Desicritics Section: BizTech

Book Review: SQL and Relational Theory

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:08:28 EDT

This book is intended to be an improvement over an earlier book on the same topic by the same author, namely 'Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners' . As the author states, the current book is a product of his realization of SQL being such a difficult language that it was far from obvious how to use it without violating relational principles even when covered in much depth in this earlier book, primarily for database practitioners.

One of the main features of the current book hence is the additional effort taken to have enough elucidation to connect the theory with practical SQL examples. While the theory discussion about the relational database model remains largely similar to the earlier book, there are exercises at the end of each chapter for better connecting the concepts with more examples. The answers to these exercises are included towards the end of the book.

There are about half a dozen chapters in the center of the book starting with “SQL and Relational Algebra I:The original operators” through to “Miscellaneous SQL Topics” which are the highlight of this book. There are some really lucid examples of implementing the relational definitions and theory in proper SQL in these chapters.

The slightly sarcastic tone of discussion of the author on the popular and theoretically doubtful usage of relational terms seems to be a constant companion for use of terms such as “duplicate elimination” instead of the more correct “duplication elimination”. This seems to be an attempt to challenging the maintenance of a continuous approach to try and match the SQL implementations to the theoretical definitions and concepts of Relational Model for Database Management.

One of the recent implementations of newer database models seem to be the Google proprietary Bigtable distributed storage systems. Since such proprietary models are out of public domain, it would be interesting comparing the principles behind them and the widely used relational database management systems.

To summarize, the book is a recommended read for all the database practitioners and other related professionals looking to match their implementations with the theoretical concepts and hence improving usability of the relational database model implemented within the enterprise.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Plays Catchup, Sets Stage For Future

Aaman Lamba — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:57:48 EDT

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 was released today to some acclaim. While it will doubtless break all previous records of the most downloads, it brought little overtly new to the browser landscape that was not already available in Google Chrome, Apple Safari, or Microsoft Internet Explorer. That being said, some features that come with the browser could prove more useful as websites adapt to them.

Private browsing, tearaway tabs, and faster JavaScript engines - we're getting inured to the rapid pace of innovation in browsers, and look for something revolutionary. Two features that might address that yearning are the support for HTML 5 and for location-aware sites.

When you visit a location-aware site, Firefox 3.5 asks you if you would like to share your location information with the site, and this provides you location-specific information, such as movie listings, restaurants, etc. The browser determines your location using Wi-Fi data, IP lookups, and Google Location Services. Unfortunately, you'd be hard-pressed to find too many sites that support this feature just yet, but one can envisage an array of hyperlocal services that will leverage this ability soon. There's no way to grant blanket permission to all sites to broadcast your location information, which is probably the best approach.

HTML 5 support is another aspect that the average user might not care about today, but features like embeddable video using the video tag and the Ogg Theora format (no more Flash plugins, etc), offline storage, web workers, etc., will mean the most significant transformation of the Web over the next couple of years since, well, Netscape's IPO.

Under the hood, the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, faster startup, the usual ACID-compliance to standards, and extension support, still make Mozilla Firefox 3.5 the browser to beat. Almost all my extensions loaded or updated seamlessly post the upgrade.

It would have been good to see more social media aware features, such as the ones in Flock or perhaps Semantic Web browsing-related capabilities, but the Firefox 3.5 release is an important one, not least because it sets the stage for future enhancements like Snowl, Weave, and Jetpack.

Book Review: Using Google App Engine

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:54:36 EDT

Using Google App Engine starts with introducing cloud computing and the App Engine as a concept within the Google Implementation of cloud architectures. There is some discussion about the basic ways of developing web applications in HTML and CSS, Python and enough concepts to begin interacting with App Engine server using HTTP protocol commands. Python is to be used as a sort of controller to the HTML and CSS in front-end.

The concept of mostly HTML template to be rendered from Python code uses the Django project for the default syntax used in Google App Engine. The database that is at the back end of the Google App Engine uses a hierarchical object-oriented storage approach called as Bigtable technology. The interaction with this type of database being different from the widely used relational database models, there is an entire chapter dedicated to interfacing with this database.

