Haiti Aid

If you read this, please consider donating to help the victims of earthquake in Haiti. This blog entry links to the Red Cross.

Worthwhile bay area music - for families

I had the opportunity to attend a performance of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra Sunday in a special performance aimed at children. Donato Cabrera conducted. The young performers really did an outstanding job: tight if not quite soulful, they exceeded my expectations. The overall program was great fun - interactive, with clapping and singing. The main classical settings featured works by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, two wonderful Russian composers. The capstone was a story-narration by Linda Ronstadt set to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, Opus 67. If you have children these performances strike me as a great way to develop a love of great music and are highly recommended.

Our family is planning to attend (and sponsor) at least one of three upcoming performances in the bay area of a selection of Russian choral music (for which I have more than a soft spot). The concert is called NEVER SETTING LIGHT: A Day of Sacred Song in the Russian Choral Tradition and includes "a capella selections from the services of a liturgical day -- from sunset to sunrise. The ancient lyrics are set to the music of Russian and American choral masters from the 18th century to the present, including 5 pieces by northern California composers."

Performances:

Saturday, Feb. 20th Livermore - Asbury Methodist Church

Saturday, Feb 27th Oakland - Ascension Greek Cathedral

Sunday, Feb 28th Fremont - Mission San Jose

I expect these will be settings more traditional than, say, Rachmaninov's, Liturgy of St. John, but I am very much looking forward to these performances.

svod 2009

This year's Silicon Valley Open Doors conference linking Russian technologists and Silicon Valley is scheduled for December 9-10 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Prior year participants and speakers I've known for some time have been consistently impressed with this event.

http://www.svod.org/2009/announcement

OpenWorld 2009

This year's show has an almost electric feel to it: lots of enthusiasm and excitement about the 11g middleware offering, which is great to see up close. Kudos to Clemens Utschig for pulling together a great technical deep-dive session on SOA suite 11g today.

You can watch keynotes live or recorded by following this link.

Fusion Middleware 11g Kickoff - Moscow

The rollout for the Fusion Middleware 11g release in Moscow next week: I will be participating in the presentations. The Russian press release has the details. I'm very excited about the 11g release - it's technically compelling but it also contains important advances for delivering business value.

WESOA 09 Call for Papers

This year's workshop on Engineering Service Oriented Applications has been scheduled for November in Stockholm (still one of my favorite cities). Details follow - I will be working on the Program Committee again this year, so I'm looking forward to seeing submissions.

http://www.wesoa.org/

Many of today’s large-scale software projects in the area of distributed systems and especially enterprise IT adopt service-oriented software architecture and technologies. For these projects, availability of sound software engineering principles, methodology and tool support is mission-critical. However, traditional software engineering approaches are not fully appropriate for the development of service-oriented applications. The limitations of traditional methods in the context of service-oriented computing have led to the emergence of software service engineering (SSE) as a new specialist discipline, but research in this area is still immature and many open issues remain. There is an urgent need for research community and industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering principles, methodologies and tool support for the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) of service-oriented applications. The WESOA 2009 workshop is the fifth in a series of workshops that focus on the specific aspects of SSE.


WESOA highlights key challenges of SSE that arise from specific characteristics of service-oriented applications that are often process-driven, loosely coupled, composed from autonomous services of complex IT landscapes and closely related to diverse socio-economic contexts. Service-oriented computing (SOC) enables the materialization of organizational processes as flexible compositions of autonomous service components. Stakeholders, domain experts, software architects and engineers instrument service-oriented software architectures (SOA) to drive constant organisational change by means of agile reengineering of software services, system landscapes and applications. In particular, service-oriented applications need to provide multiple, flexible and sometimes situational interaction channels within and beyond organizational structures and processes. Engineering of such software systems requires continuous, collaborative and cross-disciplinary development processes, methodologies and tools that synchronize multiple SDLCs of various SOA artefacts with organizational innovation processes.


Our aim is to facilitate exchange and evolution of ideas on SSE topics across multiple disciplines and to encourage participation of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. In particular, collaboration will be fostered by means of a highly interactive and fast-paced workshop format.

Objectives

Topics

WESOA Series

WESOA'09 continues a successful series of former ICSOC workshops. During the past four editions, WESOA has demonstrated its relevance by constant high numbers of contributions and participants. Its impact is documented by consistent output of high-quality papers.

Publication

WESOA proceedings are published in the Springer LNCS Services Science Subline.

WESOA’09 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes papers that address challenges of SSE in general or in the context of specific domains. Workshop topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

•Software service development lifecycle methodologies and processes
•Distributed and collaborative software service development
•Service-oriented reference models and frameworks
•Architectural styles and standards for software service systems
•Management and governance of SSE projects
•Models, languages and methods for service-oriented analysis and design
•Requirements-engineering for software service systems
•Service-oriented business process modelling
•SSE for cloud computing environments (e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
•Validation, verification and testing of software service systems
•Service assembly, composition and aggregation models and languages
•Model-driven SOA and service systems development
•Reverse engineering of software service systems
•Tool support for software service engineering
•Case studies and best practices of service-oriented development

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release

The 11g Middleware release has been released. Webcast of launch is here.

