Sprint Announces Bluetooth Phone
Until January, I'd been a long-time (over 5 years) Sprint customer. I switched to ATT because I wanted the Sony T68i phone, primarily because of its bluetooth capabilities. Overall, I've been pretty happy with it, but I liked the 1xRTT network better than I like the GPRS network. The speed was better and coverage seemed better. Yesterday, Sprint announced that they'll support the new T608 phone. I really like the T68i phone and ATT has been a reliable carrier, so I don't think I'll switch, but if Sprint had had this phone four months ago, I'd still be with
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Organizing Data: Whence Real Integration?
I was just answering an email and realized how far we are from real integration. There were two related emails. One with an attachment that I wanted to save to a folder. One of them turned into an appointment. Don't forget my reply. I also have two related URLs that I want to keep track of related to the emails. The emails are in a two email folders (received and sent), the attachment, now modified, is in a folder, and the URLs are in my bookmark list. I really want them all in one place. Furthermore I want managing
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The Hundred Year Language
From Patrick Logan's weblog, I found a pointer to an essay by Paul Graham called "The Hundred-Year Language." I don't know Paul well, but I have interacted with him on more than one occasion. A hundred-year language is one that people will still want to use in one-hundred years. Paul makes some very interesting points and, if you program, the essay is well worth the read---right to the end. Here's one quote I just can't resist repeating: I don't predict the demise of object-oriented programming, by the way. Though I don't think it has much to offer good programmers,
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Hydra and iStorm
Hydra caused quite a stir at ETCon last week. I thought it very helpful in getting a group to capture thoughts together. iStorm is a similarly positioned product. I looked into it and here's what I thought. iStorm bills itself as "the worlds most innovative collaboration tool." iStorm is a collaborative editor like Hydra, but also comes with a drawing board and chat client. It can even understand LaTeX which could be really helpful for collaboratively doing math. Here's my one minute review: iStorm requires per-user licensing for more than two users. Collaboration takes place between like-licensed instances of
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Using Rendezvous with iChat and Hydra
I don't know how many OS X users there are in the class. If there's more than one, I'd encourage you to use Rendezvous to connect in class and make use of some tools to enhance your classroom experience. You can use iChat with Rendezvous to open up chat sessions with others in the class. I think this kind of back-channel communication can be helpful. Download and install Hydra, a Rendezvous enabled editor. You can use it to create a set of group notes. Once you use it, you'll be hooked.
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Some Things to Know
Welcome to CS330. If you've made it here, you've found where I'll be posting occasional thoughts on the class. Feel free to take a few minutes to read the blog this is part of. Here are a few places of note: The course web site contains useful information including lecture notes, homework assignments, and policies. I encourage you to use it. Blackboard will contain grades. I've created a wiki for discussion, collaboration, and whatever else suits you. If you don't know anything about wikis, then here are some starting points. You'll probably want to get a copy of DrScheme
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Concepts of Programming Languages
Wednesday I start teaching a course for BYU called Concepts of Programming Languages. This is a course I designed 10 years ago when I first went to BYU and its still taught in much the same manner. The text, which is an excellent introduction to how programming languages work, is Essentials of Programming Languages. In many curriculums, this course is a survey course that simply becomes a "programming language of the week" sort fo thing. I try to avoid that. The primary concepts that the course tries to teach are: The interpreter architecture pattern How static structures (i.e. programs)
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Where Am I Going? Blog Events from iCal
Thursday while I was listening to Ben Hammersly's talk on the semantic something or other, I noticed that he had a box on his weblog that showed events he was planning to attend in the near future. I thought that was a good idea, so I put one on my weblog too. If you look to the right, you'll see a box labeled Upcoming Events that lists things I'm planning on going to in the next 90 days. I didn't really want to double enter this on my calendar and my blog, so I decided I'd link the box
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What's in a Name: Social Software
Dave Winer argues that social software is hype. "Take something that exists, give it a fancy new name, and then blast at reporters and analysts about it." I have some sympathy for that position, I used to argue it myself. In some ways, Alan Kay made a similar argument in his "nothing new under the Sun" demonstrations yesterday. Maybe I'm just getting soft as I age, but I've come to rethink my position somewhat. Here's why... In the 80's Object Oriented Programming was the hype that got my dander up. After all, it was nothing more than an effective
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Done at ETCon
I'm leaving the ETCon a day early. A good friend is graduating from college tomorrow and I need to be home for that. Its a shame all the nanotech stuff was scheduled for Friday. I really wanted to hear more about that. One of the great pleasures of the conference was meeting Doug Kaye in person and being able to spend some time getting to know him better.
