There are four platforms within the Dynamics ERP portfolio:

• “Dynamics AX” – aimed primarily at large enterprise
• “Dynamics GP” – aimed at businesses that want out of the box solutions
• “Dynamics NAV” – aimed at businesses that want something more customisable
• “Dynamics SL” – with its project-centric approach and focus on professional services industries

Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV will be cloud optimised for use by small and medium enterprise companies and will be subscription based tying in the benefits of Azure’s scalability. Aiming the cloud enabled versions at the SME marketplace makes a lot of sense as these are likely to be businesses with few resources to support the infrastructure required for on-premise solutions whilst the cloud enabled functionality will have added benefits of anywhere, anytime access for employees. However, the products will remain available in their existing on-premise formats for enterprises that have no plans to utilise the cloud.

INTERNET DATA IS GROWING MASSIVELY

The amount of data being pushed through the internet on a daily basis is massively increasing. Website monitoring company Pingdom log a great deal of web traffic and publish annual figures on the state of the Internet via their Royal Pingdom Blog. According to their statistics in 2010, the number of email accounts worldwide exceed 2.9 billion whilst in 2011 the same figure exceed 3.146 billion and with the average number of emails sent and received by the average corporate user exceeding 100 we can see that email alone generates information of the big data magnitude. The number of websites in 2010 was around 255 million whereas in 2011 this figure had more than doubled to 555 million. If we look at Facebook data, there was 600 million people on Facebook at the end of 2010 but in 2011 this figure was over 800 million and similarly Twitter accounts grew from 175 million to 225 million with hundreds of millions of tweets being posted per day.

ENTERPRISE IS LOOKING AT DATA WITH FRESH EYES

In the enterprise the story is likely to be similar with business looking at its data with fresh eyes – particularly in organisations who are modernising systems from legacy platforms, or attempting to unify data silos, where there is very real need to analyse the grass roots data structures in place. With this analysis opportunities can be gained not only from historical data, or “data at rest” in big data terms, but also from streaming data, “data in motion”, such as information from sensors. Dashboard technology and key performance indicators have become a popular trend in enterprise and these are ideal mechanisms for presenting data analytics, both in rest and in motion, but they still require the analytical tools and business intelligence to make logical sense of the information in an optimum way. For many an enterprise big data and business intelligence may already be on the data strategy roadmap but it is only in the last year or two that appropriate terms have been coined.

BIG DATA IS A CALL TO ACTION

This umbrella term of “big data” is also interesting in the sense that is conveys a problem to be resolved as opposed to other technological buzz terms which describe attempts to wrap solutions around things, such as “Crowd sourcing”, “Business intelligence”, “Software as a Service”, and “Cloud computing”. In this sense “big data” is not the end of the story but the call to action to highlight a very real problem that is short on solutions.

The situation is clear, data is massively on the rise, and with big data come big opportunities; sentiment analysis being one of the key areas of study for social networking information and efficiency drives being of key interest in enterprise. Big data is not a passing fad but a very real issue and should be on the agenda of every enterprise CIO.

HUNDREDS OF MOBILE DICTIONARY APPS

There are no shortage of dictionary based apps on the Apple App Store as there are literally hundreds to choose from, both free and paid, so why this particular app? Following an App Store search on the keyword “dictionary” the friendly blue tone of this application icon was the first thing to catch my eye and the heritage that came along with the website of the same name also helped. Also, the consistently high ratings also worked in its favour but what keeps me using the app, when other dictionary apps have long since been deleted, is its neatly laid out and intuitive interface.

INTUITIVE INTERFACE

Upon launching the Dictionary.com app the search bar is often the first port of call where you can either enter a word or talk a word directly by utilising the built-in microphone (although I find the audio input a bit hit and miss – you need to speak slowly and clearly). If you are not quite sure how to spell a particular word the app is clever enough to come up with alternative spelling recommendations.

A useful feature here is the history of recently looked up words (around 30) which really reduces the amount of time needed when looking up a word for the second time.

Once a word is entered the definition of the word is displayed neatly with a fuss-free interface and the audio prompt to hear how a word sounds is also very useful. Words can be flagged as favourites, which is a feature I make a lot of use of, and definitions can also be shared using social networks. Switching between dictionary view and thesaurus is achieved easily be tapping on the orange “D” or “T” icon next to the word.

