Cubegeek

A Week as a Geek

This week's geekery involves a small select few things, almost not worth mentioning, but I'm committed to the shift from politics, so...

I'm about ready to start playing with VM images of all sorts. I like the idea of a VM jukebox. VM plus VPN can get me all sorts of elementary cloudishness.

NoSQL is an interesting and peculiar movement. I think they've got a lot of cheek, and I like that. But criticizing the NoSQL crowd is forcing me to think about the nature of the particular sort of computing I do. I think one way to think about it is to understand, as John C. Dvorak says, LAMP is over. Which means that the business model of certain providers like Dreamhost, as much as I love them and am a loyal customer, is threatened. Rackspace has evolved. There is an IT revolution afoot but before we get ahead of ourselves...

Way back when everybody was coming up with e-Business plans, I thunk up some mildly interesting product ideas. My obsession then, and growing again now, is what kind of things could be done with multiple database technologies. The plan was called 3DB and intended to build best of breed (enterprise) applications using object, relational and multidimensional databases in tandem. Why? Because each kind of job that interoperates across an enterprise requires a different kind of workflow with different sorts of transactions, and you simply couldn't assume that one database technology would support that best. I didn't end up specing out that business, but the idea remained in the back of my head. Now I'm thinking about it again, in the narrower sense of a tri-level hub and spoke architecture for data warehousing.

But the point is to think about workflows that databases support. I'll repost the idea from a comment thread at DBMS2.

NY Nick hipped me to the Verizon Mifi. A very cool device with a somewhat limited battery life that enables a personal mesh. Now that I swore off Palm and am on iPhone that allows no tethering, I have a marginal need for that. It's a really good idea, but I think I'm going to hold off. Another 40 bucks below the radar subscription is not what I need right now.

I'm about to get my first Slingbox today, from a buddy of mine. I can certainly use that now that I'm on the road. Why? Because my kids fill up my DVR with junk when I'm not around, and I don't need that. But there's an implication that I could VPN back to Vault107 remotely, which is weird because i don't think that my FIOS gives me a fixed IP. It has been years since I tinkered with DynDNS and it never really worked out for me. Hmm. We might see that again.

Video Professor has been charging me for stuff I didn't order. Be very careful if you order from that guy.

I'm trying out the Seesmic Desktop as I navigate my way sensibly through the Twitterverse. I originally had Twinkle on the iTouch, then on the iPhone. I then tried Tweetie and liked it. On the desktop I went from Twhirl to Tweetdeck and back to Twhirl, primarily because I like Adobe Air and Twhirl is cross platform. But I like Tweetdeck on the iPhone now. So today it's like this:

Ubuntu: Twhirl
iPhone: Tweetdeck
Windows: Seesmic + Twhirl

I added a bunch of DW heads to follow and I'm a little annoyed that they haven't decided to compartmentalize their life into waffle-hole sized blocks like I have. So now I know that one of the great database heads of our time has a cousin who wrestled with TSA over the weekend to fly his special homemade charcoal. OK.

I'm about ready to make the leap over to an EC2 box. I'm thinking VM host and/or Ubuntu playground. I'm displeased with the throughput I'm getting from JungleDisk and Nirvanix (not that I've tried much recently), but it just doesn't make me feel good about standalone cloud storage. Meanwhile the appeal of Dropbox is increasing. I think it obliviates thumbdrives.

I got a peek at Windows 7, and I must say that I'm intrigued. What I saw was MSFT finally approaching the multiple desktop paradigm that's been in Linux since the invention of KDE. It also looks like you can Alt-Tab by application. So instead of cycling through all your apps, you can cycle through just your open browsers or just your open spreadsheets. Nice.

I also found Isohunt, an alternative to the Pirate Bay.

Science is Political

There is some controversy, especially if you listen to some conservative pudits, over the future of China and whether or not we (stupid, lazy, spendthrift, immoral) Americans ought to be watching our asses lest we be overrun. In general I tend towards the belief that China will stumble before she and America rumble. Aside from all that, there's India. We like India and India likes us.

We in America tend to think of science as Big Science, which is something akin to Mad Science because it has, more often than not, military implications. But mad science could also have medical implications and there's a chance that China might decide that's the direction of their big science. So suddenly all the millions of Chinese scientists don't sound so scary.

And while it might difficult for us to get our heads around the notion that Chinese scientists might decide it's a good idea to clone people or genetically modify themselves, I would suggest to you that you probably have no idea how popular cosmetic surgery is in China.

