Johan Louwers is for more then 10 years working in the IT world in several roles. As a Java and PL/SQL developer, UNIX and Linux administrator, Oracle Consultant, Oracle DBA, network consultant, storage admin and much much more.
my view on the IT world
A very interesting whitepaper on security and hacking done by China (to be believed). I think this whitepaper is a very good read to get some more understanding in the basics of the role of china in the world of today.
"Starting in November 2009, coordinated covert and targeted cyberattacks have been conducted against global oil, energy, and petrochemical companies. These attacks have involved social engineering, spearphishing attacks, exploitation of Microsoft Windows operating systems vulnerabilities, Microsoft Active Directory compromises, and the use of remote administration tools (RATs) in targeting and harvesting sensitive competitive proprietary operations and project-financing information with regard to oil and gas field bids and operations. We have identified the tools, techniques, and network activities used in these continuing attacks—which we have dubbed Night Dragon—as originating primarily in China. Through coordinated analysis of the related events and tools used, McAfee has determined identifying features to assist companies with detection and investigation. While we believe many actors have participated in these attacks, we have been able to identify one individual who has provided the crucial C&C infrastructure to the attackers."
"iPhone App, Enhancements Available in Oracle's Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management", this presentation is shared by Oracle online and free for you to watch. From a personal experience and from a personal point of view I think that Oracle is making a great move at this point to intergrate project management and portfolio applications with mobile applications. This is not all the presentation is touching however for me it is a important part.
Why is the mobile option such a big deal? When you are working on a project, or in my case on multiple projects the same time you most likley will be running from place to place and you are always in need of the latest information. This is why I love e-mail on my mobile, you can send and read your mail always on the go and now you also have the option to look into the details of a project and add information to the project. This is especially handy when you are commuting daily by train and have some time on your hands while waiting for the train to come or when you are on the train. Making things more mobile and available always, everywhere and on all devices is in my personal opinion the way to go forward.
We will see this trend picking up in the upcoming years and I expect that we will see more and more applications in the business area adding a mobile part to it. For some companies this will not be a very big plus however for most companies this is a very big thing and it will help you as a employee to work always and everywhere you want. The new applications from Oracle do have a native app for the iPhone and the iPad and do have options to connect to other mobile devices, for example Android, by making use of a mail interface. If you would like to view the presentation please refer to the Oracle site at this location.
The transcript of the presentation reads:
The latest release of Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management offers many significant enhancements, including a new iPhone app and a streamlined architecture that enables companies to more effectively plan and operate business processes.
The new release’s integration with e-mail and smart phones improves communication among project managers, schedulers, and field personnel to ensure that projects stay on track and delays are minimized. Teams can comment on tasks via e-mail, view project to-do lists, and distribute photos via their mobile devices.
Other key benefits allow organizations to
* Unite project teams and stakeholders with a host of collaboration and feedback capabilities
* Reduce the risks of cost and schedule overruns
* Better optimize resources for maximum ROI
* Clearly monitor and visualize project performance versus plans to help workgroups achieve project commitments
The new release is designed for easy scalability—to aid a single person overseeing a small project, or tens of thousands of users engaged in millions of complex activities across hundreds of projects. And the application’s role-based capabilities address each team member’s needs and responsibilities. For example, senior managers can view real-time performance summaries for the organization while interactive dashboards, Web applications, and simple forms help workers across all levels easily communicate status updates and issue scope changes.
Interactive activity Gantt charts allow planners, schedulers, and project managers to communicate a more accurate and complete graphical representation of a project’s schedule. Top-down or bottom-up resource requests and staffing processes help groups match the right people with projects. And finally, calendar and activity network views provide team members with a clear view of ongoing assignments.
I you like to see the presentation slides without the audio and just want to have a quick look please check the document below;
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/60429468?access_key=key-m172fohqviweay4x411
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We currently see a trend that more and more companies are moving into the cloud. Some time ago the word cloud was a buzz word now it is becoming more common. Cloud is not the perfect world, it is just another way of handling and looking at IT. It will make that datacenters are no longer within a customer, it means that it will be at some other company who will take care of most parts of your application which in some cases you share with thousands of other companies.
People are still concerned about the multi tenancy as this is in conflict with all that has been IT for the past years. However we now see that companies start to make the move. This is a smart move and solves a lot of issues however it is also introducing some new issues. To be honest, those issues where already their in the past however now they are more clear. In none cloud landscapes you had the problem of systems that where not connected now we have the issue of clouds which are not connected. HOwever we are currently at another level of thinking. People are more into the SOA way of thinking and the SOA in the cloud way of thinking.
What we now see is that new solutions are coming to the market which help customers connect clouds. This is a great way forward and we will see a lot of companies picking up speed in this area. One example video from Capgemini is below which I personally think is a great way of looking at the issue and dealing with it. Capgemini Immediate is helping you with some of those issues.
