Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Bitcoin and Crypto currency explained

Crypto currency or more specifically Bitcoin, is a new type of currency that is making waves around the world, but few understand what it is and how it works.
 
So what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a digital decentralized currency that is free of any central authority and is completely anonymous. Each person has a digital wallet with a randomly generated address. Payments are made to and from these addresses.
 
When a payment is made it is broadcasted throughout the network, and the destination receives the payment almost immediately. All payments are recorded in what is called a block chain. The block chain is a central location that contains all transactions ever made and is accessible by everyone. This means that all transactions are public, however the sender and receiver are not known.
 
Bitcoin is becoming popular among online retailers by accepting bitcoin as payment for goods and services, much like Paypal.
 
Bitcoin has had a turbulent past after soaring to over $1,000 per bitcoin. China has banned Bitcoin altogether as a result of hacked exchanges and stolen bitcoins and potential links to criminal organizations due to the anonymity of the currency. As of today, the price of bitcoin sits at approximately $500 per bitcoin and there are signs that it may stabilize, at least for now.
 
The United States just recently announced that Bitcoin will be treated as property when reporting income. Here in Canada there are 2 Bitcoin ATMs located in Toronto and Vancouver. I have yet to visit the Toronto ATM, despite being only a few blocks from our office! The ATMs allow you to buy bitcoin using your Credit Card which is a fast and convenient service. When a payment is made there is a small transaction fee of 0.001 Bitcoin. This is to pay for the Bitcoin miners.
 
Since there is no physical property, what gives Bitcoin value? It has equity-like characteristics because its value seems to grow as the ecosystem grows. Having lots of people use it, it gains value.
 
Crypto currencies are created using computers or specialized hardware known as ASIC miners that calculate hash algorithms (complex formulas). Bitcoin and other crypto currencies have mechanisms built in to regulate how many coins are generated for a certain amount of time. If too many coins are being generated, then the level of difficulty increases to slow down miners. At the same time third party companies are building faster hardware and the difficulty keeps increasing.
 
Due to the popularity and constant increase in difficulty of Bitcoin, others have launched similar currencies like Litecoin and DOGE coin.
 
When Bitcoin was first introduced, anybody with a little know how (and not afraid of the DOS prompt) could generate Bitcoin with their CPU. As the difficulty increased, it was found that Video Cards (GPUs) could mine many magnitudes faster using certain video cards, more specifically the AMD Radeon 7950. As such, these video cards went out of stock very quickly and to this day- it is still difficult to find any in stock. The reason was that AMD, for some reason, optimized a certain portion of the GPU to hash = at superfast speeds.
 
As difficulty increased again, 3rd party companies created what’s known as Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). ASIC hardware was designed for one thing only - and that is to mine Bitcoin. That’s where we stand today: companies keep increasing the speed of their ASIC hardware and the Bitcoin difficulty keeps developing, thus increasing the need for faster hardware.
 
Generating a block (a block is worth 25 bitcoins) is very difficult, and depending on your hardware, could take weeks to months. The idea of pooling the hashing power of many users was introduced to gene blocks faster and divide the revenue based on how many contributions were made to generate the block. So if you have a faster miner, you’ll get more bitcoin.
 
To start mining Bitcoin by yourself you will need the following:
  • An ASIC mining device. The faster the better.
  • A computer or a Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi is preferred for its ultra-low power consumption) to control your ASIC device.
  • Electricity and Internet connection.
  • A wallet used to store your earnings. You can use online wallets like coinbase.com or an offline wallet from Bitcoin-Qt app. If you are using online wallets make sure that you use 2 factor authentication.
  • A mining pool to join. Popular pools as of today’s post are: ghash.io, BTC Guild and Slush’s Pool.
  • Software to mine. cgminer and bfgminer are the 2 most popular and give the most options and device support.
  • Patience! The number of Bitcoins received will depend on the speed of your hardware. Don’t expect a lot unless you invest a significant amount of money.
If you don’t want to invest in expensive hardware for Bitcoin, you can get started with other crypto currencies like Litecoin and DOGE coin using your own personal computer.
 
To start mining using your own personal computer for Litecoin or DOGE coin, you will need the following (very similar to Bitcoin):
  • A computer with a modern (and fast!) Video Card, preferably AMD based as they are the most optimized, and/or an “ASIC scrypt“ device.
  • A wallet used to store your earnings. You can use an offline wallet such as Litecoin-Qt app.
  • A mining pool to join. There are many to choose from: Ghash.io, coinotron.com and ltcrabbit.com are some of the better ones as of today’s post.
  • Software to mine. Older versions of cgminer or bfgminer are the two most popular.
  • Patience! Keep in mind that you won’t get much, unless you buy ASIC based hardware like Gridseed scrypt miners as an example.
Happy mining!
 
