Don’t get irate, get ClipMate
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in support, Software, Applications on
The next time you get some piddling small change to make what’s actually going to take you hours, put up your blood pressure and make no difference at all but you have to do it to comply with some idiot directive like ‘all the images in the CMS must have file names with Separate Words Starting In Upper Case’, you could start writing scripts with complex regular expressions - which is a little easier in Windows 7 because you get PowerShell and a simple little script IDE. Or - especially if you’re doing it on behalf of a user - you could turn to a tool that’s saved me hours of time over the years I’ve been using it: ClipMate from Thornsoft.
As the name suggests, it was originally designed to make the Windows clipboard more useful. You know how you see something interesting, like a URL or the instructions for fooling Windows 7 beta into upgrading to Windows 7 RC and you copy it, only to get distracted and copy something else before you get around to pasting the first clip anywhere…
Personally, I think that’s one of the main reasons that the Web page you’re most likely to open is the one you’ve just closed, but ClipMate saves everything you copy into a rolling list (mine goes back to May 30th). If there are things you paste a lot (frequent flyer numbers, your address, directions to your house that stop people taking what looks like a short cut, basic instructions for internal applications that don’t work the way users expect, a scan of your signature for pasting into that one fax a year you still have to send…) you can put those into a ’safe’ collection that doesn’t get cleaned out automatically and you can have multiple collections to keep handy scripts separate from Polite Responses To Stupid Requests.
But once you have something copied, ClipMate also has a bundle of tools for working with it. You get a word and character count at the bottom of the window, or the dimensions if it’s an image. You can see spelling mistakes (and correct them before you paste the text back). You can remove line breaks - ideal for fixing URLs that break apart in email. You can strip out fancy text formatting (very handy if you like to compose your blog posts in a real word processor and paste them in to the blog editor without worrying about getting weird fonts and weirder HTML codes in there). You can show non-printing characters like tabs and spaces to see why text doesn’t lay out the way you expect. Or you can just highlight HTML formatting and URLs in the clip, to make it easier to read. You can strip out any formatting - the >> quote marks on email inclusions or any other specific character that’s in your way (the icon for this is a magician’s top hat and wand). You can add macros and regular expressions to clips that activate when you paste them (ideal for scripts). And you can swap the case of the clip - not just by clicking an icon or a menu entry, but with a keyboard shortcut.
So you can iterate through your list of image names going click (select filename), click (rename file), Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Alt-C (open ClipMate), Ctrl-Alt-M (Change To Leading Caps), click (select filename that’s still live for renaming), Ctrl-V. It’s the kind of soothing repetition that you can speed through even while you fume about whoever decided Leading Cap Image File Names were a good idea in the first place.
ClipMate: it’s just so useful.
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Infrastructure 2.What?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Software, Cloud, Enterprise, Business, Hardware, Storage, HP on
We live in an industry driven by the Darwinian evolution of buzzwords. Many start down the memestream to mainstream acceptance, but most die along the way. Some are weeded out early, others struggle to survive in the fringes of the blogosphere. It’s interesting to watch evolution in process.
One of the terms that’s making its way through that great filter is Infrastructure 2.0. It’s still struggling to drive the agenda, but it managed to make its way onto the schedule for last week’s Future In Review conference in San Diego. The question was still “Just what is it?”, and there were interesting definitions from all parts of the industry.
Mark Hurd, HP’s CEO, was quite clear in his thinking, noting that POCs, servers, storage and network hardware were all converging on the same basic set of components. The only thing that would differentiate them was the software, saving money and making it easier to maintain an infrastructure. That’s certainly an important piece of the Infrastructure 2.0 jigsaw, but it’s still only a small part of the picture.
Amazon’s AWS, VMware’s VSphere and Microsoft’s Azure are another piece. They’re attempts to build a univeral operating system for cloud and virtualised workloads, where workload migrates to and from on premise datacenters - making them what Amazon CTO Werner Vogel calls “more elastic”. The mix of in-cloud and on-premise is key to the flexibility that businesses need, but it’s also a new complexity that needs a lot of management, and deeper consideration of just where your data is at all times.
Here’s a scary thought: Infrastructure 2.0: it’s 12 am. Do you know where your data is?
