See Climate Change happening...

On the great TED conference, I saw this video on retreating ice glaciers... what are we humans doing to Mother Earth?

The photographer, James Balog, has been working for ExtremeIceSurvey. Seeing is believing...



Very impressive, well worth watching.

improve iTunes metadata...

I always tried (manually..) to keep my iTunes library organized, including cover images, album names and genres...

Via lifehacker I recently found Pollux - a neat and free (!) application which analyses given songs and fetches all required metadata from the internet. Version 1.1.2 did not work great, since the new version 1.1.5 it's perfect...

If you work on a mac, go get it here... (don't forget to donate if you like it!)

Update (Oct 2009): Pollux has been such an overhelming success that they cannot handle requests any longer... hope they'll be back online soon!)

old - but still great'n true: How NOT to wrap your product...

I've seen it in different flavors - but this video made me really laugh:



(if the embedded video does not work, try the URL here!)

Airplane Security and Explosives...

BBC had a brief coverage on the effect of a small amount of liquid explosive on a commercial airplane (found via Bruce Schneier).

After viewing that, I'm pretty happy the EU and other countries do not allow unidentified liquids on board....

Geniales Rockerlebnis: Queen Kings

Im malerisch gelegenen Waldschwimmbad (!) hatten wir ein Konzerterlebnis der besonderen Art: The Queen Kings rockten unglaublich nahe am genialen Original, frisch und musikalisch aufregend gut. Knapp drei Stunden Musik für 16 Euro Eintrittspreis (und Kinder hatten freien EIntritt) - das nenn' ich value-for-money.

Selten habe ich ein Bass-Solo derart genossen wie die kurzweilige Darbietung von Rolf Sander, der nahtlos Passagen von Smoke-on-the-Water in sein Cover von Another-one-bites-the-Dust: Umwerfend, Kompliment!

Die Stimmen von Mirko und der Backstage-Dame Susann gehen unter die Haut,
die Gitarrensoli klingen meisterlich, und der Schlagzeugpart von Matti Schmidt war begeisternd gut, ein instesamt überzeugendes Erlebnis.

Wir gehen wieder hin - keine Frage!

"Escheresque" 404...

I admire the folks from Dropbox for their unobtrusive, reliable, high-performance and well-supported service...

While researching some dict.cc updates for my MacBook, I found a link
to the Dropbox-404-Not-Found-Site :-)

Well done...

I stopped using Eclipse...

Ever had hassle with your numerous Eclipse plugins? With update-manager complaining about missing dependencies, which nobody ever could resolve?

With re-installing your (free) development environment every now and then?

After giving the latest Eclipse ("Galileo") a try, I just dumped it: After configuring Spring, Scala, webservice, subversion and a few other plugins, the whole app did not even bother to start...

Having been Eclipse user for several years, I am really grateful for their contribution to (Java) software development. But it has become an overly complex monster in my (humble) opinion.

I lighthearted moved over to IntelliJ-IDEA - their slogan "develop with pleasure" became true within the first hour of using IDEA (I tried both 8.1.3 and their early-access version 9). Grails and Groovy support is excellent, Scala plugin working fine, subversion support the best I ever had, even Clojure working (ok - that one can definitely be improved, but true lisp programmers should stick to Emacs)

Proud user of

die "Vierte"...

Gestern ist bei Hanser die vierte Auflage meines Buches "Effektive Software-Architekturen" erschienen. Die aktuelle Version hat um 30 Seiten auf 435 Seiten zugelegt.

Darin finden Sie jetzt über 50 Seiten Beispielarchitekturen (ich beschreibe ein System zur Datenmigration und eine CRM-Produktfamilie, beides real existierende Systeme). Dieses Kapitel können Sie beim Verlag kostenfrei herunterladen, als Appetithappen...

In einem weiteren neuen Kapitel erläutere ich den standardisierten Lehrplan für Software-Architekten des ISAQB in Kurzform.

Weitere Neuerungen finden sich under-the-cover. In praktisch allen Kapiteln habe ich aufgeräumt, korrigiert und aktualisiert.

Falls Ihnen Fehler, Versäumnisse oder Ungereimtheiten auffallen, freue ich mich über Ihre Rückmeldung!

Vitamin-D...

My favorite technical podcast, Security Now by Steve Gibson, recently had an episode titled Vitamin-D.

At first I expected a story on some clever new computer virus or one of his precise wrapups of some-clever-new-technology.

But this time Steve went for something completely different: Health. Human health - which is something most of us should be concerned about.

He presented some interesting research results about vitamin-D, showing a significant correlation between Vitamin-D levels and health. His short summary - which he proves : Vitamin D promotes health.

I followed a few of his links, bought and read a (German) book - and now
I'm pretty convinced Steve has a point!

Zehnkämpfer der IT...

Softwarearchitekten tragen - wenn sie ihre Aufgabe ernst nehmen - eine Menge Verantwortung im Projekt
und benötigen dazu eine Menge an Fähigkeiten. Lesen Sie den Artikel "Zehnkämpfer der IT", den Peter Hruschka und ich gemeinsam geschrieben haben.

Kandidat für "Nutzloseste Website"...

Ich spende seit einigen für das Rote Kreuz Blut - und bin immer wieder
positiv von der Motivation der vielen ehrenamtlichen Mitarbeiter
dieser Organisation überrascht. Blutspenden hilft, Leben zu retten. Eine gute Sache also...



Nun aber hat die Marketing-Abteilung des DRK (Deutsches Rotes Kreuz) aus meiner Sicht eine der nutzlosesten Websites der letzten Monate gebaut: Eine Online-Community für Blutspender... Wer soll die denn bitte nutzen? Aus der Werbung für diese Site:

"Lege deine eigenen Fotoalben an" (ok - höflicher wäre es, "Deine" zu schreiben). Schon was von flickr gehört? Oder Facebook? MySpace? Die können auch Fotoalben. Und sie haben massig Besucher...

"Verabrede dich online mit anderen Spendern". Toll. Wozu denn das? Ist das "Dating für Single-Blutspender"?

"Verwalte Deine Termine einfach online im Kalender": hust hust... auch das gibt's bereits im Dutzend - und zwar in ziemlich cool.