WORD OF THE DAY

One of the cute features of the app, and one that gets us talking in our household, is the “Word of the day” feature. Each day a new word, with its definition,  appears on the phone as an alert. This is a really good way to learn new words and helps kick start a day with each of us trying to guess what the meaning could be (whilst secretly trying to look the word up on our phone!). Several previous word of the day look ups can be accessed from within the app.

TRENDING WORDS

Trends is a clever feature that list the most popular words looked up by users of the services, including localised popular words searches. For example, as of writing this review the latest most popular trending words are “moolah”, “quip”, and “attainment”. At present it is difficult to assess the practical value of listing popular word look ups but perhaps this feature will prove itself and evolve to become a useful tool in a similar way that trending words has in Twitter.

ANDROID AND IPHONE

As mentioned at the beginning of this article there is also an Android version of the application available and whilst broadly similar in functionality there are quite a few visual differences between the Android and iPhone versions of the app but, for me, the iPhone version makes the best use of the interface options.

Overall I would recommend this app as an essential download for users of the iPhone. I use this app so often now that it has found its way onto the first page of my iPhone screen so it can be accessed at a moments notice. The Free Dictionary.com app currently has a five star rating, on the Apple App Store, based on 1,227 Ratings (as at 25th May 2012).

Practical Apps: Dictionary.com

A quick search of job search site Indeed.co.uk shows over 250 currently open positions requiring expertise in Cobol for platforms including IBM MVS COBOL, Acu-Cobol, Microfocus, and RM/Cobol. Interestingly, these open positions are not all London City jobs, as we might expect, but are distributed across the UK in locations as diverse as Birmingham, Bristol, Chelmsford, York, and Glasgow.

It’s not all about legacy though – there is scope for Cobol skilled developers to be involved in modernisation programmes, including .NET and J2EE (for example: the Great American Insurance Group migration from Cobol to J2EE, Source: PropertyCasualty360), however many organisations who rely on their backend infrastructure are happy to keep their platforms in legacy and this makes a lot of sense as Cobol has a heritage going back more than fifty years.

As Seagate manufacture storage devices and LaCie provide a range of storage solutions, including a range of desirable network storage devices and desktop hard drives, the partnership looks a positive one particularly when considering the increasing adoption of NAS units in the home.

The plugin allows COBOL developers to run automated code reviews against over seventy rules including checks for recursive PERFORM statements, deprecated statements, and paragraph naming standards. In addition to code checks the plug-in provides a number of metrics from analysed code including line count, comment links, paragraph count, and a complexity factor (utilising the McCabe Metric) which is useful for prioritising code reviews. The plug-in also takes advantage of the built-in Sonar tools particularly the code viewer which includes highlighting of syntactical statements.

For more information head over to SonarSource: COBOL.

Silk, according to the Amazons Silk blog, is an all new web browser powered by AWS (Amazon Web Services). With so many options for web browsing currently available, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera we may wonder why another one is needed but according to Amazon – Silk Browser is different and reflects changes in the way web page work.

THE CHANGING FACE OF WEB SITES

Web sites have seen a gradual evolution from flat, static pages, to the dynamic, multi-domain content we see and experience today. In the early days of web browser technology sites were thin – you would likely have just a few web pages, each with perhaps an image or two, and optimisation, for small page sizes and fast load times, was king. For web pages to be successful they needed to be small, and light, so they could be transmitted over the slow networks that were available at the time. Many of the browsers we use today were founded back in that time – and that time was not even too long ago – we’re talking 1994 onwards. When a user requested a web page the web page data would be transmitted down to the local browser, together with any images, and the browser would be completely responsible for understanding, collating, laying out out and presenting the information.

With the dawn of web page scripting browsers started to receive much more complex information. The information contained in a web response was no longer simple flat static data, the response would often include instructions telling the browser other places to go for information, how to process data, and how to specifically lay information out. Also, as the speed of internet data throughput increased so too the content increased and became much more dynamic so single request/response connections evolved into multiple request/responses. This evolution continued until the content itself was no longer stored in just one place – these days when we visit a website the information can come from a number of sources and locations and the local browser has to work hard to gather the information together, put in into some kind of order, and present it quickly so we can have a positive browsing experience.

The curious thing is that many of these request/responses are repeated over and over and the instructions sent over the internet often need to be reprocessed – even if it has not changed very much.

TWO-TIER WEB BROWSING

Silk Browser aims to address a number of these problems by breaking down web browsers as we know them today and building a new two-tier web browser that consists of a more structured, and logical, set of of sub-systems that can work together to deliver web pages. Silk Browser consists of primary components: a front-end component built primarily from Webkit, and a back-end component built using Amazon Web Services. To contrast Silk to how other browsers work instead of web page information being sent directly to the client device for processing the web page you request gets sent to Amazon servers which does most of the hard work and then transmits the final result to your local browser.

