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Recently I participated in Metering America conference in San Diego, CA. After a week passed and I had my chance to think it out, I’d like to share with you what new trend is visible.

All the events that I took part in last 2 years had a clear message “Moving to Smarter Grids is essential to successful growth”. Specialists from all the countries were actively discussing the technologies, communications, software. AMI pilots have been rolling out. It was not clear then how we are going to use those cutting edge technologies to earn money but it looked like no one cared. Then finally they all started to talk about Smart Grid applications as a way to have money back.  But with growing amount of pilots and deployments (more or less successful) it become clear that a new problem arises – Utilities just cannot have enough financial impact on top of existing SmartGrid environments: not a single Demand Response program, for example, can provide ROI enough to payback investments into HAN infrastructure required. At least I haven’t read about financially successful rollouts (correct me if I’m wrong)

At Metering America this problem was extremely clear for  me – there is no clear vision of what to do next in terms of SmartGrid evolution. Both Utilities and Consumers are tired of SmartGrids as a concept, they both want it as a business instrument. Utilities clearly need a way to start returning their investments and there is no general trend for now of how to initiate this return.

So, Utilities were talking about AssetManagement instead of AMI rollouts, because they see real money lost in poor EAM processes, Utilities talk about easy-to-deploy solutions on top of their brand-new metering infrastructures. And vendors need to create immediate answer to this new (actually, well forgotten old one) issue. We’ll see how it is going to happen.

PS. This year Metering America was not so great in it scale, as I expected. If they won’t make something to correct this, next year I’m going to skip this event.

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Every company once used this popular video which shows us the speed of new information appearance.

Marketing tried to understand how to get revenue from this information, and the only thing that can help us is analytical software.

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Informatica Workshop

by Vladimir Koveshnikov     on August 30, 2010         1 Comment

August 17, 2010, the Kiev office of Luxoft hosted a seminar on the solutions of the company Informatica (pic 1). The seminar covered different methods of development, and new tools to facilitate implementation of various procedures. It also provided an overview of the features of the new version of the solution Informatica 9. Besides a practical demonstration, the participants have also analyzed topical business cases.

Currently, in addition to advanced solutions for processing and data integration, Informatica offers a solution for sending messages Ultra Messaging), which is used when working with stock market data on the world’s leading exchanges. The seminar also covered the subjects of such solutions as Cloud Computing, Data Services, Data Explorer, and Data Quality.

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Software lifestyles

by Kostia Khait     on August 6, 2010         Comment

There are some people, negating the experience of the others, people who like to understand everything for themselves. Usually this does not include companies. Companies which ignore the history of industry file for bankruptcy so fast that they don’t have the chance to learn enough to become successful. That’s why we monitor what giants do, study their experience, work to reproduce their success and avoid their failures.

These days we keep our eyes on Google and Apple. The conflict between these companies is seen by almost everybody who has ever typed “google.com” or kept an iPhone in their hands. They were analyzed as competitors, as former friends who became enemies, as companies having very different stories and very similar impacts to the market… But they’re also symbols. Symbols of two conflicting lifestyles: perfectionism versus uncontrollable innovations.

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EPRI (ElectricPowerResearchInstitute) recently published a press release, stating that modern Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) like iPad® (toghther with others based on Android®, the Palm Pre®, the Zune HD® and other platforms) is predicted to be a portable minicomputers, well-suited for SmartGrid perormance monitoring, assets tracking, magnetic and electric field measurements. According to their research there is a huge field to leverage PED’s mobility and comuting power as an engineering instrument.

I personally see another way of wide iPad adoption in Smart Grid programs. As it is a “cool device”, specially crafted to bring unbelievable “touch” experience in everyday tasks, it is created for consumers, not for engineers, serving them. Yes, there are IT geeks, that have fun running Telnet on iPads, but most of the photos are of children and cats, playing with a new toy. Sooner or later,  many households will have something of the kind. That means, that the interactive, easy to use and fun to play with energy management solution is already deploying through the market.

In DRFusion Demand Response automation framework we are using IPad exactly like that – as a sophysticated In-Home display, capable of showing the homeowners their consumption levels, manage their home appliacnes and fine-tunning demand response. Only like that – handled by the consumer, this devices shows all the power it can reveal, helping utilities on the way to the Smart Grid.

And Engineers will use laptops.

