Charonite Blog

EU Project: The Social Network Graph

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:41:00 +0000

Charonite has recently had another Research & Development project funded by EU ERDF funds, called MAPGRAPH, which aims to study the graph structure of social networks in depth, while creating fast efficient algorithms that aim to answer questions like:

Who are the most influential people in a graph?
How can social network information be incorporated in the best way to improve search engine results?
What improvements can be made to speed up social graph processing?
Given a particular user, what other users exhibit similar behaviour? (this is technically known as collaborative filtering)
And many other interesting R&D areas...

The ERDF funding was obtained after undergoing a competitive proposal process administered by Malta Enterprise. The MAPGRAPH project is expected to go on until mid-2012 and a team of expert researchers with backgrounds in IT/CS, maths, and physics has been setup internally to carry out the research work.

Charonite has already had another R&D project funded by EU ERDF funds last year, concerning computer vision and traffic applications. The success of this project, together with our past experience working on FP5, FP6 and FP7 projects, coupled with our initiative to eventually achieve CMMI Level 5 and the use of ITIL/PRINCE2 project management methods is paying off by making our team achieve results in a more consistent and predictable manner.

GPU Computing

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 10:03:00 +0000

One of the core competences at Charonite is GPU computing and high performance computing solutions. Our highly skilled team of HPC developers have extensive experience in developing and applying GPU based solutions in a variety of industries, with a special focus on the transportation, data mining, search engine and image processing industries.

The use of GPU computing to speed up algorithms provides a low-cost way of achieving performance levels to that approaching entry-level supercomputing. The main appeal of GPU computing is the fact that the cost barrier to entry is very low: most graphic cards used by gamers already can run GPU programs and compared to the cost of specialised computing hardware, the cost is minimal.

The speedup that can be achieved by implementing a GPU version of a particular algorithm can be extremely significant - we have often achieved speedups well in excess of 100%, sometimes even in the 1000% to 5000% range! Naturally, it takes experience in both algorithm analysis, highly parallel programming and an almost obsessive attention to detail in order to achieve the best performance out of the computing hardware.

We prefer the use of the nVidia CUDA programming language as it has the best support so far in the industry (we can also provide solutions using OpenCL but this is less in demand and has less support for developers in the type of solutions we have implemented so far).

Charonite's expertise and services that are offered in the area covers various aspects including:

Algorithm analysis and conversion to parallel mode
Profiling algorithm performance to identify the best areas for improvement and speedup
Extensive CUDA Programming experience
New algorithm design and R&D
Integration with OpenCV and OpenGL
Use of OpenCL if necessary to use non-nVidia hardware
Theoretical and practical aspects of formal algorithm design and development
Application of GPU and HPC concepts in a variety of industries
Image Processing, Data Mining and Search Engine specialisations
Expertise in applying GPU and HPC solutions in the traffic and transport industries

Typical GPU Core used for our CUDA solutions

Charonite has delivered a variety of data mining applications, including customer segmentation for e-Commerce applications and user segmentation in a variety of B2C sites. New modules that natively support GPUs are being added to the Obulus Platform, making it possible for Obulus applications to benefit from the GPU speedups out of the box without any GPU expertise needed on the part of the developers who develop Obulus applications.

An example of recent work that we have carried out in this area, we have recently completed some outsourcing expert work for the ODICIS project in collaboration with Dr. Ing. David Zammit Mangion the University of Malta, which is an EU funded FP7 project that aims to develop a single display cockpit by employing state of the art technologies.

Another example is the use of CUDA in our traffic analysis products, where we have received EU ERDF funding to develop advanced image processing and computer vision algorithms that automatically track a variety of vehicles, while using low-power GPU hardware that can lead to improvements in traffic flow, monitoring and control.

Kindly contact us for more information about our GPU programming and development expertise at info@charonite.com.

Transport Information Days

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:19:00 +0000

Charonite recently participated in the Transport Information Days held in Brussels on the 18 and 19 July at the Charlemagne Building. The event was organised by the European Commission’s Research Directorate General and aimed to inform potential researchers and companies about the new Transport Calls for Proposals under the co-operation programme under FP7.

Charonite is currently seeking partners to participate in FP7 proposal in the transportation area, concentrating mainly on Surface Transport, while looking to expand activities in the maritime and aviation areas. Our personnel have experience in participating in FP5, FP6 and FP7 projects and we have built up a robust research portfolio over the years.

Our research and development team consisting of around 20+ experienced developers and researchers have experience in working in a cross-country environment, as our company has offices within two EU member states (Malta and the UK), and also in the UAE and Australia.

Angelo Dalli, CEO, presenting Charonite in Brussels

For more information about Charonite's research and development activies, please have a look at our Charonite Labs section on our website and our blog, which presents latest news and informal posts giving additional insight into our company's activities.

Augmented Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:23:00 +0000

At Charonite we encourage our development team to carry out research in a wide variety of related areas, giving enough latitude, flexibility and support that enables innovation to be carried out quickly and efficiently. Part of the philisophy behind this approach is that it fosters new products and innovative ideas to grow organically from within our organisation, drawing upon the strengths and skills of our highly talented staff.

