Desicritics Category: BizTech: Software

Book Review Comdex : Computer Course Kit - Windows Vista with Office 2007

Kim — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:30:32 EST

The Comdex - Computer Course Kit - Windows Vista with Office 2007 written by Vikas Gupta costs 229INR with the CD. Vikas Gupta has earlier co-authored books for Wiley, McGraw Hill and IDG.

This book, comes with a CD Training kit and the book aims to help you master Windows Vista, Internet, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Access and MS Powerpoint.

The book is developed with the premise that the qualification of the person using the book is "ability to read" hence it is extremely simple, straight forward and easy to follow, with step by step instructions accompanied by appropriate illustrations.

The book provides explanations, with screen print outs to demonstrate the described functions. The CD provides an audio video demo and a self practice mode.

The book starts out with the first 24 pages outlining the types of computers, the hardware units, and the basics of software and networks which is an excellent preface for someone not well versed with computers. This took me back to our ITC (Introduction to Computers) course, but this book was much simpler.

At times the language in the book dips a bit into the formal, flowery, government office kind of English, but it soon recovers and gets back to the simplicity, that is its selling point.

It even covers new features like Windows Aero, Windows Meeting Space, Internet Explorer 7.0, Windows Mail.

My only feeling of discontent with the book is that the paper quality is not the best and it gave me the feel of a pirated cheap reprint.

The book and the CD may be used completely independently of each other.

The text instructions on the CD are in English only, but the audio has the option of Hindi too. The audio can be turned off, if you feel that it is slowing you down during the audio-video demo mode. The voice on the audio is pleasant and not robotic or irritating except for a few mis-pronunciations(/heavily accented pronunciation) like "appears" and "adjust". This is an ideal method for auditory learners.

The Hindi version, still uses a lot of English words in the voice over and some Hindi words that aren't common vocabulary.

In some modules, The control panel at the base of the screen, takes an inordinately long time to follow instructions. You can increase or decrease the speed of the verbal instructions and the demonstration time during the demo module.

This is a wonderful book for someone who is just starting to learn about computers. Quite a good book to gift your parents and preserve your own blood pressure from escalating. Or if you are looking to brush up your knowledge or upgrade your software and need a quick primer on the subject.

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.

Python for Unix and Linux System Administration

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:54:02 EST

In addition to a very noticeable acknowledgments section, here is a book for system administrators trying out a new language to reduce their difficult and sometimes repetitive tasks. In fourteen chapters the authors have tried to do a commendable job for presenting Python as a language that could be used with little bit of learning.

Among the system administration tasks that are tackled via Python in this book, there are chapters dedicated to documentation and reporting, networking, handling data, SNMP, package management and building GUI s among others. One of the important additional tasks i.e. backup and restore seems to have not got the attention it deserves from the system administration perspective. This is true in spite of the newer scenarios where there is separate role of storage administrator as a specialist within system administration is coming up in most organizations and setup handling the massive growth in data storage and maintenance requirements.

While the examples presented are useful, there are some variations that could have made the book a more useful read. For example, in the example 5-9 about connecting to an SSH server and remotely executing a command, the password seems to be required in clear text. One variation could be an answer to the question “Would it be possible to use encrypted password so the script can be read and run by any less privileged user?” Another thing about the discussions is a frequent reference to books for further reading within the text. While it is a good idea, sometimes the list of books of further reading could have been given at the end of each chapter.

All in all, the book is giving a clear idea for using Python as a tool for system administration. Further reading and experimentation is definitely recommended to the readers after going through this book. Absence of major discussion on backup and recovery scripting is a big gap within the book of this nature.

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: 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.

Book Review: Intellectual Property and Open Source

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:39:37 EDT

The topic of Intellectual Property and Open Source does have a wide ranging audience for itself. With the seeming explosion of software engineering applications driven by web and e-commerce, this maybe a good book for grasping the finer legal details. The primary focus of the legal terms in this book are with respect to the U.S. Legal framework and sometime with European variants.