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Hertzfeld and Kapor on Chandler
Andy Hertzfeld (of Mac fame) and Mitch Kapor (of Lotus fame) are speaking about Chandler, an open source productivity tool that Kapor is funding out of his own pocket. The organization Mitch created to build it is the Open Source Applications Foundation. Why Chandler? email is the most important productivity tool there are gaps between what email is and what users want. Mitch describes it as Lotus agenda meets the Internet. A rich ability to associate all kinds of thing and people in natural ways. Here are some features: Power email - managing large volumes of email Sharing and
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The Internet Bookmobile and Copyright Protection
One of the talks I didn't get to go to, but wanted to was on the Internet Bookmobile. This is a real vehicle (see the pictures on the link) that drives around printing books on demand. The books are all in the public domain (which lots of classics are). The bookmobile doesn't keep them on a harddrive, it downloads them as needed. The printer in the bookmobile can print and bind a book in two minutes, producing one every 30 seconds (pipelined). Cost is about $1. We could probably use one of these in Utah. This is a great
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WarblogsWarblogging
We're talking, via phone, to Stu Hughes of the BBC from the UK. He created a blog before he left for Iraq as a way for him to communicate his experience with friends and family. He was in a land mine accident and now is recovering from surgery where part of his leg and his foot were amputated. . His blog talks about the experience and his steps (literally) to recovery. Xeni Jardin is interviewing him and doing an excellent job. Very touching story, but interesting from the standpoint of Stu using his blog to reach out to others,
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Clay Shirky on Social Structure in Social Software
Clay Shirky is giving the final talk of the morning. Clay was the subject of some controversy during the conference caused by this article in the Register. Tim O'Reilly bit back saying He got a complaint from a speaker who didn't get included, and made that complaint the basis for a rant. He didn't talk to anyone at O'Reilly. He didn't make any effort to get background or hear the other side. He wrote a flame, not a story. I told Tim that I'm not surprised at all. Anyway, here's what he said... Clay defines "social software" as software
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Kevin Lynch on Central, A Type-2 Web Services Application Framework
Kevin Lynch from Macromedia is talking about an upcoming macromedia product called Central (whitepaper in PDF). Central is an example of some of the rich internet applications that people are developing. Apple's Sherlock is another example. One way to think of Central is "internet as desktop" but done more much "right" than Microsoft's attempt to just turn the desktop into a browser. Central allows users to link chunks of data from various sources and tie Internet-based applications together. The following concepts are important to Central: instant delivery occasionally connected computing cooperative applications open data, which I think means decoupling
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Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet
The keynote for this morning is Alan Kay and is entitled "Daddy, are we there yet?" Alan is the inventor of SmallTalk, among other things and he has utah ties, getting his PhD from the Univ. of Utah in 1969. His primary complaint is that the last 20 years have been pretty darn boring because we're spending our time making better buggy whips in the form of better spreadsheets, better ways to write memos, etc. Alan quotes from a paper written in 1963 called "Man-Computer Symbiosis:" In not too many years, human being and computing machined will be coupled
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ETCon Blogs
Interested in reading other voices about ETCon? Here's a Wiki Directory of ETCon Blogs.
