(+) Attitude Unlimited

Few weeks ago, I was interviewed by “The Smart Techie” magazine for their Engineering Diaries column. The interview is now available at http://www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine/fullstory.php/RMBY826331763.

On the eve of India’s Independence day, the patriotic feeling does grip every one. Flags are being sold on the streets and patriotic songs being heard on the radio. One of the famous song of the yesteryear is “mile sur mera tumhara”. One could see the national heroes (and movie stars) coming together in pride. It is one of my favorite songs!

Some of the students from MIT have come up with their own video version of the song and here is the link: Mile Sur Mera Tumhara @ MIT .

Well, that’s how the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 or SARBOX or SOX is being called. Interesting name, eh? Remember until few decades back the accountants had a major control on the financial data that was there in a company. They maintained the books, checked the signatures on the documents, checks, etc., there by leaving a nice audit trail. With computerization of big companies process’ came the adoption of ERP systems. This made the process of handling the financial data very easy & kind of more effective. On the downside it also had left no audit trail — very few kept audit logs of all the financial flows! Also, the control of money moved from the Finance division over to the IT division.

In the post Enron world, the industry — mostly the CFO are worried that they might land up in jail if they don’t show proper documentation of how they handle financial data. They simply can’t get away with saying, “Oh, all financial data are correct”. Nobody believes in these kind of words uttered by the CFOs anymore.

Section 404 of the Sarbranes-Oxley Act wants the CFOs to do more than that.

According to the SEC, companies must:
“Include in their annual reports a report of management on the company’s internal control over financial reporting.”

The control report must include:

• A statement of management’s responsibility for establishing and maintaining adequate internal control over financial reporting.
• Management’s assessment of the effectiveness of the company’s internal control over financial reporting.
• A statement identifying the framework used by management to evaluate the effectiveness of the company’s internal control over financial reporting.
• A statement that the registered public accounting firm that audited the company’s financial statements…has issued an attestation report on management’s assessment of the company’s internal control over financial reporting.

So, the CFOs want back the control and they aren’t taking NO for an answer. Some of them are going so far that they leave their IT division out of the loop! On the other hand, many companies have formed internal committees that consists of prominent people from various divisions in the organization to help them comply with this mandate.

For public companies with a market capitalization over $75 million were required to have their financial reporting frameworks operational for their first fiscal year-end report after Nov. 15, 2004, then for all quarterly reports thereafter.

For smaller companies, compliance is required for the first fiscal year-end financial report, then for all subsequent quarterly financial reports after July 15, 2005.

Many company’s profits are affected with their efforts to put forth a process to comply with this Act. One of the major investments is in the arena of Security software/processes.

Here is the summary of my presentation that I did earlier this evening at Kansas City Java User’s Group.

Aspect Oriented Programming & Aspect J 101

Agenda

• What is AOP?
• OOP and AOP
• Definitions, buzz words
• Aspect J
• Demo

Introduction

• Programming Methodologies: Past & Present
• Concerns: Core & secondary concerns
• Matching Concerns & Methodology: Flexiblility with Quality

Modularization

How to indentify non-modular systems?

• Code Tangling
• Code Scattering

AOP

• AOP allows us to dynamically modify our static model to include the code required to fulfill the secondary requirements without having to modify the original static model

Examples Of Aspects

• Development Aspects: Logging, Tracing, Debugging, Profiling, etc.,
• Production Aspects: Performance Monitoring, Notifications, Security, Error Handling

AOP Process

• Aspectual Decomposition: Identify core & cross cutting concerns
• Concern Implementation: Implement concerns independently
• Aspectual Recomposition: Create Aspects

Benefits of AOP

• Higher and cleaner level of modularization
• Easier System Evolution
• More code reuse

Buzz Words

• Crosscutting: Concerns spanning multiple modules. Static & Dynamic
• Join Point: A well-defined point in the program flow. Method, Constructor, Field Access, Exception Handler, Class Initialization, Object Initialization
• Pointcut: Collection of Join Points and values at those points
• Advice: Piece of code executed at a Join Point
• Introduction: Introducing change to static model
• Aspects: It consists of: Point Cuts, Join Point, Advice.
• Scattering: Similar code distributed throughout many files/programs
• Tangling: Two or more concerns implemented in the same body of code.
• Weaving: Compile time Weaving & Runtime Weaving

Pointcuts

• Definition: Collection of Join Points and values at those points
• Example: [accessspecifier] pointcut pointcutname([args]) : pointcut-definition

Advice

• Definition: Piece of code executed at a Join Point
• Types: before, after and around.

Java Implementation of AOP
There were two prominent schools of thoughts.

