Starting off with Rails 3.2.2 on Ubuntu 11

After a long time, I picked up to build a web application for a friend. I havent worked in web apps for about 6-8 months now, and was quite rusty.

Ruby on Rails was a natural choice. However, when I issued the "gem update" it turned out that rails is on 3.2.2 these days, which means there has been at least 4 releases since I last worked with rails.

I typically work in a way that learning happens while working only.  Therefore, I just started building a new application and built a default scaffold (I know, its  an old habit of testing installation using scaffold)... scaffold generated, which means that the backward compatibility is still alive. Server started.. and bang, launched chrome to see how localhost:3000 looks like...

it bombed... there was this "ExecJS::RuntimeError" staring at my face...

It turned out that Ubuntu is the culprit and needs nodejs to be installed as a JS runtime engine is required and by default Ubuntu doesnt provide one.

after "sudo apt-get install nodejs", its all smooth and shiney...

Will share further...

App vs web browser based access to websites from devices

Every other website these days launches their own app as soon as they find a decent following among customers.  However, there are some things we need to watch out for when using apps as against browsing the same content over a web browser.

A browser is a relatively safe sandbox when it comes to executing website content and rendering it.  There really has to be a loophole in the browser engine for a website to exploit it and do weird things to your device, be it a phone, tablet or laptop/desktop.

On the other hand, when we install "apps" for websites, we provide them "permissions" to do things on our devices. This works nicely based on the trust foundation.  I trust the website, and therefore I trust their app to not do anything untoward to my device.  This trust, can be unfounded in cases, and lead to unknown actions/behaviours from apps.

Among the benefits of using apps, they  do provide a better user experience (in most of the cases) since the rendering is specific to the device.  Also, the apps provide lot more customised user interaction information to their base websites, thereby providing more and accurate and contextual intelligence about their usage. There are reports about apps stealing private information from the devices.

Most of the time, the reason for the app gaining access to information is the grain of the access control used in the device. If its too low, the access permissions to be provided are a huge list, if its too high, you can provide too much access without intending to. There comes the maturity of the device operating system.

With web browsers the information sent back for analytics purposes is rather generic, since its from the browser sandbox.

I believe its safe to say that using apps is a bit of a trade-off, between the user experience and the safety /privacy of the user.  Lets be a bit more careful about which apps do we download and use, and what all permissions that app needs. Lets just be a bit more skeptic and end up being safer for it, hopefully.

PS - There are a lot other comparisons that already exist, however, its hard to say how many of them talk about security aspects. User Experience is one major discussions point, for sure.  Try Googling it

time zone conversion in Oracle

Often times we need to see a given time-stamp column in a particular time zone.   Without casting as well, oracle allows a very simple way - 


SELECT <column-name> AT TIME ZONE <time zone> FROM <table-name>;

this method saves the expensive cast operations.

Informatica Questions from a friend - Part 2 - Schedulers

Need of Scheduling and Commonly used Schedulers

Any and all Data warehousing environments need some kind of scheduler setup to enable
jobs being run at periodic intervals without human intervention.  Another important feature
is the repeatability of the jobs set up such.  Without the help of a scheduler, things would
become very ad-hoc and thus prone to errors and messups. 

Oracle provides an built in scheduling facility, accessible through its dbms_scheduler package.
Unix provides basic scheduling facility using cron command. Similarly, Informatica also 
provides basic scheduling facilities in the Workflow Manager client.
 

The features provided by these scheduling tools are fairly limited, often limited to launching
a job at a given time, providing basic dependency management etc. 
 

However, in real time data warehousing solutions, the required functionality is lot more 
sophisticated than whats offered by these basic features.  Therefore, the need for full 
fledged scheduling tools, e.g. Tivoli Workload Scheduler, Redwood Cronacle, Control-M, 
Cisco Tidal etc..
 

Most of these tools provide sophisticated launch control, dependency management features 
and therefore allow the data warehouse to be instrumented at finer levels.
 

Some of the tools, e.g. Tidal for informatica and Redwood for Oracle, provide support for
the Tools' API as well, therefore integrating even better with the corresponding tool.