Note: NullPointerException when accessing Dashboard and Analytics Setup (BOXI 3.0)

NullPointerException: Dashboad and Analytics Setup

When using the dashboard and analytics setup for the first time, you might end up at this stack trace screwup:

java.lang.NullPointerException
    at com.bo.aa.util.SecurityStore.GetLogonToken(SecurityStore.java:28)
    at com.bo.aa.util.SecurityStore.getSecurityValue(SecurityStore.java:79)
    at com.bo.aa.impl.DBServerImpl.getSecurityToken(DBServerImpl.java:166)
    at org.apache.jsp.jsp.appsHome_jsp._jspService(appsHome_jsp.java:536)
    at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:97)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802)
    at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.service(JspServletWrapper.java:334)
    at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.serviceJspFile(JspServlet.java:314)
    at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.service(JspServlet.java:264)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:252)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:213)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:178)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:126)
    at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:107)
    at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:148)
    at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:869)
    at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11BaseProtocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.processConnection(Http11BaseProtocol.java:664)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.PoolTcpEndpoint.processSocket(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:527)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.runIt(LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.java:80)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:684)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)

Reason:
This is caused since performance management needs a separate user account to function.

This is set in the file //businessobjects/performance management12.0  /initConfig.properties

Solution:
1. Create a new user name with no password, belonging to the administrator group and update initConfig.properties with this information.

2. Wihtin Central Configuration Manager, restart both Apache Tomcat and Server Intelligence Agent.

3. Login to InfoView using the new credential and Violla!

java.lang.NullPointerException
    at com.bo.aa.util.SecurityStore.GetLogonToken(SecurityStore.java:28)
    at com.bo.aa.util.SecurityStore.getSecurityValue(SecurityStore.java:79)
    at com.bo.aa.impl.DBServerImpl.getSecurityToken(DBServerImpl.java:166)
    at org.apache.jsp.jsp.appsHome_jsp._jspService(appsHome_jsp.java:536)
    at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:97)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802)
    at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.service(JspServletWrapper.java:334)
    at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.serviceJspFile(JspServlet.java:314)
    at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.service(JspServlet.java:264)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:252)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:213)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:178)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:126)
    at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:107)
    at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:148)
    at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:869)
    at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11BaseProtocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.processConnection(Http11BaseProtocol.java:664)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.PoolTcpEndpoint.processSocket(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:527)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.runIt(LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.java:80)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:684)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)

Gartner 2009 Strategic Technologies

Although a slightly old post, but here is an interesting article by Gartner on the 2009 Stratgic Technologies. A motivation to relook at this Oct, 2008 vision a quarter later reveals the accuracy of the vision.

2009 began with a downturn economy and sales strategy focusing on fixing things, a rather reactive approach but in the world of information technology, things are getting better. Lots of convergence, huge strides in maturity, increase in motivation and an aggressive roadmap.

Gartner presents the top 10 Strategic Technologies enlisted here:

Virtualization
Cloud Computing
Beyond Blade Servers
Green IT
Web Oriented Architectures
Enterprsie Mashups 2.0
Specialised Systems
Social Software and Social Networking
Unified Communications
Business Intelligence

My understanding of the list actually streams Gartner’s choices into three:

Infrastructure
NextGen Applications
Business Intelligence

Infrasructure:
Virtualization is a massive stride forward in server consoildation and to an extent lowering licensing costs of software for organisations. As the usage of virtualization increases within companies, the need for virtualization management and security has increased. Enterprises already at a mature state of virtualization will further focus on collaboration of their virtual platforms with existing physical infrastrcture, more invisibility of virtualization on networks and capabiliites to take snapshots for cloning physical servers arrangements and configurations including software.
Pain points for the year will be virtualization security as the need for bringing virtualization into mainstream environments will reveal aspects of security specific to this line of technology.