Meiner Meinung nach hätte das DRK das (wahrscheinlich viele) Geld für diese Community-Website besser in Informationsflyer für Schüler und Studenten gesteckt... die durch die tausendunderste Möchtegern-Community mitnichten zu überzeugten Blutspendern werden. Es aber durch vernünftige Information werden könnten.

Also, DRK: Entsorge den oder die Berater, die diesen Unfug empfohlen haben. Und informiere lieber - statt ohnehin vorhandene Services zweitklassig zu kopieren. Schade um das Geld!

Ich komme übrigens weiterhin Blut spenden :-)

Architecture Evaluation with ATAM

I recently conducted several short software architecture evaluations (a.k.a. assessments) according to ATAM with small teams.

Once again I was positively impressed with the outcome: Within hours (literally!) we matched current quality goals to architectural approaches,
identifiying risks and non-risks... without even starting any tool...

So - just in case you need an overview of your architectural risks - go
and learn ATAM (for German readers: there's a free pdf on my website)

Give yourself (or your team) at least a day for an extensive evaluation -
half of which you will need to brainstorm and investigate your stakeholders' current quality goals.

Software-Architektur kompakt

endlich erschienen. Aus dem Rückentext:

Software Architektur kompakt gibt Ihnen alles, was Sie zu einem reibungslosen und schnellen Start in das Thema benötigen. Lernen Sie Systeme zukunftssicher, flexibel und transparent zu konstruieren. Sie finden hier sofort einsetzbare und erprobte Muster und Vorlagen zur Erstellung praxistauglicher IT-Architekturen.

Das Buch liefert allen relevanten Projektbeteiligten maßgeschneiderte Antworten zu Entwurfsentscheidungen, Systemstruktur und Implementierung.

Software-Architektur kompakt hilft Ihnen, das Berufsbild und die Verantwortung von Software-Architekten besser zu verstehen und in Ihren Projekten zu etablieren. Sie finden Antworten auf verbreitete Einwände wie „zu viel Aufwand", „keine Zeit" oder „zu teuer".



Freue mich über Rückmeldungen :-)

Interview über Software-Architekten online...

Mirko Schrempp hat mich über Software-Architektur und die
Aufgabe von Software-Architekten interviewt - hier das Ergebnis.

Tenor: Ihr müsst als Software-Architekten vorstandstauglich sein...

Linus Thorvalds on GIT

It's already beyond hype: GIT, distributed version control system.

Linus talks (at Google) about his source-code-management history,
his aversion (hatred...) of CVS and subversion,
on distribution and other interesting stuff.

Not too good for subversion-lovers :-)

One of the coolest things I've seen in a long time...

an absolutely stunning T-Mobile marketing event - happend January 2009 in a London underground station...

From one reviewer at youtube:

Whoever thought of this idea can rest on this one idea for many years to come. Brilliant at many levels. Music can change the world. We've just witnessed it at a railway station in London. And old and young. And black and white. Love this video. Kudos to T-Mobile.

(happend to be my mothers' birthday...)

If you like it, I found its making of video...

simplified my website...

aah - I found the time to simplify my website a bit -
thanx to RapidWeaver I even streamlined the layout in not time at all...

Vortrag über "Architekturkommunikation" online...

Die Veranstalter der WJAX haben freundlicherweise den Mittschnitt meines
Vortrags über Architekturkommunikation online gestellt.

Wer also Interesse und 57 Minuten Zeit hat... dem wünsche ich viel Spaß dabei.

Empfehlenswerter Blog - philo-politisch mit Kulturanteil...

Joerg Friedrich, vielseitiger IT-Coach und -Berater, beschäftigt sich in seiner Freizeit mit Philosophie und Politik (ok - natürlich auch Kultur und Sport).

Ich habe die letzten Wochen seine (oft langen) und gehaltvollen Beiträge in seinem Blog sehr genossen - aber lesen Sie selbst.

Er hält übrigens eine Umlaut-Domäne, was vermutlich nicht alle RSS-Reader heute schon verstehen...

Bruce Schneier on Security and Terrorism

Bruce Schneier wrote up a really good piece on security and terrorism - triggered by the recent tragic attacks in Bombay/Mumbay, India.

OOP 2009: Freitag spielt die Musik...

Zu den Kernthemen der kommenden OOP 2009 in München gehören
diesmal die soft skills. Haben wir IT'ler auch bitter nötig -
ganz im Ernst. IT-Projekte kranken selten an schlechter Technik, aber fast immer an schlechter Kommunikation oder schlechtem Teamwork.

Auf der OOP treten Alice Heiliger und Co. (endlich mal!) an, uns
auf ganz unkonventionelle Weise Abhilfen zu zeigen: Am Beispiel
der (nonverbalen) Kommunikation von Dirigenten nämlich...

Mein persönlicher Tipp: Hingehen, mitmachen.

(I'm gonna eat my own dogfood: Bin selbst auch dabei!)

Cartography-paradigm used to "map-the-web"

Via the (great!) weekly newspaper "Die Zeit" I found an interesting map of important internet sites: Websites grouped by topics and drawn like Tokyo's subway map - by informationarchitects.jp.

Using the subway-map paradigm from cartography to categorize and relate internet organizations and websites was new to me - and took away a few hours of my time (which I spent surfing previously unknown sites...). They grouped around 300 sites along the major "lines".

Great stuff - well worth a peek. Downloadable in a variety of formats - even clickable :-)

The Ultimate Authentication Device - but currently without market

That's what I was looking for the last years: A tiny, sleek, affordable, secure and really cool device for authentication: Forget about this plethora of different passwords and login-names. Just press the green-glowing button of the Yubikey - an imho revolutionary device invented and produced by Swedish company Yubico: It plugs into any USB port and behaves like a regular USB-keyboard. With the exception that it has only one single (mystically illuminated) key - and emitts a highly secure one-time-password every time this key is pressed.

Good to know: Their sdk (development kit) is open source, their business model is selling the hardware (starting from 35 US$ for a single USB-key, going down to approx 10 US$ for larger quantities).

I could really solve all login and authentication problems - would there be enough acceptance around the great players. Steve Gibson had a great coverage in his security-now podcast - but my favorite sites still don't use neither OpenID nor YubiKey...

