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Article: Walkie Talkie App Voxer Is Going Viral On iPhones And Androids, Trending On Twitter

Walkie Talkie App Voxer Is Going Viral On iPhones And Androids, Trending On Twitter

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/viralvoxer/

(Sent from Flipboard)



Sent from my iPad

An Old Linux Aphorism Revisited

People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD. People who have figured out what computers are for use Macs. Except for Stallman. 

BTW. Computers are for running apps - hopefully killer apps, in the same way cars are for getting from point A to point B. Operating systems are just powerplants for apps in the same way that engines are for cars. At some point, your ability to effectively tinker will be reduced to zero, because there really are skilled engineers out there who are better than you. I think of Linux hackers the same way I think of guys who tune their own 1966 Mustangs. Yeah, big whoop. You don't have to tune a botnet, you only have to own one.

Two Tech Tips Plus an Update

From the Duh How Did I Not Know That file.

1. BgInfo
SysInternals has a little program you need to have when you are running a whole lot of RDP sessions and you need to ask yourself where you are.  I've been seeing these nice desktop backgrounds on my clients Windows servers, and now I need them more than ever. 

2. Hak5
I've heard of it, but never actually went there. Duh! Now I'm 10 seasons behind. Much catching up to do. I'm going to end up missing the whole season of Fringe. Oh well. Now I think of all the time I wasted at Cranky Geeks and No Agenda. Kitchen is the new Dvorak, and probably gets along better with Chris DiBona.

Plus:
I am replacing my dependence on MSSQL with a new dependence on PSQL. That's Postgres. So far, so good. It's bloody quick on my Mac and I expect that using it will get me in the habit of ANSI standard SQL rather than the dialects of T/SQL and PL/SQL. I'm also dabbling a little bit with MySQL for the sake of its ubiquity.

I will be slowly converting my catalog, especially data objects older than seven years of NDA, into a cloudable data lake. So I'm putting together that which I will need to convert back and forth through SQL insert dumps, pipe delimited text,  JSON and YAML. This will likely be my first serious Ruby project, if I have a moment's free time in the next 100 days. 

Still to come is another update what I see as possible with Chef and how much I enjoyed my exposure to its inner philosophy and Opscode champions. 

Obligatory Seriousness on Exalytics

As far as I'm concerned, Exalytics *is* Essbase 11. I think at this point it is time to call it Essbase 11 because all that stands under the Essbase brand (and Oracle would be wise to think of it in those terms) is working rather the way we expected it should. I have pushed many of the components to their design limits but I still remain faithful to Essbase claims. The penultimate one has been that now I can do procedural work in ASO models. Beautiful. 

But the big news that 11.1.2.2 will have a way to manage large memory models is the breakthrough I have been waiting for. So here's what I expect and I hope to get and hope that those who know are listening. 

Context
First understand that my context is now hardware unleashed. I'm halfway to whatever certification exists for Opscode Chef and it is powerful beyond my dreams. (More on that later) I am very fortunate to be working for a CTO who gets it. So let me drop a morsel. I met a guy last week who knows what it's like to configure 5,000 servers in 5 minutes flat. Yeah, you heard me. And that was two years ago. And when OpenStack and Crowbar are done, we're going to see supercomputers in the clouds that are going to be very configurable. In the meantime, there are guys at Voxel who have done some awe-inspiring things with SSD. Scary fast things.

Consider the following:

 A 512-core SM10000-64 with 1TB of memory costs $165,000 at list price from SeaMicro, while the SM10000-64HD with 1.5TB of memory costs $237,000 and offers roughly 50 per cent more aggregate processing oomph. Dell is peddling the SeaMicro machine through its Data Center Solutions bespoke server unit, so there is no list price for it. Dell has not actually sold a box yet. "Right now, it is just a lot of conversations and we are starting to build traction," says Acosta.

So with that in mind, know that I think of the Exalytics box as just another stage for the rockstar software that is Essbase. There's all kinds of competition in the hardware arena and we can configure it quick. The questions that burn in my head have to do with how the core developers on the Essbase team think about the 64bit playing field with regard to the memory models they have been playing with up until now.