We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Fetbi Irsat to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.
 
We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.
 
Warm regards,
 
Point Alliance Team

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

A glimpse into Build 2014

Build is Microsoft’s annual developer conference and is probably one of the biggest developers’ conferences around; this year’s Build has been a truly remarkable one. Microsoft has made a ton of announcements and released a great deal of interesting updates and preview products. It really is a very exciting time to be a Microsoft .NET developer, and I personally am looking forward to building new cool applications with these technologies. So, without further ado let’s take a look at the major things announced at Build 2014.

Windows 8.1 & Windows Phone 8.1 Update

Reportedly Microsoft is already working on the next version of the Windows OS, unsurprisingly named Windows 9, which is slated for release sometime next year. In the meantime, Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 are receiving an update.

The Windows Phone 8.1 update brings Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now called Cortana. Although a late arrival in the smartphone space Microsoft seems to learn fast; Cortana inherits the best of Siri and Google Now. This service is backed by the Microsoft Bing platform and it’s running in the Windows Azure cloud. Demos during the Build sessions were quite impressive, and showcased a lot of new features to the mobile operating system. Microsoft also announced two new device partners and new Nokia phones: Lumia 930, 630 and 635.

The Windows 8.1 update is less impressive than the Windows Phone update, however it brings a lot of improvements in terms of usability for Windows 8.1’s mouse-and-keyboard users. One of the most interesting news about Windows 8.1 was availability of Windows 8.1 for free for every 9” and smaller device. Obviously this is part of Microsoft’s plan to create a rich eco-system around Windows 8.1 and push the operating system to as many devices as possible. Which reminds me of the motto that put Microsoft on the map: “A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software”; the only difference is that now with the Internet of Things, Microsoft is targeting a lot more devices, and not only those running a flavour of Windows.

Microsoft Roslyn

One of the big announcements during Build 2014 was the open-sourcing of C# and VB.NET compilers under Project Roslyn. Live on stage, Anders Hejlsberg made the Roslyn Codeplex repository public and available to anyone to play around with. Why is this important you may ask? Anyone can peek at how a state of the art compiler such as C# and VB.NET compilers are built, but more importantly, anyone can now have access to intimate information about your code that only a compiler has. Also new additions to the language itself can be made by anyone who wishes to contribute.

Windows everywhere

Microsoft is introducing universal Windows apps, a special breed of applications that run on devices powered by Windows operating system ranging from phones to Xbox One consoles. Universal Windows apps are a new way for developers to build apps that run on phones, tablets, PCs and the Xbox One with as much code reuse as possible. The latest update to the Visual Studio 2013 includes support for building universal Windows apps. Developers start with a common source code base and tweak the application’s user interface for different screen factors.

Visual Studio Online

Another big announcement was the general availability for Visual Studio Online (VSO). Visual Studio Online has been in private beta testing for a while now and Microsoft has finally released it to the general public. What exactly is VSO? VSO provides a lightweight, code focused, development environment, running in the Azure cloud. It integrates nicely with source control systems such as TFS and Git. As a complement to the desktop IDE, it’s focused toward building Azure websites. VSO has a continuous integration feature available where you can schedule automatic deployments to Azure websites directly from your TFS or Git repository. VSO is available to everyone, free (with some limitations on the functionality) for teams up to 5 members.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC

VS 2013 Update 2 RC is not a biggie, however it’s worth noting some of the things that would make your life as a .NET developer more interesting.
  •  Mads Kristensen introduced the new and improved Web Essentials with tons of goodies such as new or improved editors for Saas, Less, Browser Link menu directly injected into the webpage, Markdown support, improved stylesheet support, and many more. Head to the official Web Essentials website (http://vswebessentials.com) for a complete list.
  •  An ASP.NET project template for the direct creation of Azure websites, as well as artefacts such as PowerShell scripts for deployment and the ability to remotely debug an Azure website directly from Visual Studio.
  •  Universal Applications project template for creation of applications that run across all devices powered by Windows 8.1 OS.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure news is probably the biggest thing at this year’s Build. Scott Guthrie, the newly appointed EVP of Cloud and Enterprise Group, in his Keynote address talked about no less than 44 announcements. Here is a list of most notable ones:
  •  Preview version of the new Azure Portal that brings together management, operations, and development tools (VSO)
  •  Basic tier for compute instances which similar in CPU and memory with the Standard ones but cost roughly 26% less
  •  General availability of
  •  Azure websites basic tier
  •  Scheduler
  •  Read-access geographically redundant storage
  •  Auto Scale
  •  Azure automation public preview now available

This is just a summary of the announcements at this year’s Build conference. If you are interested in further details about any of the topics, please head to the Channel 9 website (http://channel9.msdn.com/events/Build/2014) where you can find the complete list of sessions and the recordings available.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Claudiu Tomescu to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.

