Blog Currents – 2012, Feb 29 - Happy Leap Year.

 I have bought a lot of CD’s over the years, yes the real thing. I have a tea chest full of them, another 100 or so in a rack on the wall and others scattered around in various boxes etc. Some time back I ripped them into electronic format so I could listen to them with a digital music player. I had a nice hard drive, about 500 MB or so and it recently stopped working. So I had the option of going back and ripping everything again which would have taken a long time or I could find an alternative.

Like most people I have a number of favourite artists including ELO, Green Day, The Moody Blues, Supertramp, Led Zeppelin, Alan Parsons and others. For many of these I thought I had every CD they had released, not counting the best of which were of course redundant. In my search to replace my digital collection I found a lot of albums I didn’t know existed. Many I had never seen in the music stores I used to visit. This brings me to the value of online digital music if done right the target audience is wider than the music industry realises. People can find music they didn’t know existed because in some places the music labels only bring in to a place what they know they can sell a few thousand of.

So I have been playing around a little more with SSIS or the upgrade to Data Transformation Services under SQLServer 2008.  So here is the problem, it makes everything overly complex, probably for the training dollars. Consider the fairly simple task of moving data from an SQL Server table to an Excel spread sheet. Under DTS a few seconds work. In this case I also wanted to make one small change to the data on the way.

So I created the Control flow, which was easy a simple data copy. Under that the three task were also fairly simple. Specify an Input, an OLE DB connection and pick the table and column, easy. Then a simple script transform to convert line feeds into new lines, i.e. a simple REPLACE command. Then drop that into a column in an Excel spreadsheet. Suddenly things got very difficult very fast. I tried all kinds of things but nothing worked. It should have been as easy as ‘create a workbook with a worksheet with the following column and drop in the output.” There was no simple way to do this, Microsoft does it again, turned a simple task and one that people would want to do often into an impossible task that required multiple steps, extra items in the data flow, Create statements and so on. The question, and one I imagine SSIS beginners will be asking all the time is, why did Microsoft make it so hard?

Chatting with a few IT professionals recently conversation moved to the Cloud. Like the Internet the Cloud is a virtual storage concept, i.e. you may not know where your information is being stored. Your data is being looked after by an unknown group somewhere in the world.  If you remember James’ first law “anything held in a digital form (with public access) is hackable” then as long as you are happy with the real chance your information will become public then the Cloud computing is for you. Like many computing terms these days Cloud computing is a descriptor of a range of technologies. IT is a descriptor for working on the Internet e.g. doing your word processing on documents not held on your computer. It is the Internet equivalent of a Local Area Network (LAN) but without the local control and your security.

The other subject covered was contracting or the outsourcing of work. In most Western nations these days many people are contractors. This allows organisations to not give any benefits that a full time employee would get like paid holidays. Also in a world where it is becoming more difficult to fire an employee it allows the company to get rid of someone more easily if they are on contract. On the negative side you can find people who have been on contract for over ten years in the same position. It also means that the people you get to say manage your security are not really part of your business, i.e. they feel no ownership, and this can weaken the protection of your critical information.

Industry News

No short term relief in sight for the prices of hard drives. Even though the production capacity is nearly back up to the pre-flood levels, well about 80 per cent at least. Since everyone ran out of stick last December it will take a long time to back to the real balance it used to be. This lack of stock has not been a problem the last couple of months because it has been the slack season. Hitachi and Seagate were not affected as much and so they recovered the fastest compared to Toshiba and Western Digital. It has not only been hard drives but other components that were affected which impacted the whole supply chain. So shortage of components, higher prices and smaller margins are hitting all the PC makers and as a result is putting the flash memory producers in a stronger position. So prices will hit about 40 per cent up from what they were and it will take most of the year for them to drop again.

