Desicritics Category: BizTech: Programming

Book Review: Nagios - 2nd Edition

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:52:39 EST

The book comes across as a wonderful companion for utilizing Nagios- an open source system and network monitoring tool. There are twenty six chapters covering a lot of depth and variety with respect to Nagios.

There are five main sections in the book, viz. Source code to a running installation, In more detail,The web interface and other ways to visualize Nagios data, Special applications and Development. Some of the more unusual topics worth mentioning is the configuration for external notification via SMS and via email, monitoring room temperature and humidity, monitoring SAP systems via plug-in check_sap.sh and via SAP's own monitoring system CCMS and monitoring oracle database with oracle instant client.

The chapters are very concise and readable especially for the system, network or other infrastructure administrator already hard-pressed for time. One of the important facets of this book is that although there is an attempt to present the useful information, it also motivates the reader to go further and explore based on the suggestions and hints that is provided in the book.

To summarize, a highly recommended book for interesting and very useful topics in present-day IT infrastructure.

Book Review: Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford

AJ — Fri, 7 Nov 2008 06:28:37 EST

The phrase "JavaScript master" and Douglas Crockford are considered synonymous in the web development world. When I heard that Crockford was writing a book on JavaScript, especially a guide to the better features of one of the most maligned but popular languages in the current web development industry, I was sure I wanted to read that book. I opened the book with very high expectations and unsurprisingly, I was not disappointed one bit.

With the recent explosion in the usage of JavaScript, the interest in JavaScript is at an all time high. When Netscape, which created JavaScript, released the specification of the language in the mid-nineties, it was unable to define a robust and complete specification for the language due to pressures of rushing out a production release. As a result, fair chunk of the language is not well thought out which contributes to bad programming style and promotes some bad programming practices. It is not the programmers but the language which causes this. Programming models based on Global variables, JavaScript eval, inconsistencies in variable scope, and confusion regarding how objects are created and handled in JavaScript can all be the sources of programming errors and give rise to bad programming practices.

This book, as its name suggests, focuses on the "Good Parts" of the JavaScript while cautioning the readers against the "Bad Parts" of the language. All the above mentioned "bad parts" and many other programming constructs are cautioned against in a two-part appendix.

Two other appendices also touch on JSLint, the powerful JavaScript syntax and program correctness verifier and JSON, the preferred and increasingly popular text data exchange format. These two chapters give a taste and a starter for two very important support tools for JavaScript.

However, the meat of the of the book focuses on the better parts of the JS language. In ten chapters, Crockford explains why features like - JS inheritance model, prototypes, objects, arrays and how the language handles regular expressions - are very useful and make JavaScript a fairly powerful language in its own right. Object Oriented programming in JS, how methods and the prototype chain is handled and can be used to write clean and powerful code are all a must read for advanced JS programmers.

The language of the book is very simple and sprinkled with illustrative source code which makes understanding the concept in discussion easy to understand. That said, this is not a beginners book. This book is aimed at those who have programmed in JS and have a working knowledge of the language. Nevertheless, it is a highly recommended book for anyone looking to get into better and more powerful JavaScript programming.

Book Review: Refactoring SQL Applications

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:26:28 EDT

Refactoring SQL Applications is a book on a useful subject for database and tuning specialists and other IT personnel frequently tasked with unruly SQL applications hogging precious resources which can be better utilized.

Besides discussing and providing tips and techniques to improve SQL application re-engineering on all important fronts, the utility of book would is in that most of the exercises have MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server approaches. The discussion does allude to specific examples for one of the three databases as per the concept being sought to clarify.

The topics discussed include possible implications of the auto-commit mode in JDBC, appropriate use of joins and indexes, detecting and correcting parsing issues and transaction management and basic tips to run trace on queries and analyzing them among others.

One of the possibly advanced concepts for this subject is in refactoring flows and databases using effective parallelism and physical and logical database changes to improve the performance. The must read portion of this book undoubtedly would be the eight chapter which compacts and distills the wisdom of the discussions into a set of tasks that can be performed when a SQL application is coming up for refactoring.

One of the undeniably useful tips that the author concludes by, is to avoid an over-reliance on wizards and advisors and be ready for the frequently iterative nature of performance improvement techniques.

To summarize, the book is a must have for the database practitioners and IT specialists working in this field. It would have been interesting to know what tips and techniques that the author would have suggested for improving the performance on the critical Oracle RAC clustered setups.

Book Review: Building Embedded Linux Systems

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 01:44:08 EDT

Building Embedded Linux Systemsis a comprehensive reference for the topics it seeks to cover. There is a largely successful attempt made to cover topics across the entire spectrum of embedded Linux systems right up to the development of the RT Patch which can be applied to a Linux kernel and the kernel rebuilt to have facilities similar to real time operating systems.

