2014 - mixed year

2014 was a mixed year. I lost my brother Dr. Vijaya Raghavan Krishnaswamy, a neuro-surgeon by profession. He left a void that cannot be filled.

I did not complete the book I was writing.

Regarding the blogs I did quite well with a record number of posts.
                                                 Year   Posts
Hodentek.blogspot.com           2013   94
                                                 2014   246

HodentekHelp.blogspot.com.  2013.  17
                                                 2014   56

HodentekMsss.blogspot.com   2013   34
                                                  2014  48
 
HoentekMobile.blogspot.com  2013   13
                                                  2014   56

I started a new blog in 2014- http://hodentekPlus.blogspot.com.

I also found that a certain person was pilfering (http://hodentek.blogspot.in/2014/12/domain-name-service-dns-and-dns-changer.html) entire content from blog, my hardwork of about 10 years. I complained to Google without any success. I suppose this is not on Google's priority. Google wants every post that is stolen with proof of content stolen. There were over 900 posts in my blog and you can imagine the work involved.
 

@travel: You may want to know about this if you are doing business with India

Jagriti Yatris is business school on wheels where you visit the businesses visiting the various business locations which includes most of the important cities. This coming year is the seventh time for this event with participants from many countries (around 40%) with ages in the range of 20 to 25. This is a nice event to get to know the realities on the ground. 

Read more here:
http://hodentekplus.blogspot.in/2014/12/learn-business-visiting-places-in-india.html

@travel: IoT to get academic status in India

IoT is soon to be added to the list of subjects for engineering and doctoral degree programs in India.

Some of India's IoT related statistics that appeared in the Indian news paper-The Times of India, Dec 26, 2014 are as follows:

• By 2020 the size of the IoT related industry $15 billion
• By 2020 some 2.7 billion devices will be interconnected
• Global revenue from IoT according to Gartner is around $300 billion out of which India's share around 5 to 6%.

DeitY, the department of electronics and information technology has brought out a draft policcy for IoT and the recommendations are for,

• 6 week certificate course
• 2 week training course.
• A young faculty chair at the five IITs

With a targeted funding of 638 million a year to address:

• smart parking
• inteliigent trsnport systems
• tele-care
• women safety

plus waste management; management of agricultural resources and disaster management.

Tableau Software for Rapid fire BI

I visited the Tableau Software booth at TechNet Asia-Pacific 2014 and I was quite impressed with the Tableau products (and the various data sources that can be used): Tableau for Desktop; Tableau Server; and Tableau on line which provides Business Intelligence in the cloud.

I just wanted to take a look at their Tableau on line and visited their trial page here:
http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/trial

The first step is you need to register to get in. After registering you can request for a trial use of the Tableau Desktop software. Following this you will get the software suitable for your architecture. On my Windows 8.1 I got the x64bit version of the software (TableauDesktop,msi 124MB).
You can double click the msi file at the download location. At the welcome screen accept the license terms after viewing the same. The version you will be installing is 8.3 (Actually you get the 8.2 version as I found out while using the trial software).

After registration you can start using the software. I just used the trial to see how easy; how intuitive and how difficult to use.
When launched the first window to display is a workbook called Book1 as shown.

It opens in the Workbooks view with Data on the left and a number of Sample Workbooks at the footer (bottom) as shown above.

You can connect to a data source or you can connect to saved data sources, some of them from Excel, some from Access and other from Tableau data. If you are just exploring you have option to watch the product tour or the training videos.

The menu is simple enough for this view with File, Data, Server and Help. The Help menu offers the following:

Let us just explore the World Indicators sample. Click on this sample at the bottom of the screen. The processing request get sent to the data source and this is what you will see. This is read-only.

It has the classic look of analytical software with Measures, Dimensions, Filters etc. You are looking at the bar graph of 2010 GDP Per Capita by country.

Let us modify the filter. Right click on Region to display the regions from which you can choose.

Clicking on Filter brings up the Filter[Region] tabbed pane as shown.