Microsoft is porting Office to the iPad. Sounds innocuous enough but it gives Apple credibility and validates the iPad and associated tablet platforms as an alternative to the PC and notebook computer. Some are suggesting that this could mean the end of Windows as an operating system but that is probably a big stretch. I’m guessing that Microsoft wants to get into at least part of the mobile market. All they have these days is a failed mobile platform and some Android royalties. This is not new back in 2001 people were still debating if a Mac was a good business platform and Microsoft made it easy by giving them Office back then. Don’t however expect to see Office on Android in the near future, unless the Apple market really falls by the wayside. Why? Well consider that Apple is really a device maker but Google competes with Microsoft on a number of different fronts. Better to choose a company that is not really a direct competitor on too many levels, hence Apple.      

Sigh, according to the Japanese they have had a breakthrough in optical memory. Why the sigh? Well we have been hearing about the joys of optical circuitry since the 50’s, yes really it has been that long. In this case the NTT claim that they have created an ultra-low-power optical RAM using optical cavities that represent a 1 or 0 by either passing or blocking light. The bad news is the memory lasts for about 1 microsecond, the good news is that is long enough for other components to use the information. The bad news is that they didn’t say when this may be out in the real world. The good news is that it is a very low power process. Yes good and bad news all round.

Blog Currents – 2012, Feb 22

 So SSIS or SQL Server Information Services is amazingly powerful but like most things Microsoft it takes longer to do what was a simpler task in say the older DTS. Yes you can do so much more but a simple transfer of data from one data source to another seems to take longer to set up. Remember when you could tick say 10 tables to be moved under DTS. Well this is 10 setup steps under SSIS each defined one drag and drop icon at a time. I admit that I am still at the novice stage and there may indeed be a simple way to do this but using the basic data source, data destination tasks it seems to be harder to do the easier stuff, so far at least.

It has been a busy week for me as I am working two jobs at the moment. One of them is in the Delphi SQLServer application world and the other in the more rarefied world of the Database Administrator or DBA. Like most IT tasks there are different levels to the DBA role. At its most basic the DBA or programmer level DBA sets up a database, links some tables using foreign keys and perhaps adds an index or two to the mix to make the queries go a little faster. Adding another layer of complexity are the stored procedures built on SQL statements. Moving a little higher up the chain are Maintenance Plans that are really just mini SSIS jobs including backups of databases and logs, reindexing jobs and many others that are then scheduled to run under the SQL Server Agent environment.

Moving a little higher are the job logs, the error messages and tracking down problems like blocks, locks, space and memory issues and other tuning tasks to keep everything running happily on say a Windows Server box of some kind. Finally there is the data recovery, disaster planning and so on involving off server backups, mirroring, chaining and a number of other more esoteric DBA problems at the most senior levels. Depending on the organisation the DBA role may stop at the more basic levels or involve all of them with a multi-server, multi-site environment. The latter is what I found myself dumped into the middle of recently and catch up has been an adventure.

This brings me to the issue of training courses for such roles. They suck. Sure all the subject areas are covered, sometimes in some detail. The books also cover such topics and even the occasional hint on how to clear a block. For the most part however, and this is the area where the DBA needs to be aware, they do not cover what to do when things go wrong. That role has defaulted to the boards and user groups where some bunny has faced the problem for you and somehow managed to find out a solution. The same things happens to you and it is a Google search or many of them that brings you to the answers, or something close, that you need to solve your version of the issue. All I can say is thank the powers that be for the creation of the Internet.

That brings me to the issue of managers. For the most part you are idiots. No one or even two people can know or be trained in everything you will need in an organisation as far as IT is concerned. You need programmer types, analyst types, networking bodies, database types and depending on scale even the occasional DBA. You need testers, never let the programmer be the only tester, documenters and other roles that one person cannot fill unless it is a very tiny project. Yes, in the past when things were a lot simpler one or two people could do it. These days Visual Studio or .NET development is different from SharePoint. Business Intelligence tools and multi-dimensional cubes are typically a lot different than standard relational database projects. Yes I know there is a lot of crossover but for the most they are separate worlds and paradigms that have a different focus and a different way of thinking when it comes to design and usage.

