Oracle OpenWorld 2009

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 started today and it appears to be an exciting event.  Larry Ellison in his keynote today spoke about Sun and Oracle and how that combination would beat out IBM.  At the same time, Oracle has other systems vendors as partner — especially the very important HP, which also owns EDS, crucial for Oracle deployment.  At the same time, HP and EDS, along with Oracle, have IBM as major competitor.

Looking at the sponsor list for Oracle OpenWorld 2009, there are also many other consulting sponsors.  These major consultancies’ businesses do have a big dependency on Oracle.  So to some extent, Oracle has systems and storage vendors, along with consulting companies, all aligned against IBM.

IBM has moved its business more and more into services and consultancies, with IBM software being a major component.  Could IBM, being nearly 4X bigger than Oracle, put Oracle at bay, even when Oracle has many folks with common interests supporting it?

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

IEEE One Voice Video

Inspiring video on IEEE’s role on technologies and its impacts.

Data Stores: No One Solution

As a tool is used by more and more people, we see more and more flavors of the tool, and eventually evolution of the tool.  How many types of screw drivers are there? 

As Michael Stonebraker points out in his blog on ACM:  there is no one database that solves all problems.

Same thing can be said of data stores:  it’s no longer a choice between direct attached disks, SAN block storage, NAS file systems.   Many of the developments came about because of the use of multiple servers to build web services, cloud computing, and grid computing.  The developers found that they can significantly improve system performance by locating data closer to the application or to the edge (where the data is accessed), that they could ease the complexity of development by relaxing consistency constraints (which are not needed) — see CAP Theorem, and that they could significant lower costs by avoiding or minimizing the use of expensive SAN storage or CDN data delivery.

	Problem being solved	Implementation	Characteristics
Hadoop HDFS	Ensure availability of data for distributed batch processing.	Distributed servers, with one master metadata server and multiple data servers.  Data is replicated at 3X normally.	Changes to data require creation of new copy of data.
Facebook Haystack	Minimize use and cost of CDN to provide photos to users.	Distributed servers:  memory for metadata and local disks for photos.	Mostly read system; CAP less an issue.
Yahoo! MObStor	Provide fast and highly available access for unstructured content, for operational storage	Multi-layer:  Global Object Management, Local Object Management, Object Store that accepts different types of storage	Offers eventual consistency

As the value of storage management shifts beyond SAN and NAS, the question now is:  “Should storage vendors be offering products in this area?”

Yahoo! Still Supporting Hadoop

When Yahoo! announced that it’s outsourcing search to Microsoft, some folks became concern that Yahoo! could end its sponsorship of Hadoop.  This is cleared up in the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog:  Yahoo! will continue to sponsor this effort.

Open source software requires sponsors to staff engineers in order to develop and maintain the software; and Yahoo! is the key sponsor for Hadoop.  Yahoo! has other uses for Hadoop in addition to search.  Like Linkedin and Facebook, Yahoo! has lots of users and groups, and like these other web 2.0 companies, Yahoo! can run data mining and analytics for its purposes, such as targeted advertising.  Many data analytics algorithms, including machine learning, can scale linearly with a Hadoop architecture.  So it’s very believable that Yahoo! has a big stake in having a robust Hadoop implementation,.

For discussion sake, if there were no Hadoop, the existing alternatives are somewhat limited:

• Google is not open sourcing it’s GFS and MapReduce.
• Microsoft has yet to open up its DryadLINQ.

At the same time, if Yahoo! were to pull Hadoop sponsorship, it’d likely that others could come out to sponsor Hadoop.  My guess would be Linkedin, Facebook, and even Google.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Mobile and Cloud – Upcoming Conference

IEEE Computer Society in Silicon Valley is holding its annual conference on Saturday July 18.   Moving not far from last’s year’s theme on Cloud Computing, this year it is on mobile devices and their impact to cloud computing.

Last year’s event was a great conference.  I’d expect this year to be the same.

Details here. 

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

How Twitter Is Scaling

On June 24, we had a thought provoking set of presentations at the SDForum SAMsig, arranged by our departing Co-Chair Paul O’Rourke.  The presentations ended with how Twitter is scaling today with the rewriting of the backend infrastructure from Ruby on Rails to a new language called Scala.  Notably, a queuing system, kestrel, that mediates between Twitter’s web user interface and the processing of “Tweet following” and sending tweets was written in Scala and implements Actor.  This implementation is much simplified from other implementations, is more reliable, and scales to handle billions of tweets.

The switch from Ruby to Scala for Twitter’s backend is detailed at Artima developer, run by Bill Venners, who also mediated the presentations by the 3 speakers (Hewitt, Sommers, Pointer) at SAMsig.

