Latest News from Jim Liddle

Virtualization 101

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:30:00 EDT

With Virtualization becoming intertwined with cloud computing it is worth taking a step back and looking once again what virtualisation is, and is not. Virtualization and Emulation are often compared, but there are a set of important differences. Emulation provides the functionality of a target processor completely in software. The main advantage being that you can emulate one type of processor on any other type of processor. Unfortunately it tends to be slow. Virtualization however involves taking a physical processor and partitioning it into multiple contexts. All of which take turns running directly on the processor itself. Because of this, Virtualization in faster than emulation.

The Cloud, a Disruptive Technology? Just Ask Nokia!

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:00:00 EDT

It’s often said that the Cloud will be a game changer and disruptive and that statement is put out there for the future but I believe we have already seen a huge example of this in the mobile telecommunications domain. We have seen in the last twelve months the beginning of a fundamental change in a users relationship with services because of the ability of real time delivery over mobile and fixed broadband. Apple single handedly changed the perception of, not only what dollar value a user would pay, but that they would actually pay at all. In the first 60 days Apple had 100 million downloads from their App Store. Just think about this…60 days, 100 million downloads ! At the end of September 2009 the app downloads had topped a staggering 2 billion - Phenomenal ! Even more phenomenal is they ripped up the script of the established model and implemented their own.

We have quickly seen other providers such as RIM, and Google quickly adopt the same model, with Nokia lagging behind and then news filtering out that they would launch an App Store at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona and when they did, well lets just say that it was not exactly a success. Microsoft, late to the party as always, are also jumped on the bandwagon with the launch of their “My Phone” service . Samsung have also now launched their own Mobile Applications MarketPlace. This shift has hugely changed the whole model of the Telco market. Nokia, the 100 pound gorilla, is losing market share hand over fist as it struggles to get to grips with this new model. Motorola has lost $3.6 billion as they too struggle to get to grips with this new consumer model.

Yesterday Mobile Crunch ran an article outlining Nokia’s first quarterly loss in over a decade. Nokia made a loss of $834 million and their shares dropped by 6.02 per cent. Apple however, in just over one year, has become the eighth largest mobile phone vendor in the world (source: strategy analytics). This whilst only competing in the smartphone market and, at the time of the report, not selling into markets such as China. Overall during the past March quarter mobile phone sales fell 13% worldwide, the fastest rate of annual decline since record began, but in contrast sales rose 10% in the US, largely because of Apple. The top 5 handset vendors saw their market share fall from 83.5% to 78%, a decline that is predicted to continue as Android comes of age and Apple continues it’s dominance with low-end entry points into the consumer market.

The whole notion of how to sell to an individual has changed, it has become from the edge and back rather than the reverse i.e. it has proved that users are wiling to not only pay for real-time services and just-in-time applications, but will actually choose their handset provider based on the perceived value and breadth of those services. How many times have you read of a competitive phone review, “In some ways it is a better handset than the iPhone but it just cannot match the App Store for breadth of Appllications”. Interestingly not everyone agrees. MobileCrunch also ran an article, “Not every Company needs an App Store“. I believe they miss the point. The rules have changed and the humble phone has changed to become a platform to deliver services aided by on-demand cloud applications and services. Apple’s advertising tells you “want to this, that or the other ? We have an app for that”. Well behind all those apps there are hundred if not thousands of individual developers supplying the “app for that”, and guess where the backend of many of these are hosted ? You’ve got it, on cloud services.

I agree that ideally we would be able to write against one platform for services delivered. Unfortunately the mobile phone OS market is very segmented with lots of players such as Symbian (Nokia), Microsoft, Google, iPhone etc. Having said that their are some initiatives to try and provide some abstraction to allow code / services written for one platform to run on others, such as PhoneGap, which supports iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Ultimately the Genie is out of the bottle and new mobile companies can see the carrot, that is new revenue and business models, which Apple has made reality. Ultimately the vendors will have no choice, with an Open Source OS model in Android squeezing them from one side, and Apple on the other, the landscape is being changed and the 100 pound gorilla is starting to look like an endangered species. Figures compiled by Gartner show that Apples Market share more than doubled in 2008, whilst Nokia’s Market share of the global smartphone Market fell from 47% in 2007 to 31% in 2008, and based on projections in the Gartner analysis, this would make Apple the leading global smartphone provider by 2011.

Syndicated from my original blog post on Cloudiquity

Come and Join the Cloud Crowd in London on 11th November

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:21:00 EDT

We’re hosting an event in the city of London on 11th November which is focused on practical implementations of public, private and hybrid clouds. We have speakers from British American Tobacco and Razorfish discussing implementations of private and hybrid clouds as well as GigaSpaces demoing enhanced VMWARE integration. If you want to learn about real implementations of Cloud Computing then you don’t want to miss this event.

What Happens When the Cloud Goes Wrong ?

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:45:00 EDT

It is great enthusing about the benefits of Cloud Computing, but what are the consequences when it goes wrong ? Of course, there are different levels of ’going wrong’. We have often publicised outages from the likes of Amazon and Google, but given the publicised SLA’s of each some down time is expected. However things can get much more serious than this. Microsoft have just suffered a data loss that affects all Sidekick customers, of the Danger Group Microsoft purchased in 2008. Servers went offline on October 2nd 2009 and remained offline until October 6th. The services are back up but the data is not with contacts, calendars, IM and SMS data not recoverable. The following went out to T Mobile users of the service:

“Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”

Earlier in the year it emerged that Carbonite had lost some of its customers data in 2007. According to TechCrunch Carbonite lost the data of 7,500+ customers who relied on the company to keep their files safe. This emerged because of a law suit that Carbonite filed on the providers of their infrastructure.

In this case it seems the data loss had no effect and any data loss was mitigated by the companies internal backup procedures. However, in the case of JournalSpace, this unfortunately was not the case. JournalSpace was a blogging platform that had been around for about 6 years and, due to a disgruntled employee, all customers blogs were wiped out from their internal servers. Ouch !

This is not the first time such human error has lead to such problems. In August 2008 Cloud Platform FlexiScale, had an outage for over 2 days due to an engineer accidentally deleting a main storage volume.