So what I am trying to say in a rather long winded manner is that the field of information technology has grown quite a bit since the first BASIC version hit the market. Game programmers are vastly different from application developers. Actually that has always been true, well since graphics progressed beyond blocks at least.

Industry News

In a recent poll by Essential Research the campaign against Australia’s National Broadband Network appears to be losing ground. The reason for this is simple the average Australian knows diddly about the NBN and the powers that be in Australia are working very hard to make sure it stays that way. As the IT savvy scoff at government presentations that should really start “see there is nothing up my sleeve” the average punter believes what they are told and make sounds of awe when told they won’t have to go to the doctors anymore once they are connected to the NBN. OF course the really fine print says something like you will be able to connect to your local GP if and only if you have purchased the highest speed package and your doctor will only be giving you basic advice, not much more than over the phone, across your new and highly expensing NBN link. The uptake has been very, very low and pricing is still double that of a regular, and sufficient for most, ADSL2+ connection.

With the current advances in wireless connectivity and more on the way the eventual $100 billion white elephant will either die or cost taxpayers in Australia a lot for a long time. That or it becomes a forced monopoly which is one possibility.  

As readers know I love new technology and advances in engineering. The latest comes from the University of Melbourne where a team has built a single atom transistor and even more exciting they can duplicate the results that have removed the problem of 10nm positional uncertainties. Or more simply very tiny transistors that can be placed accurately as required. So how do they do this? Using an electron tunnelling microscope they lift one silicon atom out of a group of six and replace it with a phosphorus atom. Yes I know this makes it a six atom transistor but it is still cool. This is enough of a structure to allow connection of contacts and voltage. Oh BTW, you also need to keep it at -196 degrees Celsius to run. Will it ever be commercial probably not but who cares you have to admit that this is cool (no pun intended).

It is doubtful that people in the UK will have access to Pirate Bay for very much longer. A High Court judge has ruled that file-sharing website and its users violated the copyrights of nine record labels based in the UK. The other key part of the ruling is that the operators profited from the site making them liable as well. SO expect to see the telecoms in the UK blocking access and within a few microseconds an new, more protected and harder to bring down site will spring up in its place. The music industry being too lazy to come up with a workable model of their own will continue to attack those that have.

Blog Currents – 2012 Feb 15

This is why people turn to piracy. The day after the death of Whitney Huston, Sony and Apple doubles the price of her albums on their pay sites. There are sites, easily found, that will give you her discography for free, in high def sound. As I have been writing for many years now music makers and distributers don’t understand people, they don’t understand markets and they don’t understand digital media. If they had halved their prices perhaps people might have ignored pirate sites, doubling the price simply tells people not to buy from suppliers like Sony and Apple.

I have been working away at my book on Business Intelligence SQL Server 2008 and the more I read the more things are really the same, just new tools and dressed up to make things easier. That being said it also reinforces my view that given enough time Microsoft can eventually come up with a good set of tools. Many don’t like the Ribbon but Office 2010 is a very powerful business suite. Do you need it at home? Probably not and Open Office could be put in a large number of organisations and do everything they need.

For many years I used DTS (data transformation services) to move data between databases, typically to and from Microsoft ones. The Intelligence Services (SSIS) suite takes DTS, pumps it up with steroids and adds all the tools I ever wanted and most of the tools everyone else also wanted or need in an ETL (export transform load) product. SQL Server has also evolved into a reliable, fully featured database system supporting both relational and cube based functionality. No, I have not been taken over by aliens and while some of my newspaper article readers may be surprised by these sentiments they should remember that I would always write good things about good products. It was just that for many years Microsoft had little that made that grade.

