It truly is the time for Happy Holidays! It's been an interesting year both good and bad and everyone I know is just so ready to take time to concentrate on family, friends, celebrations, gifts, and remembrances. This is the time to review the past year, and plan for the coming year, and we'll do that sometime during December, but right now we just want to thank you for your business throughout the year and to send you our best wishes.
Our wishes for you this December are to have fun with your plans and reviews. And, even more, we wish that you enjoy your friends and families, have wonderful celebrations, both get and give unusual gifts that will make you smile throughout all of 2008, and remember the good all the good - that happened during 2007.
See you next year
Here's the schedule (or you can view the complete Schedule on our website.
CSTA Web sessions:
December 12, 13
January 9, 10
February 6, 7
March 5, 6
CSTA Classroom session:
DC area - January 30
Atlanta - February 27
UITJ (Understanding IT Jobs) Web sessions:
January 10
March 6
TR Web sessions:
January 23
March 26
Keep in touch and keep up with technology!
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Web Development
The Web couldn't be more important in today's IT, and Web 2.0, new hardware capabilities in both disks and processors, and new development techniques and tools have made Web site more dynamic, more interactive, and more functional.
Web 2.0 is made up of sites that receive their content from users sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, eBay, Wikipedia, etc. Web 2.0 sites started out designed for individual users and personal use, but have now moved into the corporate world. Web 2.0 techniques include blogs, wikis, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and mass publishing. Companies are supporting internal blogs as a way of inter-departmental communications. Staff can publish the status of projects, ask for help on a problem, or share new ideas. Corporate wikis that define internal terms and acronyms are becoming popular, and the Web is used to publish internal announcements from announcing new hires to announcing retirements!
It seems that announcements about new speeds in processing and storage appear daily. While that's not true, the advances have made possible the use of multi-media sites that include sound and animation. Both on a personal and corporate basis, people are now downloading film, music, animation, etc. without long wait times. And, of course, YouTube, has become a regular filter for all kinds of video. It's the hardware that makes all this possible.
Web Development Techniques
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is one of the most important of these techniques. IT defines an approach to delivering Web content that eliminates the wait while refreshing an entire page by only updating the part of the Web page that has been changed. The update is done locally (if possible) and asynchronously. The user can continue to interact with the Web page during the refresh. This technology has been available for years, but AJAX tools only began to appear after 2005. Now there are many of them!
Mashups This technique is used to pull content from other sites for your site. For example, a user can pull the daily weather from another site to include in theirs. Many sites now include maps to their location, pulled from Google Maps, or MapQuest, etc. A developer can even add this functionality by building a site that allows visitors to ask for directions from their location to the company home. And, they can do this without a single line of code.
RIA (Rich Internet Application) is an application that runs over the Web and provides fast response and handles complex user interactions. Did you know that you could go to the Mini Web site, design your own Mini and order that car? You can design your own Jenn-Air refrigerator or design a custom Yankee candle. Term was introduced in 2003, and frequently used by 2005.
Web Development Tools
A list of all the tools available would go on and on, but the trend is important. Think user-friendly. The tools that are appearing are designed for non-technical users. The Web has become such an important part of everyone's life today, it seems that everyone should be able to build their own site, and that's what the new tools are designed to do. The corporate manager who is blogging daily to keep staff up to date is designing a unique site and using mashup and RIA technologies. He or she is pulling content from another site and providing areas for input from the visitors to the blog. The blog is dynamic, interactive, and functional. This manager could be looking at Mashup Starter Kit from IBM's AlphaWorks. This is an application development tool that allows business people to create their own Web pages by dragging and dropping components onto a pallet. It uses Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) and a Wiki on the server. A preview was released in October, 2007 with full release planned for 1st quarter, 2008. Expect more of these tools!
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1. Can computers read your mind?
2. Okay we've got C#. What's F#?
3. How can you get five bar cellular service in your home?
4. What's the latest news in Web development?
5. What's Windows 7?
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Do you believe the year is virtually over?* I know we all have those years that just seem to disappear, and 2007 was that way in my life. It was a good year, and I'm planning to get ready for 2008 during December. I've already got a list of updates to make to CSTA (Computers: Systems, Terms, and Acronyms). We want to spend more time on wireless technology and cover WiMax and 3G. Web development tools and techniques from mashups to AJAX will be included, and more on not just data integration, but also data quality. We're going to add Web 2.0 recruiting techniques to TR (Technical Recruiting), and 2008 data to RecruitingLinks for pertinent sections such as Technical Conferences and Salary Information. I'm ready to pounce on the surveys and charts reflection corporate plans for 2008 and make sure this is included in TR and UITJ (Understanding IT Jobs) materials. We update all seminars and materials throughout the year, but this is the time for the "official" look at what we do. Please let us know if you have any thoughts on our updating procedures we take your input very seriously!
*That question, by the way, is a hint for the teaser.
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Data Quality
Now that companies are collecting data in terms of terabytes (trillions of bytes) and even moving to petabytes (quadrillions of bytes), how do they maintain the quality of that data? And, what about all that unstructured data found in Web sites and emails? New techniques are necessary, and data quality is on every CIO's lists of tasks.
data assurance Data assurance states that data must have:
Consistency; all aspects of the data must be available (also called completeness)
Accuracy; information must be correct (also called correctness)
Currency; information must be timely (also called relevancy).
Some definitions add the characteristics of:
Validity; information must be important to the business
Uniqueness; no duplicates are contained in the data.
