Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 27, 2010
by sjvn01
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Managing Developers 101

We all use PHP in our enterprises. It’s become the do-it-all language of choice for Web developers, from the smallest companies to the Fortune 500 and back again. However, PHP — which has been called “the one programming language that makes German look terse” — has problems with scalability. It is all too easy to write sloppy code that never-the-less works well enough to be rolled out.

Of course, as Luke Welling, Web Team Lead at Message Systems, a digital messaging management company and co-author of the “Bible” of commercial PHP/MySQL programming, PHP and MySQL Web Development, pointed out at an OSCON seminar in Portland, OR, that’s true of many corporate programming projects.

So what can you, as IT management, do about this? Well, for starters, Welling suggested that managers fight the attitude that sloppy programming is acceptable because IT can always “throw more and faster processors” at any performance problem. Sometimes, you can’t fix performance problems with hardware. You need to convince developers and their team leaders that writing to the minimum hardware requirements, rather than the maximum, is the smart thing to do.

You also need to fight the common programmer perception that all production code is temporary. This starts with the basics. Welling observed that many developers don’t even believe that the language or dialect they’re writing in is still going to be used in production systems in a few years. Wrong! According to Welling, the idea that “PHP code is going to hang around is not a crazy idea. Programming languages hang around for a very long time, as the COBOL programmers who were pulled out of retirement to deal with the Year 2000 bug found out.”

More specifically, you must convince programmers and their team leads that “No, the code you dash off today won’t be replaced properly next year. Unless the code causes real issues today there will never be time to replace it in the future.” Welling believes that “Inertia is powerful, platform changes are harder, rewrites are harder still, and people get stuck in their ways.” So encourage developers to get it right, or righter anyway, the first time.

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August 27, 2010
by sjvn01
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The CIO and Patent Lawsuits

You may think that the last thing on earth that could happen to your company would be that your business might be sued because it used a particular software program. You’d be wrong.

In the aftermath of the Bilski Supreme Court decision, the Supreme Court did nothing to stop software or business method patents. As a result, not only software development companies but all businesses are now in more danger from patent lawsuits than ever before.

That’s because as Keith Bergelt CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN), a non-profit, patent-protection consortium, observed, “Patent lawsuits have been doubling for the last three to five years, and I expect this trend to contribute.”

In particular, you can expect to see more attacks from patent trolls, companies that exist for the sole purpose of extorting money from businesses by threatening them with lengthy and expensive litigation. Bergelt estimated that win, lose, or draw, it costs $3- to $5-million dollars to defend against a patent lawsuit.

Ouch!

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August 27, 2010
by sjvn01
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Upgrading to Windows 7 isn’t Cheap

I’ve upgraded old XP PCs to Windows 7 and I’ve bought new PCs equipped with Windows 7. Either way I’ve found that it’s not cheap. Now, Gartner, the research company, has worked out just how expensive upgrading to Windows 7 can be for enterprises. In one word, moving to Windows 7 can be described in one word: “Ow!”

Charles Smulders, Gartner’s managing VP believes that “Corporate IT departments typically prefer to migrate PC operating systems (OSs) via hardware attrition, which means bringing in the new OS as they replace hardware through a normal refresh cycle. Microsoft will support Windows XP for four more years. With most migrations not starting until the fourth quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and PC hardware replacement cycles typically running at four to five years, most organizations will not be able to migrate to Windows 7 through usual planned hardware refresh before support for Windows XP ends.”

In other words, Smulders claims you’re going to update faster than you had budgeted for. That presumes, of course, that you’ve budgeted at all for upgrading your desktops. Times are hard and I know many companies where the ‘upgrade’ plan is to run PCs until they break.

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August 27, 2010
by sjvn01
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Killer patents

n the computer technology business, we tend to see patents as being bad for developers and business. What we don’t realize that the problems we have with Microsoft’s bogus patent claims against Linux and Oracle’s patent-based attack against Google are nothing compared to the evils that IP patents bring to the pharmacy business.

Take, for example, the assault that the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is now mounting on Abbot Labs. PUBPAT is formally asking the United States Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine eight Abbot patents relating to the critical HIV/AIDS drug Ritonavir, aka Norvir.

Ritonavir, a protease inhibitor, was one of the early HIV/AID antiviral drugs. Today, as HIV has grown tougher, it is now more widely used to enhance the efficacy of other protease inhibitors in AIDs drug cocktails. In this role, it’s still a critical HIV/AIDS drug.

It’s also, thanks to patents, a lot more expensive than it should be. The example that PUBPAT cites, which tells you all you need to know, is that back in “December 2003, Abbott raised the price of its Norvir brand version of Ritonavir from $1.71 a day to $8.57 a day.”

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August 26, 2010
by sjvn01
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Wi-Fi Convenient, but Dangerous

With the advent of standardized 802.11n Wi-Fi, it’s easier than ever to expand your business network wirelessly, but that may not always be a smart idea.

I’m sitting outside an office building in Portland, Oregon. The building has at least half a dozen businesses with about 40 Wi-Fi access points (AP). In the hour I’ve been sitting here, I’ve broken into 28 of these corporate networks.

While I certainly know more about networking than most people do, I’ve no special expertise. I’m no hacker. I’m just making use of a good network packet analyzer, Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal) and several common-as-dirt, dead simple to use cracking tools.

The simple truth is that, given a few days and publicly available programs, any wireless network can be broken. Sadly, as I just rediscovered today, most Wi-Fi networks don’t require that much trouble. Heck, it barely requires any effort at all.

Indeed, two of the businesses (downtown businesses, mind you, not Harry’s Home Network) didn’t have any security on their APs. Sigh. Leaving an open AP isn’t just a matter of letting other people share your bandwidth. It’s also an open door into your network. Another three were even worse: They used the default passwords for their wireless routers and APs. As for the rest, most were little more trouble to unlock.

That’s because most Wi-Fi security protocols are pathetically easy to break. For example, it’s a good bet that every Wi-Fi device your company has supports Wi-Fi Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP). And many of you, including ten of the companies I just “visited,” use WEP for security.

It’s just too bad that WEP was broken, for all practical purposes, back in 2001. WEP stops someone with no clue about Wi-Fi networking security, but those are the only people that it will stop. However, every vendor still includes WEP as part of their laundry list of supported protocols; some reputable sources, like Consumer Reports, as recently as 2009 recommended WEP’s use. Consumer Reports subsequently corrected its mistake, but alas its “better” recommendation, WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), is also pretty easy to crack.

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August 25, 2010
by sjvn01
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Red Hat heads into the clouds, not into an acquisition

Get over it people. Red Hat is not getting acquired anytime soon. I know, I know, you’d heard all the rumors. Here’s the truth as I see it: If Red Hat gets acquired anytime soon, I’ll eat my fedora. It’s not happening.

What is happening, as Paul Cormier, EVP of Red Hat, announced this morning is that Red Hat spelled out more about its cloud strategy. Sorry, I know that’s not a tenth as exciting as an acquisition, but it’s just not in the works right now.

What is in the works is that Red Hat has spelled out more about its Red Hat Cloud Foundations. Red Hat’s plan is to provide companies with an infrastructure “capable of delivering an open source, flexible cloud stack, incorporating operating system, middleware and virtualization. Furthermore, this stack is designed to run consistently across physical servers, virtual platforms, private clouds and public clouds. Red Hat’s comprehensive solution set enables interoperability and portability, recognizing that customers have IT architectures composed of many different hardware and software components from various vendors.”

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