Blogging

I guess I'm a little late to the party, starting my first blog. Having a "web log" is something that has interested me for a while. The only experience with blogging is on Biggerbuybuton from IS 279 and IS 379. I eventually got use to the idea of having a short blog due every day. However, just because I was used to it didn't mean I got them done every day. By the end of the last section I remember not being too behind, and having to catch up by writing just about 8 or so blogs. One thing I didn't like about the way we did blogs in those classes was that it kind of felt like you were writing the blog for no one because we weren't required to read or comment on other people's blogs. I had a film class in community college that we has to post and comment on other's post about the films we watched in class (mainly because there wasn't enough time for an in class discussion after we watched the movie.) this class really had an online community feel to it which made it easier and fun to post, I’m hoping that this will feel somewhat like that and not just writing an eDiary like I’m Doogie Howser or something.

One thing that I am worried about is writing a full blog every week. I’m really don’t like to write a great deal. I have the tendency to try to find the shortest way to write something and when I’m given a minimum length to write, it tends to be frustrating for me. Three paragraphs isn’t too long to have to write and I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble, if I don’t get behind.

I did have a question that I thought I’d add to my first blog. I was wondering if the weekly blog was to be on one single topic, or if it could be a “week round up” of sorts containing a paragraph about how our project is doing and a something we read in our book and then maybe something interesting we saw on line that week that related to class. The rubric says to “remain … on topic.” So what if the topic is something like “What Happened Last Week” or “How This Week is Going, So Far.” This might make it a little easier to write every week.

What if IBM and Apple Merge?!

After blogging about how Google can take on Microsoft and vice versa, I was interested in the writer of the article, Rob Enderle. I followed his articles and came across another interesting "what if" discussion on the merger of IBM and Apple. Even though chances of such a merger is really zero to none just because both companies have redundancy in products as well as in customers, a look at the similarities and differences of both giants would not hurt. In the following paragraphs, a discussion of how the two companies could benefit from each other if they do merge will take place.

Lets take a look at the similarities of both IBM and Apple. First, just as Apple has Steve Jobs to lead it successfully through its life cycle, IBM is successfully lead by Sam Palmisano who has managed to reward IBM with often the strongest profitability. Second, Both companies has solid bases for carrying business and gaining global attention; IBM focus on its intellectual property base in system cooling and analytics and energy management. Similarly, Apple focus on its rich operating systems and differentiated product line. Third, Both companies try to ignore price competition and concentrate on product value. Lastly, they both have loyal customer base that consists of different groups from individuals to organization and government sectors.

Moving on to the differences; While Apple inserts customer voice on its marketing strategies, IBM fails to do so. Most of IBM top products serve as back end products that has no apparent advantage to many customers. On the other hand, integrated marketing and products development is perhaps the biggest success factor for Apple. Second, IBM is known or having high end products that usually gain wide satisfaction of customers whereas Apple fails to provide the equivalent quality due to different customers' perceptions. Lastly, IBM does not solely depend on Sam Palmisano because it has a strong structure, however, Apple pretty much runs on Steve Jobs; whenever he's sick, Apple stocks go down and vice versa. In conclusion, If both companies looked at each other strengths and weaknesses, they will be able to enhance their presence in the market which eventually means more customer satisfaction.

Various Software and Utilities

Already a lot of people have blogged about various software to help you develop our sites and projects for this class, but in this blog I am not going to focus to much on any particular software. Instead give some links to some helpful sites that I have used during the course of this class or that I found interesting and may have some use to my fellow classmates.