The memory cache comes between the web application and the datastore and is one of the mechanisms used to improve speed of web applications. There is an interesting discussion about using the memory cache of Google App Engine as a sort of large Python dictionary.

In addition to the all these topics, the book gives a good amount of information to properly using the App Engine webapp Framework, setting up and using Google Application Engine accounts, using JavaScript, jquery and Ajax and finally, downloading and installing Google App Engine Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows XP,Windows Vista,Macintosh and Linux Systems.

Google App Engine is part of the Platform-as-a-service approach that the Google cloud uses. Adding to the rapidly growing technical literature dealing with implementation of applications to clouds, this O'Reilly-Google Press book is dealing with making the usage of Google App Engine as detailed as possible starting from budding application developers to advanced professionals. This is a recommended read for the professionals looking to begin and ramp up their web application deployments quickly and as cleanly as possible to the Google App Engine.

Book Review: Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

Anuradha Goyal — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:44:05 EDT

Nandan Nilekani is someone I admire, someone I know a bit having worked in Infosys during the days when he was the CEO. After reading Imagining India, I want to write this letter to him.

Dear Nandan,

I just finished reading your book on Imagining India, which you have structured around various ideas: ideas that worked, that did not work, ideas that are still in process and some ides that must be explored, experimented and implemented. We are all familiar with most of these ideas, some by virtue of our education and some by virtue of the hyper active media in the country.

For someone like you who has been at the forefront of the revolution that swept India in the last couple of decades or so, there is so much that can and you must share with the world and especially with young Indians. Here are some of the things that I can suggest, but I am sure there are many more:

1. How to build a brand from scratch?

I think one of Infosys’ biggest contribution to India is the creation of a brand whose roots are purely Indian, but it is as global as it can be. You created a brand at a time when there was no known global brand that came from India, and you did build this brand consciously. You made sure the quality of your services provides the base for the brand that is strengthened by the right mix of PR and media relations. You created the brand by focusing on the aspects that were usually ignored by Indian corporations till Infosys brought them in fashion. You created a brand around values that had deep roots in India and around human capital that not many at that time looked at as asset. You created a brand that commands respect above everything else.

2. How to create the supply base where none exists?

You created a system to convert all kinds of engineers into software engineers. There was huge opportunity for Indian software industry, but the education system in the country did not even produce 1% of the engineers with required skill sets. Most people would have taken this as a bottleneck and backed out. But you started the trend of taking bright engineers from all branches and then putting them through a university like course, to convert them into software engineers like an alchemist. There are arguments for and against this. But to me this was a great move probably the biggest innovative idea that created today’s Indian IT industry or the so called the IT dream. But for this innovation, everything else might have failed.

3. How to achieve scale without diluting the core?

One of the important success factors for Infosys has been its ability to scale without diluting the values and the ways it operated. It maintained its middle class culture while dealing with the best and some of the most flamboyant personalities and companies. You must share how to scale up in such a way that the whole organization is geared up for the next level of scale, how to sync up the scale of various aspects of the organization and that too on a continuous basis.

4. How to groom yourself for handling this scale?

Not many people realize that while you were building this organization, you must have constantly groomed and prepared yourself for handing the bigger challenges, managing the current organization while laying down the vision for the next one. I remember in one of the quarterly town halls you said ‘Guys, help me, I am also learning to handle a billion dollar organization’ Now it must have been a challenge to prepare yourself for handling something that grew far beyond your own dreams. Share with is how to dream big and constantly keep improving the size of your dreams. There would be lot of stories and learnings that you must share with the future leaders so that they can learn from your experience.