Let us remove all but Asia ; click apply and click OK.
The UI changes to the following:

Right click on Country/Region on Rows to display a finer filtering as shown.

Go ahead and choose India and China (first choose none to remove all check marks and then choose India and China). Click Apply and then OK. The UI changes to the following:

Let us say you want to include data for  more years (right now only 2010). Right click on YEAR(Date..) under Filters and choose from 2000 to 2005. The picture changes to the following:

You also have some associated information at the bottm of the page.

Click on Country Ranks and you would get a whole lot of information from all the countries in the database.

By dragging the slider in the Year pane you can compare how things changes with time.

In the Show Me window you can choose the chart type and chart features . The next image shows the bubble chart for the same data.

 This post has only shown some simple features that you can look up using the sample book that comes with the software and I am sure it is lot more sophisticated than described here. Of course all this is based on crating a model which you can do in Tableau.

For connecting to SQL Server 2012 from Tableau please visit my other blog in a day or two:
http://hodentekMSSS.blogspot.com

Microsoft Azure Government at TechNet Asia-Pacific 2014

Government is big business and of course vendors are after government money. Microsoft Azure Government had a 'briefing' room at the recent  concluded TechNet Asia-Pacific event in Honolulu.

Microsoft recently announed the launch of Microsoft Azure Govrnment. A complete cloud for any goverment organization to pursue the goals of more efficient and agile operation in the mobile-centric world of today.

The Microsoft Azure Government has all the key ingredients, Azure, Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics CRM (early next year). It goes without saying that all these operate under federal government's tight security standards.

More story here:
http://www.eweek.com/cloud/microsoft-launches-azure-government-cloud-in-the-u.s..html

As recent as last year Microsoft's Azue was granted the FedRAMP JAB-P-ATO, a distinction that gets the blessings of the government. Read more details here:
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/07/windows-azure-cloud-services-get.html

The Dynamics CRM online with SLA of 99.9 should greatly improve the effieciency and productivity.
Microsoft is not alone in trying to woo the government, IBM is moving to open its new Softlayered govenment focused data centers (Texas and Virginia) which are designed for greater control and security.
More details here:
http://www.eweek.com/cloud/ibm-opening-federal-government-focused-cloud-data-centers.html

Honolulu learning event: Learn SQL Server Reporting Services 2012

This hands-on course will provide you with the ability to create cutting edge reports using Microsoft's latest reporting services product, SQL Server 2012.

The course is offered by the Pacific center for Advanced technology Training: http://pcatt.hawaii.edu/home

Please register at the above site. 

Report writing is one of the most important IT related jobs in an enterprise. This course is for you if you would like to master report writing/authoring using SQL Server Reporting Services. The course begins with a presentation of essential technical background, after which you will work through guided hands-on exercises. At the end of the course you will have gained:
• A solid understanding of how to interact with SQL Servers
• Knowledge and experience installing and configuring reporting Services
• A working knowledge of using Report Builder to author reports and deploy them to report server
• A working knowledge of Report Manager's ability to carry out administrative tasks related to all aspects of reports; creating shared data sources, folder and folder hierarchies on the report server, and report models; managing security and subscriptions; and configuring data driven subscriptions
• An understanding of how to embed report viewer controls in windows and web projects.


Venue: Honolulu Community College Honolulu Community College
874 Dillingham Blvd Honolulu, HI 96817-4598 Phone: (808) 845-9211
Official Website: honolulu.hawaii.edu/

Section 1 - Mar 31 - May 7, 2015; TTh; 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm; 12 mtgs

I will be using my latest book on SQL Server Reporting Services for this course:

More here:http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2014/11/things-you-learrn-hands-on-in-my-book.html

Basic SQL course in Honolulu, Hawaii - 2015

You are welcome to attend my course at the Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training (PACTT). Please register at the PCATT.org site.

Summary:

Databases, organized repositories of information, have become indispensable in today's world. In this introductory course you will learn about databases and the basics of Structured Query Language (SQL) including sorting, distinct, and aggregate functions and grouping of data. All SQL statements will initially be written from one table. Most practical, modern and relational databases will include a large number of tables. SQL queries have to access information from several tables. This course will then introduce you to querying more than one table. With this skill you will be able to query two or more tables in a database. This is a hands-on course.