3 themes came out in the meeting, that pointed to Twitter’s switch to Scala:

• Actor model enables simple programming of applications involving concurrency
• Scala language features make programming fun and interesting
• JVM has solid reliability and thread scaling

Actor model

Created by Carl Hewitt some 35 years ago at MIT, the Actor model is surfacing as a good way to think about and to implement systems that involve multiple simultaneous communications, such as chat and Twitter.  Actors are objects that do not operate on the same content that changes (mutable states) and communicate with each other via messages (message passing).  As the result, the actor model eliminates many of the headaches that programmers face when solving the concurrency issues involving millions of senders and receivers of messages. 

At SAMsig, Hewitt reviewed some of these issues and the history of the creation of the Actor model.

Scala

Scala is a recently created language that runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and thus uses all the facilities of the Java environment.  It takes advantage of the proven reliability, performance, and other capabilities offered by the JVM.  However, many programmers find coding in Java could be tedious with its formal requirements.  Scala makes it fun for programmers with its simplicity of passing functions (functional programming like LISP) and pattern matching (more general and powerful than C case statement).  Scala also implements Actor using the multi-threading capabilities of JVM, while removes the complexity of thread communication for the programmers. 

At SAMsig, Frank Sommers presented many of the features of Scala in a short 40 minutes.  There was much to take in in a short time.

JVM reliability and multi-threading

JVM has proven to be reliable and can scale easily to take advantage of the latest multi-core processors and large cluster of servers running together in the data center.  Robey Pointer indicated that  by using Scala to write the Twitter queuing system, kestrel, he was able to take advantage of all the goodness in the JVM, without having to write in Java.  And yet, Java could be a backup language if Scala fails.   Furthermore, by using Actor within Scala, the coding was much simplified from similar code written in Java, as the Actor enforces a share-nothing form of communication, designed for concurrent environment.  The code size for kestrel is estimated at half the size of similar code written in Java.  Without the complexity of managing threads and locks explicitly in kestrel, along with smaller code size, the support and maintenance of the code is much easier.  In fact, kestrel runs on multiple servers and processes billions of tweets without failing.  System responsiveness is fast.  Pointer’s slides are here.

The combination of Actor, Scala, and JVM makes the kestrel queueing system and Twitter  reliable, scalable, and fast.  By writing the code in Scala and using Actors, the code is easier to develop and simpler to maintain.  Such combination of these elements points to the continuing innovation happening with software.  This serves as a good example for us, as we endeavor to develop new products, that we consider new advances in software (such as Scala), rather than just being stuck with doing things the same old way.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Winning New Business

This book by Richard Denny provides good insights for people wanting to understand sales and the selling process.  Denny provides good summaries and illuminating “wise words” at the end of each chapter.  Some chapters are very applicable to those looking for employment.  Best “wise words”:

If you want to increase your successes, double your failure rate.  (Go for the ‘no’)

Yesterday is history.  Tomorrow is a mystery.  Today is a gift.  That is why it is called the present.

Some good info from the book:

4 ways to grow a business:

• increase number of customers
• increase average transaction value
• increase frequency of repurchase
• acquisition

6 stages of successful presentation:

1. show the results
2. go to prices and fees, get a reaction
3. go into detail
4. give one or two case histories appropriate for prospect
5. provide something to give you credibility
6. outline your guarantee (risk reversal)

Definitely well worth reading, and keeping a copy for reference.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Inspirations from OPENforum’09

OPENforum’09 was well attended, albeit on a Saturday, with a full audience at the large auditorium at the Computer History Museum.  I saw 2 of the 3 keynotes and I found both inspiring.

Warren Packard of DFJ described 3 curves that drive technology, entrepreneurship, and the economy:

• Bell curve:  the statistical nature of the world
• S-curve:  dynamics of competition and relationship between effort and product improvement and eventually replacement by new technology breakthroughs
• turkey curve (ala Taleb‘s Black Swan):  there are the unpredictable, high impact rare events
  

  Turkey Curve

Packard projected optimism in emerging technologies and in entrepreneurship being key to solve the difficult problems in the world.  He spoke on the positive contributions of the real time web, social networks, MEMS, new materials, dramatic cost reduction of DNA sequencing that would lead to new ways of medical diagnosis,  data center transformations, emerging user interfaces that combine the virtual and the real world.  These disruptive changes would bring about good. 

When asked about today’s economic and environment calamities, Packard’s response was that these are huge issues, absolutely surmountable, by the drive of entrepreneurs to develop solutions to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by these challenges.  Packard’s answer to political oppression in the world is to give people hope, to lead them to see the future, and people will work toward that future. 

What an inspiration!  Just consider:  our actions are driven by our beliefs.  So believe in hope and the positive future, then we can work toward that future.

