2010 New Year’s Resolutions for Software Developers

@jeffblankenburg wrote a good post for MSDN about opportunities for Software Developers in 2010.  The full article can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ee913537.aspx, highlights include:

• Learn a new programming language
• Attend [monthly] local user group meetings – (or support local community events, check out: iDetroit)
• Attend a regional developer conference – gotta luv codeMash
• Become an agent of change (within your organization)
• Use your skills to change the world (for the better) – giveCamp
• Give Twitter a real try!
• Create an online presence
• Added: Stay current with technology via pod/video casts – visit Twit.TV, Tech PodCasts or iTunes for more..

Troy Toastmasters Club

I’ve seen statistics that show people fear speaking in public more than they do death.  I used to be one of these people.  I learned this lesson first hand several years ago, when I was the best man and had to give a few words and toast at a wedding in front of a few hundred people.  This was the first time I was ever in front of that large of an audience, with the attention solely on me (even if it were for only a few moments.)

While preparing I felt pretty confident, I knew the material, most of the audience and wasn’t really too nervous about it, that is until 30 seconds before I was handed the microphone.  My heart sunk, my hands trembled and I eecked out a horrible display of public speaking, full of filler words and disorganized thoughts.  In hindsight, there was a clear lack of appreciation for true “preparation.”  That was a valuable lesson for me, as I sat down and tried to calm my nerves, trembling, trying to drink some water, I vowed to never embarrass myself like that again.

From there, I went on to read several books about public speaking, I even took a class at a community college in the evenings to learn about the discipline of public speaking, preparation, research, outlines, etc. Needless to say, I’ve improved.  My confidence in speaking publicly has also improved.  That’s not to say I’m a polished speaker, by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve overcome the first of many barriers – I no longer fear it more than death.

Speaking, communication, negotiation, whatever you want to call it is a fundamental skill in today’s society.  Being an effective communicator is crucial to your own success, credibility and influence you have with your peers, friends and even family.  In my role, (and active community involvement) I get asked from time to time to do talks on various subjects, inside and out of my organization – each of which I draw from my experience; sure I still get nervous, but after each I gain in experience and confidence making each future talk more manageable and in some cases I even look forward to them.  One day, I may even hope to give a talk at a TED conference!  Shoot for the stars – right!?

I, like you, have probably heard of Toastmasters, but until recently didn’t know all that much about them.  A good friend of mine, Danielle (@ddelonge) of Automation Alley – helped to motivate me to check out a local Toastmasters here in Troy, MI.  The Troy Toastmasters, Club #2357 (Area 23, Division E, District 28) – meets weekly at 11:45 each Thursday at Dupont Automotive (950 Stephenson Hwy, Troy, MI, 48083.)  This group (to me) was the exact venue to help keep me engaged, further developing my speaking skills, as large gaps (and busy schedules) can prevent me from practicing and the TM group (along with Danielle) provides a positive support system – much like a workout friend.

Not having had exposure to other Toastmaster clubs, I can only assume they all as well run as the Troy group is.  If you’re looking for an outlet to increase your confidence speaking publicly, increasing your verbal (and non-verbal) communication skills, confidence and all the benefits that come along with it, I HIGHLY recommend you check them out.  The group has well balanced experience, with very polished, experienced speakers, as well as total beginners, starting at step 1.  The group is highly organized, with distinct roles & responsibilities to ensure each and every meeting is good use of your time, getting everyone involved, and most importantly introducing you to the benefits of becoming a good speaker – both through positive reinforcement as well as constructive criticism.

The Troy group also has access to excellent facilities, from a large auditorium stage with stadium-style seating (for large, formal speaking engagements) to conference rooms (where most presentations occur.)  Formats include several timed, structured speeches, to one-minute intros and table topics, as well as debates – getting you full exposure to all different types of communication formats and environments – which will surely help you increase your confidence while preparing for you next big presentation – hopefully I’ll see you there!

“The mission of a Toastmasters Club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every member has the opportunity to develop communication and leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal growth.  We have fun in the process.”