Data protection regulations aren’t ready for data that flows to where the workload is - and those workloads need to be geolocked, able to keep information inside the appropriate data protection regime.
Then there’s the thorny question of user interface.
Is a PC screen what the next generation of applications and services need? There’s a lot to be said for the traditional application, mixing rich data and rich display. Tom Malloy’s research group at Adobe is looking at next generation run times that can speed up cross platform rich internet applications. Tools like Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft Silverlight simplify user interface development, and bring Web 2.0 user experiences to the desktop.
Perhaps the most telling piece of the puzzle was one simple phrase: “We need to stop treating IT pros like Victorian file clerks”. It’s a statement that hit home - we do treat our IT pros as glorified clerks, waiting for them to do things by rote. What we really need is an automated infrastructure that flexibly configures itself to deal with the tools, applications and workloads we need to use every day.
Pull apart all the different definitions from all the vendors out there and that’s what Infrastructure 2.0 boils down to. It’s a world we really need to build - if only to show the world just what value IT really brings to business.
–Simon
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Ruby in the Studio
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Software, Developer, Windows, Microsoft on
A while back Microsoft announced that it was changing the licensing requirements for Visual Studio. Yes, it probably was a response to the success of Eclipse, but it also changed the way Microsoft worked with development tools partners. Two significant announcements today show that it’s a strategy that is starting to pay off.
So what did Microsoft do? First, anyone could get access to the Visual Studio IDE. That meant you could use its editor, and its code completion tools with any language. You could host anything yyou liked in the Visual StudioShell, using it for modelling tools, for programming, or for just about anything you wanted. A generic multi-pane shell could host just about any application, from a E-911 call centre hub, to a (dare we say it in these times of crisis) bank trading desk.
The second part of the change was one of the most significant. Now you didn’t need to target Windows with your development tools. That meant you could use Visual Studio to host a PHP editor working against UNIX Apache web servers, or a development tool for Android or BlackBerry.
One of the tools announced today works in just that way. SapphireSteel’s Ruby In Steel is a Ruby On Rails development tool, built entirely inside the Visual Studio Shell. You can running the resulting code on any Ruby interpreter - whether it’s a Windows version (like Microsoft’s own IronRuby) or one running on a Linux web server somewhere on Amazon’s hosted RedHat EC2 servers.
While Ruby In Steel is a commercial tool,
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HP delivering technology optimization and luggage too
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
We are no longer the people who are keeping the lights - now we are running the company, says Fadil El-Houssine, HP
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Let’s get physical
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Processors, Silicon, Software on
Nvidia has decided that the visual computing world needs a conference, and has taken over San Jose to deliver just that. It’s an odd event, with a high-level academic parallel processing track running alongside highly analytical business sessions - and what’s billed as the world’s largest LAN party filling one of the conference halls.
Games may have made Nvidia, but it’s the rest of the graphics industry that keeps it going. Simulation and CAD drive much of today’s industrial design, while complex financial calculations can be run on GPU-powered parallel processors. It’s not just black hole plasma dynamics - it’s also the models that help calculate how a fusion reactor will operate. According to Nvidia GPU computing is bringing supercomputing to the desks of the people who need it the most - for just the cost of a video card.
One of the keynotes showcased a NASCAR simulator used by drivers to hone their skills. On stage we heard a populist story of what it was like to be a driver, and what it was like to use simulation tools. Off stage we heard a more interesting story about how the simulator developers were looking at using the latest generation of GPUs in their application. The ability to use a GPU for parallel processing - and the availability of powerful hardware physiscs engines - has made them completely rethink their next generation, as the new hardware features mean that they can now work on making the simulation more realistic.
That’s what the drivers want. Asked what he really wanted from a simulator, Kyle Busch didn’t talk about new high-resolution graphics or realtime ray tracing. What he wanted was more accurate physical behaviours. In the real world passing on the left is different from passing on the right, while slipstreaming another car can change the performance dramatically. A simulation may look real, but without the physics it’s not realistic at all.
One plan for the next generation is to move away from the current car model, with only 6-degrees of freedom. Instead, it really needs 72 degrees, for all the hinge and flex points - all of which are changing dynamically. That’s where parallel processing comes in, as it allows a car to be modelled in real time, taking advantage of physics engines to turn those model calculations into real world behaviours. Improving the simulation will mean more (and happier) customers - as well as a continually improving model that can be shared with vehicle manufacturers.