And for all the drama surrounding Al Gore and his quest, you'd think that all those supposedly brilliant Chinese scientists would come up with a cleaner way to burn coal. But that's not in the cards as far as real smart people can predict, despite the fact that clean coal is already real technology.

All this goes to show that science is political and that brains are still a cheap commodity.

So what's up with the picture of the bug?  This happens to be a Cassidyfly, a bug I've never heard of before today. I happened to run across it as I was attempting to discover the size of Tubifex Tubifex which is the mysterious 'alien' creature YouTube says lives in the sewers of North Carolina. We (stupid, lazy, spendthrift, immoral) Americans took our own sweet time dispelling the myth, didn't we? So I found another video of Tubifex and it certainly looks grotesque, but there's still no sign of scale until I see this one. Apparently these things are fishbait. Tetras eat 'em up.

All wonderous mysteries of the natural world. Yeah but who actually cares about bugs and worms? Well, scientists do. Now I don't have any good idea of how much of our American Big Science makes use for the sorts of brainy disciplined people who would illustrate a taxonomy of insects like Gina Mikel whose Cassidyfly adorns my blog this afternoon. But surely the Chinese care about their bugs and worms, and surely they have a buttload of them in their hinterlands still undiscovered. And if the Chinese are going to advance in science and technology, they must include in their millions of cheap commodity brains, some patience for the natural world as well as we have. Surely there will be some Chen or Wang to add to the line of names Linnaeus, Darwin and Audubon.

On the other hand, maybe the Chinese scientists are dead set on thinking about technology the exact same we do. In which case I can't wait until I can sign up for their version of AT&T for my iPhone.

Fingerbox Research Notes

Too much embedded stuff. Get the PDF instead.

Download Fingerbox

Open Source Property Implications - Part 1

I've begun reading 'The Success of Open Source' as I try to get my head around the idea, or the fact, that open source databases have leapfrogged enterprise engineered databases in many important ways. It's a disorienting feeling I have, so I need to reconcile it with reality. That's the thrust, but I think there are important implications as well.

If there is one thing I've always liked about my industry and also hated it is the way in which programmers have been organized to work and create wealth has managed to be casual. I thought about this today while looking for a bathroom that was not being serviced in the spanking new building where I'm working. And so I'm curious to know some of the underlying principles, if there are any.

You see the building I'm currently working in has been architected for collaboration. Nobody owns a desk, anybody can use any 'cube' which is more like an open plan workstation, to dock their laptop and do whatever it is they do. There are lockers disbursed through the building so that if you have stuff, that you can park it securely as your itinerant work takes you wherever in the building. There are small private rooms with phones and glass doors so that you can do a conference call. Some are as small as a large telephone booth, others can seat three or four folks.

Now the unwritten rule of this architecture has to be written, and you will find spontaneously printed notes all around the joint reminding employees that camping is not allowed. In other words, it defies the spirit of the collaborative environment to claim one of these small private rooms for yourself. But enough people have camped for the signs to become necessary. I even noticed one printed in large red letters in the elavator this morning.

This environment comes complete, as one would expect in Silicon Valley, with an area with beanbag chairs a ping pong table and subsidized soft drink machines. It's hardly what one would think of as panoptic. Yet despite its thoroughly contemporary style you'll still find a catering truck pulling up to to the front of the building every day at lunch. I've been to a large number of companies in my time, and I would argue that this particular campus is on the more advanced edge of the IT high tech sort. In the building I visited yesterday, there are no corner offices. In the corners are conference rooms. Everything about the place says, young, smart, tansformative & green. Yes green. Outside the front door of my building is a solar powered trash can. Don't ask.

Is propriety at risk here? Yes, a little bit, but I cannot tell to what extent. My immediate reaction to the no camping sign is split. One could easily be chagrined that old habits die hard. On the other hand re-engineering is not necessarily quality improvement. To work in a building that encourages collaboration and play is a hallmark of the new style of business organization you find in Silicon Valley. But is hierarchical organization necessarily bad? Is the desire to be territorial wrong? Is it necessarily a good thing to have a rumpus room in a corporation?  I think it all depends at root on one's understanding of the ways and means people are organized around property and how that is perceived by workers and their management.

For example. If I understand the open source movement correctly, it produces a high quality product because the inner workings of products are subject to arbitrary and massive scrutiny. In architecting a building where people work around that same principle, you don't own your office because your work should be subject to arbitrary and massive scrutiny. Camping implies propriety, of keeping to yourself, of privacy.