But hey - wait: Most revolutions took a few month to really take off...

JAX 2008: Ted Neward on "Pragmatic Architecture"

On the JAX 2008 conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, I heard Ted Neward ("I'm a big geek") talk about "Pragmatic Architectures" - presenting his very code-centric ideal of solution architects.

He started with a small joke architecture is latin, meaning "cannot code anymore". That's funny at first - but his notion of solution architect contains many issues I'm happy to share with him (e.g. care for non-functional requirements, consider goals and external influences, be pragmatic about the technology choices) - but I really missed some (imho crucial) points:

• Architecture is (only) a description of the solution - it's by no means the solution itself.


• Source code is sometimes (imho: very often) not suited to communicate structures-in-the-large. Its value is in my opionion ofter over-estimated - as there are so many other artifacts within software projects to be considered (like: existing data and data-models, existing business process descriptions etc.)


• Other important tasks (which architects need to support) are communication and documentation of technical issues, technical risk management, technical consulting to other stakeholders and so forth.
  

If the architects is coding like hell, (s)he's very likely to neglect one or several of these - with potentially dangerous consequences in the long run.

Ted continued to bash on "drawing, not coding", which got him serious bonus-points from the audience - but there were definitely no managers present to contradict him... In my opinion, coding only makes up a small fraction of the overall effort in projects.

He didn't get to the point of giving advice on how to achieve pragmatic architectures - which I found a little disappointing (all right - I did not expect miracles within that 60 minutes).

But I learned some really valuable things:

• First: Building commercial enterprise systems always boils down to the magical HST. Which stands for hooking shit together.
  
• Second: Even big geeks have no simple approaches for designing pragmatic architectures.

Summary: It's a real pleasure to hear Ted Neward talk - he's awesomely funny, makes great points and centers his attention on source code.

Cool English-German Translation on Mac

Just in case you're offline sometimes and cannot use the fantastic dict.leo.org service:
Philipp Brauner made the dict.cc project available for Mac-OS (Leopard) with a really cool plugin.

It's free and well integrated into the standard dictionay application.

(You Mac users did know that you can translate any (highlighted) word from any Cocoa application by hitting Ctrl-Cmd-D, did you?)

Video On Demand: First (positive!) Experience

In some respect I'm a little behind the "bleeding" edge in technology, and VOD (video-on-demand) is one of those areas.

Today was the first time in my life I paid money (5Euro) to watch a streamed video (the third
game in the German DEL (ice)hockey playoffs, with my favorite Cologne team playing Berlin).

It's filmed and streamed by Premiere, the imho leading German pay-TV giant.

At first I tried with Firefox on my Mac - but was informed by the Premiere system check that their DRM (digital rights management) requirements are not met. So I tried my old Dell Windows machine - which immediately played the system test trailer...

I had to register - that was a real nuisance: At least three times their payment-management system wasn't available - so I had to re-enter my data again...

The image and sound quality is very acceptable, and the price (5 Euro) was ok for this event
(although the game finally ended up with my favourite team loosing in the last few seconds...)

On Olympics and Beijing

Usually I refrain from political posts - but Tibet shall be well worth every exception!



It's a shame, a tragedy and a disaster: A big country invades a small one. Nobody cares.
Now the big country happens to host the olympics - and a few fellows from the small country
(now a so called province of the big country) try to protest their invasion. Tibetians are (and have been for a long time) severely oppressed and robbed of their (rich) cultural heritage by China. It's an
illegal invasion, nothing less!

I'm really fond of the RSF (reporters sans frontiers) initiative to boycott the opening ceremony of the 2008 olympic games - and I urge our German officials to follow this path. Do not allow
the big country their carefully planned marketing triumph.


Additionally, Jan Kurschewitz has posted a brief writeup plus some additional links.

Aktuelle Information über Bahn-Verspätungen...

Bevor Sie Ihre Zeit auf Bahnsteigen vergeuden... (soll ja vorkommen),
hilft ein Blick auf diese Bahn-Website, die über aktuelle Ankunfts/Abfahrtzeiten (sprich: Verspätungen) und deren Gründe Auskunft erteilt.

Article on Domain-Driven Development published...

The German OBJECTspektrum just published my latest article on "Domänenzentrierte Entwicklung" -
supported by this blog entry.

Store arbitrary documents in Google-Mail

Just in case you want to store some documents (or mails) online (and you don't mind the Google guys beeing able to search it...):

OpenLoops gives a nice tip for this - just send the document to your own gmail address, but instead of sending to

yourname@gmail.com

you now send to

yourname+docs@gmail.com

... the string "+docs" is ignored by gmail - and you can use a simple filter rule to add a label to all those mails...

Update (March 11th 2008): Some people asked, wether it is safe to store documents in GMail. IMHO it is not. I would currently not store any sensitive information there (nor at any other online-location!). But not every document is really sensitive...

major update on arc42-site...

(english version below)

Für alle arc42-Anhänger: Gerade haben wir die neue Version der Website live geschaltet -
grundlegend überarbeitet, mit der brandaktuellen Version 3.2 des bekannten Architektur-Templates an Bord.

Ausser dem neuen Layout gibt's auch viel neuen Inhalt, jede Menge neue Downloads und eine ausführliche Dokumentation des Templates ("How-To...").

---

English version:

Just in case you're interested in our arc42-site (free resources for software architects) - we just published a *major* update, including the brand-new version 3.2 of the template, an improved download-section and a (cool!) documentation of the template ("how-to").

Feedback welcome!

Gewachsen und gereift: Effektive Software-Architekturen...

Ab dem 17. Januar 2008 ist die dritte Auflage meines Buches "Effektive Software-Architekturen"
im Buchhandel erhältlich. Mittlerweile gibt's auch eine Website zum Buch, mit diversen Kapiteln
im Originaltext als kostenfreie pdf-Downloads.

Von 270 auf 400 Seiten gewachsen, massiv überarbeitet und durch meine Erfahrungen der letzten Jahre
hoffentlich (noch weiter!) gereift... hier ein Überblick über den Inhalt:



Ach ja - so sieht's von vorne aus...:

GSM Security...