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Semantic Mapping
Jo Walsh is talking about a semantic mapping model for geospatial information called spacewebspace. spacewebspace is a MUD world done using RDF in Jabber (I think). She's talking softly and quickly and its pretty far out there. This Friend of a Friend project is tied in somehow. Steve Fulling would love her slides---they're all in lowercase. Ignoring XML serialization, RDF is just a directed graph. The MUD bot allows you to tag locations with geodata. I think the idea is to build a virtual, RDF based map of a real place. Boy! I don't think you have to use
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Building the Memex
Maciej Cegiowski from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education is talking about P2P semantic search engines. The Memex is an idea that Vannevar Bush wrote about in 1945 to catalogue and organize information. Maciej is speaking on semantic indexing. Maciej claims that its possible to infer semantic relationships from document content. He uses a case study of Steven Johnson (author of the book Emergence). Steve had 1146 paragraph clippings from 15 books arrange in flat-file text. He shows a search on "photosynthesis" which returns the traditional keywork matches but also entries that talk about "chloroplasts" and "symbiosis."
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The O'Reilly Radar
Tim starts off with a well-known quote from William Gibson: "The future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet." This leads to his "big hairy, audacious goal (otherwise known as a mission statement: Changing the world by capturing the knowledge of innovators. One of his key strategies for doing this is "leveraging alpha geeks." Here's the editorial filters that Tim uses: Disruptive technology Technology uptake is accelerating Its on a long term trend (he quote Ray Kruzweiler: "It has to make sense in the world in which you finish, not the one in which you start.") Grassroots support--bottom
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Eric Bonabeau on Biological Computing
Eric Bonabeau is Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer at Icosystem. He apparently used to work for Microsoft Research. He's talking about social insects and what studying them can teach computer science. The chief question is "how do we shape emergence?" Less succinctly, "how do we define individual behavior and interactions to produce desired emergent patterns?" His first lesson is "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." Eric spoke for a while about how Ants learn paths to food sources via pheromones and even find the shortest part in a robust way because pheromones evaporate. He's now
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ETechCon Photos
I have started an album of my pictures from the Emerging Technology Conference. Feel free to take and use them.
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DRM Panel
Dan Gillmor is moderating a panel on DRM. First up is Joe Kraus. Joe used to be at Excite back in the day. He is best remembered, by me at least, for an interview with Morley Saffer from 60 Minutes where he said "this is not your father's company." He was right; my father's company lasted more than 3 years. :-) He's now a lobbyist on digital rights in Washington and is quite well informed. His organization is DigitalConsumer.org. His message is one I've said many times: Silicon Valley has to wake up and realize that politics is central
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Howard Rheingold
This morning's keynote presentation is Howard Rheingold on "Technology Innovation and Collective Action." Howard is the author of many books. The book which really brought him to the attention of geeks was The Virtual Community about his experiences in the Well. The latest is a book that has had some popularity called Smart Mobs. I picked up a copy yesterday but haven't had a chance to start it. Howard's message this morning is "You can create tools that amplify collective action: innovate our way out of the enclosures growing around us." His theme is collective action. He contrasts this
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Biological Models of Computing and Self-Reconfiguring Robots
I'm attending the Biological Models of Computing session tonight. John Scott is the moderator. When I was at the University of Idaho, I was in a weekly seminar with two other CS faculty members and two faculty members from the Biology department where we read books and papers to explore this topic. I've been out of it for a long time, but it sounded like an interesting way to spend an evening. We just played a game that shows emergent behavior. In the game, everyone picks two people at random and identifies one as the aggressor and one as
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Texts for My Enterprise Computing Class
I've selected the following texts for my CS426 class on Enterprise Computing at BYU for next Fall: MySQL and JSP Web Applications: Data-Driven Programming Using Tomcat and MySQL by James Turner Enterprise Java Beans (3rd Edition) by Richard Monson-Haefel Java and SOAP by Robert Englander As I've mentioned before, I'm anxious to change the format a little and move a little more about Web services into the content and that will require removing some of the content we talk about now like CGI.