Warm regards,

Point Alliance Team

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

What's to love about consulting?

Consulting has been a career choice for me since 1990. I had no idea what I was getting into when I made that choice. I was fresh from university studying business and working at an incentive marketing firm when I met the owners of the consulting firm I started my career with. In the various full and part-time jobs leading up to this point I had discovered I had an aptitude for technology and the owners saw some of my potential and offered me an opportunity that changed my life.

The firm I started with employed 7 people. During those early years, it was easier to take big risks on unproven technology platforms, more bleeding edge than leading edge some days. As my knowledge grew, my passion and thirst for more experiences grew. Consulting quickly turned into the best feeding ground for my brain. It fed my creativity and desire to solve puzzles. Everything is a puzzle, how do you make this system talk to that system, how do you improve a business process, how do you find value in the data being captured, and the list goes on.

As my knowledge expanded and my career grew and the company I started with grew I found many successes and of course some failures. I discovered I mostly enjoyed designing solutions that were about making things better for businesses and people. There would be no business without people and getting the buy-in of affected people was critical to the success of any project. Many people are resistant to change and sometimes cannot or will not see the value of a solution begin implemented. It is important as a consultant that this resistance is managed through communication, both listening and coaching. I was thankful for my business education as it created a strong foundation that allows me to create a bridge of understanding between business and technology.

One of the most stressful times during my career was when the first firm I started with was bought by a large organization. At this point we were over 100 people and were merged with several other small consulting firms into this larger organization with offices in several locations around the world. It was a culture shock to say the least. It was very political and had a culture that did not put the value of their people at the top of their priorities. There were many layoffs that were poorly handled such as letting go an entire team by cell phone just before Christmas. By this point I had worked with many different clients of varying sizes and industries and saw many different organizational cultures, some positive and some negative. But to see such a negative culture in the very organization I worked for reinforced my belief that to be successful you needed a positive organizational culture. Within 2 years I had left this organization just before they were bought by another even larger organization who practically decimated much of the management. At this point I went to work for a global firm in the insurance industry for 2 years. During that time I was evaluating what I wanted to do next in my career. I had discovered by the end of those 2 years that working in one industry just wasn’t for me in the long term. I needed to keep expanding my knowledge not just in technology but in different businesses and industries. I also desired the flexibility and less structured culture of a smaller organization. Thus my return to consulting in 2004.

I work in a small firm again with people I value and trust. Some of whom I’ve worked with before. We have the same fundamental beliefs. Our success is based on our clients’ successes. That it’s not just about the technology but also about being that trusted consultant in helping our clients discover new ways of doing business. It’s exciting to work with intelligent driven people and on interesting projects. It’s stimulating to be able to learn new businesses and their cultures and processes.

I have met a lot of fascinating and some challenging people along the way. I’ve worked with an amazing array of companies in almost every industry you can imagine. I’ve travelled to some interesting locations such as Australia, Singapore, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, England and all across Canada and the U.S. There was a time when I travelled so frequently that I lost the desire to travel abroad for vacations. In late September 2013 my desire to travel abroad returned and in the past 6 months have braved flying again and visited southern Ireland for 2 weeks and taken a week long cruise around the Caribbean in March 2014. I am already planning my next vacations, a trip to Scotland and a cruise through the Grenadine Islands on a sailing ship.

Consulting is a journey of life experiences full of ups and downs and twists and turns. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t always fun, but it was and is after nearly 25 years still challenging and creatively satisfying.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Jan Crowe to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.

Warm regards,

Point Alliance Team

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

MVVM JavaScript frameworks and how they have changed Web application development


In the beginning, JavaScript was mainly used to validate user input without doing a round trip to the server.  As web browsers matured, so did JavaScript.

The first major evolution for JavaScript were libraries like jQuery, Dojo, MooTools and Prototype.  These libraries allowed frontend developers to manipulate the HTML document library easily without worrying about different browser implementations of JavaScript.

With that being said, MVVM can be considered asthe second major evolution for JavaScript.

What is MVVM?  MVVM stands for Model View View Model and allows developers to create model(s) of the data to be displayed and the view(s) to display them.
MVVM was originally defined by Microsoft for use with Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, since its launch in 2005.

The model holds the data and the view automatically displays whatever is in the model, and vice versa.

Let’s say that you are selling products and want to present the user with a list of products that they can search, filter, etc.  Clicking on a product will display the details and hopefully lead to a sale!

