Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adedeji / a bunch of bananas ate a monkey /

Bummer by Midsummer?

Microsoft acquisition of Nokia looks like a very bad deal. Nothing good has come from Ballmer and Stephen Elop. This may not be different. I predict that Nokia would be the loser for this.

How does it feel, as the CEO of a company, when another company associates with you and everyone screams, losers? That shouldn’t be too far from the disgust Steve Ballmer must have felt skipping back to Seattle this evening.

Today, Nokia finally let the cat of the bag, announcing the hook-up with Redmond but the market reacted to the news negatively. It stripped 10% off the share price before you could wink twice. Apart from someone in my business class, everyone feels Microsoft has just supplied the nails to pin Nokia firmly into its coffin.

No doubt, Nokia lost its mojo, and this can’t be better explained than the burning platform parable made by Stephen Elop.

I wouldn’t mind to add my outcry to this but then maybe a little bit of restrain makes sense at this time. Both guys ain’t idiots but I’m not saying they are smart either. Time will tell: In the mobile world, 1 year is like 1,000 years. By midsummer, we should know if Ballmer has made Nokia a bummer.

Database in the cloud

In January this year (2010), I blogged about how nice it would be to have database in the cloud. That blog entry was inspired by what Marc Benioff was doing at Salesforce.com. Apparently, he was loads of miles ahead of my thought. Salesforce.com has released Database.com.

Database.com is a database running solely off the cloud. There is no hardware to manage, or software to install and configuration. Just create and run. From available information, basic access is free  you get 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions a month and maybe unlimited number of tables and other objects (they didn’t talk about that). With your web applications (PHP and the rest of the gang) you can connect to a database with REST and SOAP while authenticating with oAuth2 and SAML.

However, I have some unanswered questions.

  1. Apart from REST, JPA and SOAP, what happens to JDBC, ODBC, .NET and other connectivity layers? I might want to change my database while I keep my Jurassic Park applications running just the way it is. Anyway, I guess some script kiddie will come along and write another layer to slap on
  2. Some guys love to write crazy convoluted (I mean pretty bad queries that run forever) queries; is that allowed? You know one of the issues we faced with early shared internet hosting was your “web” neighbor doing crazy stuff which drags everyone down. Those were the dark ages
  3. What flavor of SQL do we write? Oracle has its dialect, same for MySQL, MS SQL (even between versions) and loads of other nutcase GPL forks.
  4. Will I get to connect my Toad (Quest is good!)?

If this model becomes successful, it could be the end of the road for the likes of Oracle, DB2 and Microsoft (Don’t even mention Sybase, they got to the end of the road years ago). Why? Because today, the portion of the total cost of ownership that goes to tuning and maintenance of database often dwarfs the cost getting the software initially. And if Google should throw its BigTable database into the fray with maybe free 1,000,000 rows and other freebies then you can size up the impact of the impending Armageddon. And mind you, some folks are already successful on the cloud business thingy. Amazon’s EC2 is the king of the park. Google apps has even signed up US government. Seems the cloud is here to stay.

Ok, maybe I am getting dramatic but sincerely, can you remember the days when Hotmail and Yahoo used to give just a measly 2mb as email and when floppy disks were the king of data back up? Think again.

Meanwhile, we have to wait till 2011 to try Database.com out and considering that it is just some 24 days away, it isn’t a long time to wait, is it?

Time to upgrade internet protocols

In a post-9/11 world, the security of internet protocols remains critically overlooked. A 328-page U.S. report unveils the alarming threats from rogue nations, with incidents like China Telecom’s misrouted traffic and Google’s breach by Chinese hackers spotlighting the vulnerabilities. It’s high time for a fundamental overhaul, starting with the widespread adoption of HTTPS and a reevaluation of DNS and routing protocols. This piece explores the urgent need for preemptive security measures to protect not just digital infrastructure but our global security at large.

The world has changed since 9/11 but why should the internet remain the same? Apparently I’m not talking about the development of internet technologies that have grown in leaps albeit the buzz word Web 2.0 is on its way out. I am taking about the basic internet protocols.

A 328-page report was recently released in the US about threats posed by rogue nations to security of the internet. The report said last year China Telecom broadcasted a bad BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and routed a large portion of internet traffics through its opaque network for about 18 minutes (US military and government traffic were affected). Coming to mind was also the recent infiltration of Google by Chinese hackers.

After 9/11, the concept of preemptive security took a firm root in everyone’s mind. Also, there is now a greater sense of security awareness on personal computers but what have been left behind are the base internet protocols. Starting with basic HTTP, I think there should be a firm deadline for the deprecation of this protocol. Before now, the grouse with HTTPS has been with its bandwidth utilization because it uses more than plain vanilla HTTP but that is no longer tenable as broadband is now the norm. Google made a move in the right direction by making Gmail HTTPS a default but it can do better by making all its services HTTPS only.

DNS and other routing protocols should be addressed, a terrorist can do more damage (even physically  the speculation of what the Stuxnet could do is extremely ominous!) by waging cyber-attacks than by blowing himself up.

Akin goes to school

Akin goes to school is a legendary Nigerian novel read by all in the 70s and 80s. It told the story of a young lad who went to school and became successful despite the hardship of life.

The biggest lesson for me wasn’t how he overcame his adversity but the importance of education. Sometimes when you think you ‘ve had it all, it is time you rebooted.

I’ve worked for 9 years since I hung up my lab coat as an engineer, counting beans for 4 different financial institutions and at this time, all I want to do is kick back my chair and experience the thrill of learning again. I’m going back to my engineering roots to probably stick my fingers in some live wires and let some sparks fly. Ok, maybe something not as dangerous but let’s see what happens.

So I’m off work for 12 months and I’m going to let my hair grow long and wild. Gosh, freedom from the suit feels so great.

Comparison of electricity tariffs in other countries

The following table shows the price of electricity per Kilowatt Hour across different countries. This should serve as a quick reference to what other guys like us pay in these countries.

Country$/KwHN/KwH
Kingdom of Tonga0.457068.55
Denmark0.428964.34
Italy0.372355.85
Netherlands0.347052.05
Germany0.306645.99
Philippines0.288043.20
Sweden0.273441.01
Ireland0.238935.84
Spain0.195029.25
France0.192528.88
UK0.185927.89
Croatia0.175526.33
Singapore0.173426.01
Portugal0.163924.59
Nigeria (Proposed)0.146722.00
Hong Kong0.123018.45
Iceland0.116117.42
Belgium0.114317.15
Perú0.104415.66
South Africa0.101515.23
USA0.092813.92
Malaysia0.074211.13
Australia0.071110.67
Finland0.069510.43
Canada0.06189.27
Nigeria (Currently)0.04677.00