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Office as a Web Service Platform
Charles Maxon from Office Zealot is speaking on using Office 2003, the XMLized version formerly known as Office 11, with Amazon Web services (AWS). Charles claims that Office 2003 solves a number of issues that have kept developers from viewing it as a platform: Distribution - Web services solve previous distribution difficulties Security - Security issues have been solved. Really...we promise!!! Captive data - XML make the data fungible. Its not trapped in proprietary formats. Sophistication perception - XML and Web services are cooler to work on that macros. Charles showed an example of giving Excel the URL of
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AWS Features and APIs
Jeff Barr is the Amazon Web Services (AWS) evangelist. His presentation on AWS is online. Simplest Shop is an example of using AWS to create an alternative shopping experience for Amazon products. The site uses a comparison shopping model in contrast to the standard product view from Amazon. The site is pretty impressive when you think that the guts is all Amazon. Another demo site is the Amazon Lite demo site is done in a RESTian fashion, showing that REST doesn't have to equate to "simple." Greek Landscapes is another example of a RESTian use of Amazon. The site
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Amazon
Some facts about Amazon: 31 million people bought something on Amazon last year 21% of the transactions on Amazon are merchants other than Amazon The Amazon Web services API allows developers who are not Amazon employees to use the platform. Amazon has spent about $900 million on technology. Associates program is second most successful marketing program. There are 900,000 associates in the program (I represent two of those IDs). The Amazon Web services platform comprises three APIs: Selling API Merchandising API Ordering API For this to be more than just an interesting playground for geeks, Amazon has to provide
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Conference Start
One of the real treats of these OReilly conferences is getting to meet so many of the people I read everyday. This morning at breakfast, I was at a table with Glenn Fleishman, Tim Pozar, Cory Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, and Doug Kaye. I'm sitting in the Amazon workshop right now. From the schedule, it sounds like it will be an interesting day.
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RSS for eGovernment
The State of Utah's Enterprise Development Group (eDG) has recently been working on RSS applications in Government. Ray Matthews and others at the Utah State Library has been educating people from all over on RSS. Its great to see some of it sticking in house. I think RSS has great applications in eGovernment. Press releases are an obvious application, but other applications include event notification for all kinds of things, but public meeting notices would be a great first start. Another example: I'd like to see the CommuterLink data available via RSS. What about court decisions? Someone ought to
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Refactoring: Emerald Lake to Aspen Grove
Tim Bray is talking about refactoring, the process of rewriting code. Tim makes the point that it seems extremely painful to rewrite something that's more or less working but that it isn't as bad as it seems, having been through it once before. My personal experience leads me to agree. When I was at iMALL, we built a multi-million dollar eCommerce system that allowed small merchants to set up a web-based storefront online. The system was code-named "Emerald Lake" or EL. We planned and implemented for months. We spent a lot of money. When we were done, we were
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Off to Oreilly Emerging Technology Conference
I'm catching a flight this morning to San Jose to attend the Oreilly Emerging Technology Conference. It looks like a good program and Oreilly always does a great job. I'm looking forward to it. There will undoubtedly be Wi-Fi access so I'll be blogging some of what I hear. I'm sure lots of others will be as well.