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New policies of energy usage

by Sergey Bakulin     on July 28, 2010         Comment

One of my friends a student of American university has received a letter, describing new policies of energy usage. The letter stated the new rules of lighting, some limitations and recommendations for students on using electricity. It was clear from the letter, that the university has signed an agreement with the utility about participating in one of the demand response programs, aimed to shave the peak. It was also clear, that the university is making all the possible to help the region to cope the load peak, slightly changing the lifestyle.

What is most interesting is the reaction of the students. Though it was clear for them that the utility and the university are trying to cut their costs, they were absolutely sure, that there were no economical benefits for them, and their own bill will not be reduced. An interesting is that none has shown the intention to participate, somehow changing their consumption patterns.

I see two conclusions here.

First, automatic demand response is the key to successful implementation of peak shaving. If there is a recommendation to turn off some of the unused or unnecessary devices , we make the consumer think about it, and make some actions, that he is not awarded for. If however, all the devices are managed remotely, the consumer have to make some actions to tune his consumption pattern,  turning on devices he needs. This, for the same reason, will lead to turning on only the minimum amount of loads, the real one he needs to.

And second, it is clear for me, being connected to the energy market, that the demand response is a must, it helps us to save tremendous amounts of money, not plugging in ineffective, costly energy sources. But many of the consumers, even young one, technology-oriented, are unaware of the reasons, processes and benefits if such programs and we still need to pay a lot of attention in educating them if we want the SmartGrid to become the part of our life.

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RFC1925 – The Twelve Networking Truths
Network Working Group R. Callon, Editor
Request for Comments: 1925 IOOF

Category: Informational 1 April 1996

The Twelve Networking Truths

Status of this Memo

This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

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How to choose a car?

by Kostia Khait     on September 23, 2009         Comment

In the past I was asked a lot of times about the same thing: how to choose a car? You like cars, you know cars, you work with cars… how to choose a car? And every time the person who was asking was unhappy with what I answer.

Each time when anybody wants to purchase a car (not only a car, but…), he does the same mistake: he wants to be objective. Car is expensive, we usually buy car for a long use, so we must do the optimal choice. And the long run becomes. What I want? Cost? Comfort? Silence? Design? Luggage capacity? Travel with family? And so on. Many factors, many weights, lots of test drives, hours of Internet search. And one of two results: either the ‘right’ car becomes ‘wrong’ after being bought, or person buys a car which is very different from what he considers ‘optimal’, just because he likes this particular car.

The problem is modern cars are very similar. Even cars of different classes, having different motors, equipment, materials, they all are having almost the same functions and capabilities. Yes, BMW enables you with driving 250km/h, but how frequently you drive 250km/h? Yes, S-class is big and comfortable, but Hyundai Sonata is also big and… also comfortable. If you forget about the brand name and skip very minor details.

Another problem, nobody is objective when chooses a toy. Car is a toy more than for 50%, therefore all careful arguments we use are not really inline with what we want. We selects one toy from a long long list of very similar toys… trying to use formal proofs of our choice. We deceive ourself.

As a result, being asked about the right way to choose a car, I always answer the same thing: take what you like. You can even buy a car in Internet, by photo, by description… no difference. You will either love or hate it and it is not depending on how accurate you are in your selection process. You should only use two simple rules: take a thing you have money for, and remember everything is relative, safety is absolute.

But. Who cares of safety before an accident?

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Financial crisis or crisis of ideas

by Kostia Khait     on September 22, 2009         Comment

I think this idea is not my one and not being new. However it looks rather interesting. For me it looks like current crisis is not a kind of ‘financial crisis launched by subprime mortgage problems’, but just a crisis of innovation ideas.

Let’s see. 1930s… Crisis, Great Depression. 40s… no comments. 50s – years of Big Automotive Dream, cars are the main engine of the progress and trading. 60s – nuclear and space technologies. 70s – no main innovative idea, crisis. Exited with Computer Epoch. 90s – mobile telephony. And with the tail of Cellphones Age, with smartphones and PDAs we entered the new millenium. And get stuck. No new great innovation, driving our mind, which we ready to fund, inflating world economic.

If I am right, there is only one way to completely exit this crisis: to identify another innovative idea which becomes the goal for mass market. The only a problem, typically ideas come themselve, it can not be brought from outside and enforced to the mind. So, waiting.