Here is one that just rolled into my inbox this week. The has a whole host of good app’s for not just development stuff but also regular utilities to help you out in everyday life. Now I will admit I have not used all of these, s o with anything found on the internet, use at your own risk. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2009UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx

This next one has some great articles, tutorial guides and very helpful forums for web development stuff. Pretty much every web language is covered in some detail here. I have used this site some, gotten some tips and some ideas. http://www.webreference.com/

Need some help with javascript? Or just want to learn it? This site has a great browser-based tutorial that is interactive and very informative. I got some great help from the guide while working in this class and hope it will help you too. You can download the entire web-book and use without needing access to the internet. It starts off pretty basic, geared towards the beginner in programming, but goes in depth into good programming practices and advanced topics. http://eloquentjavascript.net/

Ebay vs Craigslist: the Follow up

Browsing the Internet, I came across a cool article that talks about who to believe; Ebay or Craigslist. It is extremely hard to figure what is really going on just because this is a superior management ownership issues that perhaps involves secret information that could not be revealed in a week. No one denies that Ebay was seeking ownership of Craigslist; mostly because they bought stake of 28% on 2004. In the following paragraphs, I'm going to elaborate more on Ebay's point of view as well as Craigslist's point of view.

Starting with Ebay point of view, the former CEO Whitman stated that the move was mainly made because Ebay wanted to increase their share of the pie. According to Whitman, concerns about the relationship between both companies rose when Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar became frustrated with Craiglist. Her argument was that really no one ever dislikes Omidyar; when he's not happy with someone, this could also mean that who ever gets under his skin is probably doing something annoying.

Ending with Craigslists's point of view, Newmark and Buckmaster stated that Ebay betrayed them and that especially Whitman broke promises that she had given earlier to Craigslist when she started playing with their confidential data allegedly related to their hit website Craigslist.org. The concern in Craigslist rose when Ebay began creating their own classified website, oddly enough named Kijiji. Whether the right is on Ebay or Craigslist, it would not really change a thing because the launching of Kijiji changed the perspective of Classified websites. The real question is, how is this trial going to affect the ownership of Craigslist.

Cloud Computing Attack!!

It did not take long for the fears of many to come true. Since the launch of cloud services, people have been referring back to the issue of security and whether cloud computing can survive hackers' games. According to the article, one of the cloud based Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud) sites was compromised by hackers as the command and control (C&C) operation site. the hackers used the site to spread the Zeus banking Trojan (a password stealing email scam that aims not to only steal your password but also your financial data). In the following paragraphs, a clearer look at Amazon EC2 cloud based service's issues will take place.

The virus was first discovered when security researchers at CA were running a check up on spam; they then came across one with a URL for a malware called xmas2.exe. After examining the executed file, it became evident that the file contained Zeus Trojan which was hosted by Amazon web services housed by Amazon EC2. Once the virus was discovered, Amazon paused the activity o the files serving the botnet. Amazon representative mentioned that this kind of attacks hurt the reputation of cloud computing, however, it is always possible to have these attacks whether you have cloud computing or not.

Another issue occurred this passed Wednesday was the outage of one of Amazon's data centers. The outage lasted for several hours and made consumers unhappy. Furthermore, the whole backup component of a redundant supply had failed; this caused some of the facility's servers to fail to perform which ultimately means failure to retrieve information and instances needed by both the employees and their customers. In conclusion, I think that these issues are random and they could happen to any other type of infrastructure and not just cloud based services and data centers. Therefore, I think that people should not rush to conclude that cloud computing is totally insecure and is vital to attacks.

Google Vs Microsoft: competition assumptions

It is fairly obvious that Google and Microsoft are one if not the most successful companies of all time. It is also clear that the two companies are not very close friends and therefore, they try hard to take on each other. I have ran into this cool article that highlights a suggested strategies on how Google can take out Microsoft and vice versa. The article starts by pointing out how to kill key competitors (major key competitors to be exact); three main factors to consider when trying to hurt your competitors are Patience, perseverance and last but not least destroying the opponent image by manipulating trust. The secret to being patient is to allow the opponent to do most of the work for you. In the following paragraphs, a brief look at how Google can take out Microsoft and vice versa will be highlighted.

Google can take Microsoft out for a couple of reasons. First, Microsoft image has been declining over the years and it has been effecting its ways of attracting key employees. Google has also been working on destroying the public image of Microsoft by pointing out as evil. Second, the fact that Google is very successful in its search engine had put Microsoft on the race to be match that; this has sucked many of Microsoft resources which could potentially bring down their profits. Lastly, Google can gain the available government trust that could help them win most of the local and international departments. This will also pressure Microsoft to respond with lowering its prices and increase its quality. As a result, Microsoft net income could get hurt pretty bad.