5. How to use PR effectively without spending a fortune?

I think a tool that Infosys has used extremely effectively during its growth trajectory and continues to do so, is using positive PR through variety of media. Whatever you did differently or innovatively was used to put the company in the right light, be it training the support staff, be it airlifting the employees during hurricanes, be it hiring the graduates from ivy league colleges and making them work from Bangalore, be it campus connect or be it building the world class campus. I think PR was always used very intelligently which not many organizations do.

6. How not to let the limitations of your environment limit your dreams?

You created a world class campus right in the middle of mess. You competed with and challenged the best in the world, when most Indians thought they can not do so, when the business environment in the country was not really supportive. Tell us what drove you, what gave you confidence and what kept you going. Tell us the course corrections you took to adjust to the external environment and tell us what worked in your favor and what limited you.

As I was writing this post, news of you handling the Unique ID project came in, I am sure you are happy to take on that responsibility as you have advocated the need of UID throughout your book.

Wish you all the best for the new role where you would have new challenges to handle and I am sure new heights to be defined. I would love to work with you again sometime somewhere.

Thanks & Regards
Anuradha

Book Review: Cloud Application Architectures

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:19:43 EDT

Cloud Application Architectures is directed more towards the higher management personnel in IT, as an audience for making the decisions based on the latest status for this new technology.

There is an intensive discussion near the beginning of the book, as to the points of comparison between internal IT divisions, managed services outsourcing and the cloud computing environment. There is one article worth mentioning in this regard.

There are the two major cloud infrastructure approaches of Infrastructure-as-a-service, with the example of Amazon Web Service(AWS), and Platform-as-a-service, with Google Apps being an example. In IAAS, the customer owns the instances /servers on demand whereas in PAAS, there is a lock-in to the vendor APIs with respect to the software development that can use the back end vendor cloud infrastructure. IAAS is the model discussed in this book.

One of the main intentions in this book is to enable writing applications to make use of cloud computing in the IAAS model. While achieving this, the author familiarizes us with the Amazon specific terms such as elastic IPs ,buckets ,block storage volumes, Amazon Machine Image(AMI), Security Groups, etc. There are brief discussions on some important considerations to get ready for the cloud such as service levels and the mapping of different AWS services into them, security and risk profiles, database management in the cloud , among others.

The book gives a lot of exposure to Amazon Web Services with a brief look at the Rackspace and GoGrid offerings at the end. With the rapid mushrooming of different cloud offerings from competing vendors in the market, this book should be a good introduction to compare and get used to the difference in implementation technologies. One of the possible improvements for this book could be some basic simulator software examples in addition to theoretical discussions.

Positive Steps by SEBI - Anchor Investors, No Load Funds, & Lower Fees

Aaman Lamba — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:09:58 EDT

SEBI Chairman C B Bhave continues his trend of investor-friendly actions by various announcements today.

SEBI, the market regulator in India, announced the approval of 'anchor investors' for public offers. This allows an individual or entity to subscribe up to 30% of the institutional share of an IPO, similar to a pre-placement agreement, and enforces a lock-in of 30 days on such investors. Since 50% of an IPO is typically reserved for institutional investors, this would mean upto 15% of the total offering could be given to an 'anchor investor.'

The bidding process for anchor investors will be done one day prior to the opening of the IPO for subscription. This would thereby impute confidence to the retail investors as they see a large investor taking a significant stake in the IPO.

This step is expected to stabilize public offerings and give an overall boost to the primary market. This could lead to concentrated shareholdings, though, and it is likely the general norms of any single investor holding over 34% stake in a company having to make an open offer will still hold.

In addition, SEBI announced that entry loads on new or existing mutual funds would be done away with. Any commission will be disclosed and paid upfront by the investor to the distributor, bringing much-needed transparency into mutual fund investing. This revolutionary step could shake up the mutual fund industry overnight.

In an even more far-reaching decision, no listed company will be allowed to issue shares with superior voting rights. There could also be no preferential issues with superior voting rights. This levels the playing field between investors and promoters, who have typically used this route to reward themselves.

Fees on both equity and debt have been cut by 50% and rights issue disclosure norms relaxed.