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Browser as an OS: new trend or marketing fake?

by Kostia Khait     on September 21, 2009         Comment

Do you monitor what Google does? Do you monitor what Google does as close as I do it? Couple years ago I considered that Google is only a company going the right technological way. At least having solid (although hidden…) roadmap I fully understand. Now it is not so clear for me. It looks like they lost their way after did an attempt to extend their business from Internet to in-PC world and… probably failed. At least they didn’t get a market share comparable with what they have in online space. After that they become doing strange things, and I was unable to re-construct their strategy by what I saw.

Now these guys announced Google Chrome OS. And shortly after that Microsoft announced Gazelle browser as an OS. I was wondered. At the first moment I decided it is just a marketing trick. Google has no own OS (Android is just Linux clone and it seems failing as well…), but they want or at least wanted to be everywhere in computer world like Microsoft is. OS is mandatory for that, they can not create their own OS… The conclusion for experienced marketing strategist is obvious: let’s rename something different to our own OS and capitalize our brand with this light fake.

However after Microsoft responded with Gazelle, I am not so sure in what I thought. Microsoft has its own OS, moreover their market share is huge. And they are not interested in support Google in their market tricks, they are hard competitors, even enemies. It seems what’s easier than just say: “Guys, you see they try substitute real OS with just a phantom”! However Microsoft did vice versa, they practically confirmed: browser becomes an OS.

And… It might be they are correct. Current browser (regardless on which one) is looking as not just UI to see web pages, but first of all it is a kind of virtual machine to run online applications. If we assume, that most of applications may become online, browser really becomes an OS. Moreover, you even do not need any other OS than just browser. And it has much more convenience that traditional operating systems: applications are cross-platform, flexible, always on and always safe (I did not say “secure”, right?).

However I feel some fake. And now I believe I know where is it. These guys still trying to push us to online with everything we do. It makes a lot of benefits for them: if we give them all our data and involve there resources to everything we do, they become the unrestricted owners on regular computer activities. They may just make money giving us their resources in rent, but they can also blackmail us, block our jobs, smoothly refocus us to what we didn’t plan initially and control what we do. It might have some visible convenience, but I don’t think IT-community will choose this way. People wants to remain independent. If I am right, they will fail another time with making browser an OS and people continue working offline with the most of their activities.

Otherwise they win. We lose.

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Is This Battle For Nothing?

by Alex Yakima     on August 21, 2009         Comment

Every time when building up a new software development team I could experience the very same thing again and again – new team mates argue a lot about every “methodological” issue. Unit testing, commenting code, building application, debugging, naming conventions, IDEs etc etc etc. Sometimes you think it’s gonna be endless exchange of arguments without actual value to the process.

Is it really?

Actually there is value, it turns out that all these battles is simply one of the “earliest” forms of communication in newly established team. It might look pretty defensive and for sure having no certain immediate outcome because “fighters” usually quit their battle without changing their opinions, each of them. But the value is in cumulative volume of these discussions, which then combined with collaboration over the same codebase, gives the team more connective power and accelerates the process of building the team.

Although it is good if it doesn’t consume too much time. Thus at the beginning of the team path, it is rather manager’s task to facilitate right things in right portions and vice versa – help the team hit their breaks when necessary. When the team establishes more or less, these arguments will not totally go away, they actually never will. But what will happen is that they will become less often and more meaningful because by that time the team acquires another important quality – listening.

Eventually, if people you just hired never argue about how they write their code, then there might be something wrong with the team.

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Voting’s Over: Firefox Wins

by Alex Yakima     on August 16, 2009         Comment

78 people participated in this poll. Let me remind you that the question was: Which browser is most innovative.

Here’s the statistics:


Thank you all for expressing your opinion and participating in this poll!

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Ultralight, Ultrafast – Lighttpd Web Server

by Alex Yakima     on August 7, 2009         Comment

There’s nothing you should worry about a web site that needs to server few thousand visitors daily. Actual simultaneous load on your web server will be literally few requests. Although not all web servers have this luxury but need to server hundreds of thousands visitors per day or more. In this scenario it isn’t that simple and simultaneous load, especially in peak periods may jump too high. To high to handle…

Today we will take a brief look at a web server that handles simultaneous load that other “conventional” servers like Apache, Tomcat or IIS simply can’t handle. It is called LIGHTTPD. It was actually designed specifically to solve the c10k problem. The problem itself is: build web server that would handle 10,000 simultaneous web connections. Big deal, right? You can read more about c10k problem here. In short, Lighttpd is using as less server hardware power as possible for each individual connection. It is really lightweight. You can handle your heavily loaded web application with it. Lighttpd deploys on Linux/Unix environments. Distributed under BSD license. From the programming technology perspective it has support of PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby. You can use it for a full fledge web app or just for your severest bottlenecks (like for example serving static media content).

