Between Theory & Practice

Today I found back an old article I had written for a few friends of mine a few years ago while working as R&D software programmer and wanted to share the story again as it remains pretty much true and applies to other fields of IT as well.. Do not worry; you do not need to have a master in advanced telecom technologies to understand what is written below.

Back then my job consisted to design and implement a communication bus (SMBus); in other words think telephone line as it is easier to understand. This digital bus was composed of 2 wires: the clock wire and the data wire. The following devices were connected on the bus: a PC, a laptop battery (yes, you can talk to a battery, the very same battery you have inside your laptop and believe me it will answer you), and a power supply control card with a microcontroller (MCU) and a small memory chip on it. All these 4 devices had their own bus address (think phone number), and they were able to call each other in order to send and receive data (like talking on the phone or sending a fax). Last detail, all these components were grounded (linked to the ground) for electrical security reason. The theoretical schematic of the bus looked like this.

Didn't it look so nice on paper ?

In order to check the data transmissions and receptions (ie, monitor the communication), I had also connected an oscilloscope on the bus.

Now, the reality was slightly different and the result I obtained looked rather like this:

Tell me you got scared by reality.

But don't trust Murphy's Law on this one as it actually worked. This being said, I am confident you will feel reassured by knowing that similar busses are present inside your computers, your car, the trains or the planes you take, and so on.

CMS Watch SharePoint Report 2008

We purchased it and I just finished reading it: The excellent SharePoint Report 2008 from CMS Watch.

Is it useful ?
Definitively yes.

If you have only played partially with SharePoint like only using some WSS features or only used it for a specific and limited task or for a limited number of users then CMS Watch's report will provide you with the insight to go (or not go) further with SharePoint.

The main advantage and strong aspect of this report is the detailed analysis provided on a "per feature" basis. Eight different Business Services in SharePoint are reviewed, discussed, and analyzed: collaboration, Enterprise Content Management, Web Content Management, Portal Services, Business Intelligence Platform, Forms Processing, Enterprise Search, and Application Platform.

For each of these services, pros and cons are reviewed and discussed into much detail while providing insight as to better use (or not) SharePoint in a small or large enterprise environment.

The report also contains a nice section about evaluating customization and additional development which provides excellent hints about what should be taken into consideration.

All in all, this 195-pages long report is a kind of a must-read that can spare you days of consultancy just to arrive to the same conclusions for a higher price. Of course this report will not decide for you but it will make you understand why you decide for or against SharePoint (MOSS).

Finally Office 2007

Finally, I got it: the full version of Office 2007, including Visio, MS Project, OneNote ... The migration(or update) was needed in order to test some fortchoming software integration (Share Point, Exchange).

Some cool features I discovered and start using immediately:
- Under Outlook 2007, importing mail server certificates has become so much easier. As under Outlook 2003, you are first prompted to accept or decline the certificate but now you can also view them and copy them in order to easily install them.
- The task integration between Outlook and OneNote is cool.
- MS Project has a nicer look & feel.
- The dynamic toolbar from Office is simply great. As opposed to many people I liked it at first glance and from first use. It is nice, handy, and not too different. To me it is intuitive.

The main problem so far is speed. I work on a Lenovo T61 with 2GB RAM and Windows XP and most common operations seem to take more time: open, save, print ...

You can expect more reviews about Office 2007 in the coming weeks.

Google Chrome Review

Like everyone these days I downloaded, installed, and started testing Google Chrome browser.

So first things first, my very first experience with the brand new Google Chrome browser has been ... a bug !



Funny, as this is the last thing as I expected as first experience with the new Google browser.

Now except this minor annoyance that vanished upon a simple click, the test was rather positive in the beginning. Google Chrome is fast upon displaying the pages, light to load but still eating quite some memory. So what are my first negative impressions ?

- Google Chrome does not support activeX meaning you cannot use it to connect to some corporate VPNs.
- Google Chrome uses Internet Explorer's proxy settings. No progress there.
- Google Chrome seems to load and process the web pages before displaying them all at once. This can result in disturbing waiting times where nothing seems to happen until your requested page suddenly appears.

I will check and test this browser further as it can impact the development of the Star Wars Combine.

This post has been written with 100% recyclable electrons under Google Chrome.

The Multiplication of little Bits

The explosion of information data is no more a hypothesis but a fact now. Analysts keep predicting an exponential evolution of data growth for the coming years.

Each and every one of us surely heard such comment more than once. This is no news and does not really bring anything useful to the debate. As corollary, hard drives and other memory cards capacities also increase at a surprising path. This is still no news but this is rather cool for our mobile devices, digital cameras, GPS systems, MP3 players and other computers.

But where are all these data coming from ?
Of course, anyone who brags to know a bit about hi-tech will immediately accuse voice and video applications to be the main source of data explosion. Other people with a bit more experience will talk about automated sensor devices measuring and recording data about almost everything from environment (temperature, pollution level…) or car traffic (traffic jams) to security (alarms). But what most people forget about but which remains the nightmare of quite a few IT managers is email. Emails are the perfect example of useless data replication in frightening proportions. Here comes a couple of examples.