Microsoft can take Google out for a couple of interesting reasons as well. First, just like Microsoft, Google's image has been going down hill. It does not really effect its revenue as much but it could protect Microsoft. How? Simple enough, people don't want to replace an evil corporation by another. Second, Microsoft can focus on improving its search engine which is already happening as well as trying to capture the advertisement segment, which Google depends on heavily. There are many reasons but these are the main two. In conclusion, Google and Microsoft battle would go on for a long time and personally I think it would be hard to determine the winner!

Open Source Office Suite

As I am trying to figure out what to Blog about, for my final Blog, I realized that I don't have a word processing application on my laptop. I usually do my work on my desktop which has Office 2007 but I just felt like vegetating in front of the Television. So, I decided to go to openoffice.org and download the office suite. This is yet another Free open-source application and it is mostly, from what I found, compatible with Microsoft's Office suite.


“OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. (OpenOffice.org)”




Open Office is included with the Linux Distribution that I use and is also supported on Mac OS X and Windows.

I am seriously considering switching to a Linux desktop, with Open office, after I graduate since I will not need to worry about being compatible with Microsoft after that.

Google vs Work at Home Scams

Since I blogged about Ebay vs Craigslist, I thought I would score a home run and post about another law suit. This time it is the significant, Google. Randomly enough, It filed its law suit last Monday which is the same time Whitman the former Ebay CEO took stand. Pacific WebWorks was the victim this time along with many unidentified companies. One can imagine the reason behind filing such a suit because of the deceiving behind the fake sources such as articles, website and blogs. I myself was getting interested in one of these and mainly because it was under the name of Google. In the following paragraphs, an in depth discussion of the Google case and the work at home scam will be taking place.

It is a noticeable fact that money is attractive, let alone fast easy money. The work at home scams is one of the most popular successful scams. What is a work at home scam? As quoted from the suit

"This action seeks to stop a widespread Internet advertising scam that is defrauding the public by misusing the famous Google brand. The scam victimizes unsuspecting consumers by prominently displaying the famous Google mark, by suggesting sponsorship by the plaintiff Google Inc., and by urging consumers to obtain a kit supposedly showing them how to make money working from home with Google."

The scammers make money by either asking their victims to purchase an instant access pass or a supposedly cheap kit that will help them generate fast money. After the victims purchase the pass or the kit with their credit card, they also get charged a monthly fee that could be as high as 80 dollars.

Following up the case, Pacific WebWorks has not commented on the suit yet which most likely suggest that Google was right. According to Google search quality engineer, Jason Marrison, Pacific WebWorks is believed to be the head operator of the chain. One of the most effective factors upon the success is not only the Google brand but also the level of persuasion used in these websites. For instance, scammers use fake blogs that contain affectionate success stories and "laughter after suffering" stories; These all trigger the victims to correspond with the pop add or the website. One of the issues worries Google is the enormous number of available scams that limits Google attempts to filter off its search engines. As mentioned earlier, WebWorks has not responded to press yet so a conclusion should not be drawn yet. All we have to do is wait!!!

Ebay vs Craigslist

Top management at it's peak is what can be resembled out of the Ebay vs Craigslist trial. Many might assume that it is just a case. Well, they might be right only if Ebay was not one of the largest online corporations that generated 8.5 billion of revenues in the year of 2008, and only if Craigslist was not the top US online classified site. According to the article, Ebay sued Craigslist for lowering its ownership stakes by around 4 percentages making Ebay owners of 24.85 percent of Craiglist. It did not take Craigslist much to respond; a month later, Craigslist sued Ebay for trying to take over Craiglist ownership so they can use Craigslist "secret success recipe" and launch its own classified site. In the following paragraphs, A closer look at the trial and comments of trial participants will be highlighted.