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Jabra Freespeak
I've got a bluetooth enabled t68i phone that I have a lot of fun playing with. I have an Ericsson HBH-20 bluetooth headset, but as you can see if you click out to the picture, its still got a wire and a little fob for the electronics that clips on your clothing. The other day, I picked up a Jabra Freespeak bluetooth headset at CompUSA for $99.99. Here's my initial review. The Jabra is self contained and fits behind your ear. After a few days of using it, I can say that this is the most comfortable headset I've
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Programming the Internet
I spoke at the BYU Computer Science colloquium today. The title of my talk was Internet Programming. I borrowed quite heavily from some of Rohit Khare's work and some of my own thoughts in that area. As an example that many people can relate to, I also included a discussion of Clemen Vasters' Content Pipeline idea. Here is a copy of my slides. I'm not entirely happy with the presentation yet. You still get a lot of blank stares from some folks. Even so I had some great discussion afterwards that produced the following ideas: Kent Seamons and I
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A Better Finder
A number of people have talked about a better Finder. Tim Bray pointed me to a Finder replacement for OS X called Path Finder. Tim wasn't happy with the performance on a 500MHz machine. I'm happy to report that performance on a 1GHz machine is good and in just a few days I've become a convert. Overall, the user interface design is better and there are some features (like history) that just make a lot of sense in a file browser.
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Content Pipelines
Clemens Vasters is talking about content pipelines. Clemens envisions a system for processing RSS feeds, Exchange folders, public websites and other information that pushes this content through a series of stages in a pipeline that processes the information in specific ways. For example, one stage might add Google search results to the content and another might annotate it with relevant books from Amazon. Still others might perform language translation or dictionary links. Clemens sees this as an open architecture that allows stages in the pipeline to be written by anyone and routed to as necessary. In other words, this
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Hacked
I got hacked this morning. If you happened to tune in, you saw an uninteresting message from someone demanding money. This wasn't the first time either. Turns out my page had been hacked at least two other times during the last week, but Radio just overwrote it when I publihsed new stuff. That's one advantage of posting frequently and really shows the benefit of a content management system. The site can be recreated with relative ease. The problem was a known security hole in Gallery 1.3.2. I was able to fix that using information on the Gallery site and,
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The Modern University?
Philip Greenspun asks why Universities don't provide more for group learning and keep students in school 45-50 weeks out of the year so that they can finish in 2.5 years instead of 4. Northface Learning is a company that thinks they can do just that for Computer Science students. They also think they can make money at it. I've seen the progress they've made over the last year and they might just pull it off.
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Jabber Gets Liberty Enabled
Jabber, the open source instant messaging platform and PingID, have announced that Jabber will use PingID's SourceID gateway to allow Jabber users to allow federated single sign-on to Jabber services. SourceID is an open source implementation of the Liberty alliance specification. SourceID is still a pretty well-kept secret, but partnerships like this will help it get out into the sun.
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Tabs for Safari
Thank you, Apple. Safari now has tabs which are much easier to manage, from my perspective, than multiple windows.
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Weblog Directories
Dave is making another impassioned plea for people to start using OPML based directories. I'll add my small voice to the chorus. About 3 months ago, I got to wishing I had a way to create specialized directories of the content on my weblog and related content from elsewhere. As a consequence, I started my feature page. But this is just an OPML directory that Radio renders using activeRenderer. The OPML is available here. This isn't the complete answer however. A little while ago, I started to want to reference my collection of posts and material on GXA separately
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Weblog Business Strategies
I'm going to be moderating a panel session at the Jupiter Media conferernce on Weblog Business Strategies in Boston this June. This is the same conference at which Dave Winer and David Weinberger are giving keynotes. My panel is on Tuesday afternoon (June 11th) and is entitled "Using Weblogs In Large IT Organizations." I have a few ideas for panelists, but if you've got suggestions, feel free to shoot them my way.
