Tim Long

Arrays considered somewhat harmful

Tim Long — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 01:49:01 GMT

A bit of light reading while you digest your turkey sandwiches…

Fabulous Adventures In Coding : Arrays considered somewhat harmful

Eric Lippert argues that "In almost every case, there is a better tool to use than an array.” He argues that arrays lead to poor programming practice and are the enemy of parallelization. He says that with Moore’s Law failing in terms of clock speeds, processors are beginning to grow sideways (more cores) instead of upwards (faster clock speeds) so parallelization will become ever more important in the coming years. He draws the conclusion that arrays are therefore “somewhat harmful”.

Way back in the late 70’s when I began learning computer programming, most languages were procedural. The C programming language was mostly available only on Unix systems and C++ would not be accessible to most hobbyists for another decade or so. Back then, value types were everything (and mostly global) and arrays were a workhorse.

Things have changed a lot since then. Object oriented languages and integrated development environments are the norm, there are classes and frameworks defined for everything. The .net Framework has strong support for collections and generic types. System design is different than back in the late 70s. I can achieve more now, by simply creating a new Windows Forms Project in Visual Studio 2008, than I could do in a week of programming under GEM back in the 80s. I can create a data-bound web application faster than, oh wait, the web wasn’t even invented back then!

I tend to agree with Eric. Whenever I think of using an array these days, it is generally only because I’m forced into it by some third party code. Plenty of APIs that I deal with – and I’m thinking particularly of ASCOM – return arrays or take arrays as parameters. This needs to change. Instead of an array, define a class that encapsulates the data storage. The classic ASCOM example is the camera interface, that returns arrays of pixel values. Better to define an Image object, even if that object uses a private array internally, because that will at least future-proof the interface. There is almost always a better tool than an array.

It’s Not Piracy, It’s Called Generosity

Tim Long — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 05:06:37 GMT

Those were the words of Steve Knightley, half of a folk duo called Show of Hands that I went to see in Cardiff a few nights ago. “We have CDs on sale”, said Steve, “but if you’re not sure, just ask your friends to give you a copy”. He continued, “It’s not piracy, it’s called generosity”. Read more of Steve’s comments here. Steve says he is thankful to the people that pirate the band’s music and go out of their way to promote the band. In fact, he says the band utterly depends on them.

What a refreshing attitude. Steve understands that each and every “pirated” copy of one of their albums is also free publicity for the band. He understands that people buy when the conditions are right for them and that a copied album is not a lost sale.

The music industry, and perhaps the software industry, need to wake up to this stuff.

By the way, if you get the chance to see Show of Hands, they come with my highest recommendation. They have everything I look for in a music act. Beautifully orchestrated music played by talented musicians who write their own intelligent, emotive and thought provoking material.

SMB Nation 2008 Europe

Tim Long — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:42:31 GMT

Harry B asked me to mention SMB Nation Europe that is happening this Friday, December 5th in London. Still time to register!

http://www.smbnation.com/events_listpage.asp?Category=London~2008&Cat=Category

Agenda
December 5, 2008 – Microsoft Central London
8:30am-9:30am Delegate Registration
9:30am – 10:00am Microsoft Introduction
10am – Noon How SBS 2008 Saved The Economy (Brelsford)
Noon – 1:30pm Lunch and HP (Essential Business Server, HP Partner Program)
1:30pm – 3:00pm Migration Techniques for 2008 (Middleton)
3:00-3:30 Come see how Autotask can help your IT Business Run Better.
3:30-5:00 Migration Techniques for 2008 Platforms (Middleton)
5:00pm End of Day

Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing

Tim Long — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:46:34 GMT

This one is absolutely priceless. I wish I had half the comic genius of this self-confessed prankster from Australia…

Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing

Windows Live OneCare Team Blog: Consumer Security Strategy Update

Tim Long — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:17:53 GMT

Microsoft has apparently decided to phase out OneCare, just as SBS 2008 begins to ship with free trials of it installed. The blog entry (linked below) seems to suggest that it will be replaced with a free product.