Cloud Computing will further SaaS models and the business model’s appeal will increase in emerging markets like the Middle East and the Far East. This is coupled by the reason of increased investments in telecommunication backbones and greater awareness of outsourcing IT maintaince to service providers offering services on the cloud.
However, there are many pain points ranging from raising costs of telecom and sporadic skepticm in TCO of the SaaS business model in markets like the Middle East. Pain points remain the height of exceeding expacations and lack of best practices to adopt for most organizations.

Green IT and Blade dissappearance can be duly served by the changing trends in the software consupmtion behavior from products to services) where service providers determine these initiatives. However, Green IT  will not be adopted widely during this continued recession phase.

Next Gen Apps:
SOA is reaching its plateau of productivity on the Gartner’s Hype Cycle and will further enterprise mashups. This technology has already given a direction to evolve web standards and architectures influenced a wider range of application connectivity leading to benefits harnessed by other technologies and applications including social networking applications, collaboration and business intelligence. However, with the emerging trends of converged networks, pervasive computing applications including location aware, embedded systems will increase as well. Companies already having a level of this will continue to invest in application semantics using BPM automation, service orchestrations and semantic web services. Certain vendors have already started to bring forward their product offerings in these areas.

Business Intelligence:
It is prime time for BI to flourish, already aggressively growing in 2007 and 2008 according to both Gartner and TDWI, BI makes its justifaction for greater compliance, visibility, transparency, something whcih the post-recession period demands. This period also serves the motivation for organsiations to focus on their performance management. Business Intelligence offerings has a wider portfolio to offer this year with many vendors offering (or acquiring) data management appliances including Teradata, Greenplum, Microsoft etc. Last year vendor consolidation has brought greater strength to individual portfolio of each BI provider. SaaS models are also avaiable as alternatives giving customers much flexibility and even possiblity to mature their BI initiatives. Costs of implmementing Business Intelligence will go down for organisations with experience in consuming SaaS and those ready to invest in open source BI which has reached impressive maturity.
However, Predictive Analytics is still to go mainstream this year but is a probable reality in coming years.

Bill Gates

BBC presented a documentary titled ‘How a Geek Changed the World’, the Geek epitomized here is Bill Gates, who needs little introduction. He co-founded Microsoft Co. the biggest economic revolution of the modern times. The age of technology boomed by his vision of personal computing which has become inevitable now. However, as he retires now and hangs his boots from Microsoft, a new era has had already begun in technology, the rise of the Open Enterprise, with movements like the Free Software Foundation radicalizing the way technology is to be consumed. As much as Bill Gates and co were ridiculed by the likes of IBM for favoring desktop computing, Bill Gates has been throughout his career been an anti-open source and anti-FSF advocate and with the muscle of technology lock-in on nearly the entire world, he tried all he could to carry out controversies most famous of which being with Netscape.

Although one has to give credit to Bill Gates for revolutionizing technology to the masses, to non-techies and geeks no matter how he did it. His business savvy is admirable reflected by his ability to solve various business challenges using his technologies.

Although as his retirement approached, several changes took place, the cathedral and the bazaar foresighted it, the emergence of Google also boosted the open source movement and Microsoft in all the gone by years opposing it, finally shows the white flag. Microsoft’s own open source repository can be found out at their recently launched www.codeplex.com website.

He presents his retirement to the world with a light comedy but the jokes has been on him, Yahoo! venture being a near disaster, Microsoft embarrassed by the stubbornness and ego to give in, the failure of their flagship product (Windows Vista) might not show an opportune moment for him to leave but the end has finally come.

A new era has begun in computing. But with all due respect (with a lot of reservations), to a man who showed that achievement is more important that paper degrees, Bill Gates finally at the mercy of historians now…

ActiveSync Alternative for Linux

Windows Mobile based gadgets use the elusive ActiveSync protocol which Microsoft hasnt released yet for public use. However, for me to get my O2 XDA Cosmo (HTC Excalibur s620, T-Mobile DASH etc) to run on my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbons, it wasnt a trivial choice as I had to choose between several promised but incomplete and buggy open source tools. Until I came across SynCE, another oper source alternative, things were gloomy.

