daihozen

I've always held that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is one of the best aspects of the modern IT landscape. But like all software, FOSS needs constant effort to keep up to date, and this effort costs money. A variety of funding models have sprung up, where for-profit companies try to sell a variety of peripheral services while keeping software free. However, one of the most obvious ways to fund the development of FOSS is government funding. Government funding is public money, and if it isn't used to fund the development of software that is freely available to the public but spent on proprietary software instead, then it's an unjustifiable waste of taxpayers' money. It was therefore good to read that the Dutch government recently paid to develop better support for the WS-ReliableMessaging standard in the popular Open Source Apache CXF services framework. I was also gratified to read that the developer who was commissioned to make these improvements was Dennis Sosn...

I was trying to get PostgreSQL's "pgagent" process (written to run as a daemon) to run on startup like other Linux services, and came upon this nice visual (i.e., curses) tool to manage services. It's called "sysv-rc-conf" (install with "sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf"), and when run with "sudo sysv-rc-conf", brings up a screen like this: It's not really "graphics", but to a command-line user, this is as graphical as it gets All services listed in /etc/init.d appear in this table. The columns are different Unix runlevels. Most regular services need to be running in runlevels 2, 3, 4 and 5, and stopped in the others. Simply move the cursor to the desired cells and press Tab to toggle it on or off. The 'K' (stop) and 'S' (start) symbolic links are automatically written into the respective rc.d directories. Press 'q' to quit the tool and satisfy yourself that the symbolic links are all correctly set u...

Although a big fan of Ubuntu Linux as a desktop OS, I've never been interested in their cloud storage platform Ubuntu One, and found it a bit of a nuisance when asked to sign up for it every time I installed the OS. Now Ubuntu One is being shut down . I'm 'meh' but still a bit surprised. The linked article talks about mobile, and how new mobiles such as the Ubuntu-powered ones need cloud storage to succeed. If so, isn't it really bad timing for Canonical to walk away from a fully operational cloud platform just when its mobile devices are entering the market? Ubuntu-powered smartphones (Do you know what the time on the middle phone refers to ?) I think it's about economics. Ubuntu's statement says: If we offer a service, we want it to compete on a global scale, and for Ubuntu One to continue to do that would require more investment than we are willing to make. We choose instead to invest in making the absolute best, open platform and to highlight the best of...

I've been having a lot of fun building a realistic-looking demo app that is meant to showcase the features of a coming product. A big challenge in such cases is obviously dynamic data, since hard-coded data won't cut it. It needs to behave like a web app, providing the illusion of a server-side database, but without a server-side database. HTML5 provides built-in client-side persistence features called sessionStorage and localStorage, but when the data requirements are complex, as in my application, these just aren't adequate. What I need is a client-side database like SQLite. As it turns out, different browsers have taken different routes to providing client-side databases, and it made my head hurt to read about Web SQL and SQLite and which browser incorporated which database and which browser abandoned which database. Finally, I found a JavaScript library called HTML5SQL.js that promised to abstract all those implementation issues from me, giving me a standard API to work...

After weeks of hectic preparation, Rahul Singh and I held our long-awaited workshop today on "Dependency-Oriented Thinking", comprising all-new material from my recent document "Dependency-Oriented Thinking: Vol 1 - Analysis and Design" . Somewhat disappointingly, we only had three signed-up participants, but the numbers only tell half the story. Only one of the three was from Sydney. One flew in from Melbourne the night before, and another got up at 4 am to make the 3+ hour drive from Canberra to Sydney. With such determination on their part, I just had to do my best, and I hope they were happy with the workshop. They certainly expressed satisfaction on their feedback forms :-). The slides are now available on Slideshare . If anyone was put off from reading the original document on account of its size (264 pages), they could go through this slide pack instead (only 220 slides, heh).

Well, it's time to road-test my SOA method "Dependency-Oriented Thinking". I released the two DOT documents before Christmas, Volume 1 on Analysis and Design and Volume 2 on Governance and Management . Now, Rahul Singh and I are conducting an all-day workshop to provide a more interactive instruction into the Analysis and Design aspects of the method. It'll be on Saturday the 15th of February, 2014. The course fees are $450 plus GST for the all-day program. There's an early bird price of $400 plus GST for those who register on or before the 3rd of Feb. You can download the workshop brochure and schedule here:  http://slidesha.re/1j59nqK If you're a Sydney-based business analyst, solution architect or senior designer, you may be interested in this workshop. My objective is to make IT professionals more effective by helping them think more powerfully about complex, inter-connected systems. Dependency-Oriented Thinking is just structured common sense, but it doe...

I know I haven't been active on this blog for almost 6 months, but I haven't been idle. Ever since Rahul Singh and I conducted our first workshop on "Dead Simple SOA" in Sydney last year, I have been working on the feedback we received, namely that we needed to split "Analysis & Design" from "Governance & Management" because these two topics are of interest to two different audiences. Splitting out just Governance & Management from the original document " Slicing the Gordian Knot of SOA Governance " was the easy part. I realised that I didn't have much material on Analysis and Design, so I had to write that from scratch. That task ultimately took the better part of a year. Well, that's completed now, and the two documents are now ready to download from SlideShare: Dependency-Oriented Thinking: Volume 1 - Analysis and Design Dependency-Oriented Thinking: Volume 2 - Governance and Management I have believed for a while n...