Also the damage done it not just to the customer but also to the vendor’s reputation, especially if they are a smaller vendor trying to make a name for themselves. One such catastrophe can literally be the difference between success and failure in the market.

So what can we learn from this ? Well the first thing is that, just like Murphy’s law, if something can go wrong at some point it invariably will. With that in mind you should always take all steps to protect your applications and data. This could mean backing them up locally or keeping backups on different storage clouds and having a DR ready plan in place. If you don’t then you cannot just blame the cloud….

Adapted from a post I made on Cloudiquity

Why the Cloud may be another step towards less freedom

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:56:53 EDT

I did a combined honours degree in Computer Science and History and have always retained an interest in history, particulalry British, American, and religious history which was what I studied. After all, to try and understand the present, one has to fully understand the past. I believe this applies across all disciplines. For example, if one looks at the current Middle East situation and the Iraq conflict, to truly try to get a handle on it (and I would not even dare to say “understand”) one has to go back to Gertrude Bell (Al-Khatun) for she drew the lines which are still the international borders for that region today, and she understood the history , religious and tribal complexities I suspect far more than any of our politicians or diplomats do today.

Over 300 years ago Thomas Paine fought for the ‘Rights of Man‘. One of the things that was done to “shut him up” was a piece of legislation issued by ‘royal proclamation’ in 1792 that enabled the government to prosecute authors who spoke out against it for seditious libel. In our generation today, the European Court of Justice ruled that EU institutions have the right to suppress criticism that damages the institution’s image and reputation, the very same law used to muzzle Paine. Also, remember this is a constitution which none of the British people have ever explicitly voted to be governed by. The way in which the treaty has been foisted on us and other countries is breathtaking. A ‘yes’ vote requires not confirmation and a ‘no’ vote simply means you ask the question again until you get a ‘yes’ !

That brings me to technology and the Cloud. As a society, and I speak as a UK citizen here, we have a government who is obsessed with monitoring and snooping on all aspects of our life, so that they can tell us what to do and what not to do. This premise infects all forms of their governement, to stopping friends minding each others children (I mean, come on, seriously…..), to fines or prison for putting your litter out early (sic), to fairly minority bodies having access to your telephone and SMS records (something that used to require a court order).

The reasons put forward by our government make the acts try to seem reasonable, “to prevent terrorism”, “to protect children on the internet”, “to make it easier to track criminals”, but the reality is that they are a slow degradation of our civil liberties, which, through history, have been fought for so hard, but which we seem to be giving away without a thought. Labour fundamentally believe in the principles of government being involved in all policies, be it schools, NHS, or something as simple as child-minding. We, the people do not know what is “Best for us”.

If the government can force the ISP to give it access to records, we can presume as more and more of the data and services that we have locally and in our offices move to the Cloud then they will ensure that they have access to this also. Do you really trust, or want the government to have access to this data, and do you trust they will be responsible with it or look after it ? For a country that has a record deficit you can be sure they will be looking at all options of bringing money in and will have a “needs must” mentality.

When you have your data locally, you have some governance over it. You own it, you can encrypt it, stronger if you choose than can be done on public commercial services, and it becomes much less difficult for government bodies to police. This does not mean you have any data that is illegal in any way. Privacy should not be viewed as a crime or tarred with the “must have something to hide” brush. You just may not fancy some secretary in some far flung council browsing your records on a whim.

I will leave the last word to Thomas Paine: ‘only when opinions are free, either in matters of government and religion, will truth finally prevail”.

Fixing the Dell Mini OSX Keyboard problem

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:25:46 EDT

The Dell Mini I use with OSX has the US keyboard layout, but a friend of mine layout and had a pr0blem that after his OSX instal, he could not get the backslash symbol to work using the key immediately to the right had side of the space bar. It comes up as ` instead.

I eventually fixed this problem, and you need to do the following:

1. Place the windows-uk.keylayout file in your ‘/Users/yourname/Library/Keyboard Layouts/’ folder (if you don’t have a ‘Keyboard Layouts’ folder there, just create one). You should make sure to unzip the file by double-clicking it in the Finder, rather than using the command line, as it appears this can corrupt this particular file.

2. Next, open System Preferences and click ‘International’. Click ‘Input Menu’ and select the checkbox next to ‘windows-uk.keylayout’. Make sure the checkbox at the bottom of the window, next to ‘Show input menu in menu bar’ is selected and then quit System Preferences.

3. Now you should be able to select the ‘windows-uk.keylayout’ keyboard layout from the little icon towards the right of the menu bar.

What Does Legislation Mean to Cloud Users?

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:15:00 EDT

In a 15-page complaint to the FTC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic) said recent reports suggested Google did not adequately protect the data it obtained. It cited vulnerabilities that revealed users’ data in its Gmail webmail service, Google Docs online word processing and spreadsheets and in Google Desktop, which can index users’ information held on their hard drives.

The SLA Driven Cloud

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:31:59 EDT

What does it take to make a Cloud Computing infrastructure enterprise ready ? Well, as always, this probably depends on the use case, but support for real-time scaling and SLA support must figure highly.

Software that purports to scale the applications on the cloud is not new, have a look at our prior blog post on this topic, and you will see some of the usual suspects such as RightScale, and Scalr. A new offering in this space is by Tibco with its Tibco Silver offering. Tibco Silver is trying to solve the problem of not whether cloud services can scale but whether the applications themselves can scale with them. This problem is addressed by Silver through ’self aware elasticity’. Hmmm….sounds good but what exactly does that mean ? It means the system can automatically provision new cloud capacity (be that storage or compute) dependent upon fluctuations in application usage.