Masood Jabbar, formerly of Sun Microsystems, gave the second keynote and he spoke from his life experiences and lessons learned:

• 10 years of experience is a myth, it is more like 1 year of experience, 10 times.  We learn quickly when we hit the wall or when things are new and uncomfortable.  But we are not good at learning when things change very slowly or the environment is familiar and comfortable (i.e., over 10 years of doing similar things).  Lesson is:  when it ain’t broken, change it; lest the world changes on us and it becomes very costly for us to change.
• There is over-emphasis on team work.  If the team does not have active debates, the result one gets is the lowest common denominator of the team members.  Lesson:  teams without debate produce mediocre results.
• Todays’ economy is like a Formula One race car going into the pitstop, where the actions of the pit crew would determine the outcome of the race.  Lesson:  act now to take advantage of the opportunities as the economy recovers.
• Lesson from Fred Smith of Fedex:  “No company can ever get customer satisfaction without employee satisfaction.”

I consider the following the best insight from Jabbar:  To win for the future, you have got to move the ball forward today, and every day.

This was a great event.  Very inspiring.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Enthusiasm at the Hadoop Summit ’09

At the Hadoop Summit ’09, the large auditorium at the Santa Clara Marriot was overflowing with people.  There was huge enthusiasm for this open source software and its applications.  Some key notes I got from this event:

 The Hadoop ecosystem provides the framework to run big data applications using computer science techniques (distributed systems, algorithms, machine learning, …)  faster, and at much lower costs. 

The underlying compute infrastructure is cloud computing, pioneered by Amazon, that offers low cost to run multiple computers, on an as-needed basis.  The ease to scale quickly to thousands of computers makes cloud computing elastic.  This elasticity shortens the time for innovations/problem solving by deployment scalable parallel computing resources.  Hadoop simplies the programming of the large distributed system with the map-reduce programming model and a distributed file system.

In the 3 years since its inception, there is a large ecosystem around Hadoop, including Pig, Hive, HBase, Zookeeper, Cascading, Mahout, Katta, …  Cloudera has stepped in to provide a distribution to ease the deployment of Hadoop.

The range of problems that could be solved by using Hadoop is expanding:  from gene sequence matching, to Large Hadron Collider data analysis, to matching potential mates, to SPAM filtering, to classifying and organizing photos, to machine understanding of human language, to analyzing large mobile call data.  The practitioners in these diverse fields say by using Hadoop in a cloud infrastructure, they could solve their problems at much lower cost and faster– in hours/days rather than weeks.

Linkedin (at ScaleCamp the night before) claimed that they could produce revenue generating products in less than 2 weeks using Hadoop and machine learning on their data.  For example, Linkedin is analyzing the profile data to map out career paths.  Other companies like Facebook are banking on growth strategy that leverage the extraction of information from the large subscriber data available from their services. 

The was excitement at the Hadoop Summit.  Hadoop and its ecosystem offer a promising platform to address big data problems and applications.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Laughing Bot

I caught this at the end of day on the show floor at TiECON 2009.  Done by a Japanese company, Speecys Corp.  Have a laugh.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

One Day @ TiECON

I spent May 16 at TiECON 2009.  There appears strong interests in entrepreneurship:

• The announcer said attendance was 20% above last year’s, while attendance at othere conferences were reduced;
• Michael S. Malone mentioned that there is growth in ”encore entrepreneurs”, those over the age of 40, vs the younger entrepreneurs.

Three of the sessions were especially noticeable:

• Keynote by Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com.  He spoke about Zappos, its focus on customer service, reaping customer life time value, delivered by company culture, achieved by employee selection, training, and incentives.  He also spoke about achieving happiness, which ahs 4 factors:  perceived control, perceived progress, sense of connectedness, and finding meaning and value in life.

• A presentation on viral marketing by Kevin Epstein.  He provided 8 steps to viral marketing and suggested a book:  Influence by Robert B. Cialdini.  8 steps are:

1. Understand what you’re selling.
2. Craft the message.
3. Setup infrastructure.
4. Craft content.
5. Be ready to respond & reciprocate.
6. Be proactive, don’t just post, submit, participate, comment on others.
7. Reward good behaviors.
8. Do not spin.

• Interview of Reid Hoffman by Michael S. Malone.  Linkedin is not about how much time you spend online, but more on how efficiently you leverage your network.  Entrepreneurship is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down, you either survive or die.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Remix

Just finished reading Lawrence Lessig‘s Remix.  In the book, Lessig calls for changes to how we deal with conflict between commercial interests of content owners (music, video, …) and the emerging creativity using these content in mashups and remixes.  He makes the argument for the advent of the RW culture, the new hybird economy, and he calls for changes to the copyright laws.

Lessig describes the resurgience of the RW (read/write) culture, where with the advent of internet technologies, we now can mashup and remix software, pictures, text, video, music, and other content created by others into new creations.  RW culture contrasts with the RO (read only) culture that predominates in the 20th century prior to the internet, with creations like movies on tape, music on CD, software on DVD, etc.   This, of course, runs counter to the economic interests of owners of (commercial) content and their lawyers.