Some of the important subjects in the book revolve around root file system content - explaining how to build a root file system with some intricacies, storage device manipulation, root file system setup within the embedded system's storage device, setting up boot loader among the available options and setting up networking services based on software packages. There is additional discussion for the topics covering real time Linux variants.

One of the interesting discussions is about handling software upgrades. There is the file system requirements and also the possibilities to be considered for fail-safe software upgrades. There is a step by step procedure for implementing this facility using an example system layout. Other interesting discussions includes enabling remote administration with SNMP for the embedded device mostly as an SNMP agent and the common pitfall made by novice embedded Linux system builders while using Telnet service to neglect some configuration detail related to ptys.

The examples and guidelines given are reader-friendly, the text is clear enough for immediate application of the concepts. Considering the breadth,depth and lucid manner of discussion of the topics, the book is a must have as a reference for the technologists working in this field.

Book Review: The Art of Debugging

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:56:03 EDT

One of the frequently overlooked parts of many a computer engineering syllabus, namely debugging, is the topic of discussion for this book. The subject is addressed focusing on the usage of three debugging tools GDB, DDD and Eclipse with a more or less heavy reliance on Gnu Project Debugger(GDB) developed by Richard Stallman.

While GDB uses the command line syntax, DDD offers a GUI front end and Eclipse is an IDE for debugging working on top of GDB or some other debugger.
Starting from some basics of debugging and the three basic mechanisms for pausing, viz. breakpoint, watchpoint and catchpoint, the authors have discussed the topics such as inspecting and setting variables, debugging program crashes, debugging in multiple activities context such as client/server network programs,threaded code, etc. as well as special topics such as programs unable to compile and debugging curses programs.

There is also a discussion for making best use of text editors, compilers and other features in the debugging context. The book concludes with suggestions for using GDB/DDD/Eclipse for languages such as Java, Perl and Python.

Most of the examples are in line with the theory and bring out the concepts clearly. There is the repeated comparison of usage of the three debugging tools for the same example so the reader can draw their own conclusions and grow on their own favorite debugging tool. Some of the more interesting intricacies are occurring in the chapter where program crashes and the client server program debugging is discussed.

While the examples in this book are extensive, one of the useful additions to this book could be a list of unsolved and debuggable code for further practice. This could bring out a few more expert debuggers from the readers of this book. All in all, a good book in an area where interest is difficult to inculcate due to widely dispersed documentation.

Machiavellian Fire Fighters

thunga — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:10:21 EDT

I have been obsessed with this parable since I stumbled upon it a few days ago.

In ancient China, there was a family of healers, one of whom was known throughout the land and employed as a physician to a great lord. The physician was asked which of his family was the most skillful healer. He replied, “I tend to the sick and dying with drastic and dramatic treatments, and on occasion someone is cured and my name gets out among the lords.

“My elder brother cures sickness when it just begins to take root, and his skills are known among the local peasants and neighbors.

“My eldest brother is able to sense the spirit of sickness and eradicate it before it takes form. His name is unknown outside our home.” LINK

The world is so much filled with mediocrity and fighting the mediocrity to create a better world that fire fighters are celebrated more than actual creators and value adders. The person who was most well known in the above parable is the fire fighter.

This behavior is from time immemorial. Every developer who has coded a module will be aware of fire fighting. Every project manager who has handled a slightly complex project will be aware of fire fighting. What is more surprising is that it is not just the complexity of code or project which substantiates the parable but every team consisting of more than four people promotes and celebrates fire fighters.

It is always better to add to problems or blow up the problem to unmanageable proportions and then get recognition for fire fighting than to nip it in the bud. Some beautiful examples were also discussed in Nassim Taleb's book 'Black Swan'. One of the examples quoted by Taleb is about the 9/11 event in the US. If 9/11 event could have been in some way predicted, it would have never got the publicity that it has enjoyed helping the politicians the misuse for their own personal benefits than to help the humanity and the economy.

The winner in today's corporate and social world is the person who can create the loudest noise about solving a problem than a person who can actually add benefit through better processes and care which will nip the problem in the budding stage itself! If you belong to the latter categories of elder brothers, find joy in your inner abilities and strengths and not in worldly recognition.

Have you had some similar experiences?

Book Review: Website Optimization

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:52:12 EDT

Undoubtedly the focus of Website Optimization is on converting website viewer into customer by having a set of best practices. In the age where legendary search engine like Google has grown into a verb in English, the book is a must read for the web technologist.