Let’s start with something simple. You just decided to invite 10 of your friends by mail for a barbecue. You send them a nice and small text email of only 1 kilobyte (1kb). You just hit the send button and – Miracle – your email has been decupled. Ten more copies have been created, each of them surfing on the world wild web network and hunting for their recipient mailbox. Now when each of your friends will reply, they will most likely include your original message in their email along with their response. If we suppose that such a reply will make 2kb in size, then there will be 31 created emails for a total of 51kb of data. How did we manage to create 51 more data ?
- 1 original email still stored in your “Sent Items” folder (1kb)
- 10 emails stored in the recipient mailboxes (10x 1kb)
- 10 received answers (10x 2kb)
- 10 original answers stored in the Sent items of your friends (10x 2kb)

Out of these 51kb, the only interesting information are your invitation (1kb) and the answers of your friends excluding the part of their mail which includes your original invitation, making it only 1kb of meaningful data per answer. If we sum it that way, we have 11kb of meaningful information and 40kb of uselessly duplicated data.

And sometimes it can goes even further and have more impressive consequences. Here is an example directly issued of my past experience. As member of a workgroup of 10 people, I received a document of one megabyte from the group leader. Each workgroup member had to fill a part of the document and send it back. Can you estimate the amount of data that such process flow will generate ? Well here is the result according to the previous method of calculation.
- 1x 1MB for the original document stored on the hard drive of the sender.
- 10x 1MB for the original document stored on the 9 recipient inboxes and in the sender sent items.
- 9x 1MB for the 9 local copies including the recipient updates.
- 18x 1MB for all 9 replies stored 9 times in the workgroup leader inbox and once per workgroup member sent items folder.
- 1x 1MB for the final document gathering all updates and stored on a shared folder.

We already have 39MB of data for only one megabyte of useful data and mostly because most members wanted to keep all of their email for as long as possible (ie, forever). And was it finished ? Not even. All members of this workgroup were equipped with laptops and each of these laptops had an automated backup system on it, copying all data onto network NAS. As a result, the total data volume is doubled to 78MB; seventy eight megabytes of data for only one megabyte of final useful information.

Is this a bad thing ?
Well it is certainly a bad habit to desire to keep all of his emails at all costs instead of concentrating on the final deliverable (when applicable). Therefore, it is probably more a problem of people than of technology and people are hard to change. As a side note, tt means also that IT managers need to plan for storage space and that CEOs must give them the budget for that.

The Port Side of Telecom Operators

A few years ago in our little country named Belgium, the Mobile Number Portability was introduced. It enables mobile telephone users to retain their mobile telephone numbers when changing from one mobile network operator to another.

I now use a mobile since over 10 years with still the same Proximus number as of day one. When joining my first employer, I had no problem to keep the same mobile number when they started paying the bills for me as it became a work tool. Back then I had only to fill a simple form and a couple hours later, the mobile bills were no more part of my concern - and of my budget. So far so good as this step did not involve any port-out/port-in operation.

So last month, I joined Aliaxis and would still get a mobile from the company. Unfortunately -- for me but not for them they say -- they use another mobile telecom operator named Mobistar.

As I used my number since over 10 years, I asked my company if I could keep it and have it transferred from Proximus to Mobistar, knowing the portability rule would apply and that it was technically possible . My company accepted immediately, which was a real relief to me.

And this is where the crusade began. We contacted Mobistar and requested the transfer. On the next day, they also requested -- god knows why -- a copy of the last invoice concerning my mobile number. So I had to contact one of my former colleague, kindly ask him to dig into the Proximus monthly invoices, find the pages involving my number, scan them along with the cover page, and email me back the resulting PDF. I could then forward it, hoping it would be solved within 2-3 days. After all, I had already initiated port-in of private numbers to the Proximus account of my previous company and it always transferred within hours. Therefore 2 to 3 days did not seem utterly optimistic to me.

Two to three days -- and rather three than two -- were indeed necessary to get notified by Mobistar that we needed to provide them a signed letter from my previous company stating their agreement to the transfer. So I contacted the new Telecom Manager of my previous company, asked him for such a letter, received it (and it was a very nicely letter, very professional), forwarded it to Mobistar, and prepared my minds to wait again for an additional two to three days.

After three days, the push-email service on my Blackberry stopped working. This was anticipated because it used a temporary SIM card and I had received a new SIM card for my own number. I plugged the new SIM card and quickly discovered a very nice message on my Blackberry screen:

SIM card rejected

Of course, this had to happen on a Friday afternoon while coming back from a business trip and with none to call. The idea of spending the weekend without my Blackberry services was not as frightening as the realization that it would surely still not work for my business trip planned on the next Monday.

On Tuesday, when back to my office, I learned that the transfer was not authorized by Proximus because the signature on the letter was not the same that the one in their database. Of course it was not, I was the previous Telecom manager and I left. At that point, I was extremely tempted to modify the letter and use my own signature to have this solved. I resisted to the dark side and decided instead to call the Proximus account manager as I had still her contact info.

From there, it took still four working days, several phone calls and emails to have the situation settled. But on Friday 13 of June 2008 around 6.00pm, my mobile number was finally ported to Mobistar and I could start using my Blackberry 8320 as email and telephone device while dismissing my old Nokia phone.

Now, I "just" have to re-customize my mobile with my own screen background, specific ring tones, and so on. Some say it is the funny side of the job...

We're Hiring !!!

We are urgently looking for a Software Development Engineer (junior or not) based in Brussels willing to become an AXAPTA guru. For more information, please visit the job description. If interested, please send your resume to Mr Elie Vulfs. Don't forget to mention the job description.

Great company, great opportunities.