Lessig highlights the conflict in the way we exchange content via 2 economies::

• Commercial economy, where money or “price” is a central term of the normal exhcange.  Netflix, Amazon, and Google are 3 commercially successful enterprises based on the Internet, due to the Long Tail principle, which says that as the cost of inventory falls, the efficient range of inventory rises.  As transaction costs fall to zero, the efficient inventory rises to infinity.
• Sharing economy, where content are exchanged for the purpose of relationships, and when money comes in, poisons the relationships.  Examples include open source projects, where people are sharing their work without the exchange of money, for the benefits of the greater good or creation.

Lessig advocates the internet now allows for the hybrid of the 2 economies.  He pointed to Warner Brother, who has began to adopt this, has benefited from this approach.  By being less restrictive with its intellectual property, allowing Harry Potter fans to uses images in their fan sites, it strengthened it’s fan’s loyalty to the brand.

Lessig says that the copyright laws need changing, as they do not address the new world as the result of the internet.  He advocates 5 key changes:

1. Deregulate amateur creativity, allow for remixes.
2. Clear title and reinstitute opt-in copyright, where the copyright owner has to actively re-register after a period of time, in order to retain title to the work.
3. Simplify the law.
4. Decriminalize the copy.
5. Decriminalize file sharing.

Very valid, very logical.  This would surely take a long time for the world to accept and implement.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

SDForum Annual Developer Conference: April 17-18

SDForum is holding its annual developer conference on April 17-18, with emphasis on cloud computing platforms and applications, as well as the emerging social network business models.  There is also an unconference on April 18.

Speakers include:  Bill Grosso, Eric Klein, James Staten, Clara Shih, and others.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Now Certified Scrum Master

After going thru the training with Dr. Dan Rawsthorne of Danube Technologies, I’m now a Certified Scrum Master.

The focus of Scrum is to deliver results with small teams (less than 10 people).  Issues are identified and resolved by the team, product requirements are put in a backlog and prioritized by the product owner.  In the latest iteration of the Scrum definition, the product owner has responsibility (his/her neck is on the line) for the results delivered by the team and interfaces with the stakeholders to ensure proper communication with the stakeholders.  As a full-fledge member of the team, the product owner adheres to the Scrum rules in working with the team.  The Scrum Master ensures that the product owner follows the rules of Scrum.  Influence is key to the success of the Scrum Master.

While scrum was developed for software development, it could easily be applied to marketing launches and other product deveopment, as the focus is on team work and marching toward sprint cycles.  There are ways to coordinate multiple Scrum teams to form larger development work.

Many companies are already practicing scrum, including Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo!, and others.  This is a good practice to apply to teams.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Multi-tenancy @ Salesforce.com

With less than 1K servers, redundant data centers included, Salesforce.com supports over 55K customers, including Google and Dell.  This feat is achieved by an ingenious group of Oracle database experts who have taken an enterprise class relational database and turned it into a multi-tenant system that runs customer relationship management for these many customers.   BTW, this system supports close to 200M transactions each weekday, at less than 1/4 of a second response time.

On March 25, Craig Weissman, CTO of Salesforce.com, gave an illuminating presentation on the internal architecture at his company to a room full of attendees at the SDForum SAMsig.  Some highlights:

• There are 15 or so “pods”, each consisting of 50 or so servers, running a 4-way Oracle RAC and application (Java) and support servers.  Each pod supports thousands of customers.
• Each Oracle RAC database consists of static tables that store the data from thousands of customers all mixed together.  One row of data belongs to one customer and the next row belongs to another, and the columns may have completely different types of data between the rows.  Control and access to the data are managed by metadata.  In essence, the Oracle database is transformed to a multi-tenant database.
• Customer data in the columns are stored as human-readable strings.  Some customers have requested certain data to be encrypted.  Appropriate transformation functions are used to convert to the correct data types when the data are accessed.
• Using lucene, the data are all indexed.
• Apex is a new language to enable customers to write data processing applications, like a new generation of 4GL.  It resembles Java.  Governors are deployed to prevent abuse of the system resources.

The Salesforce.com architecture is an engineering feat in leveraging the strength of an existing product (reliability and scalability of Oracle RAC) to build a new system that supports thousands of customers on the web with million of transactions per day and fast response time.  Interestingly, Salesforce was able to move the underlying hardware from Sun Sparc systems to x86 and updated the Oracle version, over the course of 10 years, while retaining the higher level software architecture and getting substantiate customer growth.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Managing Humans

I just finished reading this book Managing Humans by Michael “Rands” Lopp.  Great book for software managers, managers, and individual contributors.  I find Rands provide realistic and practical advice on dealing with people who run your company, the person you work for, and people you manage.  Rands also provide interesting insights on people and classify them in his terms:   NADD, incrementalists, completionists, organics, mechanics, inwards, outwards, holistics, free electrons, joe.

Like usual, I borrowed this book from the library so I’d read it, as I tend not to read books I buy.  With this book, I purchased a copy via AllBookstores.com after I’ve read it.  It’s worth the purchase, if only for future reference.