The book covers lot of ground in useful topics such as search engine optimization, pay per click optimization, conversion rate optimization, etc. across two main divisions of search engine marketing optimization and web performance optimization.

The book is packed with useful real-life experiences .More importantly even concepts where the author has learned through hard way have not been left out. The example for this appears in the topic 'Hurl harmful outlinks', part of the discussion on natural search engine optimization. The author learnt this tip when his client had low rankings on Google in spite of intensive promotion over six months.

There is list of tips given for optimizing CSS, Ajax and javascript. There is also discussion on client side and server side techniques for increasing the performance. Among the server side methods discussed, include optimizing parallel downloads using multiple domains, caching frequently used objects, using HTTP compression,etc. On client side techniques include loading javascript on demand, caching off-site resources locally,etc.

One of the important concluding discussions is on website optimization metrics and measuring them. Some of the website success metrics include unique visitors, Average time on site(ATOS) and length of visit, pages per visit, bounce rate,etc. The second part is the search engine marketing metrics to improve website PR campaigns and conversion rate optimization efforts. The web performance metrics give the important numbers about load times.

The CFO-CIO Cross-over, Part I

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:33:47 EDT

The CFO and CIO roles are interesting roles when compared from various dimensions. As it so happens, I just moved from supporting a CIO to supporting a CFO in a bank, so I thought of shedding light on some aspects of these two roles. The two roles are simple, one looks after the financial matters and the other looks after the information technology of a firm. One would expect the twain would not meet other than the CIO is supporting the CFO's technology and the CFO seeing the CIO as a supplier and a cost line, but life is much more complicated. In a small way, a good CFO-CIO relationship especially in financial institutions, can lead to massive competitive advantage.

Where does one start? One way would be to talk about the past and present of the technology/financial relationship and then my thoughts about the future. As there is a lot of information and facts about these two roles, this will be a series rather than an essay. But before delving into the prosaic matters of organizational structures and strategic alignment, there is the small matter of philosophy to be handled. And that is the philosophy of technology to the CFO herself. And this is where I see the crucial issue.

Accounting and finance, by their nature, are backward-looking and are oriented towards making sense of disorder according to strict rules. There is nothing wrong with that, because that is how you come up with a normative view of the world, something that you can compare and contrast with a fair degree of accuracy and consistency across the world. The field and thus the people working in it are also fairly predictive and reactive in nature. Their remuneration patterns are high and consistent in nature, job descriptions are standardised. This world handles change rather slowly, systematically and gradually, with due consideration and with controls - Salt of the (business) earth so to say. But that sits uneasily with the broader technology world.

The technology area, whether on the web 2.0, the applications, the networks, the technology people, their remuneration, the IC chips, the massively online multiplayer worlds, virtual worlds, ERM systems, virtual reality, Offshoring and outsourcing, SOA, you name it, are almost like the anti-thesis of what I described above. Change is something that is constant; it is creative destruction all the time. The basic foundations of what you believe in change so rapidly, skills become obsolete quickly, and so on and so forth.

You might want to ask, how does that matter to me as a CFO? Here is precisely where it hits the CFO, because technology is redefining our customers, our employees, our ways of doing business, our ways of valuing assets, the question of governance, the communication channels, the people interaction, the coverage of events, and so on and so forth. In other words, just when the CFO is desperately trying to make things simple, explain everything and keep things under control, technology is making things agile, mobile and hostile. You do not believe me? Well, here’s something that you can see for yourself. In a finance department, more and more people are non-financial or accounting people. More and more, the regulators are finding it difficult to just rely on accounting data and demand further information to control the business. And internally, the business also demands much more than just accounting data, it demands commentary which allows the business to be agile, mobile and hostile. Customers walk in and demand information which we cannot provide. Can you imagine trying to provide bank account level information as rich as what you can get from a web page counter software application?

How does the idea of a going concern relate to a website originated business which can be fully automated, dealing in virtual assets such as songs or coding applets with payment in Linden dollars and the possibility of doing a gift exchange within the World of Warcraft? How do you handle a customer who has no conception of paying for assets because he has spent his lifetime getting his songs, films, phone calls, entertainment, software, assets etc. for free or through swapping them online?

What is the role of an intermediary - like a financial institution - when the concept of assets themselves is changing and everybody is running like mad after Intellectual Property and Virtual Assets? How do you account for depreciation of assets which have no discernible way of judging decay or usage? I can put aside 33% every year for a machine because I guess it has a three-year life, but how much should I put aside for an online constantly regenerating random number generator which theoretically has an infinite life? Actually, most software online technology assets have infinite lives. And if the value addition is happening by a group of enthusiasts based on a free open source model, then what do you say to the tax man?