Finally, the Board would consider amending its structure to provide itself powers similar to those of a civil court, lending it more teeth and enforcement powers.

Fiat Launches the Fiat Punto Grande in India

Aaman Lamba — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:11:54 EDT

Fiat, continuing its rise in the global auto industry, has announced the launch of its award-winning Fiat Punto Grande supermini cars in India.

The car will be jointly produced with Tata Motors and is very reasonably priced between Rs 3.99 lakh and Rs 6.11 lakh rupees. The petrol versions will have 1.2L and 1.4L engines, while the diesel variant has a 1.3L multijet diesel engine. The launch also follows close on the heels of the launch of the Honda Jazz in India. Evidently small is in, and car manufacturers are prepping for the Tata Nano's arrival in stores.

The Fiat Punto Grande is a 2005 model and was announced at the India Auto Expo in New Delhi in January 2009. Fiat's premium model, the Fiat Linea has been selling well in India. The car has a high safety rating in European tests, and conforms to the Euro IV emission standards. It bears a Straight-4 engine, in which all four cylinders in the internal combustion engine are mounted in a straight line on the crankshaft, making it cheaper to manufacture and well-suited for small cars. Unfortunately, it also leads to noise and vibrations in smaller cars as the cylinders are not well-balanced, without a more complex design. By Fiat's announcement, the expected mileage is 22.3kpl for the 90bhp and 21.2kpl for the 75bhp engine.

“The launch of Grande Punto marks a new milestone for Fiat in India as we bring the quintessentially Italian designs to Indian shores,” Fiat India official said

Book Review: Gray Hat Python

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:05:32 EDT

With python being a language of choice for hackers and reverse engineers, Gray Hat Python gives an insight into using the python programming language and pre-built python tools within its covers ,saving time and effort looking on the web.

While the installation methods for Python and its tools are shown in the early chapter for both Linux and windows OS, the rest of the book uses more of Python on windows OS. There is a exclusive chapter devoted to the theory behind building a windows debugger in Python before going to discussing about PyDbg and I mmunity debuggers.

Examples of usage of techniques such as soft and hard hooking,dll and code injection and fuzzing are explained in simple ways. After discussing the basics of fuzzing and the sulley fuzzing framework, Immunity debugger is used to demonstrate windows driver fuzzing. One of the important tips from the book is to do the fuzzing demonstrations or experimentation on virtual machines so the appearance of the “blue screen of death” is not a significant issue.

One of the last topics of discussion revolves around using Ida Python in the disassembler IDA Pro 5.2 with examples of scripts. The book ends with description and usage of PyEmu- a pure Python IA32 emulator that allows a developer to use Python to drive CPU emulation tasks.

This sums up the review of this concise book of barely 190 pages covering usage of python for reverse engineering and hacking. With a bare-bones approach for the topic, the book does enough to get the interested novice up to a decent level of expertise. There is also lot of information useful for the advanced professionals looking for some fresh approach. The interested readers would do well to have sound theoretical concepts to put the tips and examples in this book to good use.

PSU Divestment in India - The Rocky Path Ahead

Ashish — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 08:11:22 EDT

When the Congress Government came back to power with an enhanced mandate and higher numbers (and consequently, a less dependence on allies to make up its numbers), the markets welcomed the step, with people talking about a re-start of the earlier stalled divestment process. In fact, with the amount of money that the Government has committed towards its ambitious social welfare programs, it needs to arrange for large sums of money to fund these programs. The disinvestment program seems a good way to arrange money for these programs. However, not everything seems to be going the right way for the Congress; even though the allies are lower in number, the opposition from them is still prevalent.