How to disable SSL v2 in IIS 7

For some reason, Windows Server 2008 using IIS 7 allows SSL 2.0 by default. Unfortunately, this means you will fail a PCI Compliance audit by default. In order to disable SSL 2.0 in IIS 7 and make sure that the stronger SSL 3.0 or TLS 1.0 is used, follow these instructions:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In Registry Editor, locate the following registry key/folder:

   HKey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols\SSL 2.0

3. Right-click on the SSL 2.0 folder and select New and then click Key. Name the new folder Server.
4. Inside the Server folder, click the Edit menu, select New, and click DWORD (32-bit) Value.
5. Enter Enabled as the name and hit Enter.
6. Ensure that it shows 0×00000000 (0) under the Data column (it should by default). If it doesn’t, right-click and select Modify and enter 0 as the Value data.
7. Restart the computer.
8. Verify that no SSL 2.0 ciphers are available at ServerSniff.net

Note: This process is essentially the same on an IIS 6 (Windows Server 2003) machine. Normally, the Server key under SSL 2.0 will already be created so you will just need to create a new DWORD value under it and name it Enabled.

For more information, read Microsoft’s Knowledge base article on how to disable SSL 2.0 and other protocols in IIS 7.

Microsoft Releases Exchange 2010

The e-mail server includes better storage optimization, voicemail integration, archiving, and potentially big cost savings, says the software giant.

Microsoft released the latest version of its Exchange e-mail server Monday with claims that Exchange 2010 could cost as much as 70% less than previous versions in terms of total cost of ownership.

The move comes just a week after Microsoft slashed the price of its online productivity suite, which includes a cloud-based version of Exchange, from $15 per user to $10 per user.

Though Exchange remains by far the dominant corporate e-mail platform, Google continues to get notice while competitors continue to ply their hands at the corporate market. In addition to IBM’s announcement of a SaaS version of Notes, Cisco announced Monday that it would be entering the corporate e-mail market by integrating e-mail capabilities into its WebEx collaboration suite.

You can read the full story here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/saas/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600802

Google Chrome OS Announced

Members of the media were invited to Google’s headquarters for the official unveiling of Chrome OS, the new operating system from Google. Details were few and far between, so don’t expect Chrome OS to become widely available until 2010.

Google has shared little information since first announcing Chrome OS just a few short months ago. The operating system, says Google, is designed for people who spend most of their time on the Web.

Rumors have been circulating around the web for weeks about when Chrome OS will arrive. In fact, a beta version of the operating system was expected to appear as early as this week. That may still be a possibility, but given the wording of the Google invitation, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.

Google is billing Thursday’s event as “an update on our progress with Google Chrome OS.” The event will include a demonstration of what Chrome OS is and how it works. Google also said it will detail its “launch plans for next year.”

That last quote makes it pretty clear that the operating system won’t be ready until some point in 2010. Hopefully it will be earlier in the year rather than later in the year.

Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management and Matthew Papakipos, engineering director for Google Chrome OS, will be leading the event.

Arnesia’s Song

Call me a sucker for a good story teller; but do yourself a favor, take six minutes out of your busy life and embrace a tale about paying respect to the past while paving a new.

Robert B. Jones performing at TEDxDetroit. Robert has more than twenty years of experience as a performer, musician, storyteller, radio producer/host and music educator. He has opened for and played with some of the finest musicians in the world. Still, Robert considers his greatest honor to be his call to the gospel of ministry.

http://www.myspace.com/revrobertbjones

TEDxDetroit
The area’s leading creators, catalysts, entrepreneurs, artists, technologists, designers, scientists, thinkers and doers gathered on Wednesday, October 21st to share what they are most passionate about — positive ideas for the world from Detroit.

SQL 2008 Hyper-Threading Support

Ok, this is a somewhat misleading post, thus far.  I’m struggling to uncover support (in either direction) if SQL 2008 has improved support for hyper threading – and I’d like to use this medium to get any feedback YOU may have, so please reply in the comments below!?

Now, I’ve been around long enough to know, the easy (and often correct) answer is always “It Depends” but at this point I’m simply looking for any kind of supporting documentation about HT within SQL 2008, all searches have turned up minimal results, most dating back many years – so it’s time we update content on the subject.

I promise to update this post with any supporting data or links I find, and hope it may help you down the road – so if you have something to share – please leave a reply!

