2013-06-26

A smart telephone and a dumb user.

Yesterday I ‘upgraded’ my telephone from a dumb SonyEricsson j10i2, to a smart Samsung Galaxy S4. I suspect this will not be a smooth ride into smart telephone nirvana. I had problems with SMS (I could not  SMS), with my old dumb telephone, but I could call people and talk to them and I could receive calls from people and talk to them. You may notice I use past tense, I could not SMS, that still true I cannot SMS. But I could call, that is no longer true. Nothing happens when I call and I do not know how to open inbound calls. A colleague help me, he ‘rebooted’ my telephone, yes rebooted my telephone! Now there is sound in my telephone and I have been able to call once and receive once, I do not call that a success though. For some reason I have my GMail box in the telephone but I still do not know how to handle the mails in the phone. I suspect I have a long way to go  before I can handle my new telephone.

As a two year old I had no problem calling my grandma ( 503326 ) with the wire telephone of the time, now I can’t call my sons with my smart telephone. I guess while the telephones are getting smarter I grow dumber.

But there is hope for me, the new telephone is an Android device and this is an opportunity for me to explore the Android operating system. I hope I get some time this summer to write some Android code, that will give me a chance to get to grips with my new telephone. Maybe write a console app from where I can manage my telephone.

Note with ‘dumb’ in this post I mean lack of smartness.  

 

2013-06-15

Guided tour on a submarine

Last weekend I was given a guided tour on the attack submarine HMS Halland  by my nephew Marcus, he is Weapons Engineering Officer Lieutenant jg and the CIO of the ship. I and my son Axel (private in the Army) were guided by Marcus.The space inside is cramped, very cramped. You move by crawling and climbing tiny ladders. How they manage to load the torpedoes on board is still a mystery to me.

Anyway Marcus concentrated on the IT equipment. There are several networks in the boat, server racks with blade servers, very special computers, more computers for the hydrophones and lots of laptops. The need for computing power in a modern submarine is phenomenal. In Marcus office, the server room you could squeeze yourself into a chair with a miniscule desk in front of you and that is all. Marcus told us an english colleague envied his spacious office.

The information management system controlling all this hardware 9LV CMS , has lots of interfaces that are totally alien to me but at the heart of the system there are multi function consoles which actually runs under Windows XP from which the submarine warriors carry out their tasks. Here is a schematic picture of the system.

Marcus told us a lot of technical details, but I already forgot most of it (that comes with age), he probably have the entire system on top of his head. (Marcus is a very smart guy, learned himself to read at the age of four, started to play with computers in pre school age and started serious computer programming at ten.)

Some years ago Marcus and the crew on HMS Gotland (a sister ship to HMS Halland) was stationed in USA, playing war games with US navy, here is a awesome photo with Marcus onboard.

HMS Gotland playing search and destroy with aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan outside of San Diego harbour.

2013-06-03

Moving a Data Warehouse - 2

Now we have moved the Data Warehouse  to the new hardware. It is more than just a move to new servers, it is a complete redesign of the Data Warehouse. The mysql database server is still a physical server, but the rest of the servers have been virtualized . The data warehouse is now based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Linux, with one exception the heart of the Data Warehouse, the ETL server is a Mageia 2  Linux .

The Data Warehouse is in the middle of the blue circle (background photo Anders Nygård).

Here you see a schematic picture of the new Data Warehouse. The new Data Warehouse consists of three physical servers, the database server, the application server or virtual host and a satellite server in Japan. The database server connects to the DW applications via an internal switch and to external applications via some connections to the corporate network. The virtual host contains all virtual DW application servers. The ETL server has been divided into two server a communication server containing mail, ftp and a smb client, and the ETL server where all jobs inbound and outbound are run. The Japanese satellite server is a replica of the database. This new setup is much easier to maintain. I’m very grateful for the invaluable help Anders Nygård  from Red Bridge  provided. Without Anders skills and knowledge this migration project would not been finished for a very long time.