My BIOS problems for example were the result of the Microsoft policy of “if anything changes in the hardware platform then throw a tantrum and freeze the system.” I finally managed to get things up and working and it was not the BIOS but Windows 7’s reaction to the BIOS upgrade. In the end I had to reinstall Windows 7 during which it never complained once proving that it was the “oh my god things have changed” issue rather than a bad BIOS. Of course as soon as I got everything back up and running my Internet went down, not related. It has been four days now with a possible two more before I get back up. In today’s world that is a long time for Internet access to be down and the problem is Australia, where I am now. Service standards are very poor and people don’t work on weekends here.

Not something that would happen in Bangkok any more but in Australia the service is rubbish. On the positive side I use TPG whose service group has easier access to the exchanges than others. I was told by someone in the know that if I was say on Optus it could take at least week to get back up. For an IT professional that relies on e-mails the only real; option appears to be to have a backup redundant connection with a competitor to cover any down time. Remember this if you need good and reliable service or if you work from home. So I am writing and research this week’s article on a computer at the office, not where I work but at least one with a working Internet connection. It also means you get to see it a bit earlier this week. It could be worse I could be in Iran.

Industry News

While I may complain about not having Internet access for a couple of days consider say the Iranians who may have Internet access but little access to Internet material. A week ago the country put a block on all the SSL based VPNs it could find. This was done to make sure local Iranians could not bypass restrictions by using the well known TOR Project. They also found that access to Google Mail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail was also cut off. There were a number of other services blocked as well effectively cutting Iranians off from any open news services so that the local authorities could control all information to the people. Yes these are the people that most Leftie, Greenie, woolly headed thinkers believe should have access to nuclear weapons.

As I write this some restrictions are being lifted, mostly e-mail access, probably because it is affecting the remaining business with Russia and other sympathetic nation states. The term for this being used, and quite appropriately, is the Halal Internet. This would essentially be a closed Internet system using a NAT firewall around the whole country that will block all haram sites. Best estimates still put this 4 years away and Iran may become a glowing pile of ash in the meantime.  

In a couple of weeks the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is due out and they can no longer abstain from telling people what they are in for. It looks like Windows 8 will generate an environment where the operating system has a big impact on the way that application are written. This will affect how an application is written and how it is delivered. The first problem will be to convince all those who write fro Microsoft that they will need to upgrade the way they do business.

Windows on ARM is another new proposition. Yes there will still be lots of Windows on Intel and Windows on AMD but there is a definite shift to ARM in the future because the mobile platforms are the biggest growing markets. First problem for readers, most current Windows x86 apps will not run on Windows 8, with the exception of Microsoft ones of course. In particular Office 15 and IE 10 will be OK. There will be no plug-ins for IE on the new platform, none at all. No Flash, No Silverlight and so no business apps, web media or advertising will be allowed. WOA will be a locked down system that will probably go the way of iOS i.e. only a small select group of people will ever be interested in it.

The reasoning is to stop bloatware and third party apps clocking up the operating system. ROTFL as it was mostly the Microsoft apps that fitted into that category. Not quite sure where Windows on ARM will end up but I suspect it will never appear on any of my devices. Also not quite sure why Microsoft is trying to take back the role now owned by Apple, i.e. the Evil Empire who controls your every digital experience, but it is not a good look fir the future. 

Not really news but Anonymous and associated groups have been busy attacking the CIA, the Mexican Senate and Interior Ministry websites, Alabama.

Blog Currents - 2012 Feb 08

So I am back on my old computer at the moment, actually I am back two versions to my old XP 64 machine because I have moved my XP boot drive somewhere so I’m stuck with this version.

The problem started when I downloaded and used the Gigabyte BIOS updater software, it is slick, it found an updated BIOS and loaded it onto my new motherboard. I was having problems with the USB 3.0 working with a connected USB drive and thought it would solve the problem. Instead it confused Microsoft or in this case my Windows 7 Professional installation. It got to the Microsoft flag and went into recovery mode, was unable to recover so I am back to my old machine.

