Aehso’s Output

The spammers are getting deperate for Eclipse developers attention.

Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 02:10:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: wen fengli <wenfengli2007@yahoo.com>
Subject: No 1 in US and China?
Lawsuit maker wenfeng li used to declaim to be NO.1 business software vendor by 2006.Right now,he can declaim that BIRT to be NO.1 business intelligence software by whatever year he want to be. As long as he continue to grab big check from Actuate, he can declaim whatever he want to declaim.
Wenfeng li's business strategy is that let's do it. Let's hire more people and get rid of people I don't like quickly. Eventually, let's add version number and declare a success.
The trend is "Express". Let's call it BIRT Express next year.

Or that could be the most cunning and devious business plan I have ever seen (’excellent’, as Mr Burns would say). Watch out BIRT competitors!

Can the PS3 Save Sony contains an interesting quote from Phil Wiser, former CTO of Sony’s US operations:

But it’s very hard to quantify the advantage of good software. If you’re in a hardware company and you analyze it from a financial perspective, you just want to do it as cheaply as you can. Software and services are an afterthought.

Interesting quote. In fact, many (unsuccessful) software companies make exactly the same mistake so we can’t be too hard on a hardware company for making it but the mere fact that Sony still think of themselves as hardware company doesn’t bode well for the PS3. Me, I think I will Wii…

It took a while, but those there is apparently now a tool to strip Windows Media DRM (not that I’d be able to verify, being a mac bigot and all) - those monthly subscriptions from Yahoo and Napster are suddenly looking mighty attractive! I wonder will they have to suspend distribution for a while (someone think of the media!)

Microsoft are very quiet on the whole affair, probably hoping that Big Media do not notice while they try patch up this almightly mess. Meanwhile, expect a critical software update to install itself on your machine soon to seek out and update all the poor vunerable wma files on your machine, in the name of fair use of course.

I guess that’s the thing with these content protection genies, once they get of the bottle it is damn hard to get them back in.

I must be busy, I completely missed this until now.  DTT trials have started in Ireland.  Now if they’d just integrate with Freeview…

While booking a table for dinner tonite I just remembered to post a small warning on a recent experience. Dinner in Wongs Chinese Restaurant in Ranelagh last Thursday turned out to be one of the worst dining experiences I’ve ever had in a restaurant in Dublin. Yep, I think I’ll even include take-away dining experiences in that observation.

• Stale prawn crackers. Imagine, a “gourmet” Chinese restaurant that cannot even serve fresh prawn crackers. Then imagine that they store said prawn crackers on shelves above the cloak room rails (I kid you not).
• Uninspired, bland, overpriced, precooked main dishes. Incredibly, we were were served about two minutes after ordering, they did not even pretend to cook the food after it was ordered.
• An obligitary 10% service charge added to the bill total - for a table of 3. I thought this begorra-chance-me-arm practice had died out in the 90s?

How such a terrible restaurant can survive in a gastro-mecca like Ranelagh is beyond me. Silly rich people who don’t know any better perhaps?

Back to Zen in Rathmines for me that type of meal in future…

The Last Word have put a collection of TJ and TJ comedy sketches up on their website (unfortunately in .wma format). 

My favourite has to be Radio Garda:

Remember it’s your duty to police that booty…

Dion Hinchliffe’s recent WOA/Client article went pretty close to making my head explode.  Calling WOA/Client the “Pragmatic Service-Oriented Architecture”, the article contains a pretty diagram that reduces the use of web services to five key patterns that are defined in detail in another article Dion wrote for The Architecture Journal titled Patterns for High-Integrity Data Consumption and Composition:

• Frequent run-time checking of only the part of the contract you care about
• Minimal surface area dependence on Web service
• Lowest possible distance between client data representation and server representation
• Tolerant, robust, federated data modification (incomplete updates must never break the application)
• Managing multiple data sources in a maintainable way.  Use MVC to knit them/update them.

How this differs from any other SOA, beyond being an incomplete subset of considerations for any enterprise architect to muse over, is very questionable.  Why we need another term for this set of patterns is questionable.   How these patterns qualify as pragmatic when others (such as defining an interface versioning strategy up front) are somehow not is questionable. 

On a deeper level, how well-defined these patterns are is also questionable.  For example, I find it difficult to reconcile the use of the MVC pattern on an enterprise architecture level.  Are we supposed to define model services and view services?  Where does the controller get implemented and do we have to provide view callback interfaces (for the model to update the view).  Do the view services have to maintain state?  Sorry, the granualarity and complexity doesn’t fit distributed services at all.
 
And I’m still not sure what the term Client in WOA/Client signifies.  I have to agree with Sam Ruby - articles like this signify that the term SOA has entered the realm of Newspeak.  WOA/Client seems to be bordering on the stuff that Dilbert cartoons are made of.  It may only serve to further disconnect and confuse the very architects who are struggling to embrace existing, concrete, service oriented architecture definitions.

So IBM are making good use of OSGi in Websphere 6.1.  The OSGi security, module and lifecycle layers can provide can substantial benefits to a server runtime - capabilities like dynamically loading/updating/unloading bundles etc.  These don’t come for free though - most require that the hosted bundles contain code that is properly ‘component-ized’ and adheres to the constraints imposed by the hosting OSGi runtime.  Refactoring a legacy codebase like WebSphere to integrate with a new component model like OSGi would be, I imagine, a mammoth undertaking.  And there is the question of how much of OSGi to integrate with - which subset of OSGi Services are worth using instead of legacy alternatives?

Still, they are stepping in the right direction and it is part of a larger trend.  At ApacheCon Europe a month ago I bumped into one of the JOnAS guys who
told me they are building JOnAS 5 on OSGi.  As I mentioned in the past, I expect most Java based servers worth their salt to be running on OSGi runtimes within a year or two, it’ll be interesting to see to what degree…