With a traditional approach you would need to:
1. Create a page to show all of your categories
2. Create a page to display a list of products per category
3. Create a page to display the details of the product

With the MVVM approach, you can do all of this with in one page:
1. Create a model that will hold your categories
2. Create a model that will hold your products
3. Create a model that will hold your product details

Initially no products will exist in your products model, so nothing will display.  Clicking on a category will fetch all of the products from the backend which will cause the products to display.  Clicking on a product will clear the categories and product list and fetch the product details from the backend, thus automatically displaying the product details.  When the user modifies the quantity input field, the model also updates automatically.  When the user clicks on ‘Add to Cart’, it would then pass the model to the backend.

Though you can do this without MVVM, the automatic binding between the models and the UI is what makes this simple and valuable.

Some of the more popular MVVM libraries are Angular, Knockout, and Ember.  Because these libraries reside in the browser you can use any modern web stack to drive them, like ASP.NET, ASP MVC, PHP, Java, etc...

Technology is changing constantly, and it seems like there are new ways of doing things every day.  Some of them stick around and some don’t make it.  It looks like MVVM is here to stay as it effectively simplifies web application development and it just simply works!

We hope you have found this week’s edition of “To The Point” by Fetbi Irsat to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.

Warm regards,
Point Alliance Team

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Mobile App Development Trends

A recent IDC forecast of shipments of tablets and smartphones predicts that by 2017, 87% of connected device sales will be tablets and smartphones. More specifically, the forecast predicts that 5-inch devices will take the lead, followed by 7 and 9-inch tablets. Computer sales, on the other hand, are slowing down and the sales forecast is not encouraging.

These forecasts underscore the direction that enterprises should focus their efforts on:  mobile development and connected devices and how to get the most out of these investments. More and more businesses are adopting the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model, and enterprises have to adjust their infrastructure to support this model. With that being said,this is not an easy task given the fast pace within the connected devices market.

With respect to the line of business applications, enterprises need to start planning how to move them into the mobile space. This could be achieved by building either mobile-enabled web applications or native applications. Each of these options has its pros and cons, and they should be considered carefully ( this topic will be detailed in a future post- stay tuned!). For today, let’s  focus on different options available for developing mobile native applications.  More specifically we’re going to focus on the three major platforms out there right now: 1) iOS, 2) Android and 3) Windows Phone.

The vendor behind each platform mentioned above has built the tools required to develop native applications for their respective platform: Apple has Xcode and Objective-C, Google has Android SDK and Java, and finally Microsoft has Visual Studio and Microsoft .NET Framework.

1) ut of the three vendors, Apple is considered to be the most advanced, having a head-start compared to the other two. The iOS has matured since its release back in 2008 (when it was named iPhone OS). Apple has been very keen to deliver state of the art tooling for building applications for the iOS platform, and the Xcode IDE along with the programming language Objective-C has certainly been up toexpectations!

2) Google has taken a different path with the Android platform, by open-sourcing the OS and adopting Java as the language for building applications. A vast majority of the Android developers did adopt Eclipse IDE as their development platform, using plug-ins and tools provided by Google to this end.

3) Microsoft is the newest entrant to the mobile market, and their Windows Phone OS is slowly gaining traction among the public application developers, but mostly among the commercial ones. Building applications for this platform relies heavily on their ubiquitous Visual Studio and Microsoft .NET Framework. This makes it very interesting to those businesses which  already have an important investment in the Microsoft .NET platform.

So, as a business with a big investment in the Microsoft .NET platform, the big question is: how to capitalize on this investment, and build applications not only for the Windows Phone, but for iOS and possibly Android as well? Fortunately, there is an answer to this question: Xamarin. Xamarin is a San Francisco, California based software company created in 2011 by Miguel de Icaza, one of the creators of cross-platform tools Mono for Android and MonoTouch. Xamarin further developed these tools and their current offering includes Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android which allows cross-platform development of native mobile applications for Apple iOS and Google Android platforms using C# programming language and Microsoft .NET Framework. As you can imagine, these tools are already very popular among .NET developers.  Our team at Point Alliance feels that this is best suited approach given our expertise within the Microsoft .NET space.

The latest addition to the cross-platform mobile development tools list is the Telerik Mobile Application Development Platform. This allows web, hybrid and native development, supported by an end-to-end mobile platform. Telerik is well known for its excellent web components suite as well as the Kendo UI suite for web development.

This post is just a brief introduction to the world of mobile development, but please feel free to contact our team if you are interested in find out more about these various options or have a mobile development project idea.

We hope you have found this week's edition of "To The Point" by Claudiu Tomescu to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at:
info@pointalliance.com.

Warm regards,

Point Alliance Team