It’s an approach that requires specialist processing that goes beyond the traditional CPU. Don’t confuse it with the death of the CPU, though. There will always be a place for the traditional CPU - it’s just that silicon technology has become ubiquitous enough for specialist hardware to offload processor intensive functions.
Need to encrypt something? Just use the hardware cryptosystem built into a TPM. Need to do thread intensive Java? Hook up an Azul network processing appliance. Need to do complex vector calculations on large amounts of data? Use a GPU. Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsen Huang talks about it as heterogenous computing, where the CPU handles tasks, and more specialised hardware handle the complex tasks that tax general purpose silicon.
Intel and AMD may still say that general purpose processors are just what the world needs - but they’re still investing in HyperTransport and QuickPath, the fast buses that specialised silicon needs. I wonder why they’re doing that, if specialised silicon is the dead end they say it is. Is there something about Moore’s Law they’re not telling us?
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Green if but for the licenses
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Licensing, Software, Applications, Hardware, Microsoft on
Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.
With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.
That’s good news for SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com, but it’s bad news for CIOs all around the world - and (in the long run) worse news for proprietary software developers. Why worry about falling over a hole in your Windows Server 2008 licence if all you really need is a set of virtualised Linux boxen running Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl. Fractional licensing is water off a duck’s back to open source and free software.
So what do proprietary software vendors need to do? First and foremost they need to realise that the landscape has radically shifted. Microsoft made one step in the right direction when it realised that cores didn’t equal CPUs and switched its licence model to handle the change in server architectures. It was quickly followed by much of the industry. Now the industry as a whole needs to accept that a server is an ephemeral construct which is tied to a purpose not to a specific piece of hardware, and businesses will need to be licensed either for a maximum number of live instances or for a total number of licenses over a set amount of time.
Why should a company by three server licences if it’s actually only going to have two live at any one time? Two licences should be sufficient. Of course there’s also the issue of disaster recovery, but those purchased licenses should also be able to handle snapshot images of the virtualised servers that are ready to be put into play at a moment’s notice.
At VMworld, back in February, BT’s Stefan van Overtveldt said that vendors weren’t ready for virtualisation licensing. As he said, “On a generic level what I would say is as I come from a software background myself I understand that it’s very hard for software vendors to look at different types of commercial agreements because tracking usage is harder than tracking physical copies”. It’s a perennial problem that goes back to the days of the mainframe - and one that vendors are unlikely to approach with much enthusiasm, especially as most businesses are actually over-licensed.
Any shift to fractional licensing will be likely to result in lower revenues (at least in the first instance), but even so, van Overtveldt is optimistic, and expects vendors to come up with appropriate tools and licenses, “The industry hasn’t come up with standards that say if you transmit this kind of data in this format we will track it and reduce your licensing costs automatically when you get below a certain level of usage. But I believe something will come.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
–Simon
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Beyond the valley of the CPU
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Processors, Software, Applications, Server, Mobile on
(or “The return of the co-processor”)
The white heat of technology in the 1980s was focussed on the BBC Micro. Not only was it the heftiest 8-bit machines around, its open bus made it possible to add more processing power. With everything from music machines to Z-80s running CP/M, the BBC Micro could share its keyboard with many different CPUs.
Those days are on their way back.
Last week Toshiba announced a new range of consumer notebook PCs. Like many of Toshiba’s systems they’re designed to be media players, and in a side swipe at BluRay, they now come with an upscaling DVD drive. That’s where the coprocessor magic comes in, as Toshiba is using a derivative of the same Cell processor in Sony’s PS3 to drive its imaging software. A quad core version of the Cell sits alongside a dual core intel processor, and it’s used to handle a range of processor intensive tasks - acting as a feed to the GPU that drives the screen. Not only does it upscale DVD streams (very impressively) it also can be used to handle file transcoding (so your movies end up on your iPhone that much quicker), and also works well as a way of quickly indexing images and video.
Focused on video, Toshiba’s co-processor is also taking advantage of bundled web cams for a limited form of gesture control. Stopping a film by holding up a hand is effective, as is using a clenched fist as an in air mouse. Bill Gates’ departure reaffirmed his belief in alternative user infterfaces, and this is one approach to delivering those new ways of working.