It wasnt as trivial to get SynCE going as well due to various library conflicts and an inability for me to properly configure my firewall to allow a Remote NDIS based connectivity between the SynCE tools and the device. However, thanks to this guide, major things were resolved, I however, chose minor alternatives when choosing my source files to get it going for my device.

For me, usb-rndis didnt work, but the newer version usb-rndis-lite did.
For some reasons, GnomeVFS 0.11 still doesnot work for my device, however I tried the GnomeVFS 0.10 as recommended on SynCE website to finally enable Nautilus to recognize my device contents as a remote site.

I am still unable to actually sync anything between Thunderbird and this device. There is a possibility to hack Multisync to synchronize the above two but thats for later….

Startup Insiders – The Art of the Start

There is a healthy activity going on these days in the Pakistan IT scene. P@SHA (Pakistan All Software Houses Association) alongwith some volunteering entrepreneurs are running an evangelising campaign for budding tech entrepreneurs in Pakistan. They have recently started to publish their videos too. Check this:

All due credit to Ali Raza Shaikh, CEO of Nuvica Inc. for this video.

Inspired from that from atleast the feel-good-about-Pakistan-IT-Setup-And_Enthusiasm feeling, I came across this and found it worthwhile to share it here:::

Wacky Week of IT

I have been computing for the last 13 hours and right now my mind is going bizzurk. In a news that took my attention, SAP  is planning to acquire Business Objects, yippee!!! I love this company coz its German, no more America Number 1 in Software as long as SAP makes them run harder. Recently they have become pretty smart, the move to make a deal with Microsoft paid off well. and now as I am about to write my master thesis in data mining at SAP’s largest research center, the news of SAP going BI materializes by this acquisition. Earlier Hyperion was acquired by Oracle and Microsoft is in the game too. As far as im in BI and im backing up SAP, this is a great news. But what worries me is that Oracle already has a strong data mining software so Hyperion, more into reporting and integration does them fine. As for SAP, Bussiness Objects is just a basic BI suite, no fancy predictive analytics or other data mining goodies around. Maybe they are into acquiring data mining rising stars or they r looking forward to release a few surprises when they release the new reborn SAP, written from the ground up….again!

On another news this time, Some bloggers are spamming that Microsoft goes open source with .NET 3.5, had it been true, would have been the greatest news of the decade. The thought that came which was besides being naive was also the first one was that the Mono community will get a booost here, no booze for the Redmond laddies but it turned out fake. Microsoft is slick enough not to make that move….just yet. Its a season of licensing and as the GPLv3 hits the roads, developers are moaning already. It so intimidating that Google Inc. announced (or rather rumored…) that they r about to release their own license whcih will free developers from all the legalities of innovating. The Microsoft’s version of license, they call Microsoft Reference License only allows them to use it to debug, and a few other productivity things, NO sharing and NO community stuff, still hiding thier paintings….

Oh ya, what am I talking about, its Whaky week of IT, everyone is doing hot stuff but apparently someone stole 13 hard drives from one of our ministries, how lame, or rather how laymanish…..can’t find the source again, thats right now, im too sleeepyyyy….

Quote….Unquote

“Find a bug in a program, and fix it, and the program will work today. Show the program how to find and fix a bug, and the program will work forever.”
- Oliver G. Selfridge, in AI’s Greatest Trends and Controversies

If an expert system–brilliantly designed, engineered and implemented–cannot learn not to repeat its mistakes, it is not as intelligent as a worm or a sea anemone or a kitten.
-Oliver G. Selfridge, from The Gardens of Learning.

Both quotes taken from the AAAI page on machine learning. Quite inspiring arent they, this gets me motivated now to begin my machine learning assignment on ID3 decision tree learning.
so adios for now!