Opinions, Expertise, Passion.

I was reading today in a printed magazine Business Week the article Beyond Blogs. It’s unusual these days to actually read on paper what we can find on our online world.

What’s interesting is the printed article did actually contain content I didn’t find online. There was a section called “We Didn’t See ‘em coming”, and it’s finally important site mentioned was iTunes. I found the following comment extremely relevant. “…. But we didn’t guess it would become the leading destination for podcast downloads. Contrary to our expectations, podcasts have evolved into a feature of traditional radio, not a rival to it.”

It’s important that with any business model you know, understand and review consistently your competitors. I find many organizations that don’t do this. You need to know your competitor. But as mentioned with iTunes, the designers of podcasts could have easily considered radio to be a competitor initially. One must always evaluate the changing times regularly.

The following are three more quotes of interest.

“But in the helter-skelter of the blogosphere, we wrote, something important was taking place: In the 10 minutes it took to set up a blogging account, anyone with an Internet connection could become a global publisher. Some could become stars and gain power.”

Like the LAMP stack has done for websites, the cost to entry now to get exposure is very low. The problem is now too much content exists to review, compare and evaluate effectively.

“Turned out it wasn’t quite that simple. The magazine article, archived on our Web site, kept attracting readers and blog links. A few professors worked it into their curricula, sending class after class of students to the story. With all this activity, the piece gained high-octane Google juice.“.

I’d not heard of Google juice before.

In relation to Linked In, FaceBook and MySpace, “While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas. These social connectors are changing the dynamics of companies around the world. Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals,…“.

I was contacted this week by a previous client regarding a failure of processing data. This was a Contact, Financial and Media Management system I developed for a non-for-profit organization a LAMJ stack, and I’ve had to do nothing since deployment in the past 3 years, no bug fixes, no feature enhancements. The only thing lacking is additional management reporting, and data is extracted for this option now.

It runs under commodity Hardware, Linux and MySQL and it’s only unscheduled downtime was an power failure before UPS power was installed. However this all changed last week. Processing of regular scheduled encrypted data simply failed unexpectedly.

A summary of the environment.

• Data is inserted with AES_ENCRYPT(data,key);
• Data is retrieved with AES_DECRYPT(data,key);
• Data is never updated.
• New data is always added, and historical data always remains.
• The application has no end user access to modify data.
• The application has no function anywhere to modify the data, so no rouge happening could have occured.
• An AUTO_INCREMENT column and TIMESTAMP columns provide a level of auditing for data forensics.
• Backup copies of data exist up to 3 years for reference.
• The seed key has not changed.

The problem

Selecting the first 10 rows saved in the table (By AUTO_INCREMENT Key and confirmed by dates), 8 of 10 are now corrupt. Select the last 10 rows inserted, zero are corrupt. Across 20,000 records 75% are now corrupt.

A lot of analysis has been performed to identify and track the data that was recorded, a certain amount of data forensics, and it was confirmed information was successfully processed last month for example. As this performs financial transactions, there is a lot more auditing available and being reviewed however it is simply a mystery that I can’t solve.

• What options remain? is this a Hardware problem, Disk or even Memory.
• What other data maybe corrupt?
• How can more investigation occur to track the cause of the problem.

mysql> select version();
+------------------+
| version()        |
+------------------+
| 4.1.10a-standard |
+------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)