Mobile mobile everywhere ...not an app to blink.... :-)

Today, I made my Nokia E71 crash or hang. I'm capable of doing this to any phone and I have done this to multiple phones that I owned. Not intentionally. As an ambitious user, I load a lot of widgets and apps on my phone as I have practically given up using my laptop for my daily activities. However most apps don't work on all published features. And most browser based apps don't render properly on the mobile screen because...yes, they have either not been tested for mobile platforms or not been designed for them at all.

That got me thinking. Can you believe that 47% of apps are accessible or available on the mobile as well according to a study by DataCorp? Thats an enormous amount to be left untested or partially tested.

What challenges does mobile (as in cell phone) testing involve?

1. Multiple Operating Systems - Win Mobile, RIM, Symbian...etc

2. Great variety of handheld devises (all of which cannot be practically emulated by testers)

3. Rich UI, rich media such as high res images, video streams, Ajax based animations are not implemented for low memory, low processor systems such as mobile phones

4. Form Factors are different

5. Users can switch languages - for example Japanese use English for business bt switch the skins to Japanese for every thing else.

6. Carrier speed, carrier frameworks vary

If the dataplan does not allow video streaming, then does your software detect that or does it make to and fro requests to the server in an end less loop (aka. hang ;-)

I'm researching to know if mobile test automation (or test automation tools devices for embedded in a broader sense) has matured?

Until then,when in trouble reboot the phone.

Mobile Number Portability coming

It looks like we in India can keep the same mobile number even after changing providers.
Syniverse & Telcordia to Provide Mobile Number Portability in India


After having suffered many times by incorrect billing, I'm anticipating the following:

1. "Sir, we don't know why this charge is added in your bill Sir. Can you contact the other provider?"

2. "Sir, our billing systems are yet to be integrated and upgraded Sir. meanwhile can you please pay the bill to avoid disconnection? "

3. "Sir, We have two database records showing against your number Sir. Can you please send your name proof, address proof and birth certificate so that we can ascertain your identity Sir?"

4. "Sir, this is the right PBX number. However our calling system can transfer your call to only the old provider Sir. ...Sorry sir - we don't know the new provider's phone no Sir"

5. "Sir, we have miscellaneous charges. Your old provider had Other Charges. Now we have clubbed both and added a surcharge to make General Charges Sir".

6. "Sir, we understand your concern. But you downloaded an email from 399 plan on your old package Sir. Now since you have downloaded another email from default program of 899 plan, you are required to subscribe to new plan of 1999 Sir. No Sir, our systems are programmed this way Sir"


Okay, here's the actual news:

from IndianWeb2.com - Web 2.0 and Technology Startup News and Reviews by Vardaan
The India Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has selected Syniverse Technologies and Telcordia Technologies to implement mobile number portability (MNP) services in the country.Noticeably both of the companies are US based.
Syniverse is a business and technology solution for the global telecommunications industry, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, USA the company was awarded a letter of intent to provide India’s telecommunications operators with number portability clearing house and centralized database solutions for the next 10 years.
Telcordia on other hand is the world’s leading provider of MNP services and has solutions deployed across nine countries, including the US, Canada, Egypt, Greece and South Africa.
Because of the project’s enormous scale, the DoT divided the country into two geographic zones for number portability implementation, each of which will be handled by a different MNP provider. Each zone is further broken down into 11 service areas that represent cities within the zone. Zone 1 will cover the northern and western regions of the country, while Zone 2 will include the south and east.
Syniverse was selected to receive the license for Zone 1, which includes the service areas of Delhi, Mumbai, Maharashtra, Gujarat and seven others. The MNP implementation will first focus on the larger metropolitan service areas before moving into the more rural locations.
As an operator-neutral third party, Syniverse will maintain an accurate, rapid and seamless number porting process for both Indian operators and their subscribers, facilitating the transfer of telephone numbers when subscribers wish to keep their numbers when changing from one operator to another.

Storage (Part 2)

You can do even more soul searching by calculating how many real filing cabinets those wooden or steel filing cabinets, cup boards and carpets) are used for storing documents and also calculate time for searching, retrieving, shipping, photocopying etc.

Information Life Management is a key evaluation criteria for data centers and other storage management services. ILM essentially values your data for currentness, accessibility, need for availability and various other parameters and decides if the data can be moved to lesser expensive systems. Most documents, other than those needed for litigations and legal requirements, tend to lose their value over time and can be very well managed to lesser expensive storages such as tapes.

Sample companies that sell ILM solutions are EMC, IBM and Sun Microsystems.


De-Duplication and Compression : De-Dup is a commonly used jargon now and essentially involves using certain data identification and comparison algorithms that will identify all the copies of the same document lying in the data store and create a ‘single instance’ of the document without affecting the accessibility of the document. De-dup is expected to reduce data from 1/10th to 1/100th depending on how granular and identifiable the data itself is. De-Dup also can be deployed on almost any storage type – primary storage, virtual environments, network accessed storage, archives, back ups etc.