According to Tibco, unlike services in a service-oriented architecture cloud services are not aware of the SLA’s to which they are required to adhere and Tibco Silver is aimed at providing this missing functionality. Tibco claim that “Self-aware elasticity” is something no other vendor has developed. I would dispute this. GigaSpaces XAP with it’s ability to deploy to the cloud as well as on-premise using the same technology has very fine grained application level SLA control that when breached allows the application to react accordingly, whether this be to increase the number of threads, provision new instances or to distribute workloads in a different way. GigaSpaces Service Grid technology enables support for this real-times elasticity. The GigaSpaces Service Grid originated from Sun’s RIO Project. (interestingly GigaSpaces are doing some work on enabling their cloud tools to deploy to and manage VMWARE images on private clouds as they do with AMI’s on Amazon’s public cloud)

Without a doubt the ability to react in real-time to application level SLA’s rather than just breaches of an SLA at an infrastructure level is something that will find a welcome home in both private and public clouds.

Syndicated from my post on Cloudiquity

Cloud Computing Best Practices

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:45:00 EDT

Some of the key things to think about when putting your application on the cloud are discussed below. Cloud computing is relatively new, and best practice is still being established. However we can learn from earlier technologies and concepts such as utility compute, SaaS, outsourcing and even internal enterprise centre management, as well as from experience with vendors such as Amazon and FlexiScale.

Licensing: If you are using the cloud for spikes or overspill make sure that the products you want to use in the cloud can be used in this way. Certain products restrict their licenses to be used from a cloud perspective. This is especially true of commercial Grid, HPC or DataGrid vendors.

Data transfer costs: When using a provider like Amazon with a detailed cost model, make sure that any data transfers are internal to the provider network rather than external. In the case of Amazon, internal traffic is free but you will be charged for any traffic over the external IP addresses.

Latency: If you have low latency requirements then the Cloud may not be the best environment to achieve this. If you are trying to run an ERP or some such system in the cloud then the latency may be good enough but if you are trying to run a binary or FX Exchange then of course the latency requirements are very different and more stringent. It is essential to make sure you understand the performance requirements of your application and have a clear understanding of what is deemed business critical.

One vendor who has focused on attacking low latency in the cloud is GigaSpaces and so if you require cloud low latency then these are one of the companies you should evaluate. Also for processing distributed data loads there is the map reduce pattern and Hadoop. These type of architectures eliminating the boundaries created by scale-out database based approaches.

State: Check whether your cloud infrastructure providers have persistence. When an application is brought down and then back up all local changes will be wiped and you start with a blank slate. This obviously has ramifications with instances that need to store user or application state. To combat this on their platform Amazon delivered EC2 persistent storage in which data can remain linked to a specific computing instance. You should ensure you understand the state limitations of any Cloud Computing platform that you work with.

Data Regulations: If you are storing data in the cloud you may be breaching data laws depending where your data is stored i.e. which country or continent. To combat this Amazon S3 now supports location constraints, which allow you to specify where in the world to store data for a bucket and provides a new API to retrieve the location constraint for an existing bucket. However if you are using another cloud provider you should check where your data is stored.

Dependencies: Be aware of dependencies of service providers. If service ‘y’ is dependant on ‘x’ then if you subscribe to service ‘y’ and service ‘x’ goes down you lose your service. Always check any dependencies when you are using a cloud service.

Standardisation: A major issue with current cloud computing platforms is that there is no standardisation of the APIs and platform technologies that underpin the services provided. Although this represents a lack of maturity you need to consider how locked in you are when considering a Cloud platform or migrating between cloud computing platforms will be very difficult if not impossible. This may not be an issue if your supplier is IBM and always likely to be IBM, but it will be an issue if you are just dipping your toe in the water and discover that other platforms are better suited to your needs.

Security: Lack of security or apparent lack of security is one of the perceived major drawbacks of working with Cloud platform and Cloud technology. When moving sensitive data about or storing it in public cloud it should be encrypted. And it is important to consider a secure ID mechanism for authentication and authorisation for services. As with normal enterprise infrastructures only open the ports needed and consider installing a host based intrusion detection systems such as OSSEC. The advantage of working with an enterprise Cloud provider, such as IBM or Sun is that many of these security optimisations are already taken care of. See our prior blog entry for securing n-tier and distributed applications on the cloud. Be sure to check out Amazon’s new VPC inititative as well as looking at VPN-Cubed by CohesiveFT if you have to tie together public Clouds with private applications, services or infrastructure. If you need to keep costs down and evaluate free then look at OpenVPN.

Compliance: Regulatory controls mean that certain applications may not be able to deployed in the Cloud. For example the US Patriot Act could have very serious consequences for non-US firms considering U.S. hosted cloud providers. Be aware that often cloud computing platforms are made up of components from a variety of vendors who may themselves provide computing in a variety of legal jurisdictions. Be very aware of the dependencies and ensure you factor this into any operational risk management assessment. See also my prior blog entry on this topic

Quality of service: You will need to ensure that the behaviour and effectiveness of the cloud application that you implement can be measured and tracked both to meet existing or new Service Level agreements. We have discussed previously some of the tools that come with this option built in (GigaSpaces) and other tools that provide functionality that enable you to use this with your Cloud Architecture (RightScale, Scalr etc). Achieving Quality of Service will encompass scaling, reliability, service fluidity, monitoring, management and system performance.

System hardening: Like all enterprise application infrastructures you need to harden the system so that it is secure, robust, and achieves the necessary functional requirements that you need. See my prior blog entry on system hardening for Amazon EC2.

Content adapted from my book “TheSavvyGuideTo HPC, Grid, DataGrid, Virtualisation and Cloud Computing” available on Amazon.

Enabling an external display for the Dell Mini with OSX

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:29:02 EDT

I tend to do quite a lot of presentations so was keen to get the Dell Mini with OSX ready for being able to plug into projectors and external monitors. Given the Dell’s unique display resolution this proved to be a bit of a problem, but the solution proved to be fairly simple. If you are using a Mini with OSX, the quick way to get around this is to obtain a simple application to mirror displays from Fabian Canas. You can get it here. This toggles between mirrored displays.

Once you have the dual display setup you will probably want to make the external monitor the primary. To do this, call up the Displays Pref Pane and drag the menu bar to the external monitor. The external monitor is now the primary and you can get on with the presentations !