One of the recent prototypes developed involved the use of Augmented Reality (AR) technology, using a combination of off-the-shelf hardware such as the Sony PS3 PlayStation Eye to track the user and the Nintendo Wiimote to track hand movements and acceleration accurately. The user wears AR glasses which simultaneously film what the user is seeing, send it to a computer for processing, and then display an AR graphic overlay that appears to be seamlessly integrated with the real world.

Augmented Reality prototype in action

At Charonite we are currently evaluating the use of AR technology in various applications including intelligent transport systems, vehicle information augmentation, ANPR / LPR augmentation, UAV control, and data mining results visualisation. Prototypes that show enough promise will then form part of our R&D pipeline and hopefully open up new collaboration with other industrial partners. The AR software prototypes are built using a mixture of proprietary algorithms and open source systems such as PTAM.

For more information about AR please have a look at the Wikipedia entry on AR.

For more information about Charonite's R&D activities, have a look at our Labs section.

Scoop New Version Launched

noreply@blogger.com (Angelo Dalli) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:19:00 +0000

We have recently launched a new version of Scoop, our on-street and off-street traffic enforcement product that offers a streamlined parking enforcement solution. Scoop automates the legal process of collection of penalty charges from vehicle owners and provides a complete tool kit for asset-owners, such as private land owners, local authorities, retail and business parks for off-street use. Scoop also has features for local councils, municipalities and other governmental organisations who need to do on-street enforcement.

Scoop Progression Screenshot

The new version of Scoop has been launched in the UK and is currently being phased in at a number of sites in England and Scotland. The new version provides the following improvements:

Enhanced workflow capabilities and ticket progression views
Faster Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) processing and enforcement, capable of dealing with large sites that process thousands of PCNs per day
More flexible enforcement process and configuration
Better support for multiple languages
Better support for multiple regimes and jurisdiction / rules with a new "regime pack" option that allows operators to pick and chose preset rule packs in their deployment site
Enhanced compliance with the Parking Industry Code of Practice
New Scoop Mobile application which compliments the web-based PC / tablet version which runs on rugged mobile devices using the Windows Mobile OS
Modular means of plugging in Blink
Modular means of plugging in speed camera data
New support for Digital Traffic Enforcement systems

Scoop complies with the Road Traffic Act 1984, TMA 2004 and British Parking Association code of practice for parking enforcement. Our Smart SaaS deployment solution together with Scoop mobile allow for flexible configuration scenarios that provide exactly what operators need.

For more information please have a look at our Products section on our website or contact us on sales@charonite.com.

Juicy Fridays: Yorick Wilks

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:39:00 +0000

Charonite's Malta based team has a tradition of regular events held on Fridays for all the development team, called Juicy Fridays. On a Juicy Friday afternoon we discuss various different topics that are of interest to the whole team, in an ongoing effort at continuous improvement.

Occassionally, we invite external speakers to participate at our Juicy Friday events. Recently, Professor Yorick Wilks, who acts as our Chief Scientific Advisor on our advisory board, gave us an inspiring presentation on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Semantic Web. Professor Wilks' insight and depth of experience made for an informative and often entertaining afternoon. As most of our developers have some experience in either NLP or Search Engine technology, the event proved to be quite interesting as various points ranging from the finer points of using RDF as a knowledge representation technique to the future use of NLP techniques in a search engine architecture were raised and discussed.

Professor Yorick Wilks at Charonite

Prof. Wilks brings a wealth of experience to Charonite, having over 40 years of experience in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing.
Amongst other awards, Yorick has won the British Computing Society Lovelace Medal in 2009, which is considered to be one of Britan's highest honours given to individuals who have advanced Information Systems significantly, with past recipients being Sir Tim Berners-Lee (WWW inventor), Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the computer mouse) and Linus Torvalds (Linux original author). Yorick has also won the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, and the Antonio Zampolli Prize in 2008 (similar to the Nobel prize, in the Natural Language Processing field).
Yorick has pioneered various AI technologies, including the invention of one of the first practical Machine Translation systems at Stanford University in 1973, and forming part of the team that won the 1997 Loebner prize in AI.

New Office Building

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 11:23:00 +0000

Charonite will be moving into our own new office building in Q1 2012 in Ta' Xbiex, Malta. The new office building will house all of our Malta based staff and provide working space for our UK based staff when they come over to work in Malta. The groundbreaking process started at the end of February 2011 and construction and finishing work is expected to be carried out by the end of January 2012.

3D Rendering of the New Office Block

The new offices have been designed with state of the art ecologically friendly building techniques as part of our commitment to sustainable and green IT. The offices will have a large photo-voltaic panel installation that will generate most of the electricity used for lighting, efficient insulation and triple glazing to cut down on air-conditioning costs while reducing environmental noise, and better use of natural light whenever possible. The offices also feature a custom-designed environment that is suitable for an advanced technology company like Charonite including fibre-optic interlinks throughout all floors, provisions for development server rackspace, redundant power supply and standby generator systems, and a high security environment. Project management is being provided by WH Works who are also entrusted with the internal finishing and commissioning of the offices.

The new office location is in the upmarket area of Ta' Xbiex, and is located on the seafront with a tranquil garden area and yacht marina in front. The office offers views of the Marsamxett sea harbour and views of Malta's capital city of Valletta.

We look forward to providing further updates around September when the office shell should be completed.

