On the whole, Barack Obama's presidential campaign is wonderfully internet-savvy. The new Obama iPhone app is getting rave reviews. They "get it" about the iPhone. Their YouTube video foreshadowing a tough attack over John McCain's Keating scandal is just the right buildup. They "get it" about online video.

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Creators of spam web sites commonly steal and sometimes modify existing web content, the better to look "real" to the search engines. Some specifics of how this happens can be found in a couple of posts on splogs and black hat SEO. A few days ago, I tripped across an example of this that seemed pretty funny, kind of like a Mad Libs version of my career. In close to its entirety, it reads (links removed, emphasis added):

He afterwards co-founded EvernetInc., a $40 meg networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and consultive steadfastly cover software-intensive sectors of the subject industry. Do you want to buy guild wars gold? In that period he also has been co-founder, presidency, or chairwoman of various else discipline startups.

Laconic has served as a strategic consultant to umpteen well-known firms, including Vaticinator, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Concise attained a Ph.D. in maths (Spunky Theory) from University Lincoln. He has held body positions in maths, economics and open insurance at University, Altruist, and Suffolk universities.

Similarly, players are the penultimate connexion of investigation. LOTRO has its reliability problems (such solon than Guild Wars ever did, and I intend to investigate few ideas as to why). guild wars gold is the currency used to buy and trade items. But flatbottom so, they’re uncovered quickly, and for the most location secure relatively shortly. LOTRO also does a nice job of but editing aspects of the scheme if fact missions or whatever are generally imperfect.

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I'd like to write about two very different blog posts, both by smart and very experienced guys, that at the bottom say rather similar things.

Confessions of a terrible programmer is a great post about how to write programs that actually work. Key takeaways include:

• Go way beyond the minimum safeguards apparently necessary. Multiple layers of defense against accidents are good things. (That's even before we think about security-related attempts to introduce deliberate errors.)
• Try to break your own code.
• Have another programmer look over your code.

I know. Nothing terribly revolutionary there. Still, it's a great reminder from a witty curmudgeon. And the sequel Dinosaur programmers know more than you is pretty good too.

CTO Sid Probstein of Attivio kicked off Attivio's corporate blog with a more happy happy utopian post about development. Attivio programmers, A+ programmers all, collaborate in hushed tones in the perfectly-designed Attivio corporate space in the mornings, then bang out great code on the pathbreaking Attivio underpinnings in the afternoon, validated in a build that night ... OK, I'm exaggerating.

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Edit:  I followed up this October 6 in a note to Slashdot, after more data came in.

Back in the 1980s, I was a tech stock analyst. Indeed, I was the top-ranked computer software & services industry analyst -- they were lumped together into a single category then! -- in 1984.

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I've been furiously busy over the past week with the Oracle Exadata announcement. In the very unlikely case you missed it, Oracle introduced a multimillion dollar data warehouse appliance targeted at Teradata and Netezza. I've written a lot about Exadata and the Oracle Database Machine over on DBMS2, and the rest of cyberspace has been busy as well. Here's a guide to some of the coverage.

• Computerworld/IDG's Eric Lai has an excellent, detailed Exadata overview. Eric also provides links to quite a few other commenters.
• Kevin Closson of Oracle is the most active and followed Oracle employee posting about Exadata.
• I clarified some points in Eric's piece. I also posted detailed analyses of Oracle query parallelization and Exadata pricing.
• Official Oracle information can be found here and here (although Oracle.com links can be distressingly unstable).

The Cliff Notes (TM) version of all this is:

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Linda just came downstairs to tell me that Bank of America's online banking had been inaccessible for several hours. Apparently there was a very active thread about this on Yahoo Answers, but it was pulled just as she tried to post to it herself.

I have trouble imagining how this could happen due to a run-on-the-bank volume problem, unless B of A has done a really bad job in segmenting its systems. No doubt some IT management is distracted by the impending huge acquisition of Merrill Lynch, but that shouldn't be a cause either.

Whatever the reason, this is really unfortunate timing.

Edit: A little after 9 pm Eastern time, I was told the site was finally back up.

Related links

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/09/bank-of-america.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10047905-93.html http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20080922/bank-america-039-website-troubles-leave-customers-rattled.htm

One great thing about my business is that customers often just contact me and ask me to consult to them, typically after having visited my database blog and my company website. (Hat tip to my outstanding web designer Melissa Bradshaw.) Recently a very large company did just that -- making the original contact by AIM, no less! -- and scheduled a consulting session for the following week. But it got postponed. And then postponed again. Why?

Because they couldn't get a purchase order number generated.

Why couldn't they get a purchase order number generated within one or two weeks?

Because they'd just converted to Oracle apps.

And why was that a problem?

Because they were a Firefox shop, and Oracle apps don't play nicely with Firefox.

As as a full-service consultant, I naturally proposed a simple workaround to this problem. But the basic question remains:

In 2008, is there a problem running Oracle's or other enterprise applications on Firefox?

What say you all?