Lest you assume I am just talking about software, how about virtualization of servers? If the asset based was dependent upon a number of servers, then it has just been virtualized, and if you want to go for the virtualized servers, then they have just gone into the Google or Amazon cloud. It is not like everything is moving 100% into the technology world, but every bit of interest to the CFO is being impacted by technology and is making structural changes. Take the example of resource planning. Previously, if your business grew, you would simply increase the number of analysts and accountants you had and kept on supporting the business, but now you cannot do that. You have to have technology to preserve history, run the rules, generate the reports, do the regulatory stuff.

Basel II taught a deep lesson to the world of finance, namely that if a CFO ignores what’s happening in the business, then satisfying requirements such as Basel II will not be possible. This is so, because the front office business and their systems are simply unable to provide the information in the right fashion which the CFO wants, and mostly, it is because the CFO did not specify or demand the front office business and systems to be transparent and fungible as far as accounting and financial information are concerned. This very same point also applies to the CRO by the way. While there is a surprisingly large number of CFOs who are forward-looking and technology literate, CFOs should recognise that there is a philosophical tension between their profession and technology.

While you might differ, my gut feel is that a CFO has to have a very firm control over the technology that she/he has, what’s coming down the pipeline and what’s generally happening around the technical world. In other words, she/he has to be clued-up and work closely with the CIO to manage the business going forward. Now what does this “manage the business” mean? And what does “work very closely” mean? All these questions are strictly with reference to banking because the relationship between IT and Finance is industry and to a lesser extent size, specific. This is what we will find out in the next part.

Book Review: Database in Depth

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 00:32:13 EDT

One of the most critical components of the IT framework in any organization is unarguably the database. With the consolidation of relational database management systems of different brands, there is a correspondingly demand for knowledgeable Database Administrators of good caliber at the administration end of such a critical component. This book comes as a theoretical shot in the arm for people aiming for such a profile.

For almost all the database products in use today, the foundational paper remains E.F. Codd's Derivability, Redundancy, and Consistency of Relations Stored in Large Data Banks. One of the important objectives of this book is to clarify the relational theory to practitioners. The author of the present book was one of the colleagues of E.F. Codd and has a much clearer understanding of the original paper as well as developments on it through to the present day. The author of this book along with Hugh Darwen has a formal proposal for the basics of future DBMS.

In the book under review, there is a very clear explanation of the theoretical concepts and their working without getting convoluted with particular implementations of the theory. Based on the components of the relational model throughout the beginning chapters, the eighth chapter gives the full-fledged definition of the relational model. It is defined in terms of five components that are discussed in the preceding chapters.

A must read portion of the book is the foreword by Jonathan Gennick giving the key reasons why any database practitioner should have this book in their collection. There is a warning for the reader though that they approach the book with the intent of learning, as the prose sometimes gets difficult to understand and needs multiple readings to get the point.

One of the only curiosities that the reviewer has is how the author of the present book would analyze the various branded implementations currently in the market in a sort of comparative study. Any such article would make a very interesting read indeed.

Book Review: Hacking - The Art of Exploitation

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 1 Jun 2008 10:35:55 EDT

Experience is the best teacher, goes the old saying. Students and learners of C and assembly are often stuck with the seemingly abstract implementations of these programming languages. Being the closest to the execution on the machine is also requiring an intimate knowledge of the way that the 0s and 1s are getting manipulated within all the circuitry.

In Hacking - The Art of Exploitation, starting with each and every basic of the programming from control structure, pointers, typecasting to file access and permissions, function pointers, etc., the discussion is moving on to the various scenarios and examples of general exploitation techniques, networking exploitation, countermeasures and cryptology. The main thing about the treatment of the subject matter is that the clarity of thinking of the author is very prominent. As it is, the large number of domains that a hacker has to encompass do sometimes put to stretch the understanding required. Understanding the basics provided in the step-by step manner is really the implementation of a divide and conquer strategy.

There is also an extensive portion dedicated to cryptology. Quite a few of the texts dedicated to cryptology require the reader to go across for some other book dedicated to information theory for a back-and-forth approach across the two to gather the concept. In this topic especially, the positioning of the examples seamlessly with the concept explanation is a big plus point.

Hacking as a word is very different in different contexts. Thus we have the derivative words cracker and script kiddie. For those looking to have a beginning to the world of optimum coding and extensive knowledge about the nook and crannies of the system, here is a book that does justice. There is a very practical accompaniment of a bootable Live CD to learn the code and examples as well as experiment without risking corruption for the stable OS on a typical desktop.

The book is really recommended not only to the experts looking to have a addition of ways to solve the problems but to the beginner programmers and computer science students who are faced with the problem to imagine real-life problems to understand the various programming techniques.