Blink New Version

noreply@blogger.com (Angelo Dalli) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:44:00 +0000

We have recently released a new version of Blink, our access control software, containing major new features that improve the user experience for our customers while providing additional functionality for a wider variety of deployment scenarios.

Blink Access Activity Screenshot

New features that have been added include:

Complete end-to-end encryption of all data including ANPR, RFID and Image/Video data via the new secure Blink Connector+
Enhanced security and encryption including the use of AES256 throughout
Advanced report scheduling and auto-export functions
New control methods for traffic light systems and more integration options with intelligent transport systems
A wider variety of gate control methods for both vehicles and pedestrians
Improved control of barriers in a wider variety of configurations and setup
Additional support for weight in motion systems and weight bridge systems
Improved support for loop based systems
Web based user interface enhancements
New alerts engine with faster realtime alerts and displays

Please have a look at our website for more information or contact us at sales@charonite.com.

Annual Winter Holiday 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Angelo Dalli) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 13:01:00 +0000

One of our staff perks at Charonite is to have a summer and winter event organised for everyone, apart from social activities that are organised intermittently (such as football, baseball, paintball, going out for drinks, etc.). We believe that having team building events in fun locations keep the whole team focused, happy and productive while showing our appreciation towards our hard working staff (as it cannot be all work and no play!).

This year we decided to go to Rome for our winter holiday (previous locations included Pisa, Florence, Venice and Madrid) in our neigbouring country of Italy. The eternal city provided a good backdrop for our team building activities including a carefully planned treasure hunt across the city done by four separate teams.

Tasks included finding an orange Fiat car, a red Vespa scooter, convincing a Carabiniere to pose for a photo (a very difficult task!), taking the usual photos with Roman gladiators, throwing coins into the Fontana di Trevi, attempt to capture all members of the team jumping in the air with the river showing in the background, taking the funniest photo, and so on... As you can imagine it was good fun!

Obviously no trip to Rome would be complete without a visit to well known spots such as the Colosseum, the Vatican, etc. and more modern attractions such as the panoramic lift on top of the truly monumental monument to Vittorio Emanuele III.

Interested in joining our team? Drop us an email on careers@charonite.com. See you next year!

Precision Solutions

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:55:00 +0000

Precision and accuracy are two hallmarks of software quality that should always be emphasized. The best way of ensuring precision and accuracy is via a rigorous testing process. At Charonite we employ the following test practices:

- automated test harnesses that run a number of tests on each module and function, saving the results in a test log and database

- automated regression testing performed after each major build to ensure that new bugs do not creep into tested code and that new features do not break old code

- dependency and impact analysis to identify possible areas that may be affected by the new changes

- prioritised change management procedures that work hand-in-hand with testing procedures to ensure that changes and updates occur in a reliable and pre-planned fashion, with a backup rollback plan always ready in case of problems during the update process

The Obulus platform is also adding automated system simulation and statistical stress test functions that give additional confidence to developers that their application will work properly once deployed on live systems.

Some common issues that we encounter during testing for precision:

- rounding errors especially when using float data types can creep in when processing massive datasets, giving rise to very small numbers that can wreck havoc with code like (account_balance <= 0) which will fail unexpectedly. A common solution that we generally add is to have code like (account_balance <= 0.01) or (account_balance <= OB_PAYMENTS_MIN_THRESHOLD).

- the order of operations in long sequences of floating point calculations may affect the accuracy of the result, especially when the GPU is involved in speeding up the results. A CPU-GPU result set comparison may be useful in such cases to identify discrepancies. We have noticed that these errors may start becoming noticeable only when the dataset has a couple of million entries, so large-scale testing is a must.

- the result calculations should be as traceable as possible. It is very convenient to keep track of the basesources on which a specific result has been produced, as this will aid in identifying errors.

- in cases where performance needs override precision, quick approximations may be developed to give a roughly accurate result which is then refined if more time and resources are available. Quick approximation functions are also useful to generate previews and samples.

- good quality sample simulated data generation routines are a must. Random number sequences should be truly random, artificially generated names and addresses should be similar to real life ones, and most importantly: there should be a percentage of erroneous inputs to simulate real life accurately.

- it is not enough to test for positive cases only but also for negative cases also. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of testing that can really improve precision: do not make assumptions about the system behaviour and try to test for events that should not happen but that may happen if there is an error.

Juicy Fridays: Alex van Someren

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:02:00 +0000

Charonite regularly organises special Friday afternoons for all of the development team with presentations and tutorials on interesting topics, which we call Juicy Fridays. The topics are generally chosen using a mixture of an internal voting based system (anyone can nominate a topic for Juicy Friday) and past topics have included search engine ranking methods, MVC frameworks, semantic web technologies, Natural Language Processing (NLP), image processing and so on.

Our distinguished guest for July 2010 Juicy Friday was Alex van Someren, who is a dealmaker for the Global Entrepreneur Programme by the UK Trade and Investment and a successful serial entrepreneur. Alex gave a very inspiring presentation on his own journey in IT and investments, taking good technical ideas, transforming them into products and then helping raise VC funding and finally taking the company public via an IPO.