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Grand Central Connects Web Services
Imagine a world with no Postal Service nor Federal Express. Whenever you wanted to send a document to someone, you'd have to find out how they accepted documents, find a trustworthy carrier to transport the document, and then negotiate delivery mechanisms, notification requirements, and security measures. This is the current situation of Web services. Sure, transport is available and there are some basic standards about envelopes and how to look up an address, but there's not much else. In fact, unanswered questions about security, reliability, trust, and coordination abound. [Full story at InfoWorld...] One of the best parts of
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Singularity Hints
So, you'll probably accuse me of living in a cave somewhere, but I was talking with Scott Lemon this morning at a Utah Venture breakfast and he mentioned "the singularity." The look on my face must have told him that I had no idea what he was talking about, so he explained. The Singularity is the point where superhuman intelligence spontaneously emerges from our various technological activities. The idea was put forward by Vernor Vinge and taken up by Ray Kurzweil. I had an opportunity to hear Kurzweil speak a year or so ago and I have to say
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Wi-Fi Security: Guarding Against Man in the Middle Attacks
People discuss the security issues surrounding Wi-Fi a lot and it is one of the primary stumbling blocks to widespread adoption. Most people who look into the problem fixate on WEP as the primary problem. In fact for small businesses and SOHO, its not really a big concern: cracking a 128-bit key with the volume of traffic a small network generates is going to take too long to be worth it in most cases. Large businesses ought to be using VPNs anyway. The larger security problems, from my perspective, are more subtle, like the man-in-the-middle attack. This picture shows
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The Future of IT Consulting
Harvard Business School has a new working paper on the future of IT consulting. The paper is only available in excerpt, but there is an interview with its authors that has some interesting comments. I found this comment from the excerpt to ring true: As an established function, IT in the company now has more degrees of freedom to source services for highly specific purposes and value. One CIO describes the IT organization of the future as consisting of the following: Business analysis to understand the needs of the businesses Technical architecting to oversee and interface between IT and
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Tips for Protecting Your Identity
Much is made of the potential for identity theft in online transactions, but the truth is that the vast majority occursdue to meat-space activities that are much simpler to pull off. I ran across a set of ideas on how to protect your identity and thought they'd be good to record. Some of them are obvious, at least to me, but they probably aren't to everyone. I don't know who the author was. Here they are, edited and augmented by me: When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card accounts, do not put the complete account
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Well its Even Worse Than That
In response to the recent uproar over Google News returning company press releases, Karlin Lillington writes ...it seems to me that a lot of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations also routinely publish/broadcast items that are basically just rewritten, unquestioned press releases and government statements, which also aren't clearly distinguished from 'actual' news articles... Well, its even worse that that. In fact, much of what is not just rewritten company press releases is just rewritten from other papers. I saw the same misinformation quoted and requoted from paper to paper as they read each other's stories and rewrote them.
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Blogging Panel at UEN Summit
I'm going to be moderating a panel on blogging at the Utah Education Network's annual technical summit. I'm unfortunately opposite a session on Mac OS X which I think will garner significant attention. I plan to open with some information on what blogs are and use examples like the Weblogs at Harvard Law and Kern County Superintendent of Schools since UEN provides service to both higher and public education. Today, I notice that David Carraher has posted an article on using weblogs in education that I'll have to read for ideas. I'll probably also draw on my experience last
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LAMP and JAMES
Jon Udell makes reference to LAMP platforms (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl|Python|PHP) in an article about his interview with MySQL's CEO Mårten Mickos. I've been thinking of using an architecture I'm calling JAMES when I teach my large-scale distributed systems class next fall. JAMES stands for JSP, Apache, MySQL, EJBs, and SOAP. In my class, I'd like my students to see three different client-server architectures, a 2-tier architecture, an n-tier architecture, and a web services or service oriented architecture (SOA). Ideally, I'd have them use LAMP for the 2-tier architecture because its so popular. But they don't already know PHP|Python|Perl and that creates
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Evelyn Rodriguez Blog
Evelyn Rodriguez, who although living in the Bay Area right now, has some deep Utah ties, has started a blog. Evelyn was the organizer of the Digital Identity Summit that I blogged a few weeks ago. She's got an interest and expertise in digital identity and web services. I look forward to following what she writes.
