SPARTA News June 2008

June 2008

SPARTA President’s Corner

by Brad Carson

This month our presentation will be by Mike Fitzgerald of UBS Hainer in Dublin, Ireland, to discuss DB@ Productivity Tools. I look forward to seeing you all at LabCorp on the 24th.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)


June 24 DB2 Productivity Tools from UBS Hainer
July 29 TBA

We need ideas and volunteers for future speakers. Presentations don’t have to be fancy, just informative and interesting. Even a 5 or 10 minute talk can start an interesting interaction. Contact Ron Pimblett by phone as noted below.

2008-2009 SPARTA
Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President
LabCorp 336-436-8294
3060 S. Church St.
Burlington, NC 27215

Ron Pimblett - Vice President
Dignus, LLC 919-676-0847
8354 Six Forks Road
Raleigh, NC 27615

Mike Lockey - Secretary
Guilford Co. Information Services 336-641-6235
201 N. Eugene St.
Greensboro, NC 27401

Tommy Thomas - Treasurer
LabCorp 336-436-4178
231 Maple Ave, Koury Ctr 3rd Fl. 919-361-7267
Burlington, NC 27215

Ed Webb - Communications Director
SAS Institute 919-531-4162
SAS Campus Drive
Cary, NC 27513

Meetings

Meetings are scheduled for the last Tuesday evening of each month (except no meeting in December), with optional dinner at 6:15 p.m. and the meeting beginning at 7:00 p.m.

These monthly meetings usually are held at LabCorp’s Center for Molecular Biology and Pathology (CMBP) near the Research Triangle Park (see last page). Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn right onto Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right into LabCorp complex and turn Left to the CMBP Building. In the lobby, sign in as a visitor to see Tommy Thomas. Tommy will escort you to the conference room.

Call for Articles

If you have any ideas for speakers, presentations, newsletter articles, or are interested in taking part in a presentation, PLEASE contact one of the Board of Directors with your suggestions.

Newsletter e-Mailings

The SPARTA policy is to e-mail a monthly notice to our SPARTA-L Group. The newsletter is posted to the website about five (5) days before each meeting so you can prepare. The SPARTA-L Group is maintained by Mike Lockey at (336) 641-6235; if you have corrections or problems receiving your meeting notice, contact Mike.

February 2006 CBT Tape Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V471 (dated February 28, 2006) are available from www.cbttape.org.

If you need help obtaining one or more files, contact Brad Carson at LabCorp or Ed Webb at SAS (see Board of Director’s list for contact info).

Minutes of the May 20, 2008 Meeting

(Editor: Minutes not available at time of publication)

Treasurer’s Report for June 2008

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $1283.84 as of June 16, 2008.

Financial Report
3/01/2007 through 06/16/2008

Items of Interest

SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2008

contributed by Tommy Thomas and Chris Blackshire

June 24 - Chicken
July 29 - Subs
Aug. 26 - BarBQ
Sept. 30 - Pizza
Oct. 28 - Chicken
Nov. 18 - Subs (Nov. 25 = Thanksgiving week)


New Look for SHARE website

August Schedule Online

contributed by Ed Webb

SHARE, the major IBM user group, has updated its website with a new look. Check it out at www.share.org

The session schedule for SHARE in San Jose during the week of August 10-15, 2008, is now online. Check out this webpage at share.org: http://shareew.prod.web.sba.com/displaymod/SingleConf.cfm?conference_id=19. Online Registration and Housing Requests for the summer SHARE are also available now at http://www.share.org/Events/CurrentConference/Registration/tabid/130/Default.aspx. Early registration for SHARE in San Jose ends Friday, June 27, 2008.


Just Do As the Mainframes Do

contributed by Ed Webb

The problem is that most computers in data centers run at 15 percent or less of capacity on average, loafing the rest of the time, though consuming electricity all the while. (In the old days, when they housed a few large computers, data centers were far more efficient. Mainframe computers run at 80 percent of capacity or more.)

No company has longer experience in the care and feeding of data centers than I.B.M., and analysts say improving data center efficiency will involve applying some mainframe-style management disciplines.

