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.

Happy Holiday Season

I will shortly have an on topic post for the blog dealing with all the controversy around agile programming, but in the meantime, I wanted to wish all my friends around the world a very happy holiday season. I don't know where to start with the list of seasonal holidays that have already past or are coming (Christmas, Hannukah, Diwali, Ramandan, Chinese New Year.... off the top of my head). To make it simple, I hope everyone had a prosperous year in 2006 and I look forward to seeing you in 2007!

Icons

I wanted to make a small note on the passing of several icons of culture. First, Ed Bradley, who always distinguished himself as a gentleman throughout his life as a reporter. The passing of Bradley and earlier of Peter Jennings seems to mark the end of the era of broadcast television and of more civil and urbane news reporting. I'll miss both the figureheads and the genre as it was. Bradley also hosted an NPR program Jazz at Lincoln Center, worth checking out if the archives are available online.

Second, Milton Friedman died at 94 this past week. There are few economists that can lay claim to the level of influence and intellectual energy of Milton Friedman. In this century, the other great influencer was John Maynard Keynes. Friedman may not have been right about everything, but he managed to direct the course of history in his lifetime.

On a slightly less somber note, I had a chance Saturday night to see the newest James Bond film, Casino Royale. In the US, at least, Bond reruns seem always to have been on television, with the Connery and Moore eras dominant. The old James Bond has been killed off. Casino Royale is a complete re-invention of the character, carried off well by Daniel Craig. The new Bond is darker, more reckless and the film itself has a more developed realism. The Craig Bond is aggressively targeted at a female audience with a perhaps ironically dulled carnal appetite. The film is the best in years, perhaps ever, with the primary drawback being the relentless brand advertising.

Open Source Java

Sun announced that the core Java platforms will be made available under GPL. In general, I think this is a useful turn, but at this point I wonder how many people really have a keen desire to hack Java platform code. The main benefit is likely to be in areas like performance and memory management, where ISVs have a vested interest in tuning the platform.

It's strange to see how GPL has moved from being the license of open source purists to a preferred vendor license.

Blue Moon

Once in a great while, something utterly simple comes along that changes the way you work and do business. I'm wondering if Zotero may be a such a thing on a massive scale?

SOA Suite Release

The latest release of Oracle's SOA suite is available with ESB functionality, policy management and governance, and process management tools and engine. Check it out. Note the article is from an Indian software development site: Indian IT news coverage is getting really strong!

Unbreakable Linux

There's a flood of commentary coming out on Oracle's move to offer Linux support, most of it speculative. I prefer the simple explanation: its good business to give customers what they want at an attractive price... One thing for sure, this is going to be a major, major shot in the arm for Linux.

SOA at Oracle Open World

Open World is this week and it is truely huge this year. To keep up with the latest and greatest on middleware, you should check out Thomas Kurian's keynote tomorrow. For a high level overview of where we see things moving forward in the SOA space, there are a series of customer-oriented white papers worth checking out.

The Road Less Taken

After years of labor, OSGI has started to gain critical mass. In fact, OSGI is popping up all over the place: Eclipse, Spring, SCA discussions, etc. It seems like almost everyone is interested in leveraging OSGI. I won't go in to the details of OSGI, except to say that there are some genuinely useful things that can be done with OSGI for building product software: some of the most interesting capabilities have to do with dynamic loading and unloading. Sun has spearheaded an alternative model in JSR, 277. It is interesting to look at the reaction of the OSGI community to 277. Will this be the dividing line that marked the transition to a new generation of middleware technology?

Kid Safe Internet

There's been a rash of local stories of kids stumbling on inappropriate content on the Internet over the last few months, so I decided to pick up some filtering software. The package I chose was BumperCar 2 for the Mac. As far as I can tell, BumperCar is essentially a customization of Safari.

The software provides the standard white list/black list facilities. The white lists are useful for young kids and the black lists are useful in a way I hadn't thought of initially: you can filter out specific domains associated with an otherwise useful site. For example, BumperCar blacklists Google images by default. Google searches are automatically kid safe on BumperCar, which is imperfect but useful. Lastly, BumperCar will filter on both the content coming in and going out. Incoming content appears to be checked before rendering, which is a nice way to catch things that might slip through.

I've only looked at the filters briefly, but they appear to check for sexual content and violence. In this day and age, it would probably be best to check for extremist material of all sorts as well.

First, impressions: a good product.

Oracle JPA and Spring

I've found the Spring framework to be a very useful addition to the J2EE platform. I've been working with early releases of Spring 2.0 over the last year and its a genuine point release for sure. I've long been a fan on the TopLink toolkit (long before coming to Oracle, I might add), so it is even cooler to see that the core of TopLink and Spring will be packaged together. A new standard for Java development?

Human, All Too Human

I spent last weekend in Paris. Only on my return did I realize this was my first time in France as a tourist, rather than a business visitor. My wife and I had the opportunity to spend some sustained time in the Louvre, which is a wonderful repository of human achievement.

I stopped halfway through the Greek sculptures to ask myself how much we've improved as a species in the last several thousand years. Clearly, we've seen advancements in mathematics, including the algebra and the (recent) development of the fundamental theorem of calculus. As a result we've seen significant advances in sciences, especially in conjunction with the adoption of inductive reasoning. Along similar lines, we've seen progress in medicine, which has extended our lifespan and often (though not always) our quality of life.

In contrast to the ancient world, we've virtually eliminated human slavery, which seems to me to be our most important social advance, since it implies at least the idea of basic and universal human dignity. At the same time, we keep finding reasons to kill each other en masse, as the horrors of the twentieth century remind us. Those retrograde instincts of hate, dogmatism, and fanaticism to which we all may be susceptible to some degree threaten to pull us back to barbarism and to make our scientific advances tools of evil.

In some ways, a uniform measure of progress may be an impossible thing to measure, but it is clear that there is a basic human drive toward humanism, greatness and beauty. The
Louvre is a fine place to rediscover that fact.

Travesty

I've lived within proximity of Amish communities most of my life, more specifically near the community in Pennsylvania that just suffered a tremendous loss. These people live a meaningful and peaceful life. I cannot imagine in my worst nightmares what would motivate someone to try to harm their children. My heart goes out to them.