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Bonding for Broadband
One of the little noticed bills in the past utah Legislative General Session was Senate Bill 184 which allows the creation of municipal improvement districts for telecommunications. This is the way it works: A group of property owners decide that they want some telecommunications service (like broadband). They petition the city to create a "special improvement district" for that purpose and the property owners are put into that district. They need not be contiguous. The city creates the district, bonds for the capital required to build out the facility, and contracts with someone to do the build-out and someone
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LAL Cat Archive
I spoke to Quinn Snell's CS426 class yesterday. One of the things I talked about was how the World Wide Web got introduced to BYU. I had just joined the faculty in 1993 from the University of Idaho and was waiting for my equipment to arrive. To combat my boredom, I started playing with these new things called web servers. We set one up at http://lal.cs.byu.edu. We even set up a web site for the University (without any explicit permission) and we'd teaching professors and grad students from all over campus about HTML, browsers, and web servers. One of
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Programming the Internet
I'm speaking at the BYU Computer Science Departments colloquium on April 17th at 11am in 1170 TMCB. Readers of this blog are cordially invited (campus map). The title of my talk will be "Programming the Internet." I'm taking some inspiration from Rohit Khare's statement that The future of software development requires integrating network services that are very far away, and owned by strangers. Here's the first draft of the abstract for my talk: Programming on the Internet means integrating network services that are very far away and owned by strangers. Thus, programming the Internet requires that we understand issues
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Industrial Advisoty Council Papers on Enterprise Architecture
The Industry Advisory Council (IAC) is a broadly based organization of information technology (IT) professionals representing more than 300 companies nationwide that provide products and services to the government. (It says so right on their website.) They have been very active in supporting the Federal government's enterprise architecture initiatives. Their website has a collection of white papers on enterprise architecture. I haven't read the papers, but I've been to several presentations by IAC members on the contents of the papers. Many of the more progressive states are following the Fed's lead on this and doing the same thing with
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Googlewashing, Googlejuice, and Exploiting Page Rank
There is an article in The Register alleging a tech-blogger conspiracy to hi-jack the phrase "second superpower" though the power to exploit page rank on Google. The article refers to this as "googlewashing." The story is that Dave Winer and Doc Searles didn't merely link to James Moore's weblog entry on "second superpower," but were part of, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, "a vast tech-blogger conspiracy." The article says: But the real marvel is that they did it with so few people. Pew Research Center's latest research says the number of Internet users who look at blogs is " so
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Excellent GXA Reference
Joseph Chiusano is a Senior Consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton. He's also one of the most knowledgeable people on GXA who I know. In this excellent article on developer.com, Joseph lays out GXA and explains the important components in some detail. I've been going through them one at a time. I've still got one left that I really want to look into WS-Transaction.
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jBOSS and Middleware 2003
In this interview with C|NET, Marc Fluery, the force behind jBOSS says that "JBoss software will displace commercial Java server software faster than Linux is replacing more entrenched operating systems." That's a bold statement, but not beyond the realm of possibility. Marc will be keynoting Middleware 2003 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil this June. I've been thinking of going, but I wish it were closer. Going to Rio would be nice, but its time consuming. Is anyone else who reads this blog going? Let me know.
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Making Applications Green with Envy
Jon Udell is blogging the Infoworld CTO forum. He has a very detailed post on Adam Bosworth's (CTO, BEA Systems) talk. There's a lot of interesting insights there, but something that Adam said relative to integration challenges caught my eye: Data lives behind firewalls, apps guard it jealously, you can't run one query to reach all of them. I don't think we give this idea enough mind time. Sure, we like to think of databases as repositories of our data independent of the application but ask yourself two questions: How many databases under your control were started as the
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eGovernment Through the Deseret News
Dave Fletcher reports that the Deseret News has put inspection results from the Regulatory Services Division of the Utah Dept. of Agriculture online. I saw the article in the paper, so I missed the online application. The application is pretty good. Its unfortunate that its not done by Agriculture however since it will quickly become out of date. This online data points out one of the real powers of eGovernment: true transparency. I've given a few examples of this before (nursing homes and sex offenders). This data was all available before but not easily so. Practitioners of eGovernment have
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