New in 2015: You will also get an introduction to Power Shell.

Dates: (Section 1) Section 1 - Feb 17 - Mar 12, 2015; TTh; 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm; 10 mtgs.
Venue: Honolulu Community College;

Note: SQL Server 2012 Express will be used and a knowledge of SQL Server is not assumed. Students will be using the free version.

For details : Access http://pcatt.org/index.php/search and look up the course or write to:
Hodentek@live.com with course name in the Subject line.

With this Japan could easily cut Carbon-di-Oxide emissions

Toyota motor has a model ('Mirai')on the market that is powered by Hydrogen and coming to US in the not so distant future. Now hydrogen fuel cells to provide energy for homes are being developed.

Nuclear fusion was supposed to provide clean energy but it is perhaps decades away. It is a tough cookie. Now Japan's R&D has produced viable Hydrogen Fuel cells that can power homes and it is something that is not on a drawing board, but already installed in many Japanese homes.

I am sure this will get Japan back in the saddle and we will be having a better environment; less dependence on fossil fuels; less pollution; improved quality of life; fewer transmission, distribution losses as energy gets used where it is produced; and less of Fukushima scenarios.

Tokyo Gas and Panasonic Corporation have jointly developed the Fuel Cell which they call 'Ene-Farm' probably a diminutive for energy farm. In fact so far there have been couple of models starting Jan 2013 after debuting first time in May 2009. The price of the new model which came out in April 2013 was 1,995,000 Yen including tax but not installation. Right now it may seem prohibitive but the price is sure to go down.

Read more here , here and here.

There are two plans of Azure RemoteApp starting December 11,2014

So far it was on preview, which means free. Now there are two plans as shown below from this site here,
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/remoteapp/?WT.mc_id=Blog_EntMob_General_PCIT

Read the FAQ at the above link for gnawing questions.

• Azure RemoteApp is priced per user and is billed on a monthly basis.
• The service is offered in two tiers: Basic and Standard. Basic is designed for lighter weight applications (e.g. for task workers). Standard is designed for information workers to run productivity applications.
• Pricing: Each service has a starting price per user that includes 40 hours of service per user. Thereafter, a per hour charge is applied for each user hour up to a capped price per user. You will not pay for any additional usage beyond the capped price in a given month.

 

What's more,  Windows Phone 8.1 is supported too.

 

Of course Microsoft enabled running custom apps on Aqure RemoteApp service back in July 2014.

 

http://redmondmag.com/articles/2014/07/18/custom-apps-on-azure-remote.aspx

 

However this is available only in the highlighted datacenters.

 

 

Listen to Fmr NSA director talking about the necessity of Cyber Legislation

NSA Director (Gen. Keith Alexander) talking about cyber security talking with Vanity Fair on Bloomberg TV here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/we-need-cyber-legislation-ex-nsa-chief-alexander-i3Iypjy3R3qozcXX8wSNVA.html

He talks about Cyber Security issues and the necessity of legislation. He elaborates on the important topics like Integrated defense; getting a deep knowledge of behavioral patterns (recognizing signatures) and efficient messaging to share information. Integration is the key word here.

His new firm Iron Net Cyber Security (http://ironnetcyber.com/) is to patent a new technology to thwart cyber attacks. He advocates an open and transparent way of doing things. He feels Government and Power Industry are not doing as much as the financial sectors in taking serious view of cyber attacks.

Watch this Video on Bloomberg TV.

FireEye as a Service: The indispensable 24x7 protection

Spying has shifted emphasis from on the ground to online. Security breach in one form or another has become all too common. The adversaries are better equipped (reminds bme of smugglers having faster boats than law enforcement), nimble and persistent, not only in pursuing their activities to get in, but also leave behind codes that live and thrive to cause further damage. Also as organizations grow adding on many more constituent parts, the overall vulnerability gets to the level of the weakest link making the organizations much more vulnerable.