If you plan to discuss *really* important secrets over the GSM mobile network, read this article (pdf) first:

We have presented a simple-to-implement known-plaintext at-
tack on the A5/1 stream cipher, and given an implementation
on a small FPGA. The attack is novel over previous attacks
in that it needs only a very small amount of plaintext frame
data. A distributed implementation on specialized hardware
was projected to derive a key within half a minute on the av-
erage. We conclude that the A5/1 algorithm is not secure for
longer phone calls.

Actually I didn't know it was feasible for non-government groups to crack GSM... but it seems to be...

Further info on this wiki. There is even a video available, from the 2007 CCC convention.

Highly regarded Rickard Öberg creates "New Energy for Java"...

Only a few people combine creativity and the ability to deliver solutions... one of them is Rickard Öberg. His brain- and codechildren range from XDoclet to the JBoss application server, cool stuff.

Now he's back with the idea (and framework) he calls new energy for java in a lengthy blog entry.

He names it "QI4J" (pronounced "chee for jay") - a framework in the area of domain-driven development (I blogged about it here). Well, just in case you're architecting software systems, you should check it out...

Verfassungsbeschwerde gegen Vorratsdatenspeicherung

Ich habe mich der Verfassungsbeschwerde gegen die Vorratsdatenspeicherung angeschlossen - einer löblichen Initiative gegen ein aus meiner Sicht Gesetz ohne jegliches Sachverständnis und bar jeder Verhältnismäßigkeit

Ein paar Infos zum Thema bei Wikipedia und dem Choas-Computer-Club.

Links on Domain-Driven-Design (and Development)

For an upcoming article I researched a few things on domain-driven design. Find some of the links below:


(last updated Feb. 24th 2008, for Grails)

Note: This entry will be updated in the near future - stay tuned if you're interested in DDD!!

---

• Eric Evans' domaindriven website, link to his awesome book on domain-driven design:
  
  


• InfoQ published a minibook on DDD: Domain-Driven Design quickly (authored by Abel Avram and Floyd Marinescu)


• Jimmy Nilson on Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns - a printed book...Of course, he maintains his own blog.




---


The Groovy-/Java based Grails adopted the convention-over-configuration ideas from RoR, but included several of the DDD patterns. It's really easy to describe entities and their associations, both static and dynamic scaffolding care for (some of the) rest. Just recently the Grails-team published their 1.0.1 version (too bad they introduced a number of issues, so the samples from the docu currently don't work properly - but stay tuned.





IMHO this is one of the most promising approaches to DDD - I'm really curious wether their Apache-Wicket plugin turns out to be enterprise-ready :-) Well done, guys!!



---



• NakedObjects Framework, a proven implementation of many DDD-patterns. Hosted here on sourceforge, includes an excellent (!!) programming manual with loads of samples.


• InfoQ article on the 3.x release of NakedObjects



• Some very clever people (Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood) badly complained the strange user interface of NakedObjects and published their very clear dislike here. What else to be expected from UI-gurus? It's their turf where NO and similar frameworks.



---




• JMatter framework. Re-used some ideas from NakedObjects. Contains many sample applications, extensive docu. Have a look at the myTunes sample, where Eitan Suez implements a crude iTunes clone in approx 190 lines of java code. Quite cool. As in NakedObjects, the UI takes some time to get used to... Just recently (Feb-04-2008) updated the framework.



• Introduction to JMatter on InfoQ - with interesting comments.


• A discussion of JMatters wizards - with Groovy to the rescue...


• A few articles on JMatter (from their website, but difficult to find).



---



• Roma Framework. Another productive development framework which claims DDD, but does not provide any of the typical DDD patterns.


• Presentation on the Roma Framework (on Slideshare)



---



• Trails framework. More a productivity enhancer than a DDD-framework, but nevertheless...



---



• CSLA Business Framework (Homepage), created by Rocky Lhotka.


• Blog-Entry on CSLA-Business Framework, some critique



---



• Of course, Ruby-on-Rails might be used as DDD framework. It's really productive for web applications, but does not implement any of the DDD patterns verbatim (and convention over configuration is not in the DDD list of favorite patterns...



---



• Rickard Öberg started with QI4J - well worth checking out, just because it's him...
  
  



---



• A german company (Freiheit.com) started their own UI-generation-DDD-framework, named SansSouci. Seems to be dead since 2005...

Three links you for GPG ("gnu-ish PGP) on Mac

Just in case you need to setup a PGP-like infrastructure on Mac-OS: I recommend the GNU-GPG-tools
for it - and found helpful instructions on MacGPG-site.

1. Download the files from Sourceforge. You'll surely need "GnuPG for OSX" and "GPG KeyChain Access" (makes life much easier).


2. Point your browser to the cool docu (by Zeitform).


3. In case you need to pgp-encrypt EMail (I'm sure you need to!), get GPGMail (from SENTE), also free.

Installation is very straightforward.

Then you

• (must) generate your own key (unless you already have one and it's still valid!),


• (should propably) upload your public key to a keyserver (the default keyserver of GPG works fine),


• (have to) find the keys of your communication partners, either on the public keyservers or from them directly,


• (should) publish your key's fingerprint, so others can verify a downloaded key... (put it on your website, find mine here). In case your're too lazy to klick: 9E64 477B 0BCF A2C6 C868 68B3 CF32 9C31 4E1A 26BA

And you're done: From now on, your mails or files can look like (snippet from the pgp'd version of this post:)

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin)
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....

VNC-Clients for Mac-OS

(Just in case you don't know VNC, skip this post...)

For those interested in using VNC to remote-control another computer... a simple solution
without the need to configure X-Servers...

At least two (free) options for the Mac are available:

• ChickenOfTheVNC: Nice, but remember to add the port-number in the address-field (e.g. 192.160.0.17:5901). What shall I say - it just works.


• JollyFastVNC: Faster and more responsive then the "Chicken", but does not properly map the (German) keyboard... Therefore, for me as DE-localized user it is close to unusable (except I only use the mouse).