Alex van Someren speaking at our Juicy Friday event

Alex started off his career in IT with Acorn Computers in the 1980s, where he was extensively involved in the BBC Microcomputer project. He subsequently co-founded ANT Ltd in 1990 to produce networking products, including Web Browser software licensed to Oracle. ANT plc was listed on the London AIM market (AIM:NCH) in 2005 and is now positioned in the embedded software market for IPTV.

In 1996 Alex co-founded nCipher with venture capital backing to develop internet security products using advanced cryptography. The company became a world leader in IT security, counting major banks, finance companies and governments among its customers. He subsequently raised a total of £14 million in venture capital funding before he led the company to a listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 (LSE:NCH) at a £350 million valuation. nCipher plc was sold to Thales SA in 2008. Alex is the current Chairman of the Prince’s Trust in Cambridgeshire and a Governor of King’s College School, Cambridge.

Summer Event 2010 Archery

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:04:00 +0000

As part of our ongoing social activities we try to organise regular fun team building events for all our staff. This time around we organised a medieval themed archery event together with a medieval themed BBQ (we were influenced by the fact that one of us likes to take part in medieval re-enactments!). We also made the unexpected discovery that we had an actual amateur archer who started working with us - were quite surprised to see that someone was going to bring along their own bow!

An acceptable result from one round...

Get ready to shoot arrows with a medieval bow!

Being held during the World Cup, some football fanatics within our midst just could not handle the fact that they were "far away" in the middle of "nowhere" (this is quite relative, especially since the development team is based in Malta - which is tiny by most comparison scales) and thus may have run the risk of missing out on the football match for that evening (England - Algeria was on that evening...). So, being IT people, a laptop with mobile WiFi was quickly rigged up to stream the game live - not exactly medieval but the World Cup just could not be missed!

World Cup separation anxiety and IT: using mobile WiFi to stream football games live in the middle of nowhere...

Our hosts, a group of people who regularly do medieval re-enactments, prepared a delicious BBQ complete with a roasted hog on a stick (looking exactly like the Asterix and Obelix cartoons) and simple hearty food that everyone loves (and with vegetarian options too!)

Enjoy the summer weather while it lasts!

p.s. Interested in joining us? Drop us a line at info@charonite.com

HTML5 vs Flash

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Mon, 17 May 2010 09:40:00 +0000

Recently there have been quite a lot of debates about HTML5 versus Flash, with the recent introduction of the Apple iPad and the announcement that Apple will not be supporting Flash throwing up a lively debate about the merits and drawbacks of each technology. In this post we are going to look at what HTML5 offers and if it realistically can replace Flash altogether anytime soon.

Flash technology is currently the best way of delivering interactive and graphics rich content in web browsers. The almost universal availability of the Flash plugin in web browsers, coupled by the good development tools and support around it currently make Flash the number one choice for developers who want to provide quick interactivity and offload processing to the client side. The rising popularity of features such as Flash Video (FLV) made sites such as YouTube possible and easy to use.

With the advent of AJAX / JavaScript and dynamic HTML integration, around 2003-2004, notions of pure HTML / JavaScript / CSS based interactive experiences started taking shape. HTML5 addresses these notions and takes them further by providing support for richer user experiences and support for multimedia right in the browser, such as H.264 video codec support in HTML5.

The current issue does seem to be based on two underlying themes: strategic and technical. We will mainly focus on the technical issues here, but there are strong strategic reasons for favouring HTML5 support over Flash and vice-versa. An HTML5 based future will favour Google and its dominance in web search and advertising, while enabling Apple to continue its role as primary arbitrer, platform operator and app gatekeeper on its various hardware platforms. Microsoft can try to acquire market share from Adobe by providing better tools for HTML5 development and promote its own Silverlight solution. Adobe obviously will try to promote Flash, and so on...

HTML5 can be used to provide a similar experience to using Flash, given the right support from additional JavaScript libraries and proper use of AJAX techniques. Admittedly, it is still much harder to achieve a Flash like experience using HTML5 - developers need to be much more experienced and need to overcome many more obstacles than simply using the Flash development tools. Certain initiatives like SVG and 3D open source visualisation formats and data on the web have not been as widely supported as expected, although this may change in the future.

We have recently saw the Wii Mario Kart Round site which provides a good example of a graphical interactive experience that can be achieved in the browser itself without using any form of Flash.

The drawback of web browser compatibility and support is evident when using a non-compliant browser. This is how the Wii Mario Kart site looks like on a non-compliant browser:

This is something that will not happen when using Flash as long as there is a recent Flash plugin installed in the web browser. Developers so far are thus guaranteed consistency with Flash but will be taking a chance on committing completely to HTML5.

Some other good examples of HTML5 usage are those of Ben Joffe's torus game (screenshot below), and Google's Quake II port to HTML5 (see the YouTube video below).

YouTube Quake 2 Video

Many comments about Flash and H.264 seem to be overlooking the fact that H.264 is not such an open content format as people are assuming it to be. The consortium behind H.264, MPEG LA, may impose licensing restrictions and royalties in the future and own patents that expire in 2028. While we hope that MPEG LA will try to avoid another fiasco like the old GIF patent royalty issues, it does mean that the choice of H.264 as a standard open web video format is questionable. It is likely that an open source format with an open source, unfettered license will eventually emerge as a real open alternative that everyone can use without licensing problems. Until then, it is likely that the Flash Video format will remain widely supported and remain the preferred format of choice for delivering multimedia content over the web.