The author has discussed topics such as patent document, patent system,copyright,trademarks,open source etc and tried to give the relevant examples for each discussion. The book is spread across 14 chapters covering major topics of interest and appendices A through M for examples of various licenses as well as a sample proprietary information agreement(PIA).

The first chapter is a must read as it clears a lot of ground for clearing misconceptions and giving foundation knowledge for detailed tech-legal discussion that follows in the rest of the book. For example the term “Intellectual Property” is divided into four primary systems:

Patents
Copyrights
Trademarks and
Trade secrets.

One of the primary motivations for all the legal framework around Intellectual Property seems to be a balance between giving incentive for new useful information and the advance of the society by having growth in public domain knowledge.

There is the interesting comparison of a patent document with pattern-matching code such as regular expressions. One of the better examples for the discussion of patent documents is the example of destroying a patent by RSA Corporation. This was done for the RSA patent 4,405,829 “Cryptographic Communications System And Method” covering public-key cryptography so that it came into public domain two weeks earlier.

For South Asians and Indians especially, one of the interesting topics is the comparison of India's nuclear policy and Red Hat's patent policy to bring out some policy aspects of the patent system .

To summarize, the book is as good a reference or as a read to fit an Intellectual Property within the appropriate legal framework. The book gives a common meeting point for the people working at forefront of Intellectual Property development or wanting to have a clear understanding of the legal safeguards and terminologies in Intellectual Property and Open Source. The most memorable part of the book, arguably would be the disclaimer part of the preface.

Book Review: Android Essentials

Aaman Lamba — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 07:18:17 EDT

The Google Phone is based on the Android platform, which is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and relevant applications for the device. The Android platform is maintained by the Open Handset Alliance. This is Java-based and uses a custom virtual machine, Dalvik that is Linux-based. The Google Phone and Android are gaining attention primarily due to the ease of developers being able to program new applications and submit them for the platform. This is counterpoised with the 'closed' Apple model for the iPhone.

Android Essentials by Chris Haseman is a useful guide to the platform, designed for the 'dabbler, professional, hobbyist, or coding junkie.' A knowledge of Java and a familarity with mobile platforms is useful to leverage the book, although the technically minded can read through and skip the more detailed parts. The only technical tools needed are the Eclipse IDE (Jave EE version) and the Android SDK. Once these are installed, the Android Developer Plugin for Eclipse makes common tasks related to working with Android almost effortless.

The basic Android project in Eclipse is structured to provide space for multimedia assets, the Android SDK files, UI resources, and activity files. A manifest file, AndroidMainfest.xml, is used to maintain order between files, manage permissions, resources, and for parsing by the Android engine. The interesting section in the manifest is intent filters, which are used to define specific activities for the application. An acivity is similar to a Java ME midlet. Running the application is easy enough and launches the Android emulator from Eclipse if the plug-in is installed.

The Android platform allows a single application to support multiple activities, a key difference from other mobile platforms. The platform supports multi-threading to make for efficient use of resources. The book goes into sufficient detail on these aspects and provides working code samples for them. It is very easy to set up tasks such as transitioning from a splash screen to the main menu of an application, for example, and intent receivers enable the development of applications that are event-driven, such as initiating an activity when an SMS arrives.

The Android platform provides a good set of libraries. The Telephony library, for example, provides access to GSM and other common telephony entities. Services are used to execute processing actions behind the UI. Data management is handled through content resolvers. The book takes some prank applications as examples to lighten the tone, but the more practical applications are left unexplored.

The user interface is a combination of XML-based widgets and Java-style Canvas/Panel layout managers. These are the usual TextViews, Linear Layouts, and Relative Layouts. Widgets such as buttons and text fields are added by embedding them in the XML Layouts and actions are processed by using CodeBehind-style handlers. The same XML Layout can be set up using Java or even custom UI rendering using the Canvas object. This last approach is best suited for visually rich applications like games.

The book wraps up with a useful example of how to load and parse a list of Internet radio stations, and possibly play them, although, the author notes that 'Sadly, the state of Android's streaming audio does not live up to its documentation.'