Whitman , who was the chief executive officer, took the stand on Monday saying that Ebay only reason for buying Craigslist stakes was to eventually gain full ownership of Craigslist. By doing so, Ebay can keep competitors in the house. It was revealed also by Whitman that Ebay had paid 32 million dollars or its stake in Cragslist, but then realized early on that gaining complete ownership over Craigslist would not be possible. The main rationale for Ebay case was that Craigslist's co founder and chief executive officer developed a coercive plan to lower its stake. On the other hand, Craigslist main rationale was that Ebay never mentioned that it was going to launch Kijiji, which was operating in the US by 2008.

Ebay explanation about not mentioning the launch of Kijiji was that Ebay had not closed the deal with Craigslist at the time and therefore retained from giving out this kind of sensitive information. Furthermore, Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar said that he did mention to Craigslist that Ebay plans to strongly enter the classified online market. What's interesting about this is the difference between these two corporations; Ebay is a huge corporations with hundreds of employees whereas Craigslist is a small privately owned company with maybe 25 employees or so. This makes one think how creativity and hard work can change lives. The trial would most likely go for a week and all we can do is wait!

Course Wrap-Up

Well, just like everyone else, I am wrapping up my work for this semester. For IS449W, I found this to be my most enjoyable class this semester and one of my favorite classes taken in the past five and half years at Eastern. It sure would be nice if the department could apply a few more courses like this to the curriculum. The amount of hands on work programming, using different languages, incorporating different services etc. was really rewarding and challenging. I envision a network class where you actually have to configure a network with your classmates, a database class that actually functions on a server and has a web front-end, and a security class where we develop networks/programs and learn different techniques to expose their weaknesses. It would just be really nice to have some of our other courses modeled off of this one. I think we all learned a lot based on the methodologies used.

Another nice thing about this class were the other students involved. We all apparently learned a thing or two on our way to this class and it shows in everyones work. I was really impressed with both the group projects and individual projects. Some were entertaining (Justin), others were really helpful (Matt), some made me thirsty (James) and some looked really sweet and made me jealous (Mountain Biking Group). Nice work everyone, it's been a pleasure taking classes with you over the past few years. If you want to stay connected, find me on LinkedIn.

Thanks to Matt, I also noticed some people are running kinda low on blog posts. Here's some ideas if you are lacking in creativity today:

• Sarkozy Goes after Google
• Real-Time data in Google Search
• Ebay vs. Craigslist
• FTC discussion consumer information rights

That should help you get the wheels turning. And yes, I like looking at Reuters for my news sources. Thats it for my 14th post, I'm done!!!!!!!

IBM and Supercomputers

University of Illinois plan to build the world fastest supercomputer is underway and this time IBM is at the rescue. Sometimes during the next year, IBM is going to launch its new processing chip that will factor into building this potential supercomputer. The supercomputer center located in the university is known for hosting the magnificent HAL 9000 supercomputer. The name of the new supercomputer project is the IBM Blue Waters Project. As expected, the new project is going to take place in Urbana, Illinois which was the same host for the HAL 9000. The new computer would be able to perform huge numbers of complicated calculations in no time. In addition, the supercomputer is expected to perform 10 times faster than the fastest existing supercomputer. The launching of the actual supercomputer will be sometime during the year of 2011. In the following paragraphs, a brief presentation of the supercomputer components and enhanced features will take place.

Supercomputers contains a big number of microprocessors integrated together to work on complex operations. The name of the potential chip is Power7; this chip take on many features of the flagship Power chip (a chip used in one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, The Roadrunner supercomputer). One powerful feature is that it integrates eight processing cores into the chip; each core with the ability to take upon four tasks which eventually make the chip a virtual 32-core processors. In addition, instead of using the static RAM memory, IBM implemented a new technology called E-DRAM which limits the number of transistors to 1.2 billion instead of an expected 2+ billion transistors for the static RAM memory. One thing to mention about this chip is its speed; it is not yet decided whether to use a a 3GHz or 4GHz which is slower than the latest Power6 chip which was operating at a speed of 5GHz.