Is Amazon EC2 As a Platform Secure?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EDT

Following on from my last post, Securing Applications on the Amazon Elastic Cloud, One of the biggest questions I often see asked is “Is Amazon EC2 as a platform secure”? This is like saying is my vanilla network secure? As you do to your internal network you can take some steps to make the environment as secure as you can, such as:

How to Secure Amazon Elastic Cloud

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:00:00 EDT

In this post I will walk you through the high level of securing a normal tiered application running on EC2. First I will cover the basics of what EC2 provides and then briefly discuss how this can be used in a real life scenario. For Network security EC2 provides a security groups, security groups are essentially inbound firewalls suited to the dynamic nature of EC2. Using security groups you can specify which incoming network traffic should be delivered to your instance.

Amazon S3 vs Amazon EBS on the Elastic Cloud

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) is a new type of storage designed specifically for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS allows you to create volumes that can be mounted as devices by EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes behave as if they were raw unformatted external hard drives and can be formatted using a file system such as ext3 (Linux) or NTFS (Windows) and mounted on an EC2 instance; files are accessed through the file system . They have user supplied device names and provide a block device interface.

Space Based Programming in .NET

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:45:00 EDT

At a recent Skills Matter event in the UK Goyko Adzic presented for over an hour on Space Based programming in .Net. The slides are embedded below, but as this blog is syndicated and sometimes the slides get stripped out, you can find them here.

Elastic Cloud Monitoring and Tuning Tips for Linux

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EDT

When deploying on EC2 even though Amazon provides the hardware infrastructure, you still need to tune your instance's operating system and monitor your application. You should review your hardware/software requirements and review your application design and deployment strategy

The Operating System

Change ulimit

‘ulimit’ Specifies the number of open files that are supported. If the value set for this parameter is too low, a file open error, memory allocation failure, or connection establishment error might be displayed. By default this is set to 1024 , normally you should increase this to at least 8096.

Issue the following command to set the value.

ulimit -n 8096

Use the ulimit -a command to display the current values for all limitations on system resources

Tune the Network

A good in detail reference for Linux IP tuning is here. Some of the important parameters to change for distributed applications are below:

TCP_FIN_TIMEOUT

The tcp_fin_timeout variable tells kernel how long to keep sockets in the state FIN-WAIT-2 if you were the one closing the socketThis value takes an integer value which is per default set to 60 seconds. To set the value to 30 issue the command

echo 30 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_fin_timeout

TCP_KEEPALIVE_INTERVAL

The tcp_keepalive_intvl variable tells the kernel how long to wait for a reply on each keepalive probe. This value is in other words extremely important when you try to calculate how long time will go before your connection will die a keepalive death. The variable takes an integer value and the default value is 75 seconds. To set the value to 15 issue the following command

echo 15 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_intvl

TCP_KEEPALIVE_PROBES

The tcp_keepalive_probes variable tells the kernel how many TCP keepalive probes to send out before it decides a specific connection is broken.
This variable takes an integer value, The default value is to send out 9 probes before telling the application that the connection is broken. To change the valueto 5 use the following command.

echo 5 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_probes

Monitoring

You can monitor the system resources using command line but to make life easier you can use monitoring systems. A couple of free opensource monitoring tools that you can use are:

Ganglia a free monitoring system
Hyperic they have both a commercial and free offering

Logging

You will be amazed how few projects care about logging until they have hit a problem. Have a consistent logging procedure in place to collect the logs from different machines to troubleshot in case of a problem

Linux Commands

Some linux command that we use regulary to you might find useful. More details can be found in my prior blog post here, and also on posts here and here

top: display Linux tasks
vmstat Report virtual memory statistics
free Display amount of free and used memory in the system
netstat Print network connections, routing tables, interface statistics, masquerade connections, and multicast memberships
ps Report a snapshot of the current processes
iostat Report Central Processing Unit (CPU) statistics and input/output statistics for devices and partitions
sar Collect, report, or save system activity information
tcpdump dump traffic on a network
strace trace system calls and signals

Using GigaSpaces XAP as a DataGrid or Distributed Data Cache

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Although version 7.0 of the Enterprise version of GigaSpaces XAP contains much more than just DataGrid or Caching, for many customer the need for reduced latency and increased performance as well as contention reduction is pressing and for these customers these needs are often a pre-cursor to their first foray into using GigaSpaces. I recently received a set of slide from the GigaSpaces Deputy CTO, Shay Hassidim, which I though were worth posting as they not only go through some of the use cases for Caching and DataGrid but they also show the topologies and patterns that can be used.

Confusion About Cloud Computing Abounds

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:00:00 EDT

Well people at the Cisco booth at a recent event seem to have the answer….or not

Was recession just what the IT industry needed ?

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 04:39:01 EDT

I love this image form Information Age, because it is so true. Recession was just what the IT needed to stimulate innovation and use of innovative products and technologies. See my two prior posts on this topic, “What to do during a recession ? Innovate !” and “Fear kills businesses, Dead!“.

Resolving the Dell Mini OSX 10.5.8 update

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:41:31 EDT

There are two main issues I had with the 10.5.8 update:

1. The Battery showed that it was on Power even when it was not connected

2. Sleep stopped working

I wasn’t to worried about the first issue, and did not want to waste time resolving it so I just installed slim battery (which shows the correct status) and removed the Apple Battery update from the menu bar (hold down the command key (ALT) and drag it from the menu bar).

Sleep was more of a problem, and the way I solved this was by using Kext helper and installing this Kext file (I didn’t seem to need the patch file that is also with this). Also I had legacy USB devices disabled in the BIOS.

After this sleep worked fine.

Sarkozy gets it right but is all on his own

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:44:11 EDT

Sarkozy, the French leader, is all on his own it seems in wanting to restrict bankers bonuses, creating a campaign to ‘moralise capitalism’. He has forced French banks to agree to a code of conduct by threatening to pull French government business if they don’t agree. French banks have had to agree to spread bonus payments over three years, with part paid out in shares. There are also clawback clauses if business that is generated turns sour and transparency on how bonuses are paid.

All sensible stuff ! Where does the British government stand on this ? Remarkably silent….why am I not surprised….

Dell Mini 9 OSX Leopard enabled

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:53:05 EDT

My wife bought me a Dell Mini 9 8.9″ netbook for my birthday so of course the first thing I looked at last weekend was how to take off Windoze and put on Mac OSX Leopard. Firstly to check the compatibility chat of Netbook functionality with the Mac OSX Hackintosh Project. Signs were good !