*UPDATE.  While it seems SQL 2008 hyper-threading MAY work for your environment, it posed numerous issues in ours.  Issues were primarily related to I/O, or thread in-efficiency causing lots of waits (CXPacket) due to timing of true CPU threads vs. HT CPU threads.  We experienced numerous timeouts and parallelism issues with query performance – all of which were resolved by DISABLING hyper-threading for SQL 2008.  Additionally, if you’re using newer Nehalem processors, you should also confirm “TURBO” mode is disabled, which allows frequency shifting among cores, which can cause similar threading problems for heavily used OLTP database systems.

So, while HT and “Turbo” are innovative technologies, it remains once again, use caution implementing in your environments.  These are probably fine in traditional application workloads, but may not be in SQL and/or Exchange environments.  Hope this helps save you time troubleshooting.

Redefining a City By Changing Its Visual Landscape

Chazz Miller speaking at TEDxDetroit. Chazz is the founder and muralist at Public Art Workz. Chazz founded Public Art Workz to stimulate community growth, provide a creative outlet for children and instill an appreciation of the arts. PAWZ offers enrichment programs in art and technology and helps to drive academic achievement.

http://www.publicartworkz.org

TEDxDetroit
The area’s leading creators, catalysts, entrepreneurs, artists, technologists, designers, scientists, thinkers and doers gathered on Wednesday, October 21st to share what they are most passionate about — positive ideas for the world from Detroit.

 

 

Google Enterprise Apps – a first look.

I attended my first Google event last week at Google’s Ann Arbor, MI office. The event was titled “ready for the cloud?” referencing today’s IT organizations are in the midst of a cloud computing revolution, as a growing number of businesses choose hosted messaging and collaboration solutions — such as Google Apps — to help employees collaborate more effectively while saving significantly on IT costs.

Let me reiterate, this was my first “Google” event; I’ve been following the cloud-computing movement for some time, and Google is a major player – so naturally my expectations were pretty high. Not only was I interested in content, but curiously also about this Ann Arbor office. Google has made alot of news about their presence in Michigan, with a few offices in the area. It was my understanding that their precence here was primarily with their AdWords division, which I neither confirmed nor denied, but as I expected, the presentation was hosted by regional sales folks using the AA office as a hub for businesses in the area. The event took place on the 4th floor which resembled a lounge. It had all the expected Google “stuff” – pool table, ping-pong table, bar, vending drink machines, TV w/gaming systems, rock band, and a couple arcade games. We were setup in the back corner with tables in classroom style, facing two projectors.

Speakers included two Google employees from the Enterprise division and one of their Enterprise partners, Sheepdog inc. The presentation started off with a slide deck overview of google, which lead into their growing Google Enterprise practice, which encompasses four primary units: Search (appliance) / Maps / Postini / Apps.  A couple quick facts: 2008 Google had > 20k employees, w/50% of them being engineers.  They had 21B in revenue, with 13B in profit (conveyed verbally), Google owns 70% of online Ads and has aprox. 63% search market share.  Also interesting was Google is considered the 4th largest hardware manufacturer – whereas they custom build all of their own infrastructure equipment, from switches to servers (I had heard that prior, but was interesting to confirm.)  Platforms include Chrome & Android – doing a small primer on both.  They did also reference the development of a Chrome OS, and touched briefly on Wave and Voice – but not within the “Enterprise” offering.

The Google Enterprise practice has aprox. 1100 employees, nearly 800M in revenue (6% overall).  We then began to dive into the 4 offerings.  Enterprise search was quickly referenced as their Search Appliance, and that was about it.  Maps was also glossed over, with references to its popularity both from consumers as well as businesses, and advanced functionality existing to help businesses track assets and location-based information.  Postini (similar to MXLogic) is a hosted email spam filter with some security provisions to help buffer the enterprise from various threats.  We’ve been using MX Logic at Billhighway for a few years, so we’re pretty familiar with the model and will say we’ve enjoyed it thus far.

On to Apps.  We’ve all heard about .edu’s beginning to adopt GMail as their email provider, whereas they referenced a few examples.  >2M businesses were now using Apps, 15M business users and over 4,000TB of data being managed within Apps.  They have >150M Gmail customers and stated an IDC study indicated nearly 20% of corporations are already using Google docs in some fashion.  The takeaway here (from my perspective) was – it’s out there, it’s been “tested”, use-cases validated, capable infrastructure in place and we’re now ready to take on the “enterprise.”

