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:

Anyway, I’ll see if I can adapt to the way of how MS Word will publish my blog post.

Until my next blog post.

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.

Unfortunately, they broke their promise and didn’t show up on the date. I e-mailed them back and complain about it and received a reply from their customer support. The installation date was pushed to the following week. Here’s how the installation work was done:

There were 2 vans arrived at my house, one contractor is for the outdoor installation and the other is responsible for the indoor installation. Altogether there were 5 people.

I admired this guy who engaged me as the customer and did most of the work compared the other guys. Not only did he brought the barrel of fiber optics cable to the telekom pole, he drilled a hole in my living room.

He then drilled my kitchen wall to insert the fibre optic cables from the outside.

He pulled the fiber optic cables were pulled into my house living room.

The fiber optics cable barrel.

My cracked kitchen wall caused by the drilling. One of the contractor then masked the cracked wall with white plaster.

The guy then sets up the UniFi equipments in my living room.

He and another guys working on the UniFi’s connectivity.

My neighbourhood UniFi box connector. In some places, the UniFi connectivity is located underground.

My house TM UniFi equipment up and running.

The next step after installing UniFi is to terminate the TM Net Streamyx and telephone line. There were several issues I’ve encountered after the installation:

1. I tried requesting for my house number to remain the same. Unfortunately the TM Point staff told me that I can’t have my old phone number to be replaced with the new UniFi telephone number. So there goes my old house number after using it for 14 years.
2. The TM powered wireless router administration page is very opened. Even though I’ve disabled the remote access to the router, until now I can’t seem to change the password (current password is just blank).
3. I spent 2 days configuring the TM powered wireless router to work on my laptop. Only my laptop couldn’t connect to the WiFi, the rest of laptop, PC and mobile devices in my house could connect to the internet without any problem. I tried configured everything I know on my laptop, installed and uninstalled several drivers and software but nothing seems to work. In the end, I hooked up my old wireless router back and my laptop automatically connects to the internet.
4. After consuming gigabytes of data (I am a heavy downloader once in a while), I think one the UniFi devices crashed and both the HyppTV and the internet is not available anymore. This had occur twice already. The solution is to reset the whole boxes (Consist of the UniFi modem, Wireless router and HypTV box; Switch off for a few seconds and switch back on after that) and the UniFi services will be back to normal. Don’t bother tinkering into the admin page or call the customer service unless if you really need to.

If you want to read a full detail story of what happened before the installation, you can read it on my Malay blog here, that is if you can understand Malay language.

Overall, I am satisfied with TM UniFi services. There are moments when the internet line was really slow, I guess not all of the servers can cater for the high speed connection. The only significant improvement I’ve noticed is when watching YouTube where you don’t have to wait for the buffering video anymore. The HyppTV/IPTV is crystal clear and at the moment I’m enjoying all of the HyppTV channel free for a month (1-31 August 2011). That’s all for now. Do leave a comment if you would like to ask me anything.

Cheers.

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

Therefore I made a decision to search for a back up device. I went for a short trip to Low Yat Plaza, after a few hours surveying numerous back-up solutions, I decided on purchasing this Seagate BlackArmor NAS 110 1 TB Network Attached Storage ST310005MNA10G-RK
device:

Seagate BlackArmor NAS 110 Centralised Network Storage

Seagate BlackArmor NAS 110 Centralised Network Storage

Well 1TB is too large for me. My data accumulated over the years are only half of the size. So far, I’ve only used 26% of what this NAS storage has to offer. There is a few drawback using a NAS, if you are on a wireless network, the data transfer speed rate can only go up to what your wireless device can take. Like mine, I could only transfer 6GB in one hour. That is of course if the signal reception is consistent or when I’m not doing anything on the computer. Other than that, unlike the Buffalo Technology LinkStation Live 1.0TB Shared Network Attached Storage LS-CH1.0TL(Black), this device doesn’t have Bittorrent client to automatically download digital stuff I like.

Well at RM299 price, I consider this cheap for a 1TB personal storage solutions. Don’t you think so?

*Need more information about Seagate BlackArmor NAS 110 1 TB Network Attached Storage ST310005MNA10G-RK you can check it out at this site.

Winning Bid-Genuine OEM Pakite 2.4G Wirelss AV Sender Astro Camera CCTV DVD

For convenience matter, I think for a less than RM150 item is quite reasonable. If you check at Lelong (Type in “astro” on the search box) normally the item is sold between RM180 to RM420. I asked the seller to send the item using Air-Pak since it was an option given by him. I top-up another RM10 on the shipping fee for a more secured delivery. The next week, the item arrived.

Airpak Express packing

One wireless AV sender and one wireless AV receiver

Genuine OEM Pakite 2.4G Wireless AV Sender Astro Camera CCTV DVD packager

After more than 3 months using this device, I am quite happy with it. However, here’s a list of pros and cons on this little item:

Pros

Easy straight forward setup, lightweight, instant, no confusing wires

Cons

1. The display and sound reception is easily distorted when interfered by numerous electrical items such as microwaves, fans, blender, drills, washing machine etc
2. The reception distance gets even shorter when there are walls or solid objects
3. I still can’t get the IR remote control on the receiver device to work