Having recently recommended Dan Weinreb's blog, I dropped by to see what he might have added. Besides the distress of discovering I called somebody "middle-aged" who's only a year older than I am, I found a post with some metrics describing just what his company, ITA Software, runs in Lisp. To wit:

I currently work at ITA Software, a.k.a “the 800-pound gorilla of Common Lisp”. If you use Orbitz and ask “how do I get from Boston to Chicago on 10/4/2000 at 2pm …”, we provide an excellent set of choices of the cheapest routes and fares for which seats are available. This program, known as QPX, is written in Common Lisp.

I am working on our new product, an airline reservation system. It’s an online transaction-processing system that must be up 99.99% of the time, maintaining maximum response time (e.g. on www.aircanada.com). It’s a very, very complicated system. The presentation layer is written in Java using conventional techniques. The business rule layer is written in Common Lisp; about 500,000 lines of code (plus another 100,000 or so of open source libraries). The database layer is Oracle RAC. We operate our own data centers, some here in Massachusetts and a disaster-recovery site in Canada (separate power grid).

I'm sure we can come up with a few examples in, say, the financial services arena. But overall, not many OLTP systems are harder-core than an airline reservation app.

I'm on a variety of business email lists that I probably never signed up for in the first place, as well as a bunch that I arguably did. Generally, not-so-best-practices for bulk e-mail annoy me. But one particular sender -- while guilty of dubious opt-in, as well as of an unnecessary opt-out followup e-mail -- leaves me more amused than annoyed. That's due to the striking title of their repeated e-mail:

Succession Planning: Toolkit for Execution

That sounds as if it could be -- well, as if it could be brutally effective.

If for any reason you do want "60+ pages of real succession planning materials", several years old, for > 1,000 Euros, these folks will be happy to sell you same.

Infobright just open sourced its analytical DBMS, which lets you compress lots of data and query it real fast on cheap equipment, with very little installation effort. That's an effort with much serious merit.

But it also could be a cool toy -- assuming, of course, you can get your hands on a few terabytes of tabular data to play with as well. :)

More on open source DBMS in general here.

I'd been planning a write-up anyway on the very different open source strategies of PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB, PostgreSQL-based Greenplum, and PostgreSQL-based Aster Data – not to mention more-or-less-PostgreSQL-based Netezza, Vertica, and ParAccel, Ingres-based DATAllegro, and MySQL-based Infobright. Then Infobright decided it was taking its analytic DBMS engine open source too – a very worthy move in its own right -- making the subject particularly timely. So here goes.

There are three basic ways open source can manifest itself in database management products. First, a DBMS can truly be open source.

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I had dinner* with Dan Weinreb tonight, which makes this as good a time as any to write about his blog. At the opposite extreme from the last one I recommended, Jeremiah Owyang's, Dan's blog is very low volume. There's been less than one post per month since May, and in the most active and unique technical category – the one on Lisp – there are still only seven posts overall.

*At Daikanyama in Lexington, which has instantly become my second-favorite Japanese restaurant in Boston, behind only Oishii Sushi ... but I digress.

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The technology blogosphere is rife with complaints about a group of highly visible but insular “A-listers.” But none of them seem directed at Jeremiah Owyang, who is about as engaged a person as you'd ever hope to encounter. He publishes a popular, high-volume blog on social media called Web Strategy by Jeremiah; he finds time to comment on other people's blogs as well; he is ranked #1 by a landslide in Tekrati's survey of “top analyst Twitterers”; and in his day job he's an analyst for Forrester Research, advising real businesses about how to make real use of social networking technologies.

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During my recent Network World online chat, I specifically praised two vendor blogs. One was Dave Kellogg's. Dave is CEO of Mark Logic, a vendor of XML database/custom publishing software; not coincidentally, his blog is called Mark Logic CEO.*

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One of my recurring hobbies is finding interesting technology blogs. So I plan to use A World of Bytes to point out some other blogs that may be deserving of your attention. I won't promise that they all will be “great” or even – depending on your yardsticks -- “good.” But they all will be ones that caught my interest, at least for a while, for reasons that could make them interesting to other Network World readers as well. A running list of blogs highlighted – more precisely, of the posts highlighting them – is being kept below.

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I used to think that DAS (Direct Attached Storage was the obvious winner for MPP data warehousing. But last week Vertica told me that a lot of their customers use SANs (Storage Area Networks). Now I'm not so sure.

There certainly are good arguments on both sides. Generally speaking:

• SANs are pulling ahead of DAS.
• Much of the growth in storage is due to data warehousing.
• MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) is pulling ahead of SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) for high-end data warehousing.
• MPP architectures are commonly shared-nothing.
• Shared-nothing entails DAS.

But if you think about it, those facts don’t exactly add up.

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As previously noted, I think MapReduce is a big deal. Tonight I chatted with MapReduce's most famous non-fan, database management legend Mike Stonebraker, and he laid out his reasons for not liking MapReduce. However, it's far from clear that those objections apply to all MapReduce implementations. While they are quite plausible about Hadoop, they seem less applicable to Greenplum's and Aster Data's new database-integrated MapReduce implementations.