As the slide deck advanced, they referenced numerous other corporations migrating to Google Apps, primarily emphasizing GMail, which appears to be their “foot in the door” product, aimed squarely at MS Exchange and to some degree Blackberry.  One slide outlined the average legacy cost for in-house email hosting was $300/user/year – compared to $50/user/year with Google.  A slide also outlined the breakdown of these costs, with server equipment|staffing|filtering|archiving consuming the lions share of the expense.  Another argument surrounded upgrades, whereas in-house upgrades tend to be painful, slow and potentially expensive (32bit -> 64bit, requiring new hardware example) and may require 22hr/week to keep Exchange “up” – which translates to 60-150 hours/yr downtime!  On the surface, that seems like alot to me.

Gartner estimates 20% of email services will be in the cloud/SaaS by 2012.  GMail references 99.9% uptime, moving to 99.99% with 24/7 support for enterprise customers.  One thing I did like, was a reference to version “.now” – meaning, with SaaS you’re always current, no upgrade/migration and you benefit (seamlessly) with new features, vs. waiting the traditional 2-3 yr upgrade cycle.  As a SaaS provider ourselves, the benefits are pretty obvious, but like all things in technology there is no one-size-fits-all model.

Another interesting trend taking place is the (subtle) migration to the web-desktop.  By leveraging the “cloud” more and more apps can run within a browser, having minimal software footprints on computers.  Google even mentioned, many companies want to get out of the hardware business all together, giving employees a $1500 signing bonus, to cover the cost of their own computer – since the company no longer needs exclusive controls over the software they issue, since more and more of it is being hosted via the web ~ accessed by browser.  This is something I’ve been watching unfold for a while now, still a ways off (in my opinion) but getting closer all the time.

Another trend Google is encouraging is ubiquitous search.  In other words, they want users to give up their hierarchical organizing habits (often found within subfolder upon subfolders within Outlook, or Windows in general) – in favor for search.  Mac users will probably agree, a solid (unified) search is better, even offering context sensitive search.  Threaded messages is also helpful within GMail, which gives the impression of nearly 40% increase in efficiency, by summarizing email chains (which have lots of ‘replies’) into a grouped conversation.  With a simplified UI, it can make you more productive just by organizing your work differently – which provided a segway into an Einstein “Think Differently” quote (which I believe Apple even used to use back in the day.)

Google then demonstrated some use-cases for corporate Gmail, with fast type-ahead and context sensitive features such as “also include, or did you mean” links for frequently emailed users – based upon your usage habits.  Couldn’t help but think about all the [private] date Google has access to, which helps fuel these “features.”  Presentation previews was cool, again within Gmail, to display a doc, or presentation without opening a popup window.  Google also wants to encourage people moving away from attachments, making it easier to share/collaborate with online documents; think of a transparent ‘webEx’ experience, directly within popular apps (word processing, spreadsheet, spreadsheet, etc.) which helps with version conflicts and increased productivity with real-time collaboration.  This also addresses the serial nature of sharing documents, whereas a RFQ would have to pass through several hands independently.  Video chat was also incorporated (directly within browser) which is rumored to support up to 10 users soon.

So, how can you influence your shop to adopt Google Apps (via SheepDog, Inc.) :

1. Communicate the ‘Why’ (cost savings, increased productivity, collaboration & simplicity)
2. Create an Adoption Culture (identify internal advocates, training, leadership)
3. Plan and Discover (pilot team selection, success criteria, allocation of resources, timelines)
4. Train & Support (End user documentation, admin roles & responsibilities, Train the Trainer, online guides\self-service)
5. Other [customized] consulting.

In summary, the session was good.  Clearly, there is some tremendous potential for SaaS/PaaS and the Cloud in general.  I personally am excited about the space and the opportunity it presents.  Like some, I do see “cloud” as evolutionary vs. revolutionary, but it does challenge you to think differently.  If you’re part of an emerging organization already leveraging SOA, SAN, GRID, and virtualization – the cloud becomes a no brainer.  If you’re not familiar with the technologies leading up to the cloud, you have a serious homework assignment.  There is a watershed event taking place around us and you owe it to yourself to become versed in this [arguably] new ecosystem.

Detroit – While I was away..

TEDxDetroit bootleg.

Poetry Slam champion and award winning singer/songwriter D Blair brought the house to its feet in a standing ovation. His poem ‘Detroit (While I Was Away)’ was awe-inspiring.