A video form Oracle on their strategy and approach to cloud computing.
Short video howeve nice to watch to build your view on the subject.
Oracle has released a new press release which is stating a new Oracle VM template. They now have created a Oracle VM template which is based on Oracle Linux and will be running a Oracle MySql Enterprise version. This will provide the MySQL community in a even more relaxed position now they can simply provision complete MySQL installations on a Oracle VM platform. In my opinion this is a great move from Oracle to get (A) MySQL more in the picture within the Oracle community itself and (B) provide a even wider adoption of Oracle VM and Oracle Linux now they are expanding it to the MySQL groups within the Oracle community.
The press release can be found at the Oracle site and you can read a part of it below:News FactsThe new Oracle VM Template for MySQL helps eliminate manual configuration efforts and risks by providing a pre-installed, pre-configured and certified software stack that includes Oracle VM Server for x86, Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and MySQL Enterprise Edition.
By pre-integrating the world’s most popular open source database with Oracle Linux and Oracle Virtualization technologies, enterprise users and ISVs can quickly and easily deploy and manage a virtualized MySQL database server for Web and cloud-based applications.Using the Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition to deliver applications allows users to benefit from:
Faster deployments: Users can drastically reduce installation and configuration cycles both for initial deployments and to provision replicated scale-out environments.
Increased reliability: Using a pre-installed and pre-configured software stack, that has already undergone extensive integration and quality testing and is certified for production use, helps ensure a reliable and trusted environment.
Higher uptime: With MySQL’s replication capabilities plus Oracle VM’s built-in high availability features both planned and unplanned downtime can be reduced.
To further support the cost-effective delivery of high-performance web-based applications, the new Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition also provides users with access to the comprehensive suite of MySQL management tools including MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Query Analyzer, MySQL Workbench, and MySQL Enterprise Backup.
Oracle VM Templates are also available for Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris and other Oracle products.
Supporting Quote
"Oracle is committed to helping MySQL users more efficiently deploy and manage high-performance web and cloud-based applications at a lower cost,” said Tomas Ulin, vice president MySQL Engineering, Oracle. “With the introduction of the first Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition, customers can benefit from a fully integrated solution that is backed by Oracle’s world-class support, enabling faster deployments, increased reliability and higher uptime for MySQL applications in virtualized environments.”
Some people at Harvard University have greeted a template extension on the basic Drupal installation named OpenScholar. OpenScholar is intended to provide people with a Drupal installation which can be used to host a website for professors and research groups primarily. Looking at the templates they have build I wanted to give it a go. The installation is basically the same as that of standard Drupal. During installation of OpenScholar I encountered a issue which is also in some cases seen when you install Drupal itself. After the first installation page your webserver comes back with a empty page, looking at the HTML source code of the "empty" page it turns out the following error message is thrown:
Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 65 seconds exceeded in /public_html/includes/file.inc on line 934
The maximum exception time is set in your PHP configuration, this indicates the amount of seconds that a script can take to complete its task. You can resolve this by simply changing the value to something higher. Issue with this is that if you are on a hosted environment, like at a hosting provider, you will not have the option to change this value as it is set for all users on that webserver. Some options are available to you however. First is, you can add a setting to your local .htaccess file where you can change it for that specific directory. You have to add a php_value max_execution_time to this file. Secondly you can initiate a override in your PHP code itself.
However, most hosting providers will have set a setting preventing such overrides in their main PHP configuration. This is a simple and good approach from a hosting provider point of view. This is preventing certain user to consume all CPU power with bad code. For most users those options will not be valid as was in my case as I installed it not on my own server and was trying to install it on a server at a hosting provider.
Meaning we have to look into other options to resolve this issue. Looking at the code we found that the issue is coming from a part of the code that is checking the files on the file system to verify that all files needed for the installation are present. This scanning of the filesystem in some cases take more time than the time set for the max execution time. With some help from Sam Adams and his postings on acquia.com forums I found that you can prevent this scan from happening by hacking the install.inc file. What you have to do is open the file in VI and change the following line:
$installs = drupal_get_install_files($module_list);
into this:
$installs = array();
This will populate the variable $installs with a empty array and it will not call drupal_get_install_files with a list of modules to be checked. After making this change the installation go's without any issue.
Every now and then you have the feeling "how could I have missed this". In my case this came today when I was looking for a quick to deploy and easy to use database platform. I am currently working on a little project to automate some of my tasks at home and for this I am in need to store information. One options was storing it in XML files on the filesystem. However, due to the fact I am a Oracle guy I tend to look for a database solution first. Having a Oracle database running for the storing of this information is a little overkill and I wanted it to be standalone so using one of my already running Oracle databases for this was not an option.