--
The downside of proprietary engineering development that I am intimately familiar with originated with my experience at Xerox. Xerox fumbled the future because it slavishly attended to its customers - customers who were not future-oriented. Likewise when you make your money designing to spec in a bespoke manner for a limited set of customers you are likely to satisfy them very well but you will be inefficient for the masses. Open source takes advantage of the masses and a new arrangement between customer and provider. So I am aware how propriety inspires loyalty and trust and how loyalty and trust can be the enemies of innovation.

There are great implications about this new kind of property which is inherent in the open source movement, but the manifestations of the broader social implications are just beginning to appear.

Toolkit: Versioning

Download Versioner

The Version Tool is this simple perl script that works in conjunction with a version file to put a timestamp on zipped up versions of all of the Essbase objects in an app subdirectory. In this version of version.pl which is simpler than I thought - I'll have to dig for the more expansive one - it handles single database BSO cubes. 

Note that you need to modify the following snippet of code first off to assign the proper notifications and data paths.

$errdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\logs\\";
$logdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\logs\\";
$expdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\export\\";
$tmpdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\export\\temp\\";
$appdir="d:\\hyperion\\analyticservices\\app\\";
$scrdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\batch\\";
$inpdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\batch\\input\\";
$bindir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\bin\\";

$recipients='mbowen@cubegeek.com';
$logfile="$logdir"."version_activity.log";

Then you'll have to change the parameters that you will allow for the named applications & cubes that you wish to version:

switch ($appid) {
case "back"  {$type=1; }
case "hr"  {$xapp="HR"; $db="HR"; $type = 2; }
case "gl" {$xapp="GL"; $db="GL"; $type = 2; }
else {$type = 0; }
}

In this case you have two single BSO cubes named HR:HR and GL:GL respectively. 'Back' is for versioning your backend itself. As I said, I'll lookup and find the code for ASO and multicube BSO shortly. That means I may have to start learning how to use Sourceforge. We'll see. 

Also note that you need to have 7zip on the path. 

Big Data at Structure 09

In which you will hear somebody say that relational databases don't scale.

High Flight

Print Key

Many thanks to Doug Burke who offers a pointer to PrintKey2000, as a free alternative to Snagit. I've got Snagit and every time I open it, it wants to go home to it's mommy and get updated with more niceties that I don't really want or need. That's why I'm stuck on Snagit7. But I'm going to try something simple and give PrintKey a shot. You may like it too. 

MD5: 3033b0d05c7e37999b4b9644f53785af

ODTUG Followup #1

I'm still very busy kicking off a new project and haven't had much time to spare but I did want to do a short follow-up. 

First, thanks to everyone who showed up at my session. It was very gratifying to see a packed room. I hope the lesson in data management was valuable to you. And as I promised, I will be publishing parts of the toolkit shortly. I will do a separate post for each of the four tools I talked about and I will be replicating those over at the IN2HYPERION site as well. So you need to check there as well. 

Secondly, it was great, as usual to see my old friends and colleagues and meet new people face to face. Kathy Horton, Jon Rambeau, Mike McCarty, Ed Roske (whom I didn't get a chance to speak to but lobbed a softball question), Mark Rittman, Tim Tow, Rohit Amarnath, Yuri from Brooklyn, Rudy Zucca, Eric Helmer, Andrea, Ron Moore, Rob Donohue, Doug Burke, Sean Bernhoit & Darin Pope. 

More blogging this weekend. Stay tuned.

The Drama of 3.0

It was more interesting to wait for it than to get it. iPhone OS 3.0 that is. Now that I've got it, I'm left wanting the hardware that I haven't got, and the Verizon network that I cannot get. And you know what else? I really haven't gotten anything worth cutting or pasting anyway.

And so my drama was brief and reduced to

A. Wondering why the upgrade wasn't available until this afternoon.

B. Wondering why it took 45 minutes for my iTunes client to connect up to the iTunes store.

At the moment, I am assuming that the problems I'm having connecting my laptop to my iPhone are temporary and will disappear after I reboot. For the better part of an hour I thought I had bricked my phone because it had an icon that said 'connect to itunes' but whenever I did, iTunes could either not recognize my phone at all unless I restarted it, or it could recognize it and not see the iTunes store. And so all I could do was nothing...

Until I decided to synch with iTunes on another machine, after which my phone sprang to life. I haven't looked back since, and I don't expect to. Unless the laptop reboot doesn't help.

More later.