Right now, the 2 main allies of the Congress, the Trinamool Congress of Mamta Banerjee, and the DMK of Karunanidhi seem to have problems with the policy of disinvestment. The DMK is opposed to the policy of disinvestment for those Public Sector Units that are located in Tamil Nadu (these PSU's are a source of public patronage, and the DMK needs to ensure that continuous patronage opportunities remain). The politician belonging to DMK and Karunanidhi's daughter, Kanimozhi, made a statement against the process of disinvestment as well (link to article):

In the Rajya Sabha, the Congress-led government's new agenda for disinvestment faced opposition from its key ally DMK. The DMK's opposition to the government's disinvestment policy echoed in the Upper House with party MP Kanimozhi arguing that generating revenue by divesting the PSUs would not help. "I welcome that the UPA government has laid a lot of emphasis on welfare schemes and on social sector spending. But we also have to keep away from the temptation of generating revenue by disinvesting our PSUs," Kanimozhi said

Another important ally, Trinamool Congress, has already made it clear that it would not allow rampant disinvestment of the PSUs. Though the party has not yet made its stand clear in the House, party chief Mamata Banerjee opposed some of the `radical' ideas when the draft of the President's address was discussed among the cabinet ministers, Trinamool sources said.

Principally, the Government has no role to play in many of the sectors of industry. After all, why is the Government in the business of running airlines and having to spend huge amounts from taxpayer's money to prop up Air India, or be in the business of telecom, or in financial industry, or many other similar areas. These are then totally dependent on the whims and fancies of the Minister (even for a critical area such as Road building where the previous Minister had a big hand in the slow down of road expansion).

Further, when the Government does want to disinvest, for sectors of industry where the Government should have a zero role, it should get optimum return. This is not possible through the normal case where the Government disinvests its shares while maintaining a 51% stake in some of the PSU's. For PSU's where a Government stake is not critical, it is better to follow the earlier Government (NDA) policy of strategic sale whereby the Government sells its controlling stake to bidders. This results in a much higher return, and is the optimum way to get returns from the disinvestment process.

Fishing Stocks Correlation with Future Trends

DeeptiA — Thu, 4 Jun 2009 14:38:21 EDT

Scientists know that fishing stocks the world over are at risk, both from changes due to global warming, and due to over-fishing (and there have been many reports and articles predicting dire forecasts for the health of the fishing stock in the world's oceans). However, in a more detailed and back-looking approach, researchers are studying historical records to see what fish stocks were like just hundreds of years ago, and try to use that data to correlate into estimates of what the future will hold. They are getting hold of historical tax records and logs maintained by sailors, and studying them to determine the long-term impact.

The research was carried out by Members of the History of Marine Animals Project (HMAP), and they came out with results detailing the change in fish species over the past few hundred years that shocked them, and about which they believe that the level of public awareness is low (link to article):

The scale of humanity's impact has shocked them. "I was surprised by the magnitude of the depletion of species and its universality around the globe," Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, an HMAP project leader told CNN. "The extent of it was really quite dramatic. We've fundamentally changed ecosystems without realizing that was possible." HMAP research has revealed a picture of a remarkable wealth of life in the seas as recently as 200 years ago, which has now largely been lost.

Before whaling began in the waters to the south of New Zealand around 1800, the population of whales was roughly 30 times higher than today. In the 17th century the waters around southwest England were home to blue whales, as well as large numbers of porpoise, dolphins, and blue and thresher sharks. Around the world the inshore regions of our seas are estimated to have on average held 10 times the amount of life two or three hundred years ago than they do today.

The oceans are a fundamental factor in the continuance of the human species, whether that be due to the effect they have on global climate, or due to the fact that many geographical concentrations of humanity are dependent on sea life as a major source of nutrition. For the fisheries around the world to have lost so much correlates with earlier research from a couple of years back that stipulated the dangerous position that many of the world's fishing stocks are in.
We already see this in the restrictions on the amount of fishing allowed in many regions around the Atlantic in order to conserve the fish population.

At the same time, the research also found that there is hope. If scientifically imposed restrictions on fishing are imposed, fish stocks have bounced back, with the example of the regeneration of the North Sea (Atlantic) herring stocks. If Governments have the courage to thwart the short term interests of the commercial fishing industry, then fish stocks (and the larger species such as whales and other larger fish) can come back.