I’ve never been to a cloud computing summit before therefore I immediately registered myself to attend. The event was organized by iTrain Malaysia. The last event I’ve attended being organized by iTrain was like 5 years ago so things must have been really moving forward from then. I guess I’ll cut my blog post short and show you snapshots taken during the event:

During the event, there was an announcement that really surprised me. iTrain with support from the government will be doing a ‘Free Training for CompTIA Cloud Computing Certification’. Again, I registered myself for that one as well. Basically I’ve been playing around with the cloud for several years already except that during that time it wasn’t known as ‘cloud’ yet. Hopefully I’ll become the chosen 40 selected person to receive the training and qualify for the certification. I’ll update that in my blog if I get selected.

I first registered myself to VMware email subscription in 2008. VMware wasn’t really big during those days but I heard that they are getting stronger by the day. Earlier this year in July, I attended a virtual event conducted by VMware after receiving an invitation below:

I notice that such event utilized a lot of internet bandwidth. I had my network guy screamed at me for using most of the bandwidth during that time of the hour. I don’t really blame him, he maybe wasn’t equipped to handle such enormous request. Anyway, he left the company to pursue a better position. Enough about that, I find the virtual event to be quite dull since I can’t listen to any of the web conferences because of the bandwidth issue.

Last October, I received an e-mail invitation:

vSeminar Series 2011 – Online Registration is Now Open

Join us at vSeminar Series to discover the latest cloud infrastructure and management solutions to accelerate IT and your business, and learn how you can further leverage your virtualization investments to reduce capital and operating expenses and improve business agility.

vSeminar Series is a free one-day multiple track event where you will be able to hear from VMware and experts from our partner ecosystem as we share the latest technologies in enabling Your Cloud to meet your company’s specific business needs.

If you’re an IT professional tasked with virtualizing and managing your IT environment, or taking your organization to the Cloud, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to:

• Explore the latest technologies to aid your transformation to deliver a flexible, agile IT-as-a-Service delivery model
• Learn the latest infrastructure and management solutions that enable greater efficiency, agility and choice for IT organizations – including vSphere 5, Site Recovery Manager 5 and View 5
• Create a modern, user-centric approach to personal computing that delivers secure access to applications and data from any device, such as the iPad
• Experience technology demonstrations from the exhibition showcase by VMware and a broad range of technology partners
• Dive into operational best practices, performance, tuning and troubleshooting for your IT environment
• Learn how, by using VMware vSphere, you can increase the performance of mission critical applications and how your organisation can accelerate its transition to the cloud

Don’t miss the opportunity to acquire best practices tips and strategies for virtualization and learn how to develop a cohesive, secure and compliant cloud strategy in three core areas: infrastructure, applications and end-user computing.

Register now in the city closest you and don’t miss a seat. We look forward to seeing you!

Malaysia

Date: Tuesday, 15 November 2011 Time: 8:00 am to 6:00 pm Venue: One World Grand Ballroom First Avenue, Bandar Utama, City Centre 47800 Petaling Jaya Selangor Malaysia

 
I immediately register myself. At first, I thought the event wasn’t going to have so many people. I was so wrong. Just look at these photos I’ve taken:

This was at 8.30am! I couldn’t believe it. When the event started, the speaker told that there were a thousand people who had registered and come to event. I then realized, VMware is huge!

Check out my mega photo gallery I’ve taken during the event:

Since one of my role in the company is to suggest better ways to manage the IT infrastructure for both ourselves and also to our clients/prospects. Virtualization is definitely the way of the future. My team has been fiddling with Oracle VM Virtualbox to maximize the use of our development and test servers in the office. So far, the only restriction that we have is the shortage of physical memory for the hardware. The cloud wasn’t really a solution for us since we need to utilize what we have and keeping the cost down (although we have 2 virtual private servers running in the US for hosting purposes). Overall, virtualization has helped us in our IT deployment stage.

Back to the event, I must say that the event was way much cooler and more fun than any techno events I’ve ever been to and this was in Malaysia by the way. Kudos to the organizer and to all the sponsors for organizing such a wonderful event. Looking forward to next year’s VMware vSeminar Series if VMware decided to held one again next year.

Modern Enterprise Java Development

Dear Ashrufzz,

You are invited to attend the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Java Workshop, a free, hands-on workshop that will focus on Java EE 6 and designed to enrich the development experience of enterprise Java developers.