Without going into explicit details this was pretty straightforward to do, I hit a couple of glitches but using the forums and instructions at MyDellMini I managed to overcome them.

Now I have a £250 Max OSX netbook that is surprisingly fast and which everything works i.e. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Mic, Hibernation etc. The Mini I have has 2 GB RAM and a 16GB SSD. After the stripped down leopard install I had about 1 GB of Space left but after stripping out the language support on the OS using MonoLingual and stripping down apps that had language and resource fork support I did not need using XSlimmer ( you can also use the freeware Trimmit) I ended up with around 5.5GB. After installing essential apps like Skype, OpenOffice, MenuMeters, Firefox, Adium, Cyberduck etc. I had about 2.5 GB left which is fine. If I want a beefier machines I’ll take my Macbook Pro or Macbook Air with me, but for just throwing in a bag with limited space or for travelling it is perfect.

Creating a secure USB Drive for a Mac

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:31:45 EDT

Everyone looses USB Drives….all the time……so it makes sense to ensure that any data you have on the drive cannot be accessed. The cheaper USB Drives do not have encryption built in but here is a nice way you can achieve this on a Mac:

1. Fire Up Disk Utility and create a new Blank disk image. Make sure it is of a size that will fit on your flash drive.

2. Ensure you choose encyryption when you create the image. You can choose 128 or 256 bit encyrption.

3. Drag the resultant DMG file to your flash drive.

Opening this disk image will now ask you for a password before it can be mounted. You can drag files to and from it as needed and when you unmount the volume everything is locked up tight again !

GigaSpaces XAP 7, The “Real Option” for the Cloud and On-Premise

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:16:12 EDT

I’m currently reading an interesting book called ‘Real Options: Managing Strategic Investment in an Uncertain World’. A theme of the book is that having flexibility and options create value and that therefore such factors need to be taken into account as much as any ROI, TCO or ROA analysis and that actually using only such models could actually seriously underestimate what option values exist.

For most IT managers, Real Options will not be familiar. It is used extensively in the finance vertical where an “option” contract on a given stock enables (but does not mandate) the contract holder to buy a fixed number of shares of the stock at a specified date for a specified price. Real Options substitutes nonfinancial, or real, assets for financial ones.

The end goal is to create a situation in which a company is able to benefit from the upside potential of a project, software etc, whilst controlling downside risks. Much of the premise of Real Options for IT is based around an incremental investment policy. An example would be the deployment of a Customer Relationship (CRM) management system. If you spend a small amount on a comprehensive study of that CRM system and the results are not encouraging then any losses are minimal as compared with proceeding with an Enterprise wide CRM project. Alternatively if the results look encouraging, the investment in that study has a value gain . This value can be established using a financial markets proxy and valuation tools that originate from financial markets according to Amran & Kulatilaka, the authors of the book.

Lets look at a real world project in terms of GigaSpaces and the Cloud. Recently we had a UK Telco outsource one of their services to the Cloud. I have blogged about this previously. The aim of the Cloud deployment was to market an entirely new service which had unknown business value. The company already use GigaSpaces in their internal data centers so could have easily built this in-house, but the estimated cost to do this in terms of hardware, environmental setup and test was in the hundreds of thousand of dollars. There was also the issues of other projects competing for the same resource so that the delivery data would have been pushed out. The Cloud option enabled the company to have the flexibility to make a choice and GigaSpaces XAP was an enabler in regards to the agility to make it happen.

So far so good, we expect the flexibility and agility from anything Cloud. What else ? Well, the actual cost of getting the application on the Cloud was a few hundred dollars rather than a few thousand dollars. This was a huge saving and demonstrates the economic impact that using the Cloud can have. As it turned out, the actual service did not have the huge amount of traffic expected and in fact it was found that it was going to take a more focused marketing campaign with a wider visibility to get the service being used as anticipated. The Cloud instances that were being used were scaled back as the expected load and use did not materialize.

This is a great demonstration of how the use of options and flexibility created value. As GigaSpaces XAP 7 is an enabler for Organisations to deploy and manage the same application to the Cloud or internally which gives project planning / deployment flexibility as well as investment options that traditional static middleware does not have. This type of value will not appear on any NPV but it is tangible and real nevertheless. The differential between a few hundred dollars and a few hundred thousand dollars demonstrates this.

GigaSpaces ability to scale on demand can also be factored into the Real Option methodology. The ability to use GigaSpaces unique scale on demand features enables systems to scale to deal with growth in real time. The difference in investment between using GigaSpaces as a single node and GigaSpaces scaling out to support growth is essentially the real option price. Factor in revenue that is enabled by this dynamic scalability and one can see the tangible asset that is underpinned by GigaSpaces XAP.

The dynamic nature of Cloud infrastructure and the dual deployment features of GigaSpaces XAP make a killer combination with a TCO & ROI value that can easily be established but that have a value far above and beyond that.

Gaming Scalability Event Slides

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:13:33 EDT

The Slides I presented at the Gaming Scalability event on the 9th July can be viewed below:

GigaSpaces Advantage For Gaming Platforms

View more presentations from jimliddle.

GigaSpaces UK at First Gaming Scalability Meeting on 9th July

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:27:35 EDT

I’ll be presenting at the first Gaming Scalability meet up in the UK on 9th July at 11.40 on the GigaSpaces ‘Space Based Gaming Advantage’. The event is now fully subscribed but videos from the event will be posted online by SkillsMatter and I’ll post the presentation after the event on SlideShare.

Matthew Fowler will also be presenting the CloudSave product that makes it easy for Java developers to write large applications running at grid speeds that are as reliable as today’s databases. The product leverages GigaSpaces as its base infrastructure.

After the event I’ll be at CloudCamp for anyone who wants to meet up, just email me (James AT GigaSpaces DOT com) if you wish to have a chat.

Let’s get rid of this Labour government ASAP

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:10:41 EDT

I found out today that if you are looking to get a conservatory you should do so this year as next year the government are putting legislation in place that makes them more expensive as they have to be insulated the same as the rest of your house.