Eine "Prio"rität in Baden-Baden

Zum zweiten Mal fand im November 2007 in Baden-Baden die famose Prio-Konferenz statt, auf der ich (mal wieder) das spannende Thema "Bewertung von Software-Architekturen" vorstellen durfte.

Die Prio ist einen Besuch wert, weil sie als so genannte "Themenkonferenz" eine konsiste und wohlstrukturierte Darstellung eines zentralen "Leitgedankens" verfolgt (dieses Jahr war es "Qualität").

Meinen Vortrag (inklusive ausführlichem Text dazu) gibt zum Download.

Ein kleiner (optischer) Eindruck:

Sh** happens - therefore everybody needs a backup strategy

Did you ever lost data due to an accidental "rm -r *" command? Or because your spouse just installad the newest service pack of any operating system which caused your machine to cease working?

I know about failures of humans and machines. I never want to loose digital assets due to such failures, therefore I designed and implemented a broad backup strategy.

But first things first. Let's start with the kinds of sh** that can happen:

Risks to Digital Assets

• Theft: Some nice guy steals your precious notebook with your even more precious digital assets on its drive.


• Damage: Your drive gets sick due to headcrash or an overdose of spilled coffee (I mostly stick to green tea, but they say that is equally fatal for harddrives).


• Accidental deletion: Wether it is "rm -r *" on unix machines or its equivalent on graphical user interfaces - users sometimes (involuntarily) erase their own data. All right, you might get it back from the recycle bin... unless somebody cleans that one


• Viruses or other data corruption: My special friends are office applications, killing large documents. I'm sure you've experienced that one yourself...

My Goals Concerning Backups

• Continue working as fast as possible.


• Highly automated backup - the fewer manual processes the better.


• Cover different computers with various kinds of valueable data


• Affordable. Keep the price-tag in personal range.

My Infrastructure

I'm working as freelancing IT-consultant in Germany, therefore I don't have too many machines to care for. The following diagram shows my infrastructure - which is primarily used by my wife (Cheffe Uli, for text processing, billing, accounting and other organizational tasks required to run a business).

• My primary machine is a MacBook Pro


• I use two different external USB drives. They contain all our digital music (approx 40GByte) and a copy of all our photos.


• An old PC runs OpenSUSE Linux 10.2 (very smoothly!) and contains two 160 GByte drives, which I configured as RAID-1 (mirrored) with the SUSE Yast configuration utility. The OS itself is located on a third drive. A few directories of the RAID can be mounted via Samba on our other machines.

The Pillars of My Backup Strategy

1. Of course I use a version control system (Subversion). I setup my (home) repository on our win-XP machine. Every project file I work on is regularly commited to subversion.


2. I fall in love with CrashPlan, a Java-based (commercial) lifesaver to backup arbitrary files and directories to arbitrary other machines (which must have a free version of CrashPlan installed). I backup the following things:
   
   
   
   • My Mac's valueable data to our home PC and to my RAID-1 linux server.
   
   
   • My wife's data from the home-PC to my Mac and to the RAID-1 server.
   
   
   • Not on the diagram: I backup all our data to my parents PC.
   
   
   
   


3. Every week I copy my complete MacBook-drive to one partition of an external drive (with SuperDuper). Uneven weeks are copied to partition #1, even weeks go to partition #2.


4. All my valuable data (especially project-related files and photos) are copied to Amazon S3 (TM) offsite storage with a small utility called JungleDisk (a little webdav-server). JungleDisk encrypts the files, so nobody without my key can read my files.


5. I copy the whole disk of our home-PC with Acronis TrueImage.


6. (not on the diagram): I keep a USB-stick with a pre-configured JungleDisk installation with me at all times. In case I need to access some files, I just plugin the stick into ANY machine (Win, Mac or Linux) with an Internet connection - and can start working a few minutes later...


7. (not on the diagram): I use Versomatic on the Mac (there is a Windows equivalent called RealTime Backup), which stores versions of all my working files in its own repository. Whenever I save a file in any application, Versomatic creates a new version in its repo... so I can go back in time (like TimeMachine, but I can configure Versomatic to just backup what I need!).


8. (not on the diagram): I backup files with iBackup - creating timestamped backup-sets on external drives or sometimes even on CDs or DVDs. I tried several others, including DobryBackup, but iBackup is simply better...


9. (not on the diagram): I keep a copy of SpinRite, the awesome disk analysis and repair utility from fabulous Steve Gibson. It can recover even bad disk failures (but is way to slow for USB-connected drives...)

Now what?

Let us review the list of risks from the beginning:

• Theft: If somebody steals my Mac, I'll have to get a new one. Bad enough. I'll be productive within minutes due to my SuperDuper backups.


• Damage: Every drive in our infrastructure is backed up somewhere. It might take a while to replace the computer, but I can easily restore every file, from JungleDisk or CrashPlan or Subversion or another of my copies.


• Accidental deletion: It'l be fatal if I deleted my subversion repository, but even that is safely copied by CrashPlan to several destinations (and not automatically deleted there!). Looks like I can survive a few of my own brain-blackouts...


• Viruses or other data corruption: See above. Several possibilities to get back to consistent versions, depending on the kind of damage.

I'm not fully automated in my backups - but that's ok for me.


Apart from those (technical) risks, what else can happen?

• You forget your passwords? Print out a list of important passwords, seal it in an envelope and deposit with trusted friends.


• Your house burns down. All computers within are destroyed. As long as you remember your JungleDisk password or your CrashPlan-ID, you're done... External backups have their merits...


• I keep a number of boot-CD's ready... for example a grand-universal-windows-boot-disk

Conclusion

I'm pretty sure you guys come up with some risks I forgot. The major pillars in my backup strategy are CrashPlan, JungleDisk and redundancy...

Trunk Monkey: Awesome Videoclips

Here you find four short videoclips about TrunkMonekey - really funny. I liked Monkey3 best!

Some Online Articles on Tags+Folders, Rule-based-Systems and Governance

Just minutes ago I struck a deal with SIGS-Datacom, publisher of the (German)
OBJEKTspektrum and JAVAspektrum, so that my recent articles in those magazines are now available as pdf-downlad for free...