Rands published other articles and blogs, including “What To Do When You’re Screwed“.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Cloud Computing – CCICE Perspective

With full audience, the CCICE Cloud Computing event on March 19 was a very interesting event.  The event host, Sara Rauchwerger, drove the program with a combination of video presentation, live teleconference, and live presentations by 2 speakers.  Furthermore, the entire event was broadcast live via the Internet using PAPItv.

In the use of multimedia, a pre-recorded video with Dr. Maik A. Lindner of SAP was shown to the audience.  A Windows PC ran the video.  Dr. Lindner spoke about the hype cycle of cloud computing.

With the live teleconference via Skype, Dr. Patrick Wong of IBM spoke about IBM’s cloud computing effort, while Sara drove the slides.

The live presenters had some interesting ideas about cloud computing:

• Praveen Kumar of Packet Island spoke about the  buzz word cycles and that “cloud computing” is replacing “SaaS”.
• Praveen Kumar spoke about the importance of ensuring Quality of Experience (QoE) in order for SMB to adopt cloud computing.  His way is to minimize CAPEX by managing the entire service life cycle.
• Greg Ness of Infoblox presented an interesting blog on  infrastructure 2.0:  www.infra20.com.

CCICE is pushing the envelope in conferences by incorporating what companies already do (video, teleconference, live video streaming, live presentations) to conduct an event.  For the people who attended the conference, they still get to do networking.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Upcoming SDForum Global Open Source Colloquium

Has open source become the default?  How does the rest of the world sees that?

SDForum will be hosting a Global Open Source Colloquium in San Francisco on next Monday, March 23.  Interesting set of topics:

• keynote by Larry Augustin (founder, VA Linux and angel)
• global initiatives with Arnaud LeHors, Mikko Valimaki, and others
• Report on Asia with Andrew Aitken of Olliance
• Microsoft open source advocate Sam Ramji
• panel on open source with Adam Blum, Jack Repenning, Michael Fauscette
• panel on VC $, moderated by Mark Radcliffe

Could be interesting.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Energy Matters

At the Monte Jade annual conference on March 7,  Dr. Arun Majumdar of Berkeley gave a very interesting talk on energy use and the opportunities for improvement.  He presented lots of data.  I found 3 of his points especially interesting:

1. When looking at overall energy use, there are 9 sources of supply and 6 areas of demand.  Even high growth rate in solar would take years to be of significant impact — that should not stop solar.

2. Abatement of energy use is the most efficient and effective way in the short term to solve the energy crisis.  There are many ways, including changing the way we build buildings and how a building is put together.  These savings are extremely significant.

3. Battery, energy storage, has improved little.  Storage capacity has doubled in 60 years.  New development in nanotechnolgy could help.

By focusing in these areas with new technologies and software, significant headway could be made in the next 3-5 years to improve the energy problem.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Reducing Database Costs with Network Attached Memory

Orion Letizi gave an interesting talk on Terracotta at the SDForum SAMsig tonight.  His example on the deployment of Terracotta to solve a database scaling problem was especially compelling:

Examinator example	Before	After
Concurrent web-based tests	5K	10K
Main database server utilization	75%	30%
Additional hardware	-	Additional commodity servers
Software changes	-	Management of session transient data from main database server to Terracotta networked memory

By moving the processing of various transient data used in the web service from the main Oracle database to Terracotta’s network attached memory model, with minimal changes to the Java code.  There were some additional hardware added to support the Terracotta servers, but these were low cost commodity hardware. 

This examples shows that often web/app/database architectures tend to rely on the backend database servers to manage the transactions, but also the transient data for sessions.  Transient session information includes data like tracking the page the user is on, the data that he has entered, etc.  Terracotta can manage the transient data in place of the main database.  The resulting system is much more efficient than having the entire web service architecture relying on the main database to maintain all the states in the system.

Terracotta is open source and works with Java based systems.  Orion mentioned that other languages can be supported, such as Ruby via jruby.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

A Simple Electric Motor

I learned about this motor from the Foothill CNET 119 class I’m taking.  The instructions to build this Beakman Electric Motor is by Chris Palmer.

This motor shows the marvel of nature:  

• voltage potential brings about an electric field (battery and wire)
• electric field generates magnetic field
• 2 magnetic fields in same direction cause repulsion (magnet and wire)

and the marvel of man’s ingenuity:

converting this knowledge into a device (electric motor) that’s used in so many applications from disk drives to garage door opener to cars.

I certainly have learned from this simple experience, reminding me why I was a physics major a long time ago.

To make the motor work, be sure of the following:

• the wire must be insulated wire, so the coil does not short
• one end of the wire has the insulated wire removed by sanding; the other end has only one side of the insulation removed (this ensures that the wire generated magnetic field is turned on and off as the wire spins, enabling the repulsion of the 2 magnetic fields to continue the spinning of the wire)
• regularly sand the ends of the wires again, as there are occasionaly electric arcs that bring about deposit (carbon?) on the wire that prevents electrical conduction

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Learning WPF from Charles Petzold

In the week of Feb 15, 2009, I had the opportunity to take a 3 full day class on WPF from Charles Petzold at Microsoft.  I had not written software for the .NET or Windows, but it was a good opportunity to understand this fundamental technology in the Microsoft world.