Windows Live OneCare Team Blog: Consumer Security Strategy Update

Asterisk Security Vulnerability

Tim Long — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:20:35 GMT

Actually this is not a vulnerability in the product itself, but if you use Asterisk or one of its derivatives such as TrixBox, you should review your SIP and IAX secrets to make sure they are not the same as your extension numbers. As reported by Kerry Garrison on his blog:

There are some new scripts out in the wild that are attacking Asterisk-based systems. These scripts attempt to authenticate to your SIP extensions. If you have configured your extensions with the secret being the same as the extension number and you have SIP or IAX2 exposed to the internet, then your system is vulnerable.

It seems that setting the SIP secret to the same value as the extension number (as shown here in the screen shot taken from TrixBox CE) is a fairly common practice, which makes internet-facing deployments an easy target for these scripts. If you’re in this position, you should immediately review your SIP secrets and set them all to strong passwords – note that terminals and soft phones will need to be reconfigured to use the new passwords, but this will not affect voicemail pass codes.

Security Arms Race Escalating?

Tim Long — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:50:42 GMT

A possible glimpse of things to come from Amy Babinchak on her Small Business Tech Notes blog highlights a new type of attack using x.509 certificates that is on the increase in the USA. Amy speculates that the bad guys are beginning to escalate the security arms race by leveraging some of the technologies (like SSL) that are supposed to keep us secure:

if the secure website you've gone to turns out to not be so secure there could be bad stuff coming through that tunnel and there's no way to detect it until it's too late. I think that we're going to start to see an uptick on this type of attack.

Amy’s point, of course, is that encryption technology that stops bad guys peeking at your information also stops your firewall, antivirus scanner and internet security tools from examining it too. If the bad guy can get you to install his x.509 certificate, then he can encrypt his attack on your computer, sidestepping your application layer firewall.

Small Business Tech Notes: Warning: Bank Fraud

I'm Twittering

Tim Long — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:28:58 GMT

Inspired by Richard Tubb’s remarks, I’m Twittering. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/Tim_Long. If you know me and you’re twittering then I want to follow you. Please drop me a PM or comment here and I’ll add you. I’m not sure about twitter, its one of those things that I can’t really see the point of yet – but I thought that about blogging when I first started. Often, it’s hard to see the benefits of something unless you’re actually using it. Lots of people that I know in business are doing it but I’m always reminded of “[wikipedia:The Emperor's New Clothes]”. So I’m going to give it a try for a while and see how it works out. I wonder if I’ll end up being that little boy in the crowd shouting “The Emperor is naked!”

Are You Deploying Windows Vista?

Tim Long — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:23:00 GMT

I'm curious how many Microsoft Partners are/are not deploying Windows Vista. I've started a discussion thread at the SBSC group on LinkedIn. If you're not already a member of that group, please take this opportunity to join if you are SBSC qualified.

The Matrix Runs on Windows

Tim Long — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:35:58 GMT

I saw this spoof video referenced on a mailing list, I just love it. Some of the gags are a bit obvious, but the immortal Clippy makes a comeback appearance.

WESS Discounted Upgrades and Migrations with Solutions Pathway

Tim Long — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:43:25 GMT

Licensing for Windows Essential Server Solutions either just got easier, or more complicated. I can’t really decide which, so I’ll leave that decision to you…

Get a Discount on Windows Essential Server Solutions Upgrades & Migrations with Solutions Pathway

Help your customers easily upgrade or migrate from their existing solutions to meet changing business needs. Solutions Pathway, exclusively for Windows Essential Server Solutions, provides tiered savings that enable you to develop new revenue streams when you help customers cost-effectively upgrade or migrate from existing solutions to the latest Windows Essential Server Solutions offerings. Leverage your customers’ existing investments—and help them make the transition to the latest Windows Essential Server Solutions offerings today. Small Business Specialists and Networking Infrastructure Solutions partners receive an additional 10% discount!