To exploit the opportunity, I.B.M., which built its business on mainframes and still sells them, last fall introduced a green data center services unit. The new group signed $300 million in contracts in the fourth quarter of last year, and the business is growing rapidly this year, the company says.

Read the entire New York Times article form June 17, 2008:

Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight
By STEVE LOHR

Engineers who run data centers are in high demand as the growth in such facilities struggles to keep up with the increasing demands of Internet-era computing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/technology/17data.html?ex=1214366400&en=6904a10b38ad5da2&ei=5070&emc=eta1


Cell Phone Tracking

contributed by Chris Blackshire

Daily cell phone tracking confirms we're creatures of habit

By John Timmer | Published: June 04, 2008 - 12:08PM CT

Where does a human's typical day take it? It seems like a simple and somewhat uninteresting question, but neither of these are actually the case. The dynamic movement of human populations has implications for everything from urban planning to epidemic control. Due to ethical and privacy concerns, we actually know more about animal movements than we do about those of people, leaving human daily activity a bit of a black box. A study that will be published in today's issue of Nature opens that box by following the daily travels of cell phone users in Europe for a period of six months. The study finds that, in general, we humans are creatures of habit.

People with radio collars

Animal studies have suggested that many species, from albatrosses to monkeys, follow what's called a Lévy walk, in which many short movements are randomly interspersed with a few larger jumps. Some data based on the movement of banknotes has suggested that humans were likely to move about in much the same way. As the authors of the new study point out, however, money is an indirect marker of human travel; it's not the equivalent of placing a radio collar on commuters.

Fortunately, commuters have been doing the equivalent of putting radio collars on themselves. The new study is based on an anonymized set of cell phone records obtained from an unnamed European carrier. These include the location (to within three square km) of every call or text made over a six-month period.

A smaller data set, which registered locations based on bi-hourly push services like pollen levels and weather forecasts, was also available. This was used to confirm that the larger set was not biased by people calling from a limited set of locations. The one weakness of this data is that it lacks data on any times that the phone moves beyond about 1,000 kilometers from its normal range.

The data yielded over 16 million cases where consecutive calls were made from two different locations. When graphed, the distance between these locations trailed off with distance in a way that a simple Lévy walk was unlikely to describe. The authors confirmed this by including time in their calculations: the longer the sampling, the more likely a Lévy walk should produce some long excursions. Again, no evidence for Lévy behavior appeared; as the authors put it, "large displacements, which are the source of the distinct and anomalous nature of Lévy flights, are statistically absent."

Return probability

To determine what dominates human travel, the authors calculated what they call the return probability, the likelihood that a person will wind up in the same location after a set time period. In a result that will surprise no one, they discovered a strong 24-hour periodicity to this data. In contrast to a random walk, there are huge peaks every 24 hours, indicating that most people wind up in the same places every day.

The authors then ranked the most frequent locations of individuals, and found that the probability of finding them there was remarkably simple: it could be approximated by one divided by that rank, regardless of how many locations a given subject was found in over the course of the study. The authors also
found that, when the direction of travel is removed from the data, plots based on distance traveled produce very similar-looking shapes. They followed up on this by plotting the magnitude of a given trip based on the typical distance traveled by that individual, and found that they produce essentially identical data for the entire study population. The implication is that all humans behave more or less the same; they simply travel different distances in doing so.

The authors reached a pretty simple conclusion: "people devote most of their time to a few locations." They explain the difference with the data based on money by noting, "Individuals display significant regularity, because they return to a few highly frequented locations, such as home or work. This regularity does not apply to the bank notes: a bill always follows the trajectory of its current owner; that is, dollar bills diffuse, but humans do not."

The authors suggest that, given a limited amount of information about the population in a given area, their results will allow an accurate calculation of finding a typical resident of that area in a given location. This presumably won't work for tracking something like a global epidemic, where rare, long-distant trips may be very significant. But it could help greatly in modeling the epidemic's path through individual metropolitan areas, which may be more valuable from the public-health perspective.

Study, secretive cell phone tracking raises concerns
By: Tim Barker
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A bit of a fuss is being raised over a recent study by Northeastern University that tracked the movements of some 100,00 people through their cell phones. This story details the concerns raised by some critics, who object to the idea of tracking people without their knowledge or consent.