In the future we expect more sites and web based applications to increasingly support HTML5, while possibly seeing Flash being used less over time. Charonite is working towards having full HTML5 support in our Obulus Platform to ensure that our customers benefit from the latest technology implemented in web browsers. Legacy support for Flash will always remain for the time being, especially in components that depend on Flash displays such as the interactive chart / graphing tool in web based reports.

Will HTML5 ever replace Flash entirely? Possibly - but over a longer period of time than Apple would like us to think. One of the main problems that will face HTML5 is to ensure that all independent browser manufacturers implement support in a consistent manner - something that Adobe can ensure in Flash since it controls all distribution and release of Flash technology, while web browser compatibility always has been a headache for developers aiming to release web applications that work consistently across different browsers and browser versions. Better JavaScript support in web browsers is also needed: tests at Charonite using Google Maps and a fairly complicated JavaScript AJAX code shows a staggering 1500% speed difference between loading time in Chrome and Internet Explorer / Firefox, for example. Such speed differences and compatibility issues have to go away before the HTML5 / AJAX combination becomes a truly viable alternative for rich media web applications to tightly controlled technology such as Flash.

Deployment issues will also be made easier with a consistent HTML5 / JavaScript deployment model - currently Flash offers a lot of advantages to developers due to its consistent Flash runtime environment. Offline applications are also much easier to develop using Flash than pure JavaScript, which currently requires writing entire applications using JavaScript and using something like Google Gears for deployment. Geolocation and additional services will eventually become standard in both, so this is not likely to make much difference towards HTML5 adoption.

Our opinion is that HTML5 will be increasingly used to provide a significant amount of functionality that is currently being offered by Flash, while on the other hand, Flash will still be utilised to provide rich interactive applications that need to be deployed in a consistent manner across various browsers and hardware platforms.

p.s. To check the HTML5 compatibility ratings of your browser use the HTML5 Test being developed at Github. Internet Explorer 7 got a score of 11/160, Google Chrome 4.1 scored 118/160 and Firefox 3 scored 31/160. We have not tested the Safari and Opera score, although these are likely to be somewhere between Firefox and Chrome.

Recommended related book:

Achieving Fast Performance in Web Based Applications

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:49:00 +0000

Fast performance is absolutely necessary when serving web-based applications to thousands of users simultaneously. Performance issues can arise at different points, including the network level (due to congestion caused by network traffic loads and bandwidth issues), application level (due to inefficiencies or bottlenecks in code), web server level (due to overload), the user interface level (due to unresponsive web-based interfaces) and the platform level (due to overload and large datasets).

At Charonite we are constantly researching new ways of improving the performance of web-based applications. We have found from experience that measuring and logging performance is absolutely critical to troubleshooting performance problems efficiently.

At the network level, congestion can often be reduced by having applications that prioritise data communications automatically, using intelligent "rationing" of bandwidth and giving priority to smaller, critical data over larger, less critical data. For example, our intelligent transport system applications give priority to small pieces of data like vehicle license plates, and give lower priority to routine images and videos coming from monitoring applications. Intelligent caching and layers of proxies can help in reducing the number of overall queries and internal data transfers that need to be handled by the system. Reducing the amount of disk bound I/O also helps to increase data throughput significantly. Using simple network settings like enabling GZIP compression for HTML data in the webserver can also significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth usage needed.

At the application level, using profiling tools and good algorithm design and appropriate choice of suitable data structures generally produce the best improvements in performance. Profiling helps find bottlenecks easily and ensure that yet unnoticed problems are proactively found and fixed. Often, simple fixes in algorithms, such as reducing the number of unnecessary loops and disk reads can provide significant performance boosts. Good knowledge of data structures and their behaviour under different real-life loads For database bound applications, analysing slow query logs and the structure of SQL statements can improve performance literally by hundreds of times with intelligent query modifications and rewrites. Asynchronous events are also generally useful for fast reaction times, while synchronous polling cycles limited to a max number of items for processing per cycle are useful in realtime environments where data throughput and processing times need to be guaranteed and modelled formally.

At the web server level, various strategies can be employed to improve performance, including having multiple separate web server farms to serve dynamic and static content. Dynamic content that does not change often can also be cached and later on served via a simple web server that offloads some of the demand on more complicated portions of the web application automatically. We recommend the use of the Apache web server with a customised configuration that keeps just the necessary modules loaded in the server.

At the user interface level, using techniques such as AJAX will ensure a faster and more responsive user interface. Newer technologies such as HTML5 support look promising and will provide an even better user experience in the near future. Using thicker clients such as Flash or Java applets can also provide faster performance, especially for graphics intensive uses, however we generally try to use such techniques as a last resort - proper use of HTML and CSS can give a lot of performance without sacrificing compatibility and standards based development. A well designed user interface can also workaround performance issues by reducing the amount of work needed by the user - auto-completion, auto-suggestion of data, intelligent highlighting and hiding/showing of whole sections of forms, and so on.