Principles of Transaction Processing, Second Edition

I wanted to put out a brief note that the new version of Principles of Transaction Processing is hot off the presses. Simply put, this book is the standard reference for getting your brain around the transaction processing components of the IT landscape. It was the book I absorbed when I first started working on implementing transaction managers and one I turned to get up the speed on existing systems. I had a chance to review part of the book prior to publication, so I was lucky enough to get a free copy - Eric and Phil did a great job bringing the text up to date: it remains one of the handful of books that should be on the shelf of anyone involved in information systems implementation or management.

Russia and Web 2.0

Zdrasvoyteye.

When I was in Moscow last, a lot of the talk was centered around attracting foreign capital to tech investments in Russia. The pitch is - or should be - familiar: lower costs, big market, super-bright engineers and scientists. The downside is lack of transparency and a very unique business environment that is difficult (or impossible) to navigate as an outsider. Today's announcement that Facebook has taken $200 million at first looks like a kind of a reversal in this trend: tech oriented Russians still have capital to deploy and may be choosing to spend it on bargain opportunities in the US market, which remains preeminent in technology development.

A closer look, though, suggests this is a part of a trend that has been gaining steam. Russians have been developing and investing in Web technology for a long while. Yes, Google was co-founded by a Russian, but there has been a number of interesting developments based in Russia itself. The Russian firm Yandex is often described as the "Russian Google" and has picked up small Russian social networking companies like Moi Krug on the cheap (someday there long awaited IPO will happen). SUP, run by American-in-Moscow Andrew Paulson, picked up LiveJournal to support their Russian users, and now Yuri Milner's fund takes a position in Facebook. Milner is the founder of mail.ru, a former physicist, and Wharton alumn.

Watch carefully: the Russians are coming to Silicon Valley and it's been a largely under-noted trend. I've met some of these folks and they are very capable businessmen.

Events for SCA

InfoQ has a short synopsis of the event proposal that was released to add pub-sub style semantics to the SCA assembly model. The genesis of this lies in some ESB related work I had helped lead at Oracle back in the days when we first started to develop the SCA specifications - it took a long time to socialize this to the working group, but I'm very happy to see that that work has borne fruit. This fills an important gap in the specifications - previously, the wire driven semantics forced components to "externalize" pub-sub interactions in a way that was divorced from the SCA semantics - and is broadly applicable to many problem domains including Complex Event Processing, Queue/Pub-Sub style integration, and ESB scenarios.

I remain somewhat distressed over the way the channel abstraction has played out - the original idea divorced much of this from the assembly view and made it an aspect of system configuration. I think the current approach artificially mixes orthogonal aspects of the problem space. Having said that, this is a milestone for the specification and completes the basic assembly model nicely.

By the way, nice write up Boris!

Value at Risk

I'm not going to editorialize on this one: here's a layperson accessible view of the risk models that worked so remarkably poorly in the last several years.

Darwin Dissected

Though it may be impossible to miss, this year commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, who has justly been called the father of modern biology for this development of the theory of the evolutionary development of species. At times contentious, the fact of evolution has been long established beyond any kind of reasonable doubt - all schools of scientific knowledge are convergent in this regard. But to understand the true importance of evolution for biology as a whole, one of my favorite essays is by Theodosius Dobzhansky: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

In any case, I happen to find myself reading a facsimile of the original edition of On the Origin of Species - which I have had for many years but never read end to end. Coincidentally, the New York Times has a posted a great selection of passages by Darwin: read and enjoy.

When Finance Goes Mad

Having come uncomfortably close to working in the packaging of structured financial investments, I've been morbidly fascinated by the way in which it has led to the near-destruction of the national - if not global - economy. Here is a great article on how badly awry things went with the ratings on these instruments, and a bit of what that means for stabilizing things.

Happy New Year

I wanted to take just a moment and wish everyone a safe, happy and peaceful holiday season and new year. All the best to you and yours.

Liquidity Trap

As the fed's latest cut pushes funds target rates toward zero, I am shocked that the news is not focused on whether the US faces a liquidity trap. Instead, there is very little discussion and markets seem to be neutral on the latest news.

The article I linked here is interesting for two reasons: one, it looks into the basic issues in some depth; two, it is clear that no one really understands what is happening. Note that Bruce Bartlett is arguing that the biggest danger we face now is deflation. Maybe. But two months ago, the biggest danger we faced was inflation: the latest swings in price indices seem more related to runaway boom-bust cycles in energy and commodities - too soon to really know what we face. Time will tell, of course, but only in a backward looking sense. At that point, we'll be passed the point where we needed the information.

Gimme Shelter

Wild turkeys sensing Thanksgiving is nearly upon us gather in a safe place: my front lawn.

Budapester

After several years of delay, my wife and I finally had a chance to spend a long anticipated weekend in Budapest, Hungary. I'll give my impressions in three parts: aesthetic, economic and historical. Second - for those anticipating a visit - a few suggestions for tourists.