The final chapter covers some useful tips on UI design and location management, and points the reader to more information on Android development, as well as a call to arms for Android developers.

Kindling The E-Book Revolution

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:53:07 EDT

In the dim and distant past, I have used the Palm Pilot as well as the Sony Clie before as my e-book reader but after having moved to a Blackberry which did my PDA bits, I never could get back to getting an e-book reader. In an ideal situation, if the Blackberry can give me Windows functionality, a very good camera (5-6 MP) and some kind of e-book reader capability, I would be happy. Just one device to carry around, but in the meantime, I either had to read on my laptop or on my home pc.

But recently, on holiday in the USA, I was gifted an Amazon Kindle by my brother-in-law and his sister. This is one of the best gifts one could have hoped for and I immediately started drooling over it.

The Kindle comes in an attractive box, it looks like a book itself. Nice packaging. Something that you can easily plonk into your bookshelf without any issues, looks pretty neat, those letters and symbols floating around?

The package is clipped closed with a rubber band and opening it shows you the kindle on the right and a storage compartment on the left which contains the leather case, the charger, USB cord and the manual.

Took it out, charged it up (see the white charger? shades of Apple?). This was in the USA and I have an amazon.com account. So when I powered it up, it asked me for my amazon.com account, put that in and viola, I was up and running.

Can you see the little round button on the right hand side? looks like a wheel? It is a wheel and click mouse. The lone channel on top of the wheel with a small silver pointer running up and down is the main guidance mechanism. Pressing it brings up a context sensitive menu, you can go to the Kindle Store (I am in the UK, so the wireless network doesnt work, but in the UK, you can subscribe to newspapers, blogs, magazines and the lot, brilliant stuff).

It seamlessly connected to the Amazon.com website via the wireless cellular link, showed me my purchases and recommendations, and so on and so forth.

I did a download for my son and it was again seamless, a chapter came down, he read it and it was quite easy.

As I would be in the UK, I would not be able to connect wirelessly, so have to do the USB business. So I connected to Many Books, a site with free books in kindle and mobipocket format books and downloaded the top 10.

Here's the Count of Monte Cristo e-book. Pretty crisp to read. There are 2 buttons on the right, for next page and back. On the left, there are 2 buttons, back page and next page.

You can change the text size, this is the default big ass size, which I reduced as soon as I could. The battery life is amazing. I have been carrying it around for the past week in India without charging and have read it for about 15 hours now, and the charge meter has rarely shifted. Oh! yes, I did have a problem with it, it froze at one point. But being a good old windows user for a long period of time, simply opened the kindle's back flap, got out my trusted paper clip and gave the reset button a damn good shove. Obviously nothing happened. Still frozen. So swore at it, banged it on the desk, prayed to Ganesh, poked the reset button for 5 seconds and it worked.

I have downloaded the mobipocket creater to convert my e-library to the mobipocket format. The Kindle comes with 200MB of built in memory which is good enough for about 100-150 books, I guess. I have a few CDs full of scanned and downloaded and free and gifted and every weekend, there is a pleasurable time reading and converting those books. There is also a slot for an SD card, where you can store music and additional books if you need, although I dont see the need for it. I use my mobile phone to listen to music.

All in all, a very neat device, very hardworking and rugged (have dropped it, travelled with it jammed in my backpack for 1 week, swore at it, read it in the bog and in the dusty environs of Gurgaon, no problems) and is quite well readable in all angles and lighting.

And yes, you can read this in the bath, you have to be careful, of course, dont drop the thing into the bath, but then, you would not do that to a paper book either, would you? Some drops of water did splash on it, but a simple wipe took care of that. Only quibble? It just doesn't smell the same, but you can annotate and clip away to glory..

Oh!, the screen saver is just brilliant, the images that it throws up are very amazing, old authors, old wood cut impressions of printing presses, exotic and strange word definitions, very good. Good first impression. Anybody who is a logophile and/or a bibliophile would love this.