• Ordnung 2.0: Hilfe für den Info-Dschungel: Reality-Check von tags-versus-folders




• Wohin mit der Logik: Regeln als Rettung. Der Artikel beschreibt, wie Sie Fachlogik mit Hilfe von Regelmaschien aus Ihrem Quellcode auslagern können - mit viel Flexibilität und signifikanten Risiken...



SOA Governance ist ein wesentlicher Erfolgsfaktor für SOA. (Mit Arne Koschel). Bei unserem Plädoyer für SOA-Governance gehen wir davon aus, dass für SOA


• Regelbasierte Systeme (mit JBoss-Drools). Der Artikel stellt JBoss-Drools vor, einen bewährten Open-Source Vertreter Java-basierter Regelmaschinen.

SOA Governance: Crucial Necessity or Waste of Time?

As I occasionally worked on SOA Governance during the last few years, I took the time
to write up this article on InfoQ (did you know that is a great platform?)

From the intro:

The term "governance" has been regularly appearing in IT publications and conferences for some time, but among technical circles, such discussions are often yawn-provoking at best. This article provides a developer-friendly guide to SOA Governance, starting with the general notion of IT governance down through design-time and the second runtime Governance.

I'm eagerly awaiting your comments...

Köln: Bürger dürfen mitbestimmen

Nur für Kölner: Die Stadt bietet hier die Möglichkeit, per Internet (vorher: einfache Registrierung) über Spar- und Ausgabenvorschläge abzustimmen.

Sehr schön für aktive Bürger der Stadt - unbedingt mal reinschauen (ich habe für Vorschlag 2488 gestimmt..)

Business-Rule Technology becomes Acquisition Target...

Australian based RuleBurst just acquired Haley Technologies, one of the thought-leaders in rule-based technologies... (announced here and on the JBoss-Drools Mailing list).

A few days ago, SAP bought Indian-based Yasu (provider of the QuickRules BRMS)...

Just in case you're interested in Rule-Engines - might be the right time to invest in those companies... they surely deserve a lot more corporate attention... problem is, most of them aren't public (yet)!

Not Hungry? Try this Appetizer

Whow - just in case you still have no idea how to surprise your partner -
try one of those mouth-watering recipes.

I found it via Flickr...

OOP 2008: Architektur braucht Iterationen

James Dyson, Erfinder des nach ihm benannten (ungeheuer lukrativen, coolen und innovativen) "beutelfreien" Staubsaugers, hat 15 Jahre lang iteriert, seine Architektur an 5000 Prototypen getestet (so berichtet die Atlantic Systems Guild in ihrem genialen Buch "Adrenalin-Junkies und Formular-Zombies" (Pattern 84, Schonzeit für Ideen).

Sagt am Beispiel eigentlich alles. Hervorragende Architekturen brauchen ein paar Iterationen (manche mehr, manche weniger). Während dieser Iterationen ändern sich einige Anforderungen - und schon haben wir die Agilität im Spiel.

Also: Sieht in etwa wie folgt aus: Kunde und Umwelt ändern Anforderungen, Architekten reagieren...




Ein aus meiner Sicht halbwegs realistischer Prozess der Architekturentwicklung sieht etwa so aus:



Sie sehen: Schleifen. Iterationen. Versuch-Scheitern-Lernen-Verbessern. So funktioniert Architektur.

Dynamic Language Shootout...

You want a new notebook? You know Ruby, Smalltalk, Scheme, Lisp or Python (or Prolog...)?

There's a dynamic language shootout (in German) with some nice prices (a notebook, an iPod etc).

You gotta release your solution under GPL... and fill in a form, seems pretty harmless. And: The task
is brilliant, a little AI, a little UI, loads of fun.

Go, participate. If I find the time, I'll submit a Prolog solution :-)

(Another) visual thesaurus...

I already knew the commercial VisualThesaurus, but found a free (online)
version names Visuwords - great to visualize relationships between words. Click and hold to move the image within the browswer -

Have a look at one example (from Visuwords):



worth a try - at least for me as non-native speaker (when writing english...)

Heard of JBoss-Seam? Want to know what it's all about?

Manning has posted a (free) well-written chapter of a forthcoming book on Seam on their site...

I wonder wether critique and suggestions will be incorporated into the final version... maybe somebody from the JBoss-Seam-Team should try...

How to Use Multiple Versions of MagicDraw UML without Interference

(on Mac OS X):

At least versions 12.5 and 14.0 ff. need their "libraries" directory named "MagicDraw UML". If you want two versions on your machine, you either need to install them into different directories (which I did no like!) or patch the installation just a little:

1. Install MD to any tmp-directory.


2. Right-click on the executable, which in reality is a hidden directory. "Show content".


3. Navigate into the "Content" directory, there you'll find a file called "info.plist"


4. Edit this file (with a text editor, NOT with the default property-list-editor!)


5. Search for the text $APP_PACKAGE/../MagicDraw UML


6. replace with (e.g.) $APP_PACKAGE/../MagicDraw UM 14.0L


7. save info.plist


8. rename the MagicDraw UML directory of the MD installation accordingly: MagicDraw UM 14.0

Don't forget to move the now changed files (directory plus startup file) to your favorite application directory (mine's called "development tools" under "Applications".)

Lisp again: Eclipse plugin

Great news:

InfoQ reported about it... Cusp, an Eclipse plugin for Lisp.

One day, when I've spare time, I'm gonna post an experience report :-)
(so you might be better off NOT to wait for it...)

A free, nice (and complete) book on Linux (in German)

Galileo Computing, a German publisher, made its impressive Linux Handbook
(written by J. Plötner and S. Wendzel) available for download...

more than 1100 pages, covering all Linux distributions. A nice reference, well written.

(its also available in print, with two DVS's, loads of video-tutorial stuff etc.)

To All Fathers: You Still Got A Chance...

VERY funny short film about a young father fighting back:

Fight For Kisses //// www.ffk-wilkinson.com

Big Bucks on the Run

Oracle today proposed to takeover BEA Systems for 25% over market price...

I don't know how many millions or billions of bucks they're gonna need - but
it fits into their more than 20 billion dollar acquisition strategy.

These sums are out of most peoples' imagination: 20.000 millions already
spent - and a whole lotta more to come...

