Dashboards and Displaying Business Data

From Monolith Software blog, “even the best dashboards are somewhat myopic, and badly designed dashboards can lead to complacency, poor communication and eventually overlooked issues, degradations or outages.”

This is something that comes up repeatedly when displaying data from one area to those from the wider business. Data in any form needs to come with the required info or education to provide clarity. The most basic chart can be mis-interpreted by those who make assumptions on the colours, format, numbers, etc before them. Admittedly, providing clear, functional, beautiful dashboards of a business’s data is difficult – and that’s one of the key reasons I enjoy doing it.

Ignore Network Latency at Your Peril

We all know developers need to consider a few things outside their own backyard. Things like hardware and the network affect software even if there’s not much that can be done to control them (even if you’re Apple). This is especially true for the network if you develop software for mobile devices.

So to help us all understand why the nuances of any network are important to all of us, Nic Wise has a good little blog post about what to keep in mind. It’s written in people language and not TCP layers, so we can all benefit from this one.

Using 7zip in Cron Jobs Fails

For those people tearing their hair out trying to use the 7z util in a cron job, have a look in the Ubuntu forums for the solution. Strangely as soon as you start sending the output to a log file, the 7z part of your script will work.

I struck the problem in the Hardy version of Ubuntu Server.

MS Exchange Local vs Hosted vs Google for 10,000 Users

After looking at some comments around Exchange Hosted Services, I thought I might do a quick (and very dirty) comparison between that and Google for 10,000 users. (This is no way reflects on the three options and may not resemble your reality).

MS Exchange Hosted Services would cost US$90k/month for company with 10k email users and selecting roughly half the options available (Communicator and Hosted Archive being two). That sounds really pricey vs local in-house servers and admins? I have no specific Exchange knowledge but say 20 servers across 5 virtual hosts, plus storage and backups is roughly NZ$350-400k as a one-off cost. Plus a team of seven admins to run it @ NZ$80k pa each is a five year cost of around $2.8 million, but lets say $3.2M to round it up to include a few software licenses and some power,cooling and floor space.

Google’s offering that I compared MS against is their Premier Edition of Apps. It’s US$50 per user per year and offers the usual email, calendar, resource booking, etc much like Exchange. I was expecting a few missing features but was surprised to see BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) synching and user and group provisioning APIs. It integrates with LDAP and offers Single Sign-On (SSO) so most of your users won’t see too much of a change – especially if they keep on using the Outlook client. The main issue for some businesses may be the 99.9% uptime guarantee – that’s 8h 45m down time per year. I’m sure there are a few features that Exchange holds over Apps but in many situations the cost may outweigh the benefit or it’s just not needed. Using Google Apps also unties you from MS Outlook and possibly MS Office, so this option may open the door to other savings.

So over 5 years for the 10k user company we have the following options:

In-house MS Exchange with 20 VMs, storage and 7 admins = NZ$3.2M

MS Exchange Hosted Services with a mid-tier option seclection @ US$90k/month = NZ$7.4M (at today’s exch rate of 0.72)

Google Apps Premier Edition @ US$50 per user per year = NZ$3.5M

Now one stands out there and not for a particularly good reason. The MS EHS option does include Communicator and Hosted Archiving as an option but I don’t see the extra value over staying with what you have or sending it all to Google. Add to both the off-site options, the project costs of actually implementing this and your own Exchange would have to be in a bad way or have some serious pain to go either way.

What are your thoughts on this one? Are my locally run Exchange costs way off for 10k users and are there any NZ based companies of a similar size (NZ Post’s 2100 users are on the way to Google Apps) that have taken either remote option? Is Google half the service or twice the value of the MS offering?

My last thought would be – just how reliable is that internet connection of yours?

Google Wave Invites

I have 10 Google Wave invites to give away. If anybody would like one, please leave a comment below or DM @mikemcmurray on Twitter. First in first served.

Enable WakeUp from PS2 Keyboard in Ubuntu 8.10

One of the annoying “missing features” I’ve struggled with under Ubuntu is that I was unable to wakeup the PC from suspend or hibernate with my keyboard. Of course, Windows just does it – tap the keyboard and the PC starts up again. I could press the power button on the front of the PC, but its down the side of the desk and not easily accessible.

I found an older post in the Ubuntu forums that had the fix for USB devices and it also works for PS2 with the simplest of changes. So follow these steps and you should be saving power and getting back to work faster.

Open a Terminal and type,

cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

Note the entries that come back and you should see a device called “PS2K” toward the top if you have a PS2 keyboard. For those with USB, it’ll be one of the USB items toward the bottom. The entry will probably also have “Disabled” on the same line, hence your problem.

To enable this entry, switch to a root session by typing,

sudo -s

and enter your password. Now type the following to update the acpi file and toggle “disabled” to “enabled”, (those with USB devices can try USB0, USB1, etc)

echo PS2K > /proc/acpi/wakeup

That should have now enabled your PS2 keyboard to wakeup your PC for this session. Give it a test by putting your machine to sleep and then tapping a key on your keyboard. Probably a good idea to save stuff first, just in case.

If you tried changing a USB device, it may take a few guesses until you find the KB. My mouse was USB0 and clicking any mouse button can also do the wakeup task.

To make this change permanant, you need to add that line to a script and run it when Ubuntu starts. So we create a file called wakeup.sh with the following contents,

#!/bin/bash
echo PS2K > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Save it and from a Terminal make it executable so it runs properly as a script and not just a text file,

chmod +x wakeup.sh

Now to add it to the startup area go back to your Terminal that’s running as root. We need to copy the file to the correct location and add it to the startup processes. You’ll need to run the cp command in the same folder as where you saved your wakeup.sh file.

cp wakeup.sh /etc/init.d/wakeup.sh
update-rc.d wakeup.sh defaults

Now when you reboot, the script will run and enable your PS2 keyboard in ACPI so you can wakeup your PC.

Print Processor Updates for Windows Queues

A while back I wrote about a few little tools from Microsoft that allowed an easy way to create remote print queues. One of the things I didn’t realise then was that another handy tool exists (in the Server 2003 Resource Kit) called setprinter.exe that opens up a few more options.

We use a non-standard print processor at work to insert barcodes on certain output from SAP. So to set all the printers on the print server or just one to use the new print processor, we just run,

setprinter \\myserver 2 pPrintProcessor="SAP Barcode"

setprinter \\myserver\printer01 2 pPrintProcessor="SAP Barcode"

Lots of other properties can also be changed using setprinter.exe, pretty much everything other than security permissions and for that you can use another tool in the RK, subinacl.exe. To view the properties of a queue and what you can change, just cycle through the property groups 0-9 (that’s the 2 in the above commands).

for %i in (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) do setprinter -show \\myserver\printer01 %i

A Closer Look at Wiki Authorship

Jeff Atwood takes an interesting look at the history of changes to wiki pages and the balance between opinion and fact. The larger wikis (e.g. Wikipedia) have a huge amount of data around page edits and Jeff’s article also highlights an IBM study on how the more popular Wikipedia content evolves over time.

There’s also a comment about one of my favourite subjects – reading too much into statistics. Apparently Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-founder) looked into who was responsible for most of the articles changes and found that 0.7% of users were responsible for over 50% of all edits. But an “edit” may be a spelling correction rather than adding content or altering the facts or meaning in an article. As it turns out, the data points to these hyper-active users doing just that – cleaning up after everyone else.

Kisimi uses a basic string comparison function called simple_text() to show the relative difference between two versions of a page. We could also use the Levenshtein function which gives the minimum changes to go from string A to sting B, but that doesn’t always make much sense for larger content changes. If someone sees that two versions are 96% the same then it’s obvious they’re much the same.

Think Txt Messages Are Cheap? Think Again

The NYTimes has an interesting article about the cost of txt messages that I’m sure most of us have suspected in the past.
Not only is it extremely cheap for a mobile provider to run a txt message service, the data uses a portion of the transmission that gets sent anyway.
A scientist at the University of Leicester recently published some calculations that show txt messaging is a number of times more expensive than sending data to the Hubble space telescope.
Anyone smell a price-fixing investigation?

Installing VMware Server 1.06 on Linux

Installing the free VMware Server is a common but slightly tricky process on some newer Linux systems. Having had to go through it again recently I thought I’d write some of it down. Of course if you are using Ubuntu 7.10 then the simple option is to enable the Canonical Partner repository and just use Synaptic to select and install VMware Server.

For the others in the audience that are installing on Ubuntu 8.04 or another Linux system that doesn’t have packages, you should have a working VMware Server install with web interface and a client console by the bottom of the page. Read more >>