What the bloody hell has it to do with the government how I insulate a conservatory. Seriously, we are living more in a stalinistic state in everything but name every time a day, month, year goes by.

Let’s kick this Labour government our as soon as it is possible - they are a fraudulent, unscrupulous, pompous, stalinistic bunch of crooks.

Remember, absolutely no-one could be any worse…

Enterprise applications using and integrating with Gigaspaces XAP

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:56:55 EDT

When I am dealing with customers and Partners it never ceases to amaze me how innovative many of the solutions and products, that have GigaSpaces embedded, are. I thought it would be well worth a quick review of some of these:

ActivePivot: ActivePivot™ by Quartet is a real time object oriented OLAP engine that provides information dashboards from front office to back office including trade blotters, value-at-risk drill down analysis, inventory positions, cash flow and security inventories, credit risk, online risk and hedging analytics in real time. You can view a case study of a combined ActivePivot / GigaSpaces at a major French bank here.

An example of using active Pivot with GigaSpaces could be that market data feeds are written into a space using any of GigaSpaces’ APIs . ActivePivot is able to connect to the core in-memory data and register for events. When a tick is updated in-memory, GigaSpaces sends a notification to ActivePivot which in turn re-aggregates the relevant cube branch. This means that the aggregated cube is always updated and reflects the latest market state. In addition ActivePivot queries GigaSpaces for the raw data when Excel sends a drill-down request, which enables ActivePivot to deliver a very quick response time.

GigaSystemsBuilder: This uses the model driven development (MDD) capabilities of JeeWiz to generate Grid and Cloud-based systems under Gigasystems technologies. Comprehensive PoC’s take less than a week and using JeeWiz to generate 90% plus of the final system is an efficient and low cost to utilise these emerging technologies. You can see a screencast of this in action here.

Excel Federated Grid: This builds on our core Excel integration to enable organisations who use Excel in a trading scenario to scale their use of Excel to prevent bottenecks, to parallelize processing, or to automate algorithmic trading that uses Excel. You can read more about this in a prior blog post. To learn more about the GigSpaces/Microsoft Excel Integration and its applicability to finance have a read of this Microsoft written article.

Contact Centre: Nortel’s Contact Center application portfolio provides a single interface for blending inbound/outbound voice, e-mail, web chat, and IM customer interactions, businesses can collaborate with their customers through the device and method of choice extending a superior customer experience.

Orbyte Solutions: Orbyte Solutions provide a Trading Application portfolio that works in-house or on public clouds such as Amazon EC2 and is powered by GigaSpaces Cloud Tools. The applications include Foreign Exchange Trading, Spread-betting and encompass charting and widget features using their own innovative rich clients. You can see my prior blog posts on this here and here.

Hyper Rig: Hyper Rig is a technical framework for Risk Management that can be added to your existing set up, complement it and enhance it. As such, the architecture has been designed to include features such as orchestration, exceptions management and audit, messaging, integrated security, automatic failover, monitoring, load-balancing, virtual computation-grid and data quality management.

SmartStream: GigaSpaces XAP is embedded within SmartStream’s next generation Transaction Lifecycle Management technology suite. Using GigaSpaces’s proven technology, SmartStream can deliver on demand and predictable scalability to support clients’ high-performance processing requirements. You can read more about the integration from SmartStream’s site.

Online Gaming: I recently blogged about an online gaming application that is available on Facebook but whose engine is a commercial engine. It is the first totally enabled online Cloud gaming network and is powered by GigaSpaces Cloud Tools.

These are just a selection of application that use /embed GigaSpaces that I have touched. There are many thousands more that are used in all different parts of the world, either on premise or on the cloud.

Mac Tools for SalesForce.com

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:00:50 EDT

If you are a Mac user and want to take advantage of some of the API tools for Salesforce.com then have a look at:

Maildrop - Great utility that allows you to post emails to Accounts or Support cases from Entourage or the default Mac Mail App. You can download it here.

SFDCFuse - This Mounts your SalesForce Doc Volume as a repository. You can download it here. (you also need MacFuse pre-installed)

Quicksilver Plugin - If you use QuickSilver then enough said. You can download it here.

SF3 - This enables a two way sync between your Address Book and Calendar with Salesforce. You can download it here.

Trapdoor - Store your SalesForce logins securely in keychains. Download it here.

Firefox Search Plugin: This plug-in adds the ability to run a salesforce.com advanced search, or a supportforce solution search in your salesforce.com account, right from your Firefox search bar.

AppBar: Written by 3 salesforce employees the app bar add shortcuts to Firefox as a plug-in to interact with salesforce.

Mass Update Anything - Mass Update Anything, as the name implies, updates fields in bulk, based on a SOQL query. In addition, you can choose to delete fields in bulk as well. It’s a great little tool that does one job very well, and will save you from CSV hell.

Algorithmic Excel Trading with GigaSpaces

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:14:05 EDT

One of the really strong points of the GigaSpaces technology is the strength of the client interoperability. As well as being fully interoperable with .Net and C++ (and if you are interested in these technologies I would suggest you check out the C++ article here and the .Net articles here and here) GigaSpaces has integration with Microsoft Excel.

This enables organisations who use Excel in a trading scenario to scale their use of Excel to prevent bottenecks, to parallelize processing, or to automate algorithmic trading that uses Excel.

When using Excel for Algorithmic trading or for headless calculations a data feed can be input into the in-memory GigaSpaces data space which triggers phases of calculations in distinct unattended Excel spreadsheets. This in turn generates values to a data cache that can be picked up as events and displayed within an attended Excel sheet.

Visually we can view this as below:

The diagram shows:

· An External Data Feed Handler

· A number of Excel Compute Support Processing Units (PUs) which are managed by the GigaSpaces Service Grid. Each PU contains worker components of two types:

1. workers that select and execute Excel compute tasks.

2. workers that select and execute manager tasks.

· An attended Excel sheet that has an add-in that enables it to listen to the GigaSpaces data cache and display value changes are a result of data changes in the cache. Both User-Defined Function (UDF) and Real-Time Data (RTD) add-in approaches can be implemented.