At the platform level, we have been doing research on using massively parallel computing clusters and parallel algorithms to speed up performance and be able to handle large amounts of data simultaneously. The Obulus Platform has been designed with large datasets in mind, and uses features like federation and column oriented databases to speed up the handling of datasets going up in the terabyte ranges.

Performance issues are critical to providing a good end user experience. We hope that the issues discussed briefly here and the tips given will help out in achieving better performance in web based applications.

p.s. Charonite is hiring: if you're passionate about achieving performance on a large scale and want to work in a focused team, drop us an email.

Scaleable Solutions

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:27:00 +0000

Scaleable software solutions ultimately determine what applications remain limited to a few hundred users and a couple of thousand transactions and those that can truly support millions of users and transactions. Scaleability is essentially the software equivalent of "separating the men from the boys" (and the women from the little girls too!) *. One of the criteria that many companies unfortunately do not consider when buying off the shelf software or ordering a bespoke custom solution is the medium and long term growth of their business. The applications that are chosen need to be able to grow along with growth in business and the client base - or otherwise companies end up being faced with expensive migrations to new systems that can handle their new requirements.

Our way of ensuring that this does not happen is to have a scaleable design from the ground-up, with a well-thought data model that can be distributed amongst multiple servers, and possibly federated and sharded if need be. The software itself also needs to be capable of running in a distributed fashion, with algorithms that are friendly towards parallel processing techniques and frameworks such as MapReduce. Some choices in large scale algorithm design can be counter-intuitive, as such systems tend to optimise for maximum consistent data throughput rather than unpredictable short bursts of speed followed by long delays and waits.

Naturally, the data processing itself needs to deliver high performance over huge datasets - at Charonite we are generally not happy with anything that cannot process a couple of Terabytes of data without failing. Ideally without users even noticing the underlying complexity that goes on behind the scenes!

The Obulus Platform offers a variety of techniques and technologies that facilitate the creation of scaleable applications that can be distributed over multiple servers and server farms. And when things do fail (as they inevitably will in any large scale real-life installation), the platform design makes it possible to recover gracefully and turn parts of the application on and off and even paused / resumed in a flexible manner.

Our experience has shown us that by using profiling and measurement and focusing on the processing bottlenecks that cause the vast majority of slowdowns, an application can be significantly improved even in the face of large datasets. Often, a simple tweak such as an SQL query rewrite or the introduction of a buffer layer to reduce client spoon-feeding effects, can have an enormous positive effect on performance. The use of application level logging in such cases is very important. Testing - to the point of almost becoming obsessive with shaving off milliseconds from important processes - can also be extremely helpful in pinpointing the relevant areas where improvements need to be made. Constant minor tweaks and improvements are a daily aspect of life when dealing with large scale complex installations supporting millions of users.

Have a look at our Obulus Platform presentation at: http://www.charonite.com/resources/obulus.php

* And if you're someone passionate about multi-threading, high performance processing, distributed algorithms, etc. drop us an email at jobs@charonite.com.

Simple User Interfaces

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:15:00 +0000

One aspect of software development that is unfortunately often overlooked in the rush to get the application released on time is the user interface. Simple user interfaces take up more time to design than a complicated looking user interface. An analogy exists in writing: it is sometimes easier to write a couple of pages on a particular topic than a brief and concise one pager.

At Charonite we particularly like clean interfaces such as those on Google's homepage and products, the Apple iPhone app home screen, Microsoft's ribbon in the Office suite of products, 37 Signals' web-based applications, the Netherland's train kiosk user interface and many others. Our software needs to run in a variety of different environments and hardware platforms including web-based applications running inside a normal Internet browser, specialised PDAs such as the SmarTerminal or the Motorola MC75, and indoor / outdoor touchscreen based kiosk interfaces such as the Park and Go terminals.

The Charonite User Interface design process has been refined over the years and generally consists of the following steps:

Initial meetings with the client to identify the different features and functions together with the context in which the applications will be used
Reusing existing screens and user interface solutions that may exist in our products, while ensuring that the resulting interface conforms to the Charonite User Interface guidelines
Sketching the initial set of screens and use cases and getting rapid feedback from the client
At this stage the actual intended deployment platform of the application needs to be considered:

Web-based Obulue Platform applications need to load fast and have as much interactivity as possible using Ajax techniques and Flash based interactive graphs and charts
PDA applications need to fit in information in a very constrained space on devices that may have different capabilities (for example, finding a solution to neatly display a form that has 80 fields mandated by law, in a tiny rugged PDA screen)
Touchscreen kiosk based applications need to be simple and easy to use in a highly modal manner (our quick evaluation method is to see if you can use the kiosk application while wearing gloves)
Vehicle based user interfaces for our future IDITES technology and law enforcement applications require special considerations in mind, especially when information needs to be displayed to a driver in a manner that does not distract drivers when the vehicle is in motion or in pursuit of another vehicle

Refining the sketches and creating more polished mockups using rapid diagramming tools such as Visio or SmartDraw
Creating initial prototypes and designs that the end clients can play around with and give feedback
Iteratively refining the screens of the initial prototypes to get at the final application screens

And then repeating the above for the next version!

We recommend the following resources on UI design and usability:

- Jakob Nielsen's Web Usability Website
- Alan Cooper's About Face
- Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences

Are you passionate about user interface design and want to work on a variety of different platforms and interesting new projects? Charonite's hiring - drop us a mail on jobs@charonite.com.