The scary part was that I was not surprised by all of this Microsoft is generically hopeless when it comes to any changes made to a PC, hardware or firmware in this case. I’m going to give it back to the people who built it and see if they can do anything like flash the BIOS back to the original version perhaps. Yes Microsoft sucks.

OK I worked out that the SATA connections were different so I edited the boot.ini file and I am back to my regular XP now.

I have been slowly working my way through the book “Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2008” written by Brian Larson. Initially I couldn’t find the project files and database samples but a quick e-mail and a day later the author had responded to me with the link I needed. That is impressive support from a book author or for that matter batter than most organizations these days.

I am doing this to brush up on the latest terms, the latest tools and to satisfy the job adverts that are around these days. I am finding that the concepts themselves are very similar to what I have used in the past it is mostly the tools associated with SQLServer and its dominance of the marketplace.

For example I am familiar with OLAP cubes but this is now part of the Business Intelligence suite and Analysis Services. I am finding out quite a bit about data marts, data warehouses and the Unified Development Model introduced with SQLServer 2005 and as I absorb bits and pieces I’ll summarise them and pass them along in future columns so that readers unfamiliar with these things can also come up to speed with the latest database tools and development technologies.

Working from a book is a little harder than watching a video training course but I am slowly getting through the chapters and taking notes the old fashioned way, in a notebook, with a pen.

Industry News

Like Clippy the rumour is that Microsoft is killing off the Start button with Windows 8. Introduces with Windows 95 the Start button has been part of our lives and our knowledgebase for a while now but Microsoft needs new training dollars and with the Start button missing punters will be looking for guidance. Apparently Microsoft is not all that happy with the Start button and according to on member of the development team the new facility will provide "Improved search, more room for all your programs, tiles that are alive with activity, and richer customization all suddenly become possible when the venerable, but aging, Start menu is transformed into a modern Start screen." Not sure what that means but it sounds exciting though smacks a little of the Sirius Cybernetic Cooperation terminology.

North Korea now has apparently one million mobile phone users. Pity that many don’t seem to have an electricity at night.

It seems that all the major players are buckling under the no open networks policies of some of the world’s countries. This blog for example is hosted by Google as part of my Gmail account. Samsung also uses this platform for its Marketplace connectivity, at least I had to provide a Gmail account when I started using it.

Like Twitter backing down, Google will now remove content posted on their blogging platform on a country-by-country basis. The reason given was to help it take down material deemed to be unlawful in one country but to enable readers in other countries to see it. In other words folding to those countries with no freedom of speech or expression. People may be able to get around the restrictions by telling the browser to display content on a non-country-specific basis. E.g. Http://blogname.blogspot.com/ncr. The NCR stands for no country redirect and will always take you to the US English blog. Why a Western driven system is allowed to be dictated to by countries without freedoms is a mystery to me.

I found this one out at the office. Anonymous related hackers Lords of Dharmaraja managed to get a download the source code for Symantec’s pcAnywhere recently. This happened because talks had broken down between the hacker group and Symantec or in this case a Federal agent pretending to be Symantec. The 1.27 GB file was posted to the Internet soon after. The group also has a number of other products from Symantec.

Offers ranging from $1K to $50K were rejected in exchange for destroying the downloaded code. Norton Antivirus was also made available. There are some rumors that the code contains a number of backdoors that allow government agencies to access machines with the products installed. I guess there will be confirmation of the uploads turn out to be the real source code. The hackers were after money to supposedly not tell the world their products have these backdoors installed. There were other rumors a few years back that the US Government was demanding such backdoors for any products sold in the US, including encryption software.

Google is coming out with some cool glasses that will work a little bit like the Terminator or Iron Man HUD images seen in the movies. They will come with voice input and output, so this means a mike and headphones like some sunglass makers have brought out previously, but you will have to speak ... very... clearly. There will also be a low-res camera plus Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth comms plus GPS. The screen is moved and "clicked" by the wearer tilting his head. This is gong to look a little strange on the bus.

That's enough for this week I'm going to try and fix my boot problems.