The way this work is as follows:

1. The External Data Feed Handler reads data from a file and uses it to create an initial data value and a task to manage the overall computation stages. The data value is written to the cache and the manager task is injected using a imple task submission API. A Compute Fabric worker executes the injected manager task.

2. Execution of the manager task picks up the initial data value and spawns a set of Excel compute tasks. These compute tasks execute a number of parallel calculations using the first sheet. The manager task waits all spawned tasks to complete.

3. The manager task collates the results from spawned tasks and uses them as input to a calculation on a second sheet. The manager task spawns another Excel compute task to perform this second calculation.

4. The manager task converts the result of the second calculation into a result data value that it writes back to the GigaSpaces data cache.

5. UDF/RTD add-in to the interactive Excel sheet sees the data change event in the GigaSpaces data cache, obtains the data values and updates the sheet.

Key to accomplish this is an Excel Compute Support Processing Unit, which is managed by the GigaSpaces Service Grid. The diagram below illustrates the components of this processing unit.

Inside each processing unit (PU) instance a FederatedWorkerFactory communicates with other FederatedWorkerFactory instances in the grid to form a federated fabric that hosts a number of open Excel workbook instances., The fabric can be instructed to host a number of instances of the same Excel workbook to provide redundancy and failover. The fabric ensures that the Excel workbook instances are distributed as evenly as possible between the PUs available to host them.

When the FederatedWorkerFactory receives an ownership request for a given workbook it creates a worker to pick up and execute ExcelComputeTasks that are tagged with the name of the workbook., ExcelComputeTasks delegate calculation to a resident Excel Compute Manager, If additional PUs are added or removed from the fabric then the fabric automatically and dynamically rebalances the Excel workbook instances to maintain an optimum balance., Additional workbooks can be added (or removed) from the fabric dynamically whilst the system is running and the number of instances of already hosted workbooks can be raised or lowered.

The Excel Compute Manager within the PU manages a configurable pool of “headless” Excel processes. Each Excel process is lightweight and can manage one or more open workbooks.

The fabric ensures that the optimum number of Excel processes and open workbooks are running on each GigaSpaces Service Grid node. There is a significant relative performance overhead to loading workbooks in Excel. Workbooks are therefore opened lazily on first request, but then remain open, ensuring that repeat calculation requests to the same workbook are optimized for performance.

If a given PU manages more than one open workbook, it will perform calculations for each workbook concurrently, whilst ensuring that each Excel instance in the pool is managed in a thread-safe manager. This enables good scalability of concurrent Excel compute both within a single node, and across the nodes available in the grid. The configurable Excel pool size determines the upper bound of the number of concurrent workbook calculations that can be performed by a single PU.

If an Excel instance is damaged, dies, or is killed, the fabric ensures that it is removed from the pool of available Excel instances and, if necessary a new instance is spawned. Any in-flight calculation request is automatically retried once the workbook has been re-opened with another Excel instance.

The Excel PU, tasks and fabric specific to this solution build upon the GigaSpaces Excel integration and were developed by a partner to give a solution oriented approach to working with Excel in a Grid. If you would like to know more about this then please feel free to contact me.

GigaSpaces EC2 Cloud Casino application released on Facebook

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:35:41 EDT

The latest cloud enabled application using the GigaSpaces EC2 cloud tools went live on Facebook yesterday. This is a Facebook application built by Advanced Gaming Labs. The application is the first completely multi-player global Casino Application that runs exclusively on the Cloud and was built on the cloud from the ground up using GigaSpaces.

If you would like to play the application you can do this on Facebook here.

There are lots of firsts for this application and you’ll be hearing lots more about in the forthcoming weeks as other news about the application and other launches using the engine become available.

Trading in the Clouds Amazon Start up Event Video

Thu, 07 May 2009 12:16:10 EDT

In my prior post I posted the slides from the London Amazon Web Services event. The video of the Orbyte presentation about their GigaSpaces built Trading solution is now available and can be viewed below or from this link.

Cédric Roll - ORbyte Solutions - AWS Start-up Event - 28-04-2009 from Skills Matter on Vimeo.

Online gaming high scalability Event in London

Thu, 07 May 2009 04:04:38 EDT

I will be speaking at the Online gaming high scalability special interest group in London on 9th July. Registration for this event is now open, but be quick because there is already only 44 tickets left.

My session is entitled “The space base gaming advantage” and will explore, technically, how GigaSpaces Space Based Architecture brings technical benefits that give a specific advantage to gaming application. We will delve into what these advantages are, what they are an alternative to, and how they are architected.

There are lots of interesting sessions and it should be a really interesting day to understand topics such as cloud security, transaction processing in the cloud, scaling in the cloud, and some real world case studies of gambling and betting applications that have been deployed in the cloud.

Develop an iPhone App and Beat the Credit Crunch!

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:00:00 EDT

From the press some of the initial iPhone apps have been getting, it seems that there are going to be quite a few Apple iPhone App Store millionaires this year! So why not write your own and join the crowd? Don't know Objective C or XCode - then get learning! A nice resource is theiphonedevplace, which has many tutorial links now that Apple rescinded their NDA. So what you waiting for? Get going - beat the credit crunch!

Is the IPhone 3G All It Is Cranked Up to Be?

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

So I finally got my hands on an iPhone 3G but am currently still favoring my iPhone 2.5G – why? The signal seems better; 3G signal is patchy at best and forget receiving calls when you have 3G on – horrible…; the battery life is **much** better on the original iPhone than on the 3G iPhone; all my accessories such as Power Monkey fit the original iPhone but not the new 3G iPhone as Apple in their wisdom changed the connector.

How to Record Calls on Your Windows Smartphone

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:45:00 EDT

One of the last things that I keep my Palm 650 for is it's ability to record calls, which is very handy when you are having a conference call and need to review your call later or take notes -of course always ensure you ask the people you are speaking to whether they are OK with this! To date I've never found a product that could do this easily and efficiently on Windows Mobile.