Co-processors aren’t just for flashy graphics. Back in the 1990s I was writing mathematical simulation software, and at one point I had some electro-thermal models running on one of the MOD’s Crays. It wasn’t just any old Cray - it also had a co-processor in the shape of an additional vector processing unit. That vector co-processor made short shrift of my arrays of partial differential equations. Its direct descendent is a lot closer than an MOD research facility.
In fact, if you’ve got an NVIDIA graphics card it’s right in your PC’s GPU.
Back in January we wrote about Tesla and CUDA, and NVIDIA updated us on the next generation of the Tesla hardware earlier this week. The new G10 Tesla systems are looking very impressive, and the CUDA parallel programming language extensions are now able to work with standard multicore PCs as well as NVIDIA’s GPUs.
Memory is important when you’re using co-processors, and you need a lot if you’re signal-processing seismic data. Tesla will now support 4GB of directly attached memory per GPU, so a quad-GPU system can work with 16GB of data at a time. The numbers look good - and using Folding at Home a single Tesla 10 comes in at more than 40 times faster than a standard CPU, and more than 6 times faster than a PS3. Other demonstrations showed significant savings in space and in cost - one finance house has reduced its annual costs 9 times, replacing a 600 CPU options valuation system with a handful of front-end CPUs and 12 Tesla GPUs.
Of course with Snow Leopard around the corner, one of the obvious questions was about Apple’s support for OpenCL. It turns out that CUDA is best thought of as a personality layer on top of NVIDIA’s parallel thread execution (PTX) hardware, and it produces device-specific assembly code. There’s no reason why other GPU programming environments can’t produce the same PTX code - but CUDA will remain NVIDIA’s own route to the GPU as a processing tool, and it will be adding support for additional languages beyond C and C++ with Fortran just around the corner.
The future of the co-processor seems assured, for now at least. It’s time for software companies to start taking notice and to deliver on the promise of additional power beyond the CPU.
–Simon
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
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Join the (beta) community
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Community, Beta, Software, Microsoft on
TechEd is Microsoft’s instant university, a place where developers and IT pros go to get information about the current state of all things Microsoft. It’s not really a place for big announcements - though the odd one sneaks out.
Most of the news from this year’s event has been about software moving from one stage of beta to the next. Whether it’s a new beta (like Silverlight 2) or a long running upgrade saga finally getting close to release (like SQL Server 2008) it’s not like a new release of Windows or a new Visual Studio. If anything we’re quickly moving into a world where the big bang launch is a thing of the past. Apple may be still spinning its “one more thing”, but even Snow Leopard will just be an evolutionary move. Instead public betas and community previews will become the way things get done, and the Web 2.0 perpetual beta will be the way of the rest of the IT business works.
Is this the end of the computing world we’ve come to know?
The answer is both a yes and a no.
It’ll be harder to write a software news story, that’s for sure, but that’s not really a problem. What’s really important will be the change in the way IT pros relate to the companies providing them with software. Commuunity-based development programmes mean that you’ve got a lot more clout than you’ve ever had. Instead of passively installing the code you’ver been given you’ve now got a chance to influence its development - so you can avoid big bang deployments that dissapoint and frustrate your users.
So what should you be doing?
It’s worth setting aside some hardware for test and development - and with virtualisation software now bundled free with most OSes, you can probably make do with one multi-core box, saving on space and power. Then sign up for the programmes related to the software and tools you intend to use. Once you’ve got the code you want, start using it the way you would in production, using real data (and if you can, real users).
The most important part of the process is possibly the hardest - you need to take time to join beta communities and take part in the discussions. Report bugs by all means, but also engage with the company representatives and describe your usage scenarios and any deficiencies you see. You’ll be surprised by how many people agree with you, and while you may not get an instant response from the developers, or even see the changes you want in the version you’re testing, your points will have been noted, and will be used to help define the next release of the software.
Beta software is an important tool. It lets you prepare for what’s next, and helps you understand new capabilities and interactions with existing tools. It’ll also make you ready for support demands - another area where beta communities can help, as you’ve got a ready-made peer group where you can share problems and solutions,
It’s a brave new community out there - so why not dive in and make the most of it.
–Simon
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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