Technorati Tags: Bibliophilia, Logophilia, Kindle, Reviews

Product Review: Google Chrome - The New New Thing

Aaman Lamba — Tue, 2 Sep 2008 15:47:07 EDT

Google seems to bringing order to its cornucopia of services, slowly yet strategically. Like all grand designs, the emergence of something big wasn't evident in the beginning, perhaps even to the creators. The basic structure remains the same - to provide convenient access to information through an unobtrusive intelligence layer. The services have been layered in, providing essential plumbing to what is evidently an operating system for the always-connected noosphere.

Another critical component was introduced today - the much-awaited Google Chrome web browser. While one might wonder what incremental value yet another browser might provide as an interface, it is the primary means of human-Internet interaction, and played right, could mean a consistent memory layer that brings the Google Mind ever closer to sentience. From a user perspective, there's little to write home about just yet, if one overlooks the relatively new process-independent tab architecture (IE 8 does the same thing, and IE 7+ separates the browser UI and tabs in terms of permissions) and the minimalistic interface. The pain of giving up essential add-ons and workflow steps might mean more than using the next new new thing, but Google is looking beyond the desktop client, even if the first release of Google Chrome is Windows-only.

In a few months or perhaps sooner, it is highly likely Google Chrome will be the front end of Android-based phones. The non-standard Windows UI used in Google Chrome makes sense when one visualizes a small scale equivalent on a mobile phone. The near-instantaneous startup is going to be handy for an always-on interface. Google might go further in terms of bundling services if it didn't have the ghost of Microsoft Anti-Trust in its rear view mirror. As it is, it allows you the option of changing default search engines from Google and Google applications don't seem to be running any differently within Chrome or other browsers, expect perhaps Google Reader. The most-visited sites are a nice touch when opening a new tab, and the ability to slide a tab over others is a neat touch. There does not seem to be torrent download capabilities and I strangely didn't see any auto-discovery of RSS feeds on a website. The setup told me it was importing my Firefox bookmarks, but I don't see them anywhere, and why leave out IE?

JavaScript and CSS rendering appear to be smooth, and performance is good. I noticed five chrome.exe processes in my task manager when I had only three tabs opened, ranging between 20 MB and 42 MB each in terms of memory usage, but a large number of page faults, and minimal bloat over an hour of running. The memory utilization was almost three times that in Mozilla Firefox for a similar load. One simple script in MovableType gave unexpected results, triggering a search when I hit the save button. Pages can fail to be rendered, with an 'Aw Snap!' error that blanks out the tab. Not a nice experience, to be frank.

Incognito Mode, or as it came to be known when Microsoft announced the feature in Internet Explorer 8 - porn mode - is invoked by Ctrl+Shift+N and removes pages browsed from the browser cache and history, and avoids cookies.

For the moment, I'm not going to be giving up any of my current browsers, and it remains to be seen if this new kid on the block lives up to its promises.

The CFO-CIO Crossover, Part III

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:30:59 EDT

We spoke about the interesting roles of CFO and CIO and about the development of both roles in the past and the present. In this essay we will look at the future and make some predictions about the cooperation between them.

1. What developments will occur in IT in the next three to five years? If one looks at a standard finance function, then these are the broadly the main chunks: Product Control, Financial Control, Finance Administration, Operations, Mandatory Reporting, Management Reporting, Taxation, ALM, Risk etc. All these areas are going to get impacted by improvements to workflow systems, communication applications, business intelligence systems, reconciliation systems, fraud detection and exception management systems, product control systems, spreadsheet management applications, better reporting cube / data warehouses / data marts, ERM systems, better cost analysis applications, and so on and so forth. One can write a full book on just this question, but those are the application facing bits. There will be huge numbers of finance related changes coming from the internet, the client aspects, the hardware bits, the database bits, the networking parts, the communication channels, the IT people, the service delivery model, and so on and so forth, which is too much to go into now.