I have seen Essbase run 500 concurrent databases on an HP Superdome. I've told that story too many times. I've blown the capacity of what used to be Sun's biggest server. The deal is that people's hunger for multidimensional deliciousness is larger than the kind of hardware they have ever been able to afford or even access. But all that is changing now, and I want the Essbase programmers to dial up their ambition beyond 50 processors and 1TB of RAM.  The reason is simple. Essbase is a single server database, so that server needs to be Big Iron.

Now I know what you're going to say. You can partition onto multiple machines, and you know what, I actually believe that APS can handle that. But I personally don't believe in partitioning. It is not a ground up design feature of Essbase, in other words, Essbase was not designed to be sharded. We've got Vertica for that, which was. I have to redesign my model - or basically I have to *think* about redesigning my model when I want to partition Essbase and that's something newer database technologies do for me. So let Essbase do what it does on one box, thank you . Considering how big a box can get, let's see that kind of optimization, shall we. After all, it's still a datamart engine., and considering how the meme of 'Essbase for planning' is stinking up the joint around Exalytics it's no wonder that SAP's Sanjay Poonen, my old pal, is calling it a 20 year old washed up technology. 

Details
So back to the technical stuff and what I want to see. Remember when Essbase introduced Direct I/O? I do. I remember when we had the opportunity, back when NTFS was brand-spanking new, to determine how often Essbase would flush memory caches to disk. Those were the good old days. You can still see the commit point option in your EAS. I want those kinds of knobs on my Essbase memory modeling. Remember when people asked what kind of servers to buy and which RAID worked best with Essbase? I'm sure that when the 11.1.2.2 guys got together with the Exalytics hardware guys, these were the kinds of questions that had to get talked about. And I know they had to talk about SSD. Come on now people, you know I'm right.

I have to confess that I wasn't around to get the dirt on exactly how ASO differs from BSO when it comes to committing in-RAM data to disk. But let's pretend for a moment that if I have 100GB of RAM to play with, it shouldn't much matter should it? But what I expect is that some of the dynamics around the optimization of calculation, index and data caching can be outlined and mastered. It can't be more complex than anchor dimensions and all that stuff... Speaking of the dead, here's an antique from the very old days - it is my spreadsheet calculator for optimization of Essbase models back when we talked about Run Length Encoding.

Download EssbaseGrandUtility  <--- That used to be my secret weapon. It helped me do capacity planning back in the days when IT was very skeptical about putting Essbase on their hardware.

Speaking of which, as much as His Majesty the Ellison talked about data compression, I'm going to take that as a hint that the LZ compression model now works and makes a difference. 

So there it is in a nutshell. I want to dial up or down what is committed to memory or disk for any model in Essbase. I want to dial it in with the understanding of how big my indices are and hit rates on the various prioritized areas of storage whether it's static data or dynamically calculated or cached retrievals. I want at least some head nodding about whether it's faster to split models across machines in a way I can compare network latency to disk latency and how one so bold might actually go about sharding Essbase.  Why you ask? Because customers want realtime. Don't get me started. 

And one more thing, if it's not too much to ask. Can we finally have a selectable KB/MB/GB switch on the Stroage statistics panel in EAS? I keep clicking on the number and looking for the Excel comma format button. 

One final thing. I can see that the Classic Planning developers finally moved the Create Button to a separate interface than the Refresh Button. Bravo for bravery in 11.1.2. It only took 6 years.  Raise your hand if you ever clicked the wrong one.  Yeah, I know right?

So I've got my ears pricked up to hear any such hardware tuning stuff and I've set my Google Alerts on, because now I've got some clouds to play around in, and the best in class Opscode Chef configuration management software with which to tune my deployments. This can be good.

 

More Cloud, More Chef

 I’ve been talking about my cloudy future for a while and it looks like this fourth quarter I will be crossing the chasm and spending more and more of my compute work up in those clouds. I’ve had an Amazon AWS account for a couple years but finally the time I’m spending working in those is clouds is closing on the amount of time I spend working in traditional environments.

To solidify all that I will be adding another ninja tool to my belt which is Opscode Chef. In a couple weeks I’ll be heading to Opscode’s bootcamp in NYC. Chef is basically a framework and toolset for configuring entire environments, something you almost never think about as a consultant who has to sit around and wait for infrastructure specialists or customer IT staffers, but once you get liberated of all that you think about a bit more.