Silk Browser Front-End

The front-end side of the Silk Browser is based on the open source web browser project Webkit. According to Wikipedia, Webkit already forms the framework of Apple’s Safari browser and Google’s Chrome, and others have implemented it too including Nokia for Symbian,  so chances are you might actually have experienced Webkit, in action.  The front-end Browser consists of a number of subsystems which can either run locally or remotely making them available at both ends of the cloud connection so for every web page request a user makes the Silk Browser can make a decision about the best place to run the subsystem. Current subsystems include: Networking, HTML, CSS, Collections, JavaScript, Marshalling, Native Object Manager, Formatting, Block Building, and Layout and Display. Silk Browser also makes extensive use of caching technology so it can store visited pages and uses crowd-sourced information to predict web pages a user may be planning to visit next – based on the experiences of others.

Silk Browser Back-End

At the back-end Silk is based on technology from Amazon Web Services and in particular the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. EC2 is useful as it is able to increase (and decrease) resources as and when they are required. Many companies today are becoming reliant on the Amazon EC2 infrastructure and whilst it offers great potential there is also some risk. Back in April 2011 CNET reported that a partial failure of AWS infrastructure affected operations of a number of dependent sites including Reddit and Quora.

For effective communication between the front and back-end Silk uses an open source network protocol known as SPDY. SPDY, pronounced, SPeeDY, is a Chromium project that aims to reduce the latency of web pages, that is how long they take to respond. SPDY is a protocol in the Session layer which sits on top of TCP in the transport layer and SSL in the Presentation layer. If we cast our minds back to the OSI TCP/IP model there are 7 layers which describes the mechanism for sending and receiving information on a networks. The layers from the bottom up are the physical layer, the wires and so on, the data link layer which handles framing, and the network layer where the IP part of TCP/IP sites. Then there is the transport layer where TCP sits, the Session layer which looks after sockets, the presentation layer where SSL sits, and the Application layer where HTTP and SPDY, and others sits. Although SPDY is not a replacement, as such, for HTTP (not at the moment anyway) it does do certain things more effectively than HTTP.

Silk Cacheing

A key feature of Silk is cacheing. Silk can use its own algorithms to detect websites you may likely to visit next based on the activities of others. Initially this feature may sound a bit big brother-ish but if it speeds up the browsing process then it is likely to have advantages. Visited page will will also be cached so they do not have to be reprocessed time after time.

Another alternative might be the open source High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) from HPCC Systems, a division of LexisNexis. In HPCC the Data Refinery Cluster “Thor” and Query Cluster “Roxie” act as an alternative to Apache Hadoop but differentiate by aiming to avoid the MapReduce bottlenecks where, as HPCC Systems say, “each of the phases for these cycles cannot be started until the previous phase has completed for every record.”

In a recent InfoWorld article David Linthicum made a good point, “The answer to how to best do big data is the classic consultant’s response: It depends on what you’re trying to do.” as this highlights the “missing link”, as it were, between the ability to process vast amounts of data and the big insights deep analysis could lead to.

The real problem is that few people really know where those big insights could be and as such it is difficult to put a finger on exactly what you want big data analytics to do. Mike Gualtieri, in the Computerworld UK article “What’s your Big Data score?”, suggests that the theory behind big data is relative as he puts its “One organisation’s Big Data is another organisation’s peanut.” and we all know some nuts can be hard to crack.

For example you may anticipate finding some operational savings, efficiency gains, or competitive advantage but faced with terabytes, or more, of loosely connected information new ways of thinking are required in order to make sense of potentially new links between information sources. Later this year the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference, KDD 2012, will be held in Beijing bringing together data scientists from across the globe to present, and discuss, advancements in data science, big data, and analytics with the aim of addressing the issues behind big data science.

One of the main causes of this is when a print is stuck in the queue and the usual method is to flag the print for deletion then stop and restart the print spooler (under Services.msc, Print Spooler) however this does not always clear the queued prints.

If this happens head into Windows Explorer and navigate to the Windows “system32\spool\printers” folder and look for any files of type SHD and SPL.

If these are present stop the Print Spooler then delete these files (take extra care when deleting files in Windows system folders) and restart the Spooler.

The printer should hopefully delete gracefully.