Today we did initial testing of the Colony platform on the open source Railo 3.1 application server. I am pleased to share our findings that so far Colony runs without any issues on Railo. While we expect most customers that deploy CFML application to continue to use the award winning Adobe ColdFusion 9 Application Server, we are testing Colony on Railo in order to provide a fully free and open source distribution of the Colony application platform.
The recent disclosure of a data theft of massive proportions - 130 million credit cards - reveals the challenges insitutions face securing large stores of sensitve data in the face of sophisticated hackers determined to breach secured systems. The attacks demonstrate the weaknesses of traditional approaches to application and data security.
News broke today that Amazon remotely erased copies of some George Orwell books from Kindle devices. Putting aside the irony of Orwell's books being erased, the question we must all ask ourselves is what the ramifications are of putting our data on devices and systems controlled by others. In our increasingly connected world of always on, wired and wireless access to everything from our books to our pesonal information, we should all ask a very central philosphical question - who owns our data?
Whether the issue is Amazon deleting a book you paid for on a device you own, government workers improperly accessing private records, private industry workers improperly accessing records of public figures, companies attempting to assert ownership over data you place in their hands, or hackers stealing data from public and private databases, the twin issues of data ownership and security have become central themes in an emerging threat to the success of the Internet as a trusted medium. We believe that users own their data, and we are working on an exciting new product set that will address these fundamental issues in ways that put data ownership and security in the hands of users.
In a small but great piece of news for cooperation between the world's largest software comany and the Linux community, Microsoft has submitted drivers for the Linux kernel that will help Linux virtual machines running on top of a Windows Hyper-V host to run more efficiently.
Kudos to Microsoft for the move.
Michael Jackson's tragic death this past week created an unprecedented wave of traffic on the Internet that temporarily overloaded many sites and services. As CNN noted, the advent of social media has dramatically increased the amplifying effect of big news stories. Several years ago, news stories reported reactions from the blogosphere as the voice of ordinary people. Today, ordinary people all over the world can communicate to many people in real time using services like Facebook and Twitter. It seems as though overnight our collective ability to generate traffic on the Internet has spiked far beyond the capacity of current systems to deal with peak load in the face of dramatic events like Jackson's death.
More significantly, we are only just seeing the very beginning of the bandwidth-gobbling revolution known as social media. As AT & T is fast learning in the US market, mobile Internet usage will skyrocket as handsets and services become more sophisiticated and mobile bandwidth grows. Internet engineering experts have been predicting the saturation of the Internet for several years; it appears that we have now arrived at the saturation point during peak usage. How long will it be before Internet brownouts become a common occurence? The answer may depend on when the global economy recovers from its current doldrums.
The other day I logged onto Expedia to book a trip. I got through most of the details, and then Expedia inexplicably asked me to log into the site again. As I normally do, I clicked on the Windows Live link to log in via my Windows Live/Passport login service (one of Microsoft's better Internet services). Instead of taking me to the login screen, Expedia logged me out of the site and posted a logout message. After several attempts at logging in via Passport, I decided that the Expedia link to the service was broken and that I would have to book my ticket through another site.
I logged into Orbitz and set up the itinerary, then realized that I did not have my frequent flyer number in Orbitz. Since I have my US Air Dividend Miles statement emailed to my Hotmail account (another site that uses the Live/Passport login service), I logged into Hotmail toget my frequent flyer number, and lo and behold, Expedia had sent me a confirmed itinerary for a trip that I had not known I purchased. Oops.
I jumped on the phone to the Expedia Customer Service line and was immediately informed by their automated service system that call volume was unusually high because many travellers were calling the system at the time. Uh-oh. As a business person, this development meant nothing to me but a lot of potential hassles. As a software professional, it meant something quite different - the Expedia engineering team had pushed a change to their production systems that caused immediate and significant problems for their customers. Bad news. After sitting on the phone (on hold of course) for far too long, I gave up for the day. My time is way too valuable to sit on hold forever.
Fast forward to today. I called Expedia's Customer Service line again to change my itinerary. Remeber, the one I didn't even realize I had booked, the one that I almost double-booked through Orbitz? Sorry, the Expedia customer service folks informed me, (oh yes, they actually answer the phone when they are not being deluged with calls from customers because of their broken web site), I would need to pay a $150 airline fee to change my ticket.
I explained how the site had been broken (which they must know but would not admit) and how the site booked my itinerary without showing me that it had been booked. Apparently that was my fault, the mistake by the Expedia engineering team notwithstanding. Sorry, I would have to pay, end of story.
Not that $150 is going to kill me, but I should not have to pay for their mistake. It annoys the hell out of me when companies hide their mistakes behind a wallof customer service representatives with carefully scripted responses to legitimate complaints. For that reason and the considerable annoyance and incovenience this problem has caused me, I have decided to drop Expedia for good as a booking site for my travel arrangements. Thanks but no thanks, Expedia.
In case you haven't heard the story about the next "greatest thing since sliced bread", there is a new search engine, of sorts, called Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram is basically a big computation engine with a vast store of data to compute against. The press has been agog with the possibilities of the system, calling it a "Google killer" and more. Pardon me for my skepticism, but I don't think Wolfram will change the world.
Sure, it's a handy thing, a very handy thing, but it has significant limits. Getting data into the system is a manual affair that requires human curation, so from the very start of the project, its owners have a pipeline problem - the breadth of the engine's knowledge is limited by the amount of information their human agents can put into it. Unless they change that model, the pipeline problem never goes away. In fact, the problem only becomes bigger over time as humans generate more and more data for potential inclusion into the system.
Wolfram, in essence, has returned to the original Yahoo model of curated content, only using structured data and a more sophisticated search system. Yahoo gave up on curating data manually - it was just too inefficient and costly compared to automated indexing. While Wolfram will excel at answering the kind of complicated mathematical equations that it specializes in, I don't see it outshining Google.
Google's advantage (and disadvantage, as I have discussed previously) is the sheer volume of information in its index. I can search on Google and generally find an answer to a question within a few clicks. Why is that? In short, Google and other automated indexing engines rely on the millions upon millions of people around the world who contribute content to the Internet in the form of web pages, wikis, blogs, and many others. Wolfram, on the other hand, relies on its own staff of curators to ad data to the system.
And let's not forget about Twitter and other social media as the newest form of content contribution. If Twitter embodies Web 2.0, Wolfram Alpha embodies yet another take on Web 1.0. Don't get me wrong, Wolfram will be a boon to people doing some forms of research, but it will never live up to the hype that has been created around it.
Kristen Webb Schofield writes that a new Gartner report praises Adobe ColdFusion and recommends that agencies continue their investment in the platform, which they see as enjoying a bright future with Adobe as its steward. You can buy the report from the Gartner web site.
IT news sheet The Inquirer has written a piece on why they think Windows 7 XP mode will stink. As someone who has been using virtualization on Ubuntu for some time now (including a virtualized XP install on my desktop for specific tasks), I take for granted some of their criticisms as limitations of virtualization technology. No 3D acceleration, for instance, and no accelerated sound support. While that makes XP mode less than ideal for gaming, It should be fine for running productivity software and other older desktop applications that do not work on Vista.
My preference is to use Ubuntu and get off the OS licensing train completely, but of course that isn't possible in all cases. Some folks love that other commercial desktop OS, too, which I guess is fine.
Last night we upgraded our production systems to Ubuntu 9.04. SO far everything looks very good. I am waiting a few days to see how things continue to run before declaring victory, but so far everything looks great. Next on our infrastructure roadmap is setting up a cloud environment for use with some of our systems.