Don’t Forward Virus Warnings

Tim Long — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:31:14 GMT

Virus warnings are almost always hoaxes. Even if they’re not, forwarding the warning to your friends and colleagues can do more harm than good. My simple advice is this: press delete.

Virus warnings and hoaxes are one particular flavour of chain email. For in-depth information on why you should never forward chain email, see my article from January 2008.

Delivering super-fast broadband in the UK

Tim Long — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 17:43:01 GMT

This publication is available on the Ofcom web site and is in the form of an Interactive Executive Summary where you can leave comments. There are actually very few comments on the document at present, I have started adding mine today.

We (IT Professionals) are the people who know best what our businesses and those of our customers need from a next generation broadband network. If we don’t make our views known, then the interests of the likes of BT will prevail, and if history is anything to go by, the corporate agenda is not necessarily in the interests of broadband users.

I encourage you to review this document, it will not take too long and if we all try to make constructive comments, we could yet have an influence on next generation broadband. Let’s make a difference, or at least make it hard for Ofcom to claim they didn’t know what we wanted.

Delivering super-fast broadband in the UK - Interactive Executive Summary

Is DSL Meeting Subscribers Needs?

Tim Long — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:45:10 GMT

I spent a fair chunk of today with Peter Gradwell and some of his colleagues from Gradwell.com. They were celebrating the company’s 10th anniversary and were kind enough to invite some of their customers to lunch in Cardiff Bay. We chose Gradwell.com as our preferred supplier of digital trunks for our digital telephony solution, partly because we’ve found their support and technical know-how to be first rate. One of the subjects that came up in conversation (and there were many) was the state of the UK broadband industry, which I personally find to be woeful with a few notable exceptions. TiGra Networks has recently switched to Be Unlimited (an O2 offshoot) to get a quality of service that could handle our VoIP traffic, our previous ISP was hopelessly inadequate and VoIP was just not reliable. It turns out that Gradwell has now launched its own Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) DSL service, which I am assured can be configured with Quality of Service to prioritise voice traffic, making it an ideal companion for one of Gradwell’s digital trunks or centrex services.

Coincidentally, I was just reading a copy of Comms Business that someone had left in the office and there is an article titled DSL - Breaking Free by Ian Thomas of Cable & Wireless. Ian says:

Networks and commercial arrangements architected around the delivery of email and best-efforts browsing are floundering in the face of new, high bandwidth ‘over-the-top’ services such as [BBC] IPlayer, hosted CRM and VoIP services.

These services crash the economics of over-subscribed networks by forcing ISPs to pay more to BT than they make per subscriber, and highlight to subscribers that the way these networks are managed is not to their benefit. Businesses and consumers are seeking alternative ways of getting the services they need and use.

I concur, and I’ve voted with my feet. I’ve ranted in the past that I feel ISPs are missing the point of broadband, especially where businesses are concerned, weighting so heavily in favour of downstream bandwidth and crippling upstream bandwidth. The Internet is no longer just about email and web. In the new era of Software + Services it is about distributed computing – witness the launch of Windows Azure this week. It is about businesses connecting their digital telephony up to their ITSP, publishing web sites, sharing and synchronising data with geographically dispersed virtual teams, working from home with remote access connections, pushing email to mobile devices, all of which require upstream bandwidth. The UK broadband market is ripe for a shakeup. Today’s best hope is the LLU providers like Gradwell, Be Unlimited and Cable & Wireless, but even so we still see the emphasis on downstream traffic. I would like to see more focus and much better pricing on SDSL and equivalent services.

Windows Azure announced at PDC 2008

Tim Long — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:53:55 GMT

Ray Ozzie delivered the keynote speech at PDC 2008 a few moments ago. He spoke about a number of interesting topics.