Thinlet and J2ME

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 11:30:00 EDT

A quick refresh on Thinlet. Thinlet is a XUL styled UI development tool in which the UI can be designed using XML and the business logic is kept cleanly separate. From a Java class perspective, the version of Thinlet I used was MIDP 1.0 compliant and was pretty easy to work with, with most of the effort going into the business logic translation and some effort around the XML logic hooks.

EuroTariff Warning for Wireless Web Users

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:45:00 EDT

Last month an EU ruling limited how much providers can charge for 'roaming calls' i.e. those call made whilst abroad. At the moment users are charged between 50p to £1.50 to make calls and are also charged to receive them. The new legislation cuts the maximum charge for European calls to 33p a minute and to just 16p per minute to receive calls.

Mobile Web Finally Catches Up in Europe

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 16:30:00 EDT

Flat-data rate tariffs introduced by Orange, Vodafone and 3 networks in the UK are the first sign that the Mobile Web is set to become as ubiquitous as normal web use with the these flat tariffs bringing affordable mobile web access to nearly everyone who has a mobile web enabled phone. These tariffs critically remove the single impasse that has prevented even wider spread adoption - 'fair us' browsing within a single payment. Astonomical costs have previously put off users from going online from their mobile device - no wonder given the, often, several pounds per megabyte charge that most providers locked you into if you wanted to surf or access email from your phone.

Changing Nature of Web 2.0

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:30:00 EDT

In the past if you cannot access the Internet then you cannot use your Web 2.0 applications. This model is rapidly changing. New pogramming models are emerging that alllow Web 2.0 to be offline /online dependent on what is needed. The first of these is Adobe Apollo, which is a cross-platfrom technology that combined Flash, HTML, PDF and JavaScript into one universal application programming model / paradigm. What is unique is that id doesn't care if if it runs on its own or embedded in a webpage, the API calls remains the same.

Yahoo! Hack Day Here in London

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:45:00 EDT

This coming Saturday (16th June) will be Yahoo! Hack Day here in London, and a few members of my buddy's company (the Nestoria team) will be on hand. But rather than just attending, they though it might be a bit of fun if they tried to subvert the event and turn it into their own hack contest. As such, they are delighted to present 'The quasi-official Nestoria Hack contest' to be held at Yahoo! Hack Day.

The PC Web Still Rules...But the Mobile Web Is Catching Up

Tue, 15 May 2007 17:15:00 EDT

Search Brands Still Offer Stronger Reach on PCs According to inaugural results from the MobileWeb Metrix service, The Weather Channel, Yahoo! Weather and AccuWeather achieved mobile reach that outpaced their PC reach. All three sites had mobile-to-PC reach index scores above 120, pointing to significantly stronger reach among mobile Web users than among PC Web users (see Table 1). With an index of 190, ESPN also has stronger reach among mobile Web users.

How to Stream Wireless Audio From Your Palm / Treo?

Sun, 13 May 2007 20:15:00 EDT

Once you have done this, run the Audio Gateway software from the Application Menu - when prompted to setup the wireless headphones, hit continue and it should list your headphones that you paired over bluetooth. The Output Bitrate setting improves the quality of sound you receive on your wireless headphones and you should experiment until you are happy.

Move Over Skype, Hello Jajah!

Sun, 13 May 2007 20:00:00 EDT

Now everyone knows about VOIP, and everyone knows about Skype. Skype is pretty useful if you are doing Skype to Skype calls or even Skype to phone calls from your desk. Currently however mobile Skype just does not cut it... It doesn't work over GPRS, barely over 3G (if you can get a consistent decent signal) and Wi Fi hot spots are not always easy to find and still tend to be not free and quite expensive.

Google Maps on the Good Old Palm OS

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:15:00 EST

You know, despite all the modern Smartphones, and my new Treo 750v, I still always have a hankering to go back to my Palm Treo 650. The ease of use is still just fantastic compared to just about anything I've ever used...the apps are great, really functional. Yes, it has its problems, its not WiFi, the camera is..well its dodgy as we know

Taking The Mobile Web on Vacation

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 16:00:00 EST

Really excellent article here by Gary Price about services that can be of use when you are travelling with a mobile - I've reproduced a tiny portion of this below, but this is a class article and I would urge you to check it out. Many airlines also offer tracking information on the mobile web. Some even offer notification services to alert you, family, friends, whomever, to delays, cancellations and other information.

Now That the Mobile Internet Is Widely Available, Do Users Want It?

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 10:45:00 EST

The survey, commissioned by web service provider Hostway, found that if these problems were remedied then 90% users would be far more inclined to use the Internet on the move. Other interesting information were that 71% said they would access email on the move, if it was fast and cheap. Also, almost half said they would use the mobile to catch up on news and sports.

AJAX Property Site Update

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:00:00 EST

You may remember that I covered the start-up Nestoria earlier in this blog, even thought it is a little off-topic. I've been in touch with my friend Ed Freyfogle who co-founded this today and he has updated me as to the status.

Tried Google's SMS?

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 15:45:00 EDT

Your probably aware of all of the million of services that Google now offer, but have you tried, or are you even are of Google SMS? To use this free service create a new text message from your mobile phone and key in 46645 in the 'To' field with your question in the message field - such as 'Richmond Cinema' and you will recieve list of Cinema's in Richmond, or 'The Break Up Richmond' and you'll get as a reply all the cinemas playing 'The Break-Up' in Richmond - the world is your Oyster i.e. 'Pizza San Francisco', 'Wi Fi Oakland'. You can also convert you currency and even get directions to a destination from your current cell position - all clever stuff.

Beta AJAX UK Property Site

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:00:00 EDT

A lttle of topic, but a friend of mine has put out this AJAX-enabled property site for the UK. It's a really nice take on a property search site and really shows the power of aggregation using AJAX - very nice. Check it out yourself and view the blog for further information.

Will Palm Release Treo 700p In UK?

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 09:15:00 EDT

For a while now I've been alternating between two phones - the excellent K750i, and the Treo 650. From a Smartphone viewpoint the TREO 650 is the 'almost device' - its 'almost' the best smartphone I have ever used. The palm software is great, and innovative. The flat form factor of the phone makes it easy to use and carry, and it goes inside a business breast pocket easy enough.