In this some what dismal situation, the protection that you get should not only alert you to the threat and indicate where it is originating from, it should also provide means to mitigate at the earliest. This is a 365, 24x7 task that needs multifaceted and coordinated protection.

FireEye as a service seems to offer just that. It will help you in not getting victimized by attacks. The FireEye's patented virtual machine based technology detects and prevents most major intrusion attempts. The client's environment is monitored round the clock using techniques in the knowledge base and should an intrusion occur clients will be sent complete relevant details of the attack needed for effective response. Depending on the severity, FireEye offers quarantine solutions and FireEye's incident responders help to resolve the threat issue and assess the impact.

More at: https://www.fireeye.com/products/fireeye-mssp-services.html

The following image from their data sheet provides their 24x7 service:

There was this interesting image which looked like an animation on the same site that I would like to share. I am told that it is not  'fun' animation but small slice of real data. If this is so it looks like countries attacking each other is quite common and no country is on moral high ground.

 

Toyota's hydrogen powered car is no 'fool's' technology

Not long ago some one from the all electrical vehicle technology quipped playing on the word 'fuel cell' that Toyota is pursuing a foolish path in its development of hydrogen powered car.

Older posts here:

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/07/battery-powered-car-is-history.html
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/07/toyota-fchv-concept-vehicle.html

Now it even has a name. Well here is the car and Toyota is trippling its investment.

More details here:
http://hodentekplus.blogspot.com/2014/12/toyotas-hydrogen-powered-car-coming-to.html

 

Domain Name Service (DNS) and DNS Changer malware

Domain name service converts user friendly name such as www.foo.com into an IP address so that your computer can connect to that IP Address. The malware hijacks this to their own computers. It appears hijacking DNS using DNS Changer malware is a very common way for the rogues to get to your computers. If you believe that your computer has been infected in any way, you could checck your DNS using this FBI site:
https://forms.fbi.gov/check-to-see-if-your-computer-is-using-rogue-DNS

There are also many other Check-up sites where you can get this service. All you need to do is enter the IP Address and the checker provides a response as shown:

Read this FBI's PDF file to learn about the DNSChanger malware.
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911/DNS-changer-malware.pdf

Attend the TechNet Asia Pacific conference to learn about Malware Protection, cyber security, firewall etc.
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/11/2014-technet-asia-pacific-assured.html

Microsoft confirms purchase of Acompl, Email Client app for iPhone and Android

This fits into the larger plan of Microsoft to cover not only Windows Phone which is still trying to get up and run, but to stay in tune with the fast runners, Google and Apple. It will be Outlook for desktop but Acompl for the mobile and supports Microsoft's Exchange. Exchange is Ok but Microsoft will definitely integrate this somehow with Office 365.

This is going to make Outlook a lot richer and even without Acompl, Outlook is a damn good email client. Well $200 million may be a little pricey but for what it does the price is OK.

Read more here:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/Microsoft-acquires-iPhone-email-app-Acompli/ar-BBgcyP0?ocid=ansVerge11

http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/1/7298679/microsoft-acquires-acompli

How long will it take to recover $200 mil?

Microsoft Ignite 2015 is announced

It is just now announced for 2015 between 4 th and 8th of May in Chicago,IL. Microsoft Ignite is about addressing the fast changing technology; it is about innovation in this rapidly changing and extremely mobile technology arena that is going to make seismic changes in our lives. Microsoft Ignite is the meeting place where the sharpest of the cutting edge in innovation be it Big Data; be it IoT or something quite out of the blue is discussed.

It is also about learning, certification, compliance, deployment, security and all the different things needed to make the push needed to take your skills to the next level.

There are veteran Microsoft speakers ready to make your experience productive and enjoyable.
Read more about Microsoft Ignite here (and register for the event) and revisit as the content of this event develops:
http://ignite.microsoft.com/#fbid=xLhDyuK-AHn

SAP Executive Bernd Leukert's take on IoT

SAP's Bernd provides an overview of the myriad of IoT's that will be arriving at our door steps in the coming months and years. Some of them have already made their precense felt and more of them on the threshold.