Challenges of Virtualization & Distributed Systems

Ray suggested that business continuity is a challenge not easily addressed by small and medium enterprises. The only real way to mitigate disasters such as earthquake, fire and flood is to have more than one data centre, geographically distant. This has its own challenges of redundancy and data synchronization.

Microsoft’s has years of indirect experience in cloud computing, running services like Live Messenger, Hotmail, online help systems and Office Live.

Introducing Windows Azure

A new tier of architecture at the global scale. Windows Azure is the foundation bedrock for building scalable online applications and cloud based services. Personally, I thought “Windows Cloud” was a better name, but Microsoft has never been good at making product names. Ray described three tiers of technology. Tier 1 is the experience tier and is all about the individual. Tier 2 roughly corresponds to the enterprise and encompasses systems for provisioning, managing and computing at the enterprise scale. Tier 3 is the external tier and is at the scale of the web.

Windows Azure is not something we will install on our own servers. It is a service in the cloud. As you can see from the screen clipping, Azure will include Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Service.

Operating Systems for The Cloud

Amitabh Srivastava describes how Windows Azure provides a layer of abstraction from the details of global distributed computing. For example, how do you upgrade your application or the underlying OS without degrading performance or going offline? Windows Azure manages problems like these. At the heart is a ‘Fabric Controller’ which vies the entire data centre as a pool of resources and maintains the health of services. Windows Azure provides managed services, not just managed servers.

An Azure application consists of two things: the code to implement the service, plus an XML file describing the architecture of the service or application. The Azure Fabric Controller operates on this XML file to provision and managed deployment and maintenance to ensure high availability of the service.

Developer Experience

Code, run and test on your local desktop PC using familiar tools.

Steve Marx demonstrated building and deploying a Hello World application using ASP.Net and Visual Studio 2008. He built a minimalist web page that simply displayed a text label. All standard stuff.

The project is then published (using the familiar techniques) but this brings up the Azure Development Portal page. The configuration file and code are uploaded to http://hellocloud.cloudapp.net/ and you can see it running there.

We then get a demo of a service called http://bluehoo.com/ which is live today on Azure. It was shown how easy it is to scale up the number of live nodes, the presenter turned up the gas from 2 to 20 instances with just a couple of clicks. The BlueHoo demo will be downloadable from midday (PST) today from http://m.bluehoo.com/

Services Architecture

Bob Muglia, pictured left, describing some of the details of the Azure services architecture. He described how Azure includes ‘scale out’ services, such as the Windows Workflow Foundation that span from on-premise systems out into the cloud environment. Available today is a set of data services built on SQL Server, over time this will be enhanced to give access to more SQL features.

Next, we see a demo of how Azure makes it possible to orchestrate a product recall spanning multiple enterprises. This was somewhat contrived but did demonstrate a workflow being initiated locally then moving out into the cloud and into partners’ systems.

Bob demonstrated an application running a SQL query against SQL Services running in the cloud. Unfortunately this was done by putting a SQL query into a string then sending the query string out to the server. This would have been far more convincing had Bob been able to use LINQ (Language Integrated Query) and it is to be hoped that Windows Azure is able to support all the innovations introduced in C# 3.0 and .Net 3.5 SP1.

There was a demo of CRM Online, the salient point was that the authentication was federated to the on-premise Active Directory so there was no need for a seperate login to the cloud service. The presenter showed how we can hit the CRM web service to extract data into Office then publish that up to SharePoint services. Nothing earth shattering, I am doing all this today, except that this stuff all runs on Microsoft servers. This stuff has huge potential, but somehow it fails to inspire. Honestly, I was getting very bored at this point. A lot was said but talk is cheap. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Microsoft has invested in several mammoth data centres around the globe (one of which is in Ireland) so I’m sure we are going to see a lot more of Windows Azure. I’m just not effervescing yet.