Thoughts and Prayers

Our thoughts and prayers are with Jim Gray's family right now.

Oracle SOA Suite Reviewed

Infoworld reviews the Oracle SOA suite. This product just keeps getting better and better....

Agile Atheism Redirect

An interesting perspective on the Agile programming community from my old colleague Jim Webber. I spent several years experimenting with agile techniques (some details captured here) ultimately coming to somewhat aligned conclusions. I have the outline of a post on this same topic together, just need to find some time to actually write it up...

Japanese Melodies

I am not an expert on traditional Japanese music, so I have no authority to critique Yo Yo Ma's rendition on the album Japanese Melodies. I can say, however, that this is a beautiful, simple and sometimes quite sad recording. I find Japanese music often makes me think of it as a re-interpretation of the beauty found in nature, while I think of western classical music as having more of a man-made splendor. This album is not really a merger of the two; it strikes me as being more squarely Japanese. However you classify it, Japanese Melodies is worth adding to a music collection.

Web Services Policy

This paper was written to capture ongoing discussions about how to put structure around ws-policy and make it more generally useable. It was delivered at ICSOC2006, but I forgot to post a link back in December. Feel free to email me thoughts.

Oracle SOA Platform and Amazon EC2

An interesting article on pairing EC2 and Oracle's SOA Suite. I thought this was pretty cool. After plowing through a year's worth of program committee reviews for various Web services and SOA conference tracks, I've come to realize that Oracle's SOA platform really is the industry standard for service orchestration.

iPhone

I held off on picking up a new phone to see what Apple would announce. Indeed a slick product. The suggestion that Apple is all about style over substance is wrong: the key to the success of the product line is useability. The Apple line is just better to use, almost to a product, than competitors. True to form, prices will be very high and its not clear that the useability features in the iPhone are sufficient to differentiate it from other cheaper products in a crowded market -- though it may be premature to call it an "iFlop" as some have suggested. In the short run, I'm picking up a Blackjack from Cingular: this will likely lock me out of an upgrade to the iPhone at a reasonable cost, another factor Apple will need to contend with.

The interesting question is whether this signals the end of the iPod-as-standalone music-player as a viable product. Only time will tell. From a consumer perspective, this should put a good deal of pressure on other device manufacturers to work on useability issues, which will be a welcome change.

Swiss Time

I just got back from a holiday in Switzerland. We spent 3 days in Geneva, a city that is nothing if not Calvinist. The old town is lovely and our time there was thoroughly pleasant. Geneva has rapidly moved toward the top of my "favorite cities of the world" list, doing battle with Stockholm, Sweden and Portland, Oregon. We spent 5 days in the alpine town of Saas-Fee at a family owned chalet, where we we received exceptional treatment. The ski conditions were a bit icy, but we were fortunate in that Saas-Fee was one of the few ski areas that actually had snow. Saas-Fee is charming and very much oriented toward families.