Sample companies that sell De-Dup solutions are EMC, Permabit, NetApp and Symantec.

Data Compression has been known from a long time from the simple .zip, .tar to sophisticated techniques that reduce data storage from half to as much as 1/200th.
However there could be performance and operational issues with frequently accessed documents and hence this needs to be balanced with the overall information life cycle policy of the organization.


Thin Provisioning : I call this the just-in-time storage. While logical capacity is allocated to applications upfront, the actual physical storage is allocated on demand. This gave the storage administrator more power to juggle the resources and also increases utilization dramatically. This is still an emergent technology with less than 5% penetration. However with more and more storage devices becoming ‘provisional’ there is hope.


MAID: Massive Array of Idle Disks. The key word here is idle disks. It sounds so synonymous with my maid at home who stashes all the infrequently used stuff up in the attic. It's altogether a different matter that I will never be able to search the attic because I don't have an ILM on top of the attic!

Just like how infrequently accessed documents can be kept ‘away’ for efficiency, MAID is a storage technology that keeps inactive disks from spinning. This results in very good power savings and can add a lot to cost savings if this is configured with low cost SATA drives. Again, an intelligent policy is necessary which otherwise can increase costs due to unintelligent access management and data residing on exactly those disks that are marked for rest.

FCoE: Fiber Channel Over Ethernet is an emerging technology that essentially drives a standard protocol over Ethernet. I don't really know the industry benefits yet. However no need to lose one’s sleep on this now since if this change happens it will be big and wil ensure there is a critical mass to take it forward.

Sample company that is already into this is Cisco.

File Virtualization technologies: This technology ensures that name spaces are created for directories and file servers across network access storages and devices irrespective of operating systems or platforms. The business impact of this is ease of administration, costs saved from management and storage tiering, costs saved from managing multiple environments and many other costs associated with general virtualization technologies. I will talk about security of this separately.

Go-Green: While the first motivation to go digital from hard copies should be the trees we save, we can go a lot more green by employing intelligent storage technologies that can save power consumptions and reduce e-waste. So, Go-Greenest should be the motto!

Storage Devices (part 1)

1. Data that is being created and stored at is progressing at an insane pace every year compared to the previous years. The number of movie DVDs that are produced world wide is in billions. The images captured by world population on their cameras, handy cams, mobile cameras amount to tera bytes of data. The emails received in a day (or sent in a day) runs to 200 billion from about 1.3 billion email users including spam.
   
   Scary? It is easier to imagine this for a digital image consumer. On an average a photograph is seen 0.2 times in a person’s life time from some studies conducted so far. So, if a lay person captures on an average 20,000 photographs in his or her lifetime, he or she will actually view only about 4000 photographs. The rest are just stored and archived and migrated from disk to disk and converted from format to format until it becomes e-waste the next century.
   
   For corporations, it is even worse and a nightmare! While the data retention requirements are growing with so many compliances and regulatory requirements mandating that, the corporation also has to manage the costs associated with it and even bring it down while increasing storage. Nice problem to have, huh?
   
   Storage technologies have progressed greatly and are trying to solve the storage efficiency problem while security companies are getting to solve the issue of data protection, encryption and compliance management and Search Engine Optimization techniques are driving search and hence cost efficiencies.
   
   A simple method of knowing your cost drivers would be to collect survey results with following questions.
   
   How many employees store and retrieve documents over network as well as local disks?
   How many seconds or minutes per day does each employee spend searching for document (not searching for information)?
   How many seconds or minutes per day does each employee spend recreating documents that a quick search did not provide?
   How many seconds or minutes per day does each employee spend recreating documents because the original was deleted or is inaccessible to him or her?
   How many seconds or minutes per day does each employee spend trying to find the latest version of a document stored on local media or networked shares?
   
   
   This is just tip of the iceberg!

Betting on my memory!

Yesterday my bank again asked me to identify myself with the security questions. On answering the three of them correctly (not easy at all which I will tell you in a minute) I was asked to choose a different set of 3 questions from 5. It makes you laugh.What were the questions: Roughly they were
-What was your grandfather's first name
- What was your first bike
- What was your mother's maiden surname
- Which was your first school
etc etc.

What's amusing about these are couple of things. One, the questions themselves are 'spoof'able which means a hacker can create these questions with fair predictability because more security based checks use the same question bank.

Two, most of my close friends or cousins who knew me from the last 25 years will know the answer for all these. So, it is easier to regenerate and hence hack my password than guess/break the password by brute force!

While multiple layered checks are touted as additional security, the layers are as strong as the weakest link.

Some of my other accounts allow me to choose my own questions. Now there are isues there as well. One, I need to choose those questions for which only I know the answer. I need to remember the spacing, the acronym and if the answer is in my native language then remember the phonetics as well. Now this is betting on my memory too much. Given the fact that I hold at least 5 online accounts how many answers can I remember?

And if I forget my password after 3 years, I may not even remember the answers to my self generated questions.

Security and convenience never go hand in hand. Fortunately I'm too small a person for someone to hack.