScript rendering performance than ARM-based devices and equivalent battery performance to existing devices. Intel are pleased and well they should be as they have been working for years to come up with a hardware solution in the phone market that does not such battery life. Motorola are also apparently working on an Intel hardware based phone. Expect to see them close to mid-year. Just how good they are will depend on user testing.

In the "that's just silly, but cool" department Victorinox, the  Swiss Army people, have come out with a penknife with a 1TB USB stick inside it. You can get the just USB stick version or the obvious one with a knife and scissors. Yes I know that they had a 1GB version back in 2008 but a 1000x times capacity improvement over 4 years is impressive. The device also has a neat 48 x 96 dot monochrome LCD display to show say a volume label it also comes with AES 256 bit encryption. So if you have a spare $2000 you can get one, yes that is a very large amount of money for a thumb drive no matter how cool the red case looks. You have until April to save up for one if you want to be first.

Finally in the "no surprise here" department hackers have managed to get Amazon's proxy-based Silk browser compiled into other Android versions. This means that non Amazon people can take advantage of the Amazon cloud. Silk offloads most of the rendering of web pages onto the cloud, improving performance and reducing the bandwidth required. While this is just a hack to demonstrate what can be done, it should be considered for what it is is an admirable thing in itself and to be respected.