I learned some interesting things from the class:

• Silverlight is not a complete subset of WPF; Microsoft is pushing Silverlight, so the hope is that the 2 would sync somehow
• WPF can be done with XAML in many cases, even 3D presentation, C# would be needed for more complicated actions and controls
• WPF is tablet ready — an important support as we move forward with new user interface devices

I was able to follow along, because Charles showed lots of examples.  Great way to learn programming is by looking at examples and seeing the code work.  To become an example is writing XAML and C# with WPF, I’d have to study the APIs and use it for at least 6-12 months.  

Separately, I looked into other alternatives for RIA:

• MS WPF and MS Silverlight
• Adobe AIR / Flash / Shockwave
• OpenLaszlo
• Appcelerator
• and a few other ones (e.g. Sun JavaFX)

Charles Petzold is very well known and admired in the Microsoft community.  I’m thankful to have the opportunity to learn from and interact with him.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Fixing Vista Boot

I had a situation where the boot block for a Vista machine is on one disk drive and the Windows directory is on a different disk drive and the first disk apparently failed and I could no longer boot.  The solution is to rebuild the MBR on the second disk.  The following resources helped. 

Rebuild MBR

I used solution #2:

1. Boot Windows Vista Install CD
2. Select Repair
3. Start Command Prompt
4. Run bootrec /rebuildbcd

More info:

• Vista boot files
• Multiboot process
• Bootsect command
• BCDedit command
• Bootrec command

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Super Happy Dev House

I attended my first SHDH.  This time it’s held at Sun’s Menlo Park campus and it has over 350+ people on a Saturday afternoon that extended to 11pm.  People were doing programming and some even had computer controlled devices.  An interesting afternoon.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Enterprise Mashup

At the SDForum SAMsig January meeting, Klaus Roder of IBM showed the promise of mashup for the enterprise.  Klaus indicated that IBM is providing a set of tools to help enterprise customers to create quick mashups to access data.  Of course, in order to have good mashups, good data is a key requirement.  The tools that run on customer premises are available to enterprise customers for a fee.   A free test version of the capability is also available on the web, the web version (IBM Mashup Center) is similar to Yahoo!Pipes (not available for the enterprise).  Other than IBM, there are some vendors who offer similar capabilities, such as JackBe.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Desktop in the Cloud?

Microsoft’s James Senior showed a demo of Live Mesh to the SDForum Cloud-Services SIG on Jan 27.   Live Mesh provides desktop in the cloud.  By itself, might not be very interesting, but it promises to synchronize the content in various devices.  That could be sellable?

 Although it looks like a simplistic desktop with few features (save files, view files), there are many elements that could surface quickly.  In the developer area of Live Mesh, there are already demo applications.  Would Word, Excel, etc. be far behind?

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Big Interests in Cloud Computing

At the Jan 27 session of the SDForum Cloud Services and SOA SIG (just renamed from Web Services SIG), a bigger than expected crowd showed up, …, over 100 people.  Many were new to the SIG — there was an entrance fee as well.   There appeared to be big interests in cloud computing. 

Demos on Microsoft Live Mesh and Google AppEngine likely increased the interests.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Global Software Innovation

In CACM, Feb 2009, Ashish Arora, Matej Drev, and Chris Forman surveyed the current status of software innovations around the world.  They use the number of software patents as a measure of software innovation.  As can be seen from the chart below, the US still dominates in the number of software patents, thus software innovation.   Do note that these are software patents filed in the US.  Other countries could have underdeveloped patenting process, so there could be undercounting of software innovation.

 

There has been much outsourcing of software projects to India, China, and other countries.  These software developers over time take on more of the software project, including design.  And as demand for software grows in the local regions, the local software talents come to innovate on software developed for the local regions.  The authors made the point that software development tend to be located close to the lead users.   Over time, as local demand for software products and services increase, the local talents would create more innovations.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Consistency and Availability Tradeoff for Distributed Systems

In CACM, 01/09, Werner Vogels, in his article “Eventually Consistent“, describes how the construction of large distributed systems, such as Amazon EC2 and S3, would require the tradeoff between consistency and availability.  This follows Eric Brewer‘s CAP theorem (conjecture?).  The idea is that in any shared-data system, only 2 of following 3 properties could be satisfied:  consistency, availability, and tolerance to network partitions.  In large distributed systems, e.g. cloud-computing, tolerance to network partitions is a given.  So there is a trade-off between consistency and availability.

Vogels’ proposition is that availability of the system (and the resulting services) has higher priority to consistency in most cases.  He identifies different types of relaxed form of consistency, other than strong consistency — that all data stored in the entire system could be retrieved, and when compared, are the same.  The relaxed consistencies allow the Amazon implemention of the cloud to be highly available, and eventually, transaction updates are made consistent. 