The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.

Researchers haven't said where they did the tracking, referring to it only as an industrialized nation.

They say it was a great way to look at human behavior. For example, the study revealed that people - at least these people - don't tend to venture too far from home. Nearly 75 percent of them stayed primarily within a 20-mile circle for half a year.

Still, the study and its methods are certain to agitate those who worry about the loss of privacy that seems to go hand-in-hand with technological advancements.


Humor


Facts You May Not Know

contributed by Chris Blackshire

'Stewardesses' is the longest word typed with only the left hand.

And 'lollipop' is the longest word typed with your right hand.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

'Dreamt' is the only English word that ends in the letters 'mt'.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

The sentence: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' uses every letter of the alphabet.

The words 'racecar,' 'kayak' and 'level' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes).

There are only four words in the English language which end in 'dous': tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: 'abstemious' and 'facetious'.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

A snail can sleep for three years.

Almonds are a member of the peach family.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.

The cruise liner, QE 2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

Now you know more than you did before!!


Computer Support Phrases

contributed by Chris Blackshire

While reading some incident outage tickets, these amusing phrases were found. Enjoy!

"Application-name" is an administrive system used to collect and process information.

If this process also fails, further investigation will follow.

Gather statistics for suspect tables in production.

They are seeing unfavorable behavior happening in the database, and will attempt to force good behavior by tweaking the database using configuration hints set in a special administrative configuration table.

The outlined recovery plan is stalling.

The production run is doing really well and our vendor is leaning towards keeping with this alternate solution.

The information could come at any time. As soon as the information becomes available, another outage update will be sent.

Today is the scheduled reboot window for the server, but it did not recover from the reboot.

As time has progressed, those issues have cleared somewhat.

The problem is believe to be with the Operating System. Support are investigating further.

At that time it is hoped that the old OS can be repaired.

Impact is low at this time as it is out of working hours.

The team has elected to not receive another update until after the electrical work has completed.

The technical team is now turning focus to determining the cause and solution for the original outage condition.

The team has not received any other negative reports on performance.

We do not have a firm estimate of return to normal service at this time.

One of the servers had a firmware upgrade over the weekend, however this has been ruled out as a cause of the issue.

Problem with the application was found to be a hint that was longer than the field allowed.

Hence we will carry the testing of the query into tomorrow, during regular business hours in order to complete the testing and verify the result.

It is not possible to give an estimate on exactly how long the restore will take until such a time as the restore has actually begun and we have an idea on the data throughput.

If everything is now okay, it should only be a few minutes before the application team can be handed the server to begin their process of recovering the data links.

I've checked my 2 jobs and I see that they are firm now.

Application-X ran well but it failed at this particulat point of sending the info to application-Y.

The problem was resolved by shutting down and restarting the database.

I have analysed the program with trace command. It seems that program ran yesterday with infinite loop. And now the program is running good.

Troubleshooting continues, and the support team is currently in the process of changing out the suspect parts in attempt to remediate the issue.


Frog Loan

contributed by Chris Blackshire

A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack.

'Miss Whack, I'd like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday.'

Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name. The frog says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it's okay, he knows the bank manager.

Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some collateral.

The frog says, 'Sure. I have this,' and produces a tiny porcelain elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed.

Very confused, Patty explains that she'll have to consult with the bank manager and disappears into a back office.

She finds the manager and says, 'There's a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and he wants to use this as collateral.'

She holds up the tiny pink elephant. 'I mean, what in the world is this?'

(you're gonna love this)

The bank manager looks back at her and says...

'It's a knickknack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan, His old man's a Rolling Stone.'

(You're singing it, aren't you? Yeah, I know you are........)

Never take life too seriously! Come on now, you grinned, I know you did!!!

Have a lovely day.

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Date: Tuesday, June 24, 2008
7 p.m.

Location: LabCorp in the RTP

Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn right onto Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right into LabCorp complex and turn left to the CMBP Building. In the lobby, sign in as a visitor to see Tommy Thomas. Tommy will escort you to the conference room.

Free Food: Chicken, Drink, Dessert

Program:

DB2 Productivity Tools

Speaker:

Mike Fitzgerald of UBS Hainer