MySql, PostgreSQL and some other things came to mind however when doing some fun google work I came to a database type I did never heard of before and looking at it the phrase "how could I have missed this" came to mind. MongoDB is a easy to deploy database and has some great options. Maybe not for this little project but for a lot of other projects this can come in handy. MongoDB is not having schema's such as most databases and documents are stored as BJSON (Binary JavaScript Object Notation)If you look at he way how to interact and query a MongoDB it somehow comes very naturally if you play with it. Below you can find some information from youtube from a Google User Group meeting where Will Shulman, founder and CEO of MongoLabs, give us an excellent overview on how to persist our mobile app data in the cloud using the super-scalable and amazingly developer-friendly MongoDB back-end.Part 1:
Part 2:
When you start working with the Android development tools to develop your first Android Application you will, most likely, be using the Eclipse tools provided and you will most likely start with a HelloWorld example. HelloWorld examples are used in almost every programming guide to show you a "Hello World" text. It is considered the most simple application of showing something on the screen. Google has also provided a Hello World example which will show you how to work with eclipse plugin and how the emulator is working. If you are following the steps in the development guide from Oracle you have to run your application at some point. This is however a point I feel a lot of people will drop it if they are not really determine. The reason is not that it is complex, the reason is that you have to wait and you are not warn that you have to wait.
When you run a example the first time you expect it to be on the screen directly. However when you run your HelloWorld example you see the Android Emulator coming up with on the word "ANDROID" in a black screen and not the expected "Hello World" text. Reason for this is quite simple as is the solution. When you click run for the first time the entire emulator has to be started and the "ANDROID" message is the first stage of the boot screen. Solution; wait. After some time you will see the android splash screen coming up and short after that your application. Now you also have a complete Android device and the basic Android OS you can use and play with. Meaning, if you only see "ANDROID" in your screen when you run your application for the first time, do not be afraid, you most likely did not make a mistake you simply have to wait for one or two minutes for the emulator to boot completely. After that you can go back to your development environment and change whatever you like. If you click run the second time and you have closed down your emulator only the new code will be loaded into the emulator and it will not have to be rebooted.During the "Oracle Day 2011" organized by the Oracle User Group in Estonia OUGE a talk was given by Shahin Taromsari on the subject "Complete Positioning Versus Competetion". Shahin is given a very nice view on the Oracle strategy for the upcoming time in a relaxed way and providing a insight in what it will mean in the upcoming time for your company or what it can mean in the upcoming time. After the merger with Sun Microsystems they have now the option to build the entire stack in one company. They can build the hardware and the software which enables Oracle to create the best solutions in the market. Even do they are able to do so, in my opinion, Oracle is still a software vendor playing to be a hardware vendor. They have a hard time to make the shift to also think like hardware vendors think. This process will take some time however I do have a feeling that in the end they will succeed. A long way however has to be taken before it will become the success that it could be. I already understand from a lot of people that some frustration is raising within the relationship with the new Sun Microsystems part of the company and clients as former Sun employees now have to confirm to the way of working as set by Oracle. This way of working is a software vendor way of working and not a hardware vendor way of working.
I am confident that Oracle is having a lot of smart people working on this culture issue and will come with a solution, I only hope this will come quick and that they understand that change is needed on both the software side as the hardware side. People of research and development departments tend to work already together in a great way and started engineering new products that work together in a better way now the rest of the company will have to follow.
I was recently asked to help some people with looking into the processes and procedures of one of our clients at Capgemini. I was involved at this customer due to the fact that they have a large Oracle landscape which is used across the EMEA region and as I am already familiar with the customer and I have done already work in setting up processes and procedures to connect demand organizations within the Capgemini rightshore model I started looking into the situation. The question was how can we advise the customer to change some of the processes and procedures concerning Incident management so the service towards the end users is faster and more cost effective.
After some time of whiteboard sessions a couple of models came to my mind. The difficulty however with those kind of models is to find out which one will work best in a realtime situation and where will we find bottlenecks. I installed the Oracle BPM part of Oracle jDeveloper a couple of months ago however did not had the option to play with it. It turned out that we where able to create all the scenario's within the BPM tool and simulate all kind of situations. By using Oracle BPM I was able to quickly model the different scenarios and play situations on them. By doing so we could simulate a realtime situation and change the processes and procedures in our final advise so the customer can implement them.If you are ever in the need of simulating business processes you should give Oracle BPM a look. Below you will find a youtube movie and a presentation which give you some more info on the subject and will show how to model a test situation.The below video is made by Marcus Davies from Integrella which shows you quickly how you can model a simulation within Oracle jDeveloper.
Johan Louwers is for more then 10 years working in the IT world in several roles. As a Java and PL/SQL developer, UNIX and Linux administrator, Oracle Consultant, Oracle DBA, network consultant, storage admin and much much more.
Johan Louwers is for more then 10 years working in the IT world in several roles. As a Java and PL/SQL developer, UNIX and Linux administrator, Oracle Consultant, Oracle DBA, network consultant, storage admin and much much more.
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