As far as busines value is concerned it appears to be a deluge. It is anticipated that billions of devices will be interconnected and our private lives are forever compromised.

From the list of IoT collected in this article there is but one conclusion, it is not just IoT by IOET (internet of every thing).

Here is a compiled list that Bernd describes at length:

• The Internet of Home - HomeKit by Apple for iOS8
• The Internet of Health - fitbit, Apple's HealthKit, Jawbone, Helius System with                          ingestible sensor, etc. but fails to mention Microsoft  & IBM related news
• The Internet of Fashion- Intel's Smart Shirt, Smart Clothing for monitoring and                          acting on body messages
• The Internet of Traffic - Cisco's Connected Transport Challenge not mentioned
• The Internet of Environment -Smart America Expo,
• The Internet of Sustainability--AT&T and the carbon Wra room
• The Internet of Retail- Connected Vending Machines
• The Internet of Logistics - track and trace systems
• The Internet of Assets - enterprise asset management
• The Internet of Design -smart products
• The Internet of Manufacturing-100 Million M2M devices going to grow 7 times more
• The Internet of supply Chain- Jetsons Supply Chain, autmatic warehousing and transport

Read details here:
http://scn.sap.com/community/business-trends/blog/2014/07/07/the-internet-of-every-thing?source=email-americas-sapflash-newsletter-20141201&lf1=6091096760b816620489302b33654442

All this is fine but the lingering questions raised by many is really about security. Do all vendors address security issues at the same level of seriousness? For example, a toothbursh manufacturer (with low resources at his disposal) making his device an IoT may very well compromise other connected devices. One cannot assume that the hackers will sit by silently. They will have more opportunity to diversify. If they can hack Google, Microsfot they can hack into the smaller fries.
 

Notes and screenshots related to installing PHP 5.6 on Windows 8.1

The Windows 8.1 Professional on my Toshiba Laptop Satellite Series S70 did not have any PHP to start with. I wanted to take a look at the SQL Server Driver for PHP in CTP. I decided to install PHP. Then make sure it works with IIS 8.0. IIS may not be activated by default. You can activate it from Control Panel (Turn Windows features on or off ).
------
More details regarding the SQL Driver here, http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2014/11/php-driver-for-sql-server-released.html
SQL Server driver (SQLServer31.exe, 499KB, version 3.1.CTP) for PHP is now available as a CTP.

Now
PHP scripts can access Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Database.
You can download the CTP here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20098&WT.mc_id=Blog_SQL_Announce_DI

Details of this version:
•This version supports PHP Version 5.5 and requires Microsoft ODBC driver 11 (or higher)
•It supports SQL Server 2012; localDB abd AlwaysOn features
•Buffered Queries are included

All SQL Server users can get it at no extra cost including SQL Server Express.
------

If the IIS 8.0 is activated you should be able to see the following screen when you access  http://localhost in  browser on your computer.

For the current laptop the following is the response:

Assuming you had no problem activating IIS 8.0 we can move to the next step of installing PHP 5.x.

Downloading and installing PHP 5.X:

PHP can be downloaded (free) using the latest Web Platform Installer (WebPI) which happens to be WebPI version 5.0 from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

The advantage of using the WebPI is that not only it installs the PHP engine but also configures it to work with IIS.

Launch WebPI (wpilauncher.exe 113 KB) which brings up the following page where you searched for PHP (there are many others):

 

There is no Version 5.5 which is supposed to pair with the SQL Server Driver for PHP in CTP mentioned earlier. Install version 5.6 by highlighting it, it first checks for prerequisites and then installs.

 

 

Accept and the install starts as shown.

 

 

When the installation is completed, you will be seeing the following in your Control Panel under Programs as shown.

 

Also under Program Files (x86) you would all the PHP files in two folders PHP: v5.3 and v5.6.