Reliable Applications

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:28:00 +0000

Reliability and 24x7 accessibility are one of the most valued attributes of software, especially web-based applications that need to be available on demand without interruption. Charonite has gathered a lot of operational experience over the years that enables us to minimise downtime while increasing the overall reliability of our web-based applications.

Some practical tips on what we found to work in increasing the reliability of applications during development:

Process data in steps that can be handed over to another machine (see MapReduce for more information)
Research data structures and associated algorithms appropriately, keeping in mind that when dealing with large datasets, some non-obvious choices may be the most appropriate (for example, use Merge Sort rather than Quick Sort)
Have resume and rollback facilities for each data processing step
Split large data sources into manageable chunks, giving calling applications the chance to have pre-defined breakpoints and pause opportunities, while giving rise to a predictable processing pattern
Follow good software engineering practices to modularise code and reduce dependencies via the use of appropriate parameter structures
Use workflow automation tools to define processes accurately and with less error
Use ready-made platform components and solutions (such as those available on the Obulus Platform)
Utilise test automation extensively to reduce the risk of errors creeping in code
Use REST parameters as much as possible and spread out distributed applications over as many servers as practical to reduce load and increase overall protection from single points of failure
Favour APIs and repeatable design standards over ad-hoc one-off designs
Monitor resource usage intensively for signs of increasing memory usage or excessive CPU usage together with peak resource usage levels: it is very rare to have an application that needs to use 100% of CPU time for extended periods of time

We are also currently working on perfecting the Charonite Smart SaaS solution offers seamless integration of online and offline working modes, with automatic realtime data replication and graceful failover when a network connection fails. All Obulus applications in the future will automatically benefit from these features via the distributed data layer.

Our goal is to help developers create reliable and robust web-based applications that run without interruption, while enabling customers to have the confidence to switch over from more traditional desktop based applications to network hosted applications in full knowledge that their application and data will be available at critical times.

Intelligent Software Design

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:11:00 +0000

At Charonite we believe that software developers and designers should always provide an intelligent solution to the user's needs, no matter how small or big the problem that needs to be solved. Intelligent design requires more effort and attention to detail, but keeps the end user satisfied.

The Obulus Platform was designed in a manner that encourages intelligent software design by providing ready-made solution templates, code and database design patterns that have been tested and designed in a flexible and scaleable manner.

The use of design patterns is encouraged by using the Obulus Platform, which utilises a loose Model-View-Controller pattern (with the Model and Controller generally coded in C/C++ and the View using PHP/C#) together with support creational, structural, behavioural and concurrency patterns.

A set of naming and coding conventions and emerging Quality Assurance documents that aid in guiding the whole development process ensure that the resulting solutions are of high quality and inbuilt intelligence. Software testing, adopted from Agile methodologies, is extensively used, and support for synthetic data generation capabilities is being added in the next generation of the Obulus Platform to help developers test their applications thoroughly with minimal test environment and test case setup effort.

Essentially the whole process boils down to incessantly answering a simple question: How can our application serve the customer intelligently?

Annual Winter Holiday 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 11:01:00 +0000

At Charonite we take pride in doing our best to keep the whole team happy and productive, by providing an incentives-based environment for growth and personal development, while showing appreciation towards our work colleagues. One of the ways that we encourage team spirit is to take everyone on a short break during December (with a similar short break in August, when the weather in Malta is always guaranteed to be sunny). Our winter holiday tradition now goes back to 2007, when we went to Pisa and Florence, and to Venice in 2008.

This year we decided to go to the vibrant capital city of Spain, Madrid. Madrid was literally packed full of people and you can say that we saw the "mad" in Madrid first-hand! Madrid has a lot of nice open air markets, a rich architectural heritage and various shops.

Hamon Iberico display in Madrid

A nice tradition in Madrid is to gather around at open air food markets to eat tapas, a practice that evoked our memories of Asia. The tapas were delicious, albeit a bit difficult to get hold of at times - balancing a glass of wine, a plate of oysters, some bread and cheese and whatever else is on offer from the stalls while gently elbowing your way to a coveted seating place is an art of its own.

The first place we visited was the Museo Reina Sofia, which houses various important works of art by Spanish artists including Dali, Picasso, Gris, Miro, Gonzelez, Gargallo and others. The auestere, black and white "Guernica" painting by Pablo Picasso is one of the main highlights of this museum, commanding almost a whole room on its own - a reminder of the tragedies that war can inflict on people.

Flamenco at Cardamomo

One of the highlights was a Flamenco show at Cardamomo, a cosy Flamenco bar that was packed full of people watching the beautiful display of guitar music (toque), dancing (baile) and singing (cante). The show proceeded in different stages with male and female dancers taking turns and finally coming together in a nicely orchestrated show. We definitely recommend watching a Flamenco show whenever in Spain to savour the culture and traditions of the country.

The World's Oldest Restaurant - Restuarante Sobrino de Botin

Another highlight of our visit was an evening out at the Restaurante Botin, the world's oldest restaurant according to the Guiness Book of Records, founded in 1725 (which also claims to have had the painter Goya working as a dishwasher there!). We ordered a delicious suckling pig, cooked in the traditional Castilian way for the whole party, all washed down with caraffes of Sangria. Of course, vegetarians in our group also had plenty of food choices but Madrid does seem to be a mini-paradise for meat-lovers (especially with the numerous "Museo del Jamon" shops everywhere).