2. What issues will arise for finance and accounting in the next three to five years? The main issues which will arise can be divided into the following categories:

(a) future regulatory driven change such as liquidity risk management proposals, contingency funding modelling etc. – this will cause a significant impact, best case scenario – a new regulatory report, worst case scenario – a full-blown Basel II type implementation;

(b) feeding old regulatory changes into BAU such as Basel II – Basel II has been rolled out but it will need more time to bed down and impact BAU aspects such as risk weighted capital allocation and performance evaluation;

(c) hitting barriers to service delivery such as human capacity or process architecture / issues;

(d) sharply increased demands for aggressive capital control and management;

(e) increasing demand for better quality financial intelligence and MIS by the business;

(f) little appetite for errors or operational risk or high emphasis on reputational risk management emanating from financial misstatements or mispricing,

(g) continuing and increasing M&A activity etc.

3. How will these issues and developments impact the CFO/CIO relationship? From a generic basis, as can be seen from the above, the level of technical and technology impact on the CFO is just going to grow and grow and grow. So CFO’s will become much more demanding. Not only that, they will expect CIO’s to take responsibility of BAU activities, something that is not commonly understood and accepted. SOXA approvals by CIO’s have caused a severe issue in terms of how CIO’s see their roles, but if this is going to be extended to other parts of the Finance business, then the CIO will become much more embedded in the BAU Finance Change function. So the impact will be from both sides, pushing each other into each other’s arms. Whether it is a hug or a squish depends upon how open-minded the two executives are.

4. How will the issues change the way IT aligns with business strategy? IT will move up the decision making value chain. Before any changes come down the pipeline, IT will start getting involved, because financial institutions have started to understand the benefit of including IT earlier in the decision making process. The business has started to realise that while they define the strategy, delivery is most often dependent upon IT. So the more they involve IT, the more delivery is improved in lock step. IT has to become proactive as well, in terms of analysing its service delivery model to become far more agile and mobile; in terms of analysing its technology M&A methodology; in terms of its reporting data warehouses; etc.

5. Will IT drive changes in business strategy? Will business strategy changes and external factors (e.g. globalisation) drive changes within IT? Will both occur simultaneously? Will IT drive changes in business strategy? On a corporate level we will see very little of that, but on a line of business level yes we will. I can see and have seen business strategy change because new technology has come forth, such as in trading. For example, expansion of product coverage within the FIX protocol can trigger changes in business strategy by suddenly opening new markets or changing existing markets. Changes in technical market infrastructure, such as addition of a new stock trading platform can trigger and driver changes in strategy. Better risk management and fraud detection technologies can give confidence to managers that they can extend personal loans or credit cards to new customer bases. Will business strategy and external factors drive changes in IT? Of course, completely. And yes, both can and do occur simultaneously.

6. How will these changes play out? Let me bring my tarot card deck, crystal ball and tea leaves cup out. That is to say that anything might be possible.

7. Will these changes have an impact on IT’s influence on the integrity of the financials? Anything that changes IT has a 30-50% chance to impact the integrity of the financials (based very roughly on the proportion of systems impacted by SOXA compared to the non-impacted systems). So that will indicate where we have an issue if any external factor impacts technology.

8. What does the future look like for finance and accounting technology? Very bright. And that is primarily because the finance and accounting arena is and will be hit by a tidal wave of changes from its business clients, regulators, professional bodies (IASB..), and so on and so forth. And massive, rapid and huge change like this is perfect breeding grounds for that perfect storm for technology, it will provide mandatory driven investments, fear, ambition, vagueness, and dreams for results/order where technology loves to breed and innovate

We have spoken about the interesting roles of CFO and about the development of both roles in the past and the present. We have also made some predictions about the developments in the future. One aspect is certain, technology is here to stay. While before a CFO would worry about the professional standards, rules and processes versus the humans who would operationalise them, the CFO has to worry about the technology as well. In many structural ways, technology itself is changing the finance profession and vice versa. The future not only promises to be bright, it promises to be entwined like the proverbial double helix.

Technorati Tags: technology, management, financial institutions