This article points to the fact that in order to build cloud-computing architectures, previous assumptions such as ACID may need to be relaxed.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

More Cores Slow Computing

Sandia National Lab published a study that shows the current design of multi-core processors with high core count actually slow down the system performance.  Key issue is memory bandwidth.  The implication is that processor vendors like AMD and Intel need to improve memory and data access in addition to CPU computation.

 

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Servers vs Green

In IEEE Computer, 1/09, Kirk Cameron pointed out the ever growing contribution to the energy crisis, and consequently the carbon dioxide emission, with server infrastructures.  This chart shows the projected impact of servers in 2010:

To reduce the energy use and carbon footprint for server deployments, the following are potential solutions:

• Improve utilization of data centers — Previous studies have show that server utilization are less than 20%.  By deploying server virtualization, the utilization could be improved by several fold.
• Upgrade to the latest hardware.  Newer hardware with quad core processors offer much higher performance at similar energy use and costs as older hardware.  Many times, the issues is that businesses need to come up with the cash to pursue need capital.
• Migrate to cloud-computing, where virtualization is deployed and the cost of deployment is shifted from CAPX to OPEX, which could made the adoption easier for some businesses.  The following requirements would need be solved:  security, system availability, IT ownership, …

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Prediction Methods

In SMR Winter 2009, Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris outlined the following prediction methods with strengths and weaknesses:

• Biological Responsese Analysis
• Cluster Analysis
• Attributed Bayesian Analysis
• Content-based Filtering/Decision Trees
• Neural Network Analysis
• Collaborative Filtering
• Prediction (opinion) Markets
• Regression Analysis
• Social Network-based Recommendations
• Textual Analytics

These methods might only be applicable to specific areas and tend to require lots of data.  Like regression analysis, these methods predict the future based on past data, not likely to expose Black Swans.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Cloud Connect @ CHM

Today was the last of a 2-1/2 days of Cloud Connect conference at the Computer History Museum.  In the morning, Rob Helm of Directions on Microsoft and Lew Tucker from Sun were interviewed by David Berlind.  David called .NET and Java legacy, and asked how Microsoft and Sun would integrate these capabilities with cloud computing.   The answers pointed to the HTTP and TCP/IP being more the standard for everything. 

The infrastructure providers also had booths there, including Salesforce.com, Google, Amazon, Mosso, Rightscale.

In the afternoon, there were a number of unconference agenda.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

SDForum Through the Years

I was  at an SDForum party in its offices and I noticed this chart, which shows the various Special Interest Groups (SIG) that were active through the years.

The chart ended on 2004.  As of the end of 2008, there are 16 active SIGs, some of which did not appear at the end of 2004.  The software landscape is ever changing.

• Business Intelligence
• Cloud Services & SOA
• Emerging Technology
• Engineering Leadership
• International
• Java
• Marketing
• Mobile IP
• Search
• Security
• Semantic Web SIG
• Software Architecture & Modeling
• Start-up
• Venture Finance
• Virtual Worlds
• Web Services SIG
• Windows

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

VLAB: Upside of Downturn

VLAB held its first event in 2009 and it’s on finding the Upside to the current Economic Downturn.  It was a very interest session, with a sold-out crowd, even on inauguration day.

Renaud Laplanche of the Lending Club gave an upbeat presentation on his company, coming into the economy downturn with double digit monthly growth by offering a better deal for borrowers and lenders than traditional banks.

The moderator Drake Mosier guided the panel consisting of entrepreneurs Laplanche and John Squire of CoreMetrics, VC Rich Wong of Accel and angel Carol Sands of Halo Funds, analyst John Hagel of Deloitte, in an interesting conversation of surviving and thriving in today’s downed economy.

Some notable comments:

• John Squire:  “marketing analytics really hot”, …, opportunity in solving the “attribution” problem
• John Hagel:  opportunity in taking business intelligence at the enterprise and tie to financial metrics
• Rich Wong:  With expertise and focus in a specific segment, entrepeneurs can do well even in today’s economy.  One does have to be “extremely capital efficient in the short term”
• Carol Sands:  There is an enormous talent pool of semi-retired (i.e. relatively well-off) people in Silicon Valley who do not need to be CEO or in charge, but still want to contribute — startups should tap into this resource to leverage the experience of these folks;…  You don’t have to “spend equity dollars if you can get government money”, such as SBIR grants — you can find people (such as university professors) who can help you write these grants; …  There are likely opportunities to tap into the government, esp. with the Obama’ Administration’s agenda to drive up the country’s employment.
• Drake Mosier:  With tools like Google App, it’s low cost to start companies nowadays.

 The event was organized by a team of volunteers (Olga Milosavljevic–lead, Nick Narisaranukul, Matt Weeks, Alina Hua, Hiroshi Wald, Chris Roberson, and myself).  We met thru Christmas 2008 and New Year to ensure a good event and it turned out great. 
 