Lighttpd is pretty widely used. Some time ago it was used by YouTube for streaming. Currently SourceForge uses it, Wikimedia too. This tiny little server is solving really big problems and is worth your attention when working with high-performance web apps.

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Which Browser Is Most Innovative?

by Alex Yakima     on July 30, 2009         Comment

This week there’s simple and at the same type deep question for a poll:

Which web browser is most innovative in your opinion?

This should be based on you development experience or user experience or whatever the gut feeling you have about certain family of web browser – express it! Next Friday we will summarize the results.

Besides simple clicks, if you have any thoughts or remarks on browsers – be sure, other people would definitely like to know about it. Add comments to this post. Anything related to browsers, add-ons, web experience…

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Some things last too long in this fast changing world of IT. HTML 4, for instance. It was specified in 1999 – ten years ago! Tell me 5 more things in IT that lasted so long without changing to newer version or disappearing forever…

So now we are talking about a newcomer eventually – HTML 5. Why? Was HTML 4 not enough any more to cope with growing developer needs or Internet user desires? Both. There’s even third separate reason – web crawler companies, and I mean really broad range of businesses here. And before we start considering what exactly differs HTML 5 from previous version, something has changed in general W3C approach to the specification lifecycle management:

The HTML 5 specification will not be considered finished before there are at least two complete implementations of the specification. (http://dev.w3.org/html5/html4-differences/)

…Sounds good, sounds like they want it to be successfully implemented, not successfully specified. Now let’s see what’s inside the wrapper.

New markup tags. Examples: <nav>, <aside>, <dialog>, <section>, <article>, <header>, <footer> et cetera. Most of it (if not all) could be substituted with <div> tag in THML 4 but actually that is the point – adding semantics to the layout tags. Now it will add way more clarity when you automatically parse a web page. If want to run a search query against only what people say (but not the entire Web), new generation search engines will give you this ability by searching in only <dialog> tags. Now the question is, how flexible the new markup is going to be? Will it allow to relatively easily customize these tags or they will gradually get obsolete and web developers will keep signing their old (even though annoying) song: div! div! div!

New media tags. <video>! Now it is gonna be that simple. <video src=”video.ogv” controls poster=”poster.jpg” width=”320″ height=”240″></video>. That’s it. And now web browser needs to take care of it. Evidently browsers will be on different stages implementing different formats and support for codecs. This is raising a fair amount of questions:

• Would HTML 5 put a pathetic end to Flash and Silverlight plug-ins?

• What about codecs? Does same tag actually mean any media unification?

• How would <video> and <audio> tags impact browser market shares near term?

It is now quite obvious that HTM 5 is a specification for modern warfare and the immediate battlefield is gonna be world of web browsers and related businesses. Example with codecs is very typical. Google representative at W3C Ian Hickson said:

“I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship. I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined, as has in the past been done with other features.”

Read more on HTML 5 in respect to Flash & Silverlight (here and here) and this article about codecs question. There’re first (yet incomplete) implementations of <video> tag in Opera and WebKit, but this is just “experimental builds”, not hardened yet.

Something interesting is definitely coming…

Other good things. I didn’t have an objective to outline every bit of new flavour for HTML 5 in comparisson to HTML 4. I wasn’t expecting this post being even as big as it is right now. There’s few more things though that impact web development pleasant way:

• 2D drawing API implemented via <canvas> tag. More info on canvas and list of references here.

• Simple way to implement Drag & Drop functionality. This one was always a challenge for web developer and not so often you can see it even in enterprise web applications where it could be maybe even more useful than for web sites. Now life will be easier I guess with draggable element attribute.

• API enabling offline Web applications. This is interesting, partially one of the objectives that Adobe AIR architects put on their agenda few years ago. Now we have a chance to have it just in the browser. There’s two approaches for this one – SQL based API and Offline HTTP Cache API. More on support for offline applications here.

That’s an interesting and pretty big change overall. More news coming soon definitely…

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