If you’re an Oracle or any sort of EPM consultant you know that the result of the thin client multitier inter-operative strategic directions taken a decade ago has introduced you to that dreaded word ‘stack’. No longer do you just deal with a product, but with a stack of services that support and interoperate with a suite of this that and the other. The days of simple client-server are over, or they are for the time being until you can use tools like Chef to configure your stack on the fly.

So what we’ve already done at Full360 is make it brain dead simple to throw up an instance of Oracle 11.1.2 EPM or Vertica + Jaspersoft on AWS. That means, and believe me because  just did it this month, I can do a POC in a week, just like in the old days. I can’t describe how liberating it is to be free of concerns about environment configuration and just focus on the application. But even more cool is how powerful I can be once I start taking for granted that I can use big and multiple virtual hardware any way I want. And this is where Chef comes in.

What I’m going to do is come up with optimum configurations for all of the different sorts of BI, DW and EPM stacks I’m going to use. This means Palo. This means Essbase. This means Vertica. (OK I’m database centric, I admit it) This means a rightsized environment I can tweak over time and replicate with Chef recipes whenever I need it.  My Ruby is a little crusty but I’m not particularly worried about it.

Not to pat myself too hard on my back but a dozen years ago I was the first bloke to publish a capacity planning guide for Essbase. If I can remember how to think as sharply as I used to, this is going to be very cool as we at Full360 work with Amazon, Opscode and our elasticBI & elasticEPM customers to craft and maintain the ultimate environments.

Can’t wait.  

 

Essbase on iPad with CXO

I've seen this stuff at ODTUG. It's very clean and fast. I think they'll do well here in the States.

Bobby's Pentatonics

Progress in Tabletop Computing

Author & Punisher

UltraEdit Syntax Highlighting for MAXL

/L15 "ESSBASE_MAXL" CSS_LANG Nocase Noquote Block Comment On = /* Block Comment Off = */ File Extensions = MSH MXL/Delimiters = ;.,:%$"'*+-=<>[]{}()?!/\|~`#&@^ 

/C1"Commands" - blue abort add allow alter append archivebeginclear connect copy createdelete disable disallow display drop deployenable end execute exit exportget grantimportkilllist load lock login logoutpreservequeryrecover refresh remove rename repair replace reset restructure rebuild resyncselect set shutdown spool startup stopunload unlock update usevalidate

/C2"Objects"advanced after algorithm alias alias_names alias_table all application area as at attribute attribute_info attribute_spec attribute_to_base_member_association autostartupbefore blocks bycalc_script calc_string calculation cascade columns commands comment commitblock compression connect connects create_application create_blocks create_user cube_size_info currency currency_conversion currency_database currency_membercurrency_rate customdata data_block data_cache_size data_file data_file_cache_size database database_asynch database_synch dbstats default definitionsdesigner dimension dimensions direction directory disabled disallow disk dynamic_calcelse enabled end end_transaction enforce eqd error error_file estimated event exceeds excel execute export_directory externalfile file_size file_type filter_access for from function filtergb group ha_trace held high hostnameidentified implicit_commit in inactive_user_days index index_cache_size index_data index_page_size information input insteadinvalid_block_headers invalid_login_limit io_access_modekb kernel_cache kernel_iolevel level0 license_info linked list local location lock lock_timeout log_value logfile long lotus_2 lotus_3 lotus_4 low lromacro mail mapped max_lro_file_size mb medium member member_UDA member_UDA_namespace member_alias_namespace member_calculation member_comment member_fixed_length_data member_formula member_info member_instance_data member_name_namespace member_uda member_uda_namespacemember_variable_length_data minimum mining mode model meta_read note numerical_displayobject objects of off on opg_cache opg_state or outline outline_paging_file overviewpartition partition_file partition_size password password_reset_days performance permission persistence pmml_file portspre_image_access preserve privilege process property protocolreplicated report_file request request_history result retrieve_buffer_size retrieve_sort_buffer_size reverserow rows rules_file read scope security security_backup security_file selection semaphore server session session_idle_limit session_idle_pollshort size spec spinlock spool startup statistics status  stopping supervisor suppress sync system ssstable tablespace task tb template text then thread to total_size transparent trigger trigger_spool two_pass_calc typeunicode updated updates use user usingvalidate variable verification version volumewhen where with wizard worksheet write 


/C4"Operators" - grey
!=%()+-// /<<==>>=|all and anybetweencrossexistsjoinlikenot nullor outersome