 

If you now access IIS 8 by typing in 'IIS' in the Search charm it will display the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager link. If you click on this link you should be able to see the following when you look for Handler Mappings:

 

 

In the IIS 8's Home you would see both PHP Manager and FastCGI Settings as shown.

 

 

 

In order to complete the installation check if the CGI is enabled in the Control Panel as shown.

 

In order to test if the installation was successful you need to run a small PHP script in your localhost. In order to do this type out the following code in Notepad and save it with the extension php in the root folder of your computer.

 

The file is very simple as shown in the next paragraph.

 

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

 

If your PHP engine is working well you should see the following (only part of a very long page is shown) when you browse this file in your IIS or type the following in the address box of your browser.

 

This completes the installation of PHP 5.6 on Windows 8.1 Professional that works well with IIS 8.0

 

In a future post we take a look at accessing SQL Server 2012 from a PHP application.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2014 TechNet Asia Pacific Assured Interoperability event in Honolulu

Mark up December 9-11 for the 2014 TechNet Asia-Pacific conference (29th) in Honlulu, Hawaii. You can access all details from here: www.afcea.org/events/asiapacific

This is a premier event for this region covering defense and government related tecchnologies with thousands of defense perssonel and over 150 exhibitors. This is also a key learning event with lots of courses and panel discussions.

On this site, you can create your own 'My Exhibitors' list after filtering the 150 or so exhibitors as it is impossible to see them all.

 

Searching Elbert JJon who has infringed on my rights

My previous posts on copy write violation of my site by the said gentleman may be found here and here.
However, I have neither been able to locate Elbert JJon nor find anything more about him. I certainly have not given any permission to use the content. I will be taking all possible actions against him unless he removes the content. Here is his profile on Google+.

After searching for Elbert JJon on the Web,  I found this site where Elbert JJon has written his posts for the following URL. I am not sure he has JP Morgan Chase Investors' permission to author.
http://jpmorganchaseinvestors2.blogspot.com

It is for the site owners to check and verify if there has been an infringement before proceeding further.

Here is a screenshot of the above site:

He has also authored on the following sites/blogs:

 

 

 

I am not sure these are the only ones.

 

Since they are all on Blogspot, I do hope Blogger will help in closing these accounts.

 

 

 

Apps for the IoT with AppMethod

IoT has to be 'Universal'. Therefore, it has to be multi-platform, multi-device, device-size agnostic and more. This is why you hear more and more 'cross-platform' development. This app works on iPhone but not on Android etc. will not do. AppMethod is one such program from the veteran, Embarcadero.

Sign up here to get software that you can use to build apps in record short time.
http://www.appmethod.com/sign-up?cid=701G0000000vHaD

 

Registration is needed, but easy with few elements.

Note that the downlaoded program (file size: 3GB) is free for only one year. Read the information on
the download page above.

See overview here taken from a video on the site



Features overview

• One-stop mulitdevice app development platform

• Supports Internet of Things

• FireUI Multi-device designer

• Enterprisemobility Devices with FireDAC support

Documenting the copywrite violation by the hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com

Previous post I described the content being lifted from my site in entirety and placing on another blogger account.

Here are more details showing both the content on my site and on the plagiarizing site. This is a requirement to file a complaint with Google. This is clearly an abuse by the website http://hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com/ 


This is on http://hodentek.blogspot.com ( I am the blogger)

This one is on the site (http://hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com/    )  which has lifted all my content

 

Looks like any click on this site goes to some AdSense.

 

I will give just one more example.

This one from my site.

 

 

 

This one from http://hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com/   

 

 

Also any link under 'Popular posts' (right hand navigation) opens an advertiser page in addition to the clicked item's content on hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com

For example clicking on Apache(1) opens the following page:
http://www.dnsrsearch.com/index.php?origURL=http%3A//www.needhouseloan.com/&r=
And this has been set up as a random advertisement and most of them have .in in the url indicating it is originating from India.

 

Here is the page displayed in hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com

when I clicked on Apache(1) in the navigation on the right hand side for archived items on the blog.

 

The click on Apache(1) also popped up this extra browser window.