Naah - Lawrence Joseph (aka Larry) Ellison has an estimated private fortune of 26 billion - poor chap. One of his best friends, btw, is Steve Jobs.
THE Steve Jobs.

Drools-Puzzle #2: And the Winner is...

Scott Reed (.... applause ...)

Dunnit! A dozen solutions to the second installment of the (now famous!) Drools puzzle contest arrived at my desk, originating from brave men spread all over the world (all right, at least from Australia, South-America, North-America and Europe).

I evaluated during a brief holiday in souther Turkey - without internet access and with only Drools 4.0.1 plus Eclipse 3.2 installed on my MacBook. That initially sounded all right for me - but wasn't. Read on why I failed to evaluate a few (gorgeously interesting) solutions with this setup!

C++ for highest performance

Like in puzzle #1, all rule-based solutions were outperformed by Dirk Farin's C++ version. Dirk: You're great. But we're using rules to factor business-logic out of java applications... If we ever need to build something ultra-performant, we'll surely remember your approx-one-nanosecond-solution. Btw: I took your source and could immediately build-and-run it on the Mac :-) Dirk used numbers instead of (symbolic) names, which makes his solution-output a little hard to read...

Although admirable in performance, Dirks' solution still is a C++ program... and I didn't let those count in the puzzle...

Standalone CLIPS

The next hurdle in evaluation came from Johan Lindberg from Sweden: He send a pure CLIPS solution, which wouldn't run in Drools either...

Johan seemed to be pleased with the puzzle and asked for more. Johan & Dirk - please send us Drools solutions next time :-)

Only Seeing is Believing

Like in any athletic competition I required the winning solution to run on my machine - during my evaluation. I didn't actually feel the urge to debug or modify submissions so they would/could run in my limited setup (see above). Although this may sound unfair ("but we're still using 3.x in our project"), I had no other chance.

Therefore, solutions without source-code (Carlos Bustamante), with requirements to "mvn install" additional drools modules (Geoffrey DeSmet) or with Drools 3.1 rule syntax didn't count either. Sorry guys - life can be tough. More on Geoffreys' solution later on...

Now there were 7 solutions from 6 participants left over to compare. It had already gotten hot in
the mediterranean hemisphere - I noticed other people jump into the pool, I smelled roasted garlic and delicious turkish mokka. But I kept evaluating...

Simple and Complex Rules

No participant bothered with any explanation, how or why his solutions works. They all did work correctly, by the way. But with several of them I still don't know why. The golden ideas of their creators, those shiny bits
of knowledge - buried in crusts of unexplained code. I hear people talking about self-explaining code, of the truth that only lies on code, never in documentation. Might hold for guru-readers, but not for humble-ones like myself. I need explanation, abstracted away from source-code. Even for our simple puzzle, several solutions spanned more than 100 lines of code - mostly without any docu.

For me, this is one lessons I (once again!) learned from this puzzle: Care for understandability.

All solutions gave correct results - but I evaluated only one (from John Kirchmeier) as "clean-and-simple", without fancy decoration, and gave it top-score in "Drools code understandability". Well done, John!

One case in particular gave me headaches. One participant (he'll know who I'm talking about), a real Drools-guru, supplied a solution based on the DroolsSolver approach (formerly known as Taseree). In my remote holiday location, without internet access, I couldn't even build it. He was the only one to submit a solution based on a scoring approach - his program creates just one (arbitrary) family, scores it and, if the score is not perfect, modifies the family... The result surely works - but at what price? The "business logic" of our simple riddle gets mixed up in six business rules, one scoring rule and a pretty complex (java) function to re-order the family relationships - naturally based on Generics, a FamilyMoveFactory and two Switcher-classes... Impressive stuff, I'm sure this approach will solve generations of extremely complex riddles - but simply overwhelmed me. Impressiveness doesn't count.

Another sting to another participant: 18 rules for this puzzle might be a little over-modularized...

Running for Gold

Now that I bashed a little on overly complex solution approaches (yep - rules can be kept simple yet correct!), what solutions remained in the race for the title? (Running on a MacBook Pro, Intel Dual-Core, OS-X 10.4.10, 2GB Ram, Eclipse 3.2 with Java 1.5, running exclusively Eclipse and Finder, using System.currentTimeMillis() for timing). I ran every solution 3 times and took the lowest values for the overall performance (that is: initialization plus rule-evaluation!).

1. Scott Reed, 1596 overall, 37 for Drools


2. Christiano Guiffrida, 1682 overall, 33ms for Drools


3. Dan Berindei (first solution based on fact-retraction), 1720ms overall, 110 for Drools


4. John Kirchmeier, 1760 overall, 53 for Drools


5. Dan Berindei (second solution, without retract), 1812 overall, 65 for Drools


6. Chris Barham, 1875ms overall solution time, 56ms for Drools.


7. Reginaldo Delfino, 1956 overall, 77 for Drools

Scott - congratulations. Your solution outperformed the other Drools solutions. Please supply the next puzzle to the Drools community!

It was close: Christiano's and Dan's solutions were pretty fast too. My personal evaluation
on understandability: The fastest solutions score 4 out of 5 possible points.

With 1760 msec overall runtime, John Kirchmeier's clean-and-elegant solution provided an
excellent compromise between efficiency, maintainability and understandability. John: You're my moral winner, with a rule-understandablity-score of 5.

Download of submissions

I do not provide downloads for the submissions - maybe the participants can put their solutions
in the JBoss-Wiki and send me the link - I'll post those here!

Hints for the Future

As code quality remains to be very subjective, it cannot easily be evaluated by a single referee
in our little contest. Taking pure performance clearly identifies a winner - but as a software-architect
I'd definitely pick the solution with the lowest overall complexity and acceptable performance.

I propose that from now on each "puzzle-creator/judge" publishes her or his set of evaluation
criteria... (I failed in this respect - sorry!). Next time I'd even propose a naming convention plus a predefined "main" class structure:

   main(...)
   //...
   long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
   init_rule_file();
   long begin_fact = System.currentTimeMillis();
   pre_init_working_memory();
   wm.fireAllRules()
   long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
   //...

Thanx again for participating!

I've been to Burma - a dozen years ago...

what a beautiful country, torn down by a brutal regime. Not too many things we can do from here...