• AspectJ: a general-purpose aspect-oriented extension to Java
• AspectWerkz: Simple, high-performant, dynamic, lightweight and powerful AOP for Java

AspectJ is

• a seamless aspect-oriented extension to the Java programming language
• Java platform compatible
• easy to learn and use

AspectJ enables

• clean modularization of crosscutting concerns, such as error checking and handling, synchronization, context-sensitive behavior, performance optimizations, monitoring and logging, debugging support, and multi-object protocols

References:

• AspectJ at Eclipse: http://eclipse.org/aspectj/
• Aspectwertz: http://aspectwerkz.codehaus.org/

Over the weekend, Google released another product, albeit beta version, of Google Sitemaps. The webmaster of a site has to create an XML file describing the location of various files in the website. Google will use this file to create a meta-data like information for the site.

Here is a quote from Google:

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.

Recently I came across a nice software called Orb, and no it is not the ORB as in CORBA. This software allows you to stream pictures, videos, files to your mobile device, be it a phone, pda or whatever from your home PC. Think of it more like having the capability to do a Netmeeting to your home computer from your mobile device.

When I tried it out, I was able to get the pictures to work. Not all of them but quite few. I have a Sanyo PM 8200. It supports only MIDP 1.0, so I am not able to exploit the full benefits.

Going through Orb’s website, the feature list is impressive. The best part of this is that the service is totally FREE.

If you got a MIDP 2.0 enabled device, be sure to give this a try.

I will be presenting at Kansas City Java Users Group this month about Aspect Oriented Programming.

Outline:
Aspect-oriented Programming promises to increase the power of Object Oriented applications by modularizing functionalities across classes. Join us to know about AOP concepts — Joint Points, Pointcuts, Advice and a lot more. This session will also include a demonstration of how to AspectJ with an existing Java project.

Location:
Foss Training , 8700 Stateline Road, Leawood KS

6:30pm – 9:00pm

Hope to see you there!

-Shriram Shivakumar

There is a lot of buzz going around about AJAX. So, I’ve decided to write about it.

Introduction: AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. The concept is quite old but the implementation in Web domain fascinates the developer community and is creating a big buzz!

Description: A classic web application usually serves complete web pages whenever they are requested by a browser. Let’s say that there is a rich web-page with lots of static content and some input fields in a form. If some data in entered the input field and the form is submitted then the data from all the form fields will be sent  to the server for processing. After the server process the data, it sends the results back to the client. This usually causes a new page to be generated and sent to the client or the same page rendered with the modified values. In either case, an entire page is sent out (with their static content) to the client.

AJAX helps to avoid the necessity of re-rendering the entire page by using Javascript and XML functionalities behind the scenes. Going with the above mentioned example, when ever the form is submitted instead of posting the entire form, a Javascript function is invoked. Alternatively a separate Javascript function can also be invoked in different parts of the page and this wouldn’t need a form at all. In the Javascript, an instance of XMLHttpRequest is created. This is a component available with most of the browsers. The XMLHttpRequest, creates an regular HTTP Request, uses format the data in XML, and sends the input data to the server for processing. The server processes the data and sends a “list” of modified values. This list can be a character delimited stream of data. The process becomes simpler and easy to use if the data format is XML.

The XMLHttpRequest after receiving the response from the server, parses the data out and populates corresponding fields in the page. So, instead of reloading the entire page only the part of page that is affected is re-rendered. Simple as that!!!

Advantages: There are quite few advantages to using AJAX. Firstly, it gives a seamless experience for the web users. Since the entire page is not reloaded, the user is able to constantly see some content in the screen. Secondly, the amount of data that gets passed between the client and the server is greatly reduced. Reduction in data, results in saving of network bandwidth.

Shortcomings: Even though the concept has been around for a while, the adoption into the web domain has been pretty late. The buzz started when major players like Google started using it. AJAX can be implemented easily in new projects and it is not quite so easy to implement in legacy application (as it will require refactoring the code).

Conclusion: AJAX is definitely a technology that promises to add some nice functionality to a Web application. It could improvise an user’s web experience and could give a look and feel of a desktop application — from interaction & usability perspective.

I went to watch IRL racing today at Kansas Speed Way. WOW! I had a mighty good time, even got some sun burns.  The race included 167 runs on the mile-and-a-half strip. There were 10+ wrecks, couple of them were very nasty. This resulted aound 30+ Caution Rounds. A F-xx flew over during the national anthem. Superb!

Is there a de-tan lotion out there?

On the 36th Sol (March 1st, 2004)– Martian day – Mars exploration rover, Opportunity, found evidence that the red planet was soaked in water in the past. The pictures taken by the artificial intelligence driven vehicle, shows layered rocks of the ‘El Capitan’ area. This is near to its landing site, Meridiani Planum. Wonder what else is in store – how about them Martians?