The Blue Waters Supercomputers is funded by the National Science Foundation. IBM goal is to potentially hook 16,384 Power7 chips together that supposedly could bring performance to 16 petaflops. However, IBM continues to say that realistically the supercomputer could bring about 10 petaflops but will work with 1 petaflops on software applications. This supercomputer is said to attract big companies with massive performance needs such as Boeing, GM, and Ford. Interestingly enough, IBM plans to embed the Power7 chip in selected commercial products. This basically means that Intel would have to get its weapons ready for battle.

Supercomputers have been evident for a long time but with technology reaching its peak, it seems that more in more are interested in developing them. The more competition, the better products are going to be and may the best processor win!

Cloud Computing

I know others have previously commented on cloud computing but I find it a very interesting topic and decided to blog on it also. Cloud computing is a topic that continues to surface throughout the worldwide web and conjures up images of a white fluffy cloud floating around somewhere in the sky. Well, that is not exactly what happens when you upload pictures to Flickr or Facebook, or save your e-mails. The fact is that many aspects of your life are being stored in massive data centers located in huge warehouses that are full of computers. Cloud computing in general involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. In fact, Amazon and Microsoft replicate data several times on servers around the world so that they do not chance losing your data. They continually move the data around within the cloud centers as well as from one data center to another. Here is a video that explains cloud computing in a simplistic format.




Some of the advantages to using cloud computing are reducing the amount of hardware expense companies incur running their own data centers, while also increasing efficiency and flexibility. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access. Here is an example: Recently, Wendy’s restaurants ran an auction that allowed consumers to bid on various items starting at 99 cents. Because the company had never done anything like this previously they couldn’t estimate how much traffic would be visiting the website. A marketing agency set up the web application with a database back end hosted by Rackspace US Inc. The website was established within just 24 hours, serviced over 40,000 customers within 10 days, and was able to conduct 400 database transactions per second. This is a perfect example of when a company may decide to use cloud computing. In this situation, it would not have been very cost effective for a business to invest money and resources to sustain a temporary web application with such erratic traffic patterns.

Conversely, a major issue of cloud computing is that it may result in either inaccessibility to the data for a brief period of time, or be subject to the possibility of a security breach. The company should ascertain that they would not experience disastrous consequences if either of these events were to occur. From many of the articles that have focused on this subject, the final recommendation is to tread lightly into the clouds while cautiously relocating sensitive data.

Quick and Easy JavaScript Reference

Many of you like myself may not be as well referenced in the javascript syntax as we would like to be. When I started the IS449 class I barely knew any javascript, I had taken IS247 Web Development class, which spoon-fed me some javascript. But I personally tend not to learn programming well by simply re-typing someone else’s commands and code. I prefer the approach of learning of commands and then utilizing those commands in my own programs, but for this courses projects I needed to be able to use a fair amount of javascript.

I struggled at first; basically I have programmed other languages so I would guesstimate different commands, only to end up frustrated when it wouldn’t work. Then I would search our book, or and my IS247 HTML book or the web for snippets of code for what I was trying to do. I would find commands some that would help, and some pieces of code that were rather complex, or potentially written poorly, or were just hard to follow, further adding to my frustration.

Then I decided I would head over to the local bookstore and see what I could find. Well going there you will find a small mountain of java and javascript reference books, all with a wealth of information, but many were huge, and would take a long time to find what I was looking for, and at $50-100+ each it is hard to blindly just pick one. Then I came across this small handy book:



ISBN: 978-0-672-32880-0

It was only $20 and seems to have a lot of code segments with brief explanations of what the code was doing and how it worked. I decided to give it a try since it was so affordable, and I have not regretted that decision. It is a handy reference for a lot of simply tasks with javascript, but any of us should be able to easily follow the code and expand on it for our needs. This is in no way an end-all be-all book on javascript, be is certainly worth the small investment to help make our lives with the class projects a little easier.

Now I have been told you can get the book for cheaper from here.

Additional refernce on the book can be found at: http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=9780672328800