On several occasions, the first question I've gotten about Budapest is "what's it like?" To be frank, I've struggled to compare it to other central European cities I've visited: unlike, say, Prague, the oldest portions of Budapest are quite small: the city was the scene of many battles from the Turkish occupation through the second world war; in the latter, the Soviet army and the Nazi army clashed directly in the
city itself. With some notable exceptions, the city is redolent with 19th century facades. In fact, many of the buildings are quite impressive. My wife commented that to see Budapest, one has to be constantly looking upward.



Although it is hard to say exactly how any country is going to weather the current economic storm, Hungary has clearly experienced strong growth rates in recent years. Budapest itself reflects both a low post-Soviet starting point and the economic boom of recent years. Elegant restaurants are close to classic looking buildings suffering
from disrepair. Pricing is erratic at best. One can find a 1 USD cup of coffee, or spend 12 USD for coffee and pastry, all within a block. For a great view of the food of Hungary, traditional restaurants and the Central Market in Pest are great experiences: be prepared for tons of paprika.



A traditional breakfast at the Central Market!

The standard tourist circuit is worth doing. Budapest's museums are interesting though modest: meaning, it is possible to explore many in a day's time. There are several houses of worship that are worth visiting; in particular I recommend the Matyas Church in Old Buda and the Great Synagogue in Pest.



Matyas.

The Great Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Europe and the second largest in the world. The building is a 19th century construction and features continental Christian influence in features such as a (substantial) pipe organ: the same instrument is present in the even more beautiful Spanish Synagogue in Prague.



Time permitting, there is a modest Serbian Orthodox church on Szerb Utra ("Serb Street"), with an older iconostasis and the sweet smell of incense hanging in the air. The famous St. Stephen's cathedral is beautiful but also very modern.

And of course Budapest is famous for the public baths. We visited the baths in the central park, which is an experience not to miss. There are consultants available that will help construct a therapeutic regime while you are there, though we opted to wing it: both relaxing and revitalizing. Be forewarned: the plunge pool may not have ice crystals in the water, but it is … cold.

There are two less well-known options for visitors that I wanted to point out. First, the Terror Museum in Pest is a must-see. The Hungarians suffered under both a Nazi putsch and Soviet occupation. The Terror Museum is set in the secret police headquarters (shared by both regimes) and provides a bracing portrait of totalitarian terror as seen from the Hungarian experience. The first exhibit in the museum
was perhaps the most moving: videos of cheering and weeping crowds supporting both regimes cutting abruptly to the destruction and death concomitant with their rises. This was not an uplifting part of our visit, but a sobering and necessary look at two forms of evil.



The second thing to note about Budapest is the excellent restaurant scene. We had some of the best meals we have had in a long time in Pest. The restaurant Tigris near St. Stephen's Cathedral has fantastic food, wine and the most enthusiastic staff I've ever encountered. The "contemporary Hungarian" tasting menu at Babel was great: the chef
has a deft take on gastronomical science. Try both if you can.

The title of this post is taken from the iconic Vass shoe, the somewhat awkward looking, central European classic. The factory store is on Harris Kos in Pest and worth a visit for anyone interested in old world craftsmanship. There's a romanticism about much of Budapest tied up with the ubiquitous craftsmanship to be found.



All photos by Ruth Pavlik: they may not be used without permission.

Wild Ride

What an extraordinary few weeks we've been through economically. The economic system has started to unzip and then snap back several times: the scariest thing I saw was the more than doubling of the LIBOR rate over night. And the control of short sales is a step to nationalizing equity markets: incredible! And while, things continue to adjust and move forward, we are, for better or worse, living through an inflection point in economic history.

I was in Moscow, Russia a few weeks back when the Russian central bank had to intervene to support the ruble. At that point, cooler heads seemed to have been regaining center stage and the political climate between the US and Russia seemed to warming a bit since the Georgia conflict. Then, right before I left, a US vice president candidate speculated that we might have to go to war with Russia! A week later, the Russian markets closed for several days. I'll have a report on my Russia trip in a few days, but I'll preface it by saying it was fascinating.

I escaped the economic chatter last week by attending Oracle's Open World conference. This was by far the best Open World I have seen: customers were very enthusiastic and the show was extremely well coordinated. Getting back to core technology was a great break from some of the bleaker world news. I arrived home late Saturday and then was back on a plane this morning: only to learn that Wachovia had been dispatched!

Deika Morrison blog

I wanted to point readers to the new blog of a friend of mine, Deika Morrison. She has an extremely interesting background: she served as a Senator and Minister of State for Finance and Planning for the country of Jamaica, is a business expert, and is a careful thinker. She's also one of the nicest people I know.

I continue to believe that so-called emerging markets are the well spring of innovative ideas in economics and business. Brazil, Israel, Russia, China, Jamaica are all interesting places where necessity has proven to be the mother not just of invention but innovation: Deika's blog should help illustrate what I mean.

SVOD: Tech Sector in Russia

This year's Silicon Valley Open Doors conference has been scheduled, the dates are November 20-21. This is the premiere opportunity to learn about the technology sector and venture capital opportunities in and around Russia and understand more about what is happening with Russian companies. Hope to see you there.