 

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

Fleeting Value of Technology

In speaking to Mike Demler about the changes in the EDA tool industry, I was surprised and continued to be reminded of the fleeting value of technology. 

Mike said that EDA tools are becoming commodity, despite their complexity and required expertise.  Fast and cheap computers have enable new EE graduates to re-create faster and better EDA tools.  Over the course of the time, even the stalwarts of Cadence and Synopsis are being compromised gradually.

Today’s technology is either tomorrow’s commodity or tomorrow’s memory.   Accordingly, the financial value of technology decreases over time and eventually disappear.

BECOMING COMMODITY

Examples include operating systems subsumed by open source Linux, high-end computer hardware replaced by Intel based systems.

THEN  BEING REPLACED

Not unlike the steam engine,  we are now seeing the gasoline engine is slowly being replaced by electric motor and batteries.  The expertise precisions and high engineering required to build gasoline engines are being obviated by the much simpler and lower cost electric motors and (to some extent) batteries.

DEALING WITH THIS:

… thus the PARANOIA mindset at technology based companies.  The goal being to continue to extract high value from the expertise and capability the companies have.

Short term tactic:  Improve and innovate on the technology.  Unfortunately, this strategy has a finite life, this could last 1 year or 100 years (ala the gasoline engine).  Some vendors who are operating in this mode are:

• Microsoft
• Intel

Long-term strategy:  Reinvent yourself, examples include:

• IBM has changed from being an office equipment vendor to computer vendor to service provider,
• Nokia has grown from a paper mill to a cell phone producer.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Bradski on ROS and OpenCV

On January 14, Dr. Gary Bradski gave a talk about Willow Garage‘s ROS and OpenCV at the IEEE RAS meeting.  It was the first time this RAS meeting has over 60 people and the first time we held it in the brand new auditorium at the CMU Silicon Valley campus.

As the creator of OpenCV, Bradski is still driving new developments in OpenCV, especially with 5 full time programmers and additional part time folks helping out, and collaboration with others like Michael Black, contribution by David Lowe (though not SIFT).  New developments include (but not limited to):

• stereo (dense stereo at 30Hz)
• 3D mapping
• improved optical flow
• learning algorithms incorporating random forest
• rewrite of SURF

One of Bradski’s application of these new development is to enable ROS to recognize doorknobs, which is still yet to be solved.

Bradski’s presentation is here.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Cloud Computing = SaaS?

From reading this ZDnet blog by Larry Dignan, Berstein analyst Jeff Lindsay seems to imply that Cloud Computing is essentially SaaS.  This chart is shown. 

By saying Open Office is a SaaS is stretching thing, as it is just a download of packages to install on desktops.  This brings out questions about this chart.  In addition, Lindsay did an analyst of the revenue from Amazon S3.  However, he used 15 cents / GB for an entire quarter, whereas Amazon charges 15 cents / GB / month, so this raises more questions.

Additionally, folks from GoGrid and Mosso and others would likely say they offer cloud-computing, but they are not included in this analysis.  The premise that cloud-computing = SaaS raises lots of questions.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Cloud Services, Yankee Group View

The Yankee Group has a good perspective on cloud services, divided the current offering in to 4 types.  The following picture appeared in an IEEE Computer article by Neal Leavitt:

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Pico Projectors

I saw these new pico-projectors at CES; they are made by Samsung, Optoma, and even Wowwee.  Projected pricing is $200 and up.   These projectors can fit in the palm of the hand.  A few years ago, projectors of this type would be priced over $1K and bigger than a laptop.  Two technologies that are disrupting market landscape of projection display devices:  superbright LED and TI’s DLP.

One of the marketing manager at Wowwee told me that these products, at $200, could enable kids to show their ipod or iphone content to their friends.  This cost reduction would allow many more people access to projectors.   Maybe this is why Wowwee is getting into the business.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Write Your Own Lighted Sign

I saw these neat signs at CES.  Just write with a white color marker on the plastic surface, the light on the panel would light up the writing.  There is a choice of 7 colors or just rotate the colors.  Great for signage with a personal touch.  These signs are avialable from www.glowrite.com.

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Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok

Gatekeeper – Tiny Security Computer

Yoggie Security Systems has been producing tiny computers, called Gatekeepers, that plug into a standard PC/Mac and act as a security appliance for the personal computers.   Each tiny computer is implemented as either an USB stick or ExpressCard.  It’s a 520MHz processor running Linux and security software.  By intercepting network traffic before it gets to the personal computer, Gatekeeper identifies and removes viruses, spams, etc., very much like a network security appliance does for a network.  The hardware isolation could provide an increased level of security — offering more peace of mind for those who do not want to deal with the complexity of installing and maintaining anti-virus software on the personal computer. 

 

 This is a neat way to apply tiny, powerful computers to improve existing systems, at reasonable low cost.  This method paves the way for the spread of computers everywhere, …, everywhere.   Point-cloud of computing?

 Copyright (c) 2009 by Waiming Mok