If you're interested in the topic, read on here.

Your job includes traveling?

You sometimes need to travel for a couple of days? Get some inspiration on "packing your bundle",
fold shirts and trousers with less wrinkles. Great idea, its simplicity really impressed me.

Have a look here!

(via lifehacker).

Update on Security-Key

The cool security key (on which I blogged a while ago) finally arrived -
and here's a short screenshot (thx to PayPal) how it is used to login
to your paypal account:






Now my login is based upon TWO assets, one I KNOW (my passphrase) and one I HAVE (the security key)...

693B411504EDA26E4EB83FF74AF2E2C1C94C72D2815980551B9AFBB48AD41A56

Need a REALLY secure password? The title of this post IS one...

Security-Guru Steve Gibson creates free random passwords, with a detailed explanation on HOW that works. Very impressive, really:

Every time this page is displayed, our server generates a unique set of custom, high quality, cryptographic-strength password strings which are safe for you to use.

He describes all this in the second half of the superb podcast Security Now! Episode #107

Website-Update

Thanx to my website management tool-chain (based upon RapidWeaver) I updated my complete website with a new layout, a variety of smaller changes and corrections in just below 30 minutes yesterday night.

I moved to a grayish look, sidebar-navigation and included tags & categories for some pages.

Habits of successful ...

In lieu of Steven Covey's "7 Habits of Successful People", Yuwanda Blackput together a useful collection of seven alternative habits for freelancers. Valid for most entrepreneurs though, not just freelancers!

My (overly brief) summary/adaption/commenting:

1. It's a passion, not just some job. {Write|Design|Program|Model|Work-on-it} every day. Manxy of us freelancers love their work, and spend loads more than 40h/week with it. When asked "what's your hobby", "work" is very often contained within the first three to five answers (my answers are "family, sports, work, food", with family first and the others in no particular order)


2. Market yourself - don't wait for opportunities, create them!


3. Work with more than one client at a time. Lowers overall risk, increases usefulness for a single client as you bring in experience from multiple other sources.


4. Have a niche, sometimes called USP (unique selling point). You may even call it professional hobby, as that's what it is in my case (currently there are at least two of them, arc42 and rule-based-systems.)


5. Have a website. I do not understand freelancers and entrepreneurs in the IT sector who currently do not maintain their own. But there are such folks around...


6. Remain hungry: be consistent marketer. Speak at conferences, write articles, books, blogs open-source software. Ensure the market does not forget about you.


7. Long ago we stopped working 40h weeks. See point 1 - it's a passion. A familiy is always around, so is your enterprise. As long as you feel in control of your life, you're living your life your way, it's ok to work longer hours.


In my humble opinion you should add the following:


8. Maintain active and symbiotic/synergistic partnerships with others of your kind. Treat them as equals and friends, not a contenders. Support their search for appropriate projects - and they will in turn support you.



9. Give away freely. Give your books to your clients and prospective clients, contribute to open-source projects, create free whitepapers and the like. Readers will love it and come back to you, maybe even years later. If your stuff is good, people will remember it! (thx to Jerry Weinberg for this valuable hint!)
   

Enterprise Service Bus - Features, Usage and Critique

I recently presented some statements about the mysterious concept of ESB, the under-defined enterprise service bus. People seem to expect different things from an ESB, so I'll try to summarize a few points here:

As our industry is not really sure what an ESB really is, I'll give you a few definitions:

Defining ESB

1. "An ESB provides an abstraction layer on top of an enterprise messaging system which allows integration architects to exploit the value of messaging without writing code." (Abbreviated from Wikipedia).
2. An ESB, a.k.a "service container is the physical manifestation of the abstract endpoint, and provides the implementation of the service interface. A service container is a remote process that can host software components. In that respect, it has some similarities to an application server container, but with the specific goal of hosting integration services" (from David Chappell, who actually invented the term ESB and has written a book on the topic).
3. The OASIS SOA Reference Model calls the ESB a communication infrastructure and defines: The primary task of any communication infrastructure is to facilitate the exchange of information and the exchange of intent...Especially in the case where the exchanges are across ownership boundaries, a critical issue is the interpretation of the data. This interpretation MUST be consistent between the participants in the service interaction. (found on fantastic InfoQ, where ueber-blogger Stefan Tilkov is content-editor for SOA...)
   

Most likely, you're still uneasy wether to use an ESB or not... read on:

Functions an ESB can (and should) deliver

Again, quoting Wikipedia, an ESB has the following characteristic functions:

• Support for invoking (remote) services, either sync or async, with a variety of transport protocols.
• Capabilities to route messages to appropriate destinations (addressing, dynamic-, content- or rule-based routing)
• Capabilities to transform messages (between protocols, data formats,
• Service Choreography or Orchestration: Ability to create and execute complex (business) processes based upon existing services.
• Integration of other service providers, like encryption, signing, authorization, authentication, data transformation, compression.
• Management of services, like monitoring, logging, administration.

The problem persists: Do you (or your organization) really need that stuff?

ESB values
In his great article "ESB-oriented architecture: The wrong approach to adopting SOA", Bobby Woolfe (co-author of the famous Enterprise-Integration-Patterns book (excerpts of this available here)) argues that an ESB itself does not create value:

An ESB by itself produces no business value. An ESB is a means to an end, not the end itself. An ESB is like the electrical wiring or plumbing of an SOA. Plumbing does not produce value; sinks with water coming out of their faucets do. Wiring does not produce value; lights, especially lights connected to switches, are valuable. A road is not valuable except that it enables you to get from one point to another. An ESB without an SOA is like a road from someplace nobody is located going to other places nobody wants to be. People might eventually want to go to those places, but in the meantime, the road is all cost and no benefit.

He continues:

"Develop an ESB as part of developing the SOA. You will discover services based on business needs. Each service requires not only providers and consumers, but also a channel in the ESB to connect the two. That channel implements the service interface just like a provider (but acting as a proxy), including message formats for service requests and responses that enable remote invocation (such as interprocess communication) of the service. Differences in the consumers’ and providers’ service interfaces, message formats, scope, and qualities of service can be bridged and facilitated by mediