Five Things I Didn’t Learn at University

January 19th, 2012

Shortcomings of computer science classes (at German universities)

As a computer-scientist-gone-business-consultant I have had many opportunities to witness how IT is used in the enterprise context. Time and time again, I have found it baffling how the way that IT is really used in companies differs from what I have learnt at the three German universities I have attended over the course of my studies, or – even more important – what I did not learn at university. Here are five notable examples that I will elaborate on in this article:

  1. The relevance of enterprise architecture
  2. The legacy of enterprise IT landscapes
  3. The importance of data quality
  4. The challenge of defining and aligning on the right requirements
  5. The Embedding of IT in the enterprise and IT Strategy Read the rest of this entry »

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Top Privacy Plugins for Mozilla Firefox

January 12th, 2012

Controlling who you are sharing your data with

As a privacy concious user (maybe a bit paranoid at times… but then again, I am a German, so that comes naturally), I have been thinking a lot lately about how to maintain control about which web company gets which information about me. After all, through the proliferation of facebook’s like-button an its relatives (Google+, Twitter et al.) and the advent of behavioral advertising, companies have the means to create browsing profiles and, in the case of those companies that offer social networks and advertising services, even tie it to my person and use it to serve advertisements to me even in totally different contexts.  This is even more relevant since that tracking can even occur when I am not logged in to the social network in question, since e.g. facebook uses identifying cookies even in that case (see heise for more information, albeit in German).

In this article, I am going to evaluate a few add-ons for Mozilla Firefox that help maintain control over the data that is being shared, and discuss some of their pros and cons. Similar or the same add-ons might exist for Google Chrome or other browsers as well. The plugins I am going to discuss are the following:

  1. Ghostery
  2. BetterPrivacy
  3. NoScript
  4. Beef Taco
  5. AdBlock Plus Read the rest of this entry »

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“Always online” is not reality for groupware yet

January 5th, 2012

Why Web-based solutions cannot satisfy all requirements yet

When looking for alternatives to the dominating groupware suites Microsoft Outlook/Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, one comes across multiple Web-based groupware solutions such as Zimbra. Since groupware is first and foremost about group collaboration—including messaging, calendar sharing and appointment scheduling, and managing of contact information—it seems like a good idea to implement it as a Web application, removing some of the hassles and inefficiencies of conventional client/server applications and allowing access to the software from a broad range of devices, including mobile phones or tablets.

There is, however, one significant drawback to Web-based groupware: It requires the user to have Web access in order to use the software. While offices in most parts of the world today have fast Internet connectivity, there are—even without thinking of less developed parts of the world—situations in which online connectivity is not given. A few examples follow. Read the rest of this entry »

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An Efficient Graph Model for News Feeds in Social Networks

December 29th, 2011

Performance improvements for managing massive data amounts in social networks using graph databases like neo4j

Recently René, a friend of mine (and co-founder of the social networking website Metalcon), who is now researching in the context of Web technologies, has come up with a new concept how to efficiently retrieve Twitter-like newsfeeds in social networks, using graph databases such as Neo4j. If you are interested in Web technology in general or social networks in particular, I suggest you check out his article and the enclosed video, since it highlights how database technologies that deviate from the ubiquitious relational databases can be used and leveraged to produce a level of efficiency that is really stunning. To illustrate this, René highlights that with this technology, as much as 10’000 news streams can be retrieved per second for a network that generates 100 new content items (e.g., tweets) per second on a single machine – in comparison, Twitter reported that 600 tweets per second as of last year. This alone should be enough to emphasize the enormous potential of this new technology.

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IT and strategy

August 1st, 2010

Is IT driven strategically or tactically?

I’ve come across two quite interesting recently, both dealing with whether IT and IT projects are strategic or tactical:

Both articles provide valuable insights on what to consider strategic in IT – yet in a totally different way.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Smartphone Apps – Curse and Blessing

July 30th, 2010

Getting all touchy

Before owning an app-centric smartphone such as the Apple iPhone myself, my thinking has been that apps serve no real purpose – 90% of the purposes fulfilled by these apps exist as free Web applications and services, and app-centric smartphones usually come with capable Web browsers and data flat rate plans. My thinking has changed, however, since using an iPhone: apps have real (or at least, perceived) advantages when compared to Web applications accessed from a smartphone browser:

  • User experience perfectly adapted to the phone (e.g. touchscreen interaction)
  • Direct access to device “periphery”, e.g. gyroscopic sensor
  • Integration with other software, e.g. messaging, contacts
  • Own, colorful app icon

Read the rest of this entry »

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Spammers in the cloud

April 6th, 2010

Taking it to the next level

Apparently, spammers are following the current megatrend and moving to the cloud. I am used to getting tons of spam comments on this blog — but one of them catched my eye:

Author : ctgPi (IP: 79.125.XXX.XXX , ec2-79-125-XXX-XXX.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com)

The IP address belongs to Amazon’s EC2 (elastic compute cloud) service – the textbook example of a cloud service (more specifically, a PaaS or Platform as a Service) — so it seems that the spammer uses Amazon’s cloud to send out spam comments to blogs. Read the rest of this entry »

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Flourish Player v0.02 Released

November 1st, 2009

New Version of Open Source Flash Audio Player

Early last year, I created a web site for my Mainz-based rock band. I was looking for a Flash (SWF) audio player to use on the page, but I could find no player that was fully customizable without using the commercial Adobe Flash IDE. Thus, I wrote a new Flash audio player that is fully customizable using open source tools (swfmill for creating the SWF file, MTASC for compiling ActionScript code and Inkscape for creating the SVG control graphics) and called it Flourish Player. Yesterday, I released a new version that makes use of new features of the recent swfmill version so that customization of the player is now even easier. The individual button graphics are stored as SVG files and after they are edited using Inkscape or another SVG editor, they are incorporated in the player by recompilation. Plans for future versions include full customizability without the need to recompile the player.

The new release is available in source or binary form from the Flourish Player project web site or directly from SourceForge.

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A Distributed Architecture for the MediaSearch Framework

September 1st, 2009

My Master's Thesis

A few weeks ago, I handed in my master’s thesis with the title “A Distributed Architecture for the MediaSearch Framework” after almost six months of work. Here is an abstract of the thesis:

The Fraunhofer SIT MediaSearch Framework is a loosely coupled, event based software system that searches internet platforms such as BitTorrent, Rapidshare or YouTube for media that match specified search criteria, downloads them and examines them for the presence of digital watermarks. Since the amount of media available on the internet is huge, the system is required to be scalable so that large amounts of data can be processed simultaneously. Read the rest of this entry »

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Auto-Starting EJBs

June 13th, 2009

Taking the Scenic Route

An issue that recently gave me something to gnaw on was that of auto-starting an EJB: I wanted to achieve the effect that an EJB within a Java enterprise application would become active (and in that special case, connect to another component on another machine) as soon as it was deployed (or the container was started). If possible, I wanted the solution to be container independent. After a lot of googling and trying, I found a solution that works, but it is probably one of the most awkward hacks to solve a problem that sounds as simple as this.

Read the rest of this entry »

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