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Yesterday I wrote that Texas Instruments and several credit card companies were being accused of quashing a story exposing holes in RFID security, by show host Adam Savage. I suggested that while the spirit of his charge might be correct, the details of Savage's facts seemed implausible. Today, Savage issued a retraction, saying (emphasis mine):

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I just had to buy a new laptop computer. In the past I've had ones from Dell, IBM, HP, Toshiba, and other now-forgotten brands. The most recent is an HP my wife bought. I have a variety of standard issues with it (she chose an extra-wide screen, the machine gets awfully hot if you actually put it in your lap, both the battery and the Windows installation are now so old as to barely function). But I also was greatly annoyed when I attempted to deal with HP's support organization. Not that I love Dell or IBM support, but my experience with HP was a whole other level of bad.

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As Daniel Terdiman blogs, complete with video, MythBuster co-host Adam Savage alleges that a proposed story on RFID security vulnerability was quashed due to industry pressure. The relevant quotes are:

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The most annoying spam isn't the Viagra ads and so on, because those are easy to get past. It's the more targeted stuff that looks as if it MIGHT be of interest to you. For example, bogus press releases are a big annoyance to me, because I at least briefly skim every press release that comes in. And so when something with the title NEW: LinkedIn for Tech Industry, Download C-level, Sales & Mark turned out not to be about LinkedIn at all, but rather to be a promotional piece by a dubiously ethical outfit called CardBrowser, I got a negative impression.

Like most people, I rarely hit Unsubscribe links, fearing that will just encourage the spammers. But occasionally I email companies directly and, perhaps after a couple of exchanges (heated or otherwise), they stop writing me. CardBrowser hadn't quite made it to that level for me, but then CardBrowser CEO Steve Morgan happened to reach out to me in a personal, salesy email.

At this point I searched my inbox, saw a double-digit amount of unsolicited mail from CardBrowser, and brought it to his attention. Instead of the standard "Oops, so sorry", he insisted that CardBrowser was lily-pure, and I must have signed up for the list and forgotten all about it.

So I clicked one of the unsubscribe links. It revealed that I was signed up with the username "Friend." I wrote back to Steve, pointing out that I had never signed up for a list as "Friend" in my life, and furthermore criticizing him for the email subject line quoted above. He wrote back terminating the conversation.

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MapReduce sits at the heart of Google's data processing -- and Yahoo's, Facebook's and LinkedIn's as well. But it's been highly controversial, due to an apparent conflict with standard data warehousing common sense. Now two data warehouse DBMS vendors -- Greenplum and Aster Data -- have announced the integration of MapReduce into their SQL database managers.

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I'd been a database industry analyst for a decade before I found 1-gigabyte databases to write about. Now it's 15 years later, and the 1-petabyte barrier is crumbling. Specifically, we're about to see production data warehouses -- running on commercial database management systems -- that contain over 1 petabyte of actual user data. Greenplum is slated to have two of them within 60 days. Given how close it was a year ago, Teradata may have crossed the 1-petabyte mark by now too.

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If there’s one central theme to my blog DBMS2, it’s that modern DBMS alternatives should in many cases be used instead of the traditional market leaders. So it was only a matter of time before somebody sponsored a white paper on that subject. The paper, sponsored by EnterpriseDB, is now posted along with my other recent white papers. Its abstract is reproduced below.

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Tim O'Reilly proposes the following rule:

Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.)

By my count, the page on which he proposes it contains 44 links to other O'Reilly pages, and 22 to the outside.

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Scott Jennings left MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game maker NCSoft. GigaOm interviewed him, but unfortunately misunderstood much of what they heard. Jennings posted a followup on his blog correcting some (not all) of the errors. Here's what's really going on.

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The following email from a friend speaks for itself

A bit of background: [redacted]'s Marketing department is about to re-launch the public website. And they chose to create the new version in Sharepoint, so that each department can maintain its own sections. For example, my department handles the Jobs section. Forget whether or not I think this is a good or bad idea, because I have no say in it. So anyway, we're in the process of building our sections, using the templates provided to us by IS, who built them for Marketing.

So, I just had this phone conversation with the IS guy who's leading the project:

Me: We're having some trouble with the templates. The spacing is really off.

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If you're like most people, there are sports you like even though they're not terribly popular, perhaps because you've enjoyed them personally. I loved to fence. My wife was an archery instructor. My dear friend and web designer trains horses. And all of us can, if we choose, see hours of our favorite sports, courtesy of NBCOlympics.com. Well, almost all. For a few sports, the video isn't quite up to snuff for showing details of the rapid action (for example, I found watching water polo to be problematic). But for most events, the video quality is a literal eye-opener.

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Twitter recently caused a brouhaha by stopping people from "following" more than 2000 other folks. I was among the outraged, as the limit keeps me from following interesting-seeming people who have already chosen to follow me. Consider the scenario:

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This may seem like an obvious distinction, but a lot of coverage seems to gloss over the distinction between two aspects of support for grid or cloud computing:

• Making software run at all on many processors at once.
• Making it run fast on many processors.

In most cases, a good criterion for the latter would be near-linear horizontal scalability.

Let me illustrate by way of examples.

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