No trip to Madrid could be considered complete without a visit to the Museo Nacional del Prado, which hosts one of the worls largest collection of fine art, including El Greco, Goya, Velazquez, Bosch, Titian, Rubens, Raphael, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Durer, Rembrandt and many others. The long queue to get inside the museum was definitely worthwhile and it was interesting to see how people on our team interpreted the art in different manners.

In all, it was an enjoyable trip to Madrid, and we'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy new year!

p.s. Interested in joining our team? Drop us an email on careers@charonite.com. See you next year!

Software Design Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:15:00 +0000

Our software design philosophy at Charonite is based on six simple attributes that we believe are the hallmarks of quality solutions:

Intelligence. Solve the user’s needs with an intelligent, never mediocre, solution. Intelligent design requires more effort and attention to detail, but keeps the end user satisfied.
Precision. Provide precise results that can be relied upon and trusted. Results need to be precise on a large scale to enable business decisions and other major decisions to be based on our software's output.
Reliability. Software has to run non-stop without problems. We take pride in our 24x7 installations that do not require rebooting for months on end without any downtime.
Simplicity. Focus on the user’s needs and behavior first – and the interface simple. Users do not want to be forced to learn to work with complicated and confusing screen layouts. A simple interface that presents relevant data quickly and easily requires thought and attention to the user's needs.
Performance. Software has to be fast and responsive, even when dealing with massive amounts of information and complex computing issues. The backend of our systems needs to be capable of handling large amounts of data without failure, in a timely manner. Millions of data items need to be processed without placing any restrictions on users who need to process such data sets.
Scaleability. Interesting applications emerge when there are huge amounts of information and users being processed simultaneously. Software needs to be designed in a way that it can scale up to handle huge installations. When more capacity is needed, it should be a simple matter of adding more hardware resources or additional virtual machines.

Our flagship product, the Obulus Platform, allows us to achieve these six attributes with less effort than traditional application development methods.
In the coming weeks we will be expanding on each item and the way that we have approached each attribute to ensure the production of quality integrated software and hardware solutions.

User Interfaces

noreply@blogger.com (Charonite) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:50:00 +0000

User interfaces represent one of the key success factors to the adoption of a software application or an integrated hardware and software solution. The success of devices like the iPhone have largely built upon the overall smooth interaction experience.

At Charonite, we are continously developing new better interfaces for web-based applications that make applications responsive enough to provide realtime interfaces to components like traffic cameras, RFID sensors and barriers. Interactive data dashboards and drilldown charts and reports enable users to explore data in an intuitive manner. The initial back and forth between the development team and our customers now generally includes lots of hand-drawn sketches and UML use cases and interaction diagrams & swimlanes, followed by more polished designs using rapid mockup tools and actual working prototypes that are rapidly deployed online to obtain more meaningful feedback from the end users themselves.

For projects involving hardware integration, like our range of parking kiosk solutions and PDA based software, the design constraints involved in a keyboardless touch screen based interface (requiring large buttons and easy to read large text fonts) and a small PDA interface (which requires fitting in information on a limited size display in an easy to use manner) have been formalised into a set of UI guidelines and templates that guide developers in creating intuitive solutions.

We've found this TED presentation by Pranav Mistry on SixthSense technology to be particularly interesting:

http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html?awesm=on.ted.com_7X

The future of human computing interfaces seems to be oriented towards gesture based computing. At Charonite, we are currently researching ways of integrating gesture based computing using Wii hardware, allowing for fast exploration of 3D environments that can be utilised in future traffic management applications and possibly allow for better ways of interacting with large datasets. We are also looking at using the XBox Natal interface when it becomes available. Our research and development teams are always on the lookout for interesting emerging technologies and skilled talent in the field. Drop us an email on jobs@charonite.com if you're interested in joining our team.

Charonite Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Angelo Dalli) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:11:00 +0000

Charonite finally has a new blog that will be regularly updated with latest news and insights into our ever-growing company. From a small start in late 2006 in Malta, the company has grown to have offices in Ta Xbiex, Malta, in the UK and representation in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The number of user accounts in our systems now exceed the 500,000 mark and thus we felt that it was time to start our own blog. Charonite is currently on a recruitment drive, seeking talent in ICT research and development, Human Computing Interfaces (HCI), Quality Assurance (QA) and project management skills. Our staff generally have at least one degree in an IT related subject and we seek to maintain a high level of competence within small, compact teams.

Our overall aims for software development are simple and can be summed up in three words: Intelligence, Precision and Reliability. We aim to produce intelligent solutions for intelligent businesses, giving precise results over large amounts of data in a reliable 24x7 fashion. Our applications, running off our flagship Obulus Platform, are based on cloud computing concepts and hosted using a Smart SaaS model.

Charonite is also committed to the environment, and our intelligent transport system software components help reduce the amount of CO2 emissions emitted by vehicles, while promoting better utilisation of precious on-street parking space.

We believe that we can do business in a sustainable and intelligent manner, providing good value for money for our clients and excellent solutions for the end users.