Data assurance is also called data quality, and data quality assurance.
data dictionary A computerized glossary containing descriptions of data fields and their relationships. The information in data dictionaries is metadata. Some databases contain data dictionary facilities; some data dictionaries stand alone.
data grid An architecture for data access that uses a middleware layer and metadata framework to give connected end users a centralized view of information, no matter where it's stored. Data grids are mostly used to pool financial or research data by a single company, but can be established across companies to share data.
data harvesting Data management process. Gathering and organizing unstructured information from diverse sources, converting it to a format easy to access, and storing it in an accessible format. Harvesting addresses content, structure, and usage of information.
data hubs Data architecture which allows data to be used across multiple systems. The architecture is based on a wheel design, with spokes connecting to a central hub. A data hub is organized around the integration of a single type of data, such as customer, product or order data, to be used across multiple systems. This hub can then support various spokes; for example, a product data hub can be used to support order processing, distribution and service.
data integrity Term used to describe the accuracy and completeness of data. Data integrity must be considered during system development and is part of the responsibility of security systems. For example, systems are built with checks and balances to make sure that derived data (gross salary is derived from base salary + overtime + commission) is correctly figured. And, security systems must ensure that data cannot be altered except by authorized users.
data scrubbing Data management function. Validating data for accuracy. Includes eliminating duplicates and inconsistencies. Often used with data warehousing, migrating legacy systems to newer technologies. Estimates state that up to 70% of the cost of implementing a data warehouse is eliminating "dirty data." Also called data cleansing and data quality assurance.
data transformation Data technology usually used with data warehousing and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) software. Describes the modification of data as it is used from one source to another and can include any or all of the following: 1) conversion from one database to another; 2) conversion from a relational database to a multidimensional database (OLAP structure); 3) performing calculations; 4) creating aggregates; 5) changing data types; 6) making data more readable; and 7) replacing codes with actual values.
Deduplication Data integration technique of eliminating duplicate data by merging together duplicate information. Data can be found as duplicate by matching on operators including phonetic, direct word match, telephone/fax number and name initials. Using just a text operator, many duplicates will be left in the data collection. Once duplicate data is found, records can be merged into a folder, file, or record preserving the context and specific unique data facts. Data deduplication examines data on the block level and eliminates redundant blocks and can achieve a 20-1 reduction in the amount of storage needed. File deduplication examines only files, or CAS (Content Addressable Storage) yields a 3-1 or 4-1 reduction. Data deduplication obviously includes file deduplication.
MDM (Master Data Management) Data integration concept that focuses on managing reference data, which is also called master data. Master data describes core business entities such as customers, locations, products, etc. It includes both traditional structured information and unstructured content such as documents and images. No single business application can provide all the core information on, e.g., a single customer. Information on a customer's individual purchases is captured by the sales system, credit card information is found in the billing system, and complaints and returns are in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. The master data concept concentrated on a single system to build and maintain data that can then be accessed and created by the operational systems. Both CDI (Customer Data Integration) and PIM (Product Information Management) systems are vertical (industry specific) MDM systems. MDM functionality is also often included in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), EAI (Enterprise Application Interface), and BI (Business Intelligence) systems also include MDM modules.
persistent data The capability of storing data structures in files or databases on disks or other permanent storage. Without this capability data structures only exist in memory, and are lost when a program exits. Persistence allows, for example, a program to be restarted and reloaded with the data structures from a previous invocation of the program. Persistence allows programs to "remember" data that a particular user had already entered in an earlier user session, and let the user start where they left off during the prior session. Without persistence, every time a program was loaded it would have to execute from the very beginning. Persistent data is often used to reflect persistence, and is the opposite of transient data, which is gone when the program ends.
structured, unstructured data Structured data is that which is stored in files and databases. Structured data is made up of records, broken down into fields. Each data field has a description and all items of that field follow the description. For example, a name field could be described as 25 characters long, containing alpha-numeric data. That means that every name in the file or database would be that length (short names would have spaces added to fill the 25 characters) and both alpha and numeric characters could be used. Each record would be made up of the defined fields. Unstructured data is textual data and is found in word processing documents, emails, and Websites. Unstructured data is used in knowledge management systems. It is estimated that 80% of all data is unstructured.
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1. Yes. At least, Emotiv Systems says yes. They have created a hardware and software system for gaming that, in effect, creates an interface between a computer and 100 million or so brain neurons using a specially designed headset. The combo enables a computer to detect both conscious thoughts and subconscious emotions and allows a game to react accordingly. For instance, an Emotiv-enabled fantasy game could sense a player's emotions and virtually transform him into, for example, the Incredible Hulk. Check it out at Emotiv.
2. F# is new, and it's a programming language; a functional language for developers who are concerned with concurrency and distributed programming. It's aimed at the financial, scientific, technical, and academic industries. Functional programming treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and other functional languages include APL, Lisp, and Scheme. F# is part of .Net, integrates with Visual Studio, and runs on CLR (Common Language Runtime).
3. You can't right now, but Femtocell is a cellular base station for home or office that communicates directly with cell phones and carries the signal to the larger network via broadband, e.g., DSL or cable. This, in effect, will give customers "five bar" service in their home or office, and allows customers to give up landlines. Offered on a trial basis in Denver and Indianapolis (from Sprint) in fall, 2007. But, probably in 2008 everyone will be able to get this technology.
4. Lots of things could answer this, but I'm choosing Popfly. This, too, is new only in beta but it's a Web development tool that allows business men and women to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages and applications without writing code. It allows users to, e.g., connect blocks of code, to retrieve data from a Web site, or get photos from Live spaces, and then drag and drop blocks and connect them to build applications. Released to beta: November, 2007.
5. The development name for Windows Vista's successor. This desktop OS (Operating System) is already in the works, and planned for delivery in late 2009/early 2010. We'll see.
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