• Gain a better understanding of Oracle WebLogic Server’s capabilities and a glimpse into Java EE 7 and cloud enablement
• Dive into the different layers of a typical Java EE Web application and learn how to implement them using the latest Java EE features
• Learn how the latest Java EE 6 features provide a modern, lightweight Java development experience
• Gain insight into why scaling web applications is challenging and learn some tips and tricks on how to deal with the issues involved
• Hear about the integration of Coherence and Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle GlassFish Server and the native capabilities of each servers for HTTP session state management
• Learn how to configure and use powerful Eclipse plug-ins to develop, build, and deploy with Maven and Hudson for continuous build integration
• Learn how to develop a simple Java console-based application to access, update and remove simple types of information from a Coherence-clustered cache

LAPTOP REQUIREMENT

I arrived at Oracle’s HQ in Level 23, The Garden. I guess they are cutting down on cost so the only goodies I get is an Oracle folder, a few sheets of paper and an Oracle Linux CD. It’s okay with me since it’s kind of annoying to bring along my laptop back-pack along with a bunch of goodies especially when you take the train to come to MidValley.

The second speaker is Chuk-Munn Lee where he talked about “Exploring Java EE 6″.

• GlassFish Server V3 – Is free and most probably the most advanced web server application in the market
• JRuby – Is faster than the original Ruby
• WebXML – Format everybody loves to hate
• The use of annotation “” – If you have source code
• The use of XML – If you don’t have source code/file
• Multitenancy in Java EE 7
• Scaling application in thread – requires a lot of CPU
• Some overview of JRockit and how it can be used to manage application

I’ve never heard of GlassFish before eventhough one of the application my company is selling is using Tomcat and Jetty and based on Spring Framework. I think it’s time for my company to focus on Java instead of PHP. It was also the first time I’ve head of Maven and Hudson so it was an eye opener for me too.

There were 2 hands-on lab:

1. Oracle WebLogic Server Development with Eclipse, maven and Hudson
2. A Step-By-Step Guide to Oracle Coherence

I only managed to finish the 1st lab. By the time I was finished, it’s already time to leave.

Thank you Oracle.

The welcoming address was done by Associate Professor Dr. Masran Saruwono, Dean of Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Surveying, UiTM. Opening address was done by Dr. Yeow Yoon Foo, President of CIOB Malaysia. Keynote Address and Official Opening was done by YB Dato’ Sri Ir Dr. Judin Abd Karim, the newly appointed Chief Executive Officer, CIDB Malaysia.

A little disclaimer here. I am not from the construction industry and what I’m going to write is from my own perspective.  If for some reason the information is not correct, misleading or gibberish, I would really appreciate any comments or feedback.

Session 1 –  Paper 1 : Case Studies in Sustainability for Major Construction Projects: The Veritas Experience by Mr. David Mizan Hashim.

The introduction given by the moderator to the first speaker was quite lengthy but really interesting to listen.

Once Mr. David Mizan gave out his talk, everybody including myself became very attentive towards what he was talking. He is quite an interesting speaker. Let’s check out his slides:

17 of the 20 tallest buildings in the world are in Asia and the Middle East.

For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population is urban.

Three types of Green Building Rating Tool from Singapore, Malaysia and USA were compared.

There were 4 case studies were featured,The LCCT, Menara Binjai, Menara Chua and PKNS HQ. I kind of get the understanding of what the speaker message is since I’ve read about the Malaysia Green Building Index.

In this case study, the speaker mentioned about conserving energy by making an open design for the building.

If you’re familiar with engineering, the diagram above does make sense to you.

Some design view of the LCCT.

Case study 2: Menara Binjai. Don’t ask me where the building is, I have no idea.

The objective of the building design is to bring as much as natural light inside the building thus a lot of glass is used.

Case Study3: PKNS HQ. I have live in Shah Alam for almost 4 years during my study years. I love Shah Alam and Kompleks PKNS is one the earliest shopping mall my father used to bring me when I was little.

Did you know that the lake in Shah Alam is owned by PKNS? I didn’t know that. It is said that PKNS wanted to fence the entire lake area in Shah Alam since it is located their private land. Of course there were an uproar from the people in Shah Alam so they decided to leave it open to public. So the designer proposed this design:

The idea was to open up the building so that the public can go through instead of around it.

The building also is targeted to score a Platinum Level on the GBI scale.

I do gain a lot of knowledge just by attending this conference but I don’t want to write about the whole content of the conference. It’s not because I am lazy or so, it’s because this industry is not really related to what I am paid to work for. So, I’ll just summarize this entire post with photo galleries taken using my mobile phone down below:

ECS Pericomp is located in Kota Damansara. I had to hustle the peak traffic jam, I am puzzled of why is it that during the fasting month of Ramadan, the road traffic are more congested than usual. Maybe I was driving on the wrong route. Anyway, I arrived there slightly late and the presentation started:

I must say that ECS ICT Berhad is quite big. They have a list of smaller companies within their own premises. My company is way smaller than them.

Mike Lai is the Technology Specialist at ECS Pericomp. I really admire his presentation style because I think he loves to share stuff instead of selling.

Some brief explanation about what Open Source is all about.

Some of the software development milestone related to RedHat.

Some of the tools and features of RHEL. Mike continued to share that a lot other organization clone the RedHat to become their own, one is example is the Oracle Linux where the OS are fine tune with Oracle products.

Now this is what the entire workshop is all about, “Virtualization”. I’ve been exposed to virtualization ever since the creation of Virtual PC. From there, I moved on to VirtualBox and read a little bit about VMWare. It is really an interesting topic to learn and implement. I have a couple of ideas I wanted to experiment since my company has its own small data center and the aging servers are really hard to manage. Now comes the best part, demo:

In the demo, Mike showed how he actually makes a live migration. The Virtual Machine (VM) used is Windows XP. He opened a text file and without saving it, created an exact copy of the VM and launches it. The exact opened text file appears sort of like a clone. Of course this is no surprise for people who have been familiar with Virtual PC such as myself. However, the web-based virtualization tool used reminded me of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute EC2 I’ve been playing around 2 months ago.

As much as I marvel all this new cool technology, conveying the virtualization idea and practical issues is something to work on. Overall, this workshop benefited me well enough thanks to ECS.

Same as last time, the presentation was done at Langkawi Room located at level 23, The Garden North Tower, Mid Valley City.

The Training Room

The Presenter was Niel Pandya which I believe is from the UK.

The Oracle presenter/trainer of the day

How is Data Compromised?

Why is understanding SQL critical?

Attendees present

Oracle Database Firewall Basic Components

Diagram of Basic Data Center Environment

Now comes the best part, FOOD! The food was prepared by Restoran Rebung (Chef Ismail). Chef Ismail is one of the prominent chef in Malaysia so of course his food is superb.

Lunch! One of the best tasting training lunch I've ever tasted

After lunch was over, it’s time for some action.

The Hands-on training server's IP addresses strip sheet

Each participant was given this strip sheet with 3 IP addresses. The IP addresses was unique for each participants so no participant was connecting to the same server.

Trying to set up server connection on my laptop

At first, I was astounded by how the training was setup. Upon further investigation, I found out that the organizer used Amazon Web Services and setup more than (30 x 3) Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance for each participants. Now this is new to me.

Instruction on The Hands-on training server's using the IP addresses strip sheet

After setting up the “virtual lab”, its time to test the oracle Database Firewall setup.

Applying the Swingbench Application

If you are accustomed to dashboard style web-based console, you’ll definitely have no problem exploring all its features.

A view of the Oracle Database Firewall Administration Console

The class ended at 3.30pm, the instructor told us that the server can still be accessed up until 6pm before it’ll be shut down. Unfortunately when I got home, the server were inaccessible anymore.

Class ended

This class has been an eye opener for me since I like trying out stuff instead of just listening or reading it. I believe this type of presentation and hands-on training is more meaningful rather than just a talk. In my opinion, the Oracle Database Firewall product is useful in an environment where things has been out of control where developers and system administrator experienced some sort of a battle cracking down each other. Basically it depends on which industry the product is applied in. If it involves financial, this product will become top of the line security add-on. However, with the alarming numbers of breaches, malware, spyware, SQL injections and network security ignorance by the IT people themselves, prevention is better than cure right?

Posing in front of Oracle HQ Malaysia

If you need more information regarding Oracle Database Firewall, here’s two links you can download the product information:

• Orace Database Firewall Architecture Overview
• Preventing Database Attacks and Data Breaches with Oracle Database Firewall

Enough of the comparison crap. Last week, I represented my company to attend a brief presentation by Oracle Malaysia about Oracle’s Enterprise Single Sign On (ESSO). I was a bit surprised to find that Oracle Malaysia has moved from Citibank building near KLCC to The Garden Midvalley City since my last visit there.

There were a handful of people already arrived when I got there. Had a cup of coffee before the presentation started. The presenter for Oracle Single Sign-On was Peter Rajnak, Solutions Specialist Director, Identity Management Fusion Middleware APAC from Oracle Corporation. What a long title for a job title.

Which Single Sign On (SSO) is right for me? I’ve heard about single sign on before, simply saying you only need to remember 1 username and password. The presenter did a very good job at explaining how the mechanism work, he somehow manage to balance between the technical aspect and the business aspect.

The next presenter was Swapnil Mehta, Director of Global Access Management Practice of SENA Systems of AurionPro. A winner of the Oracle Titan Award, the firm has taken a lot of identity management jobs for enterprise level of Fortune 500 companies.

Let’s look at some brief “About Enterprise Single Sign On”:

1. Too many users IDs and Passwords
2. Security Risk
3. Enterprise Single Sign On Must Be Easy to Use

In order to solve the issue above, Oracle has come out with Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite Plus. As usual, enterprise level product would require an enterprise level of implementation and that would involve some initial investment.

If your organization would like to lighten the IT department hassle in managing IDs and password, this would be a solution to look forward to.

It doesn’t really matter which product is the best or not, it is a matter of preferences. If I can afford to buy a BMW, I would definitely owned one. Unfortunately, I can only afford a basic car at the moment but I can still dream of a BMW nevertheless. Back to my Oracle training of course. The training was held at Oracle’s HQ up in Level 38, Menara Citibank Kuala Lumpur. Check out their front desk:

I can only wish I am working with a huge corporation such as Oracle. It must be really tough trying to score a job there, don’t you think?

Anyway, my trainer is a guy name Sachin, I am guessing he’s from India from his thick Indian accent. Prior to this training, I have no idea what SOA or the longer version Service Oriented Architecture means. Even after reading Wikipedia, I still couldn’t picture what SOA is all about. My trainer tried to give some clue on what SOA is all about but all I see is a bunch application pool represented by jargon linking with each other. I must give credit to Sachin although his presentation was a bit bored, he’s quite a tech nerd when it comes to hands-on training which came in late in the afternoon since the Oracle JDeveloper installation file was almost 1GB and had to be copied manually from person to person. The requirement was 3GB of RAM for the training laptop just for the VMWare containing the SOA suite to run while I only have 1GB of RAM. Lucky there was an alternative.

The training class became more livelier when the hands-on approach began. With Nescafe coffee served, it was very enjoyable to crunch the tutorials given. Right up until my developed SOA scripts got corrupted and could not be deployed apart from the wireless networking changed setting. The journey continues tomorrow morning.

Entrance of Youth09 @ PWTC

Look..Juliana Evans!

8TV Booth

The Youth09 Gig Place

Satria Neo Club

Collage Art @ Youth09

Graffiti Art @ Youth09

Stuff Taken @ Youth09 in my new Safety Helmet

Last but not least, I’ve taken a video shot of a pole dancing show during my visit there. I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t have a strong arm and feet:

CIDB or the Construction Industry Development Board requires any personnel who is or will be working in any consctruction site to have a green card. This is to ensure every personnel is covered, sort of like an insurance or license to be in any construction site. My company has a major project in one construction site installing network cables and IT equipment. Although I only went there like one or two time only, I still need to be covered. So last January 2009, my HR department sent me to get my own green card just in case if I were needed to be sent to any construction site I supposed.

The class was done on a Saturday. This is where the place is located:

The Akademi Binaan Malaysia

The place is next to the LRT Star Station Chan Sow Lin station. So if you don’t want to drive there, just take the LRT. If you drive there, the parking is free. No sweat.

The Green Card Program

My class speaker

The speaker was fun to listen to. I wasn’t bored throughout his entire presentation. He was interactive with all of his audiences although I am guessing half of the class didn’t really understand his Malay languange (only 5 or 6 people in the class were Malaysian, the rest are all Indians, Viatnamese, Nepal or Indonesian). I really like what he is presenting. The most interesting part is when he includes his past experiences being a safety inspector.

CIDB Guideline Mini Booklet

This book was given complimentary of CIDB. It’s a nice booklet, less text and more illustration. During the end of the class, I received the construction helmet which is now being displayed on top of my closet collecting dusts. BTW, it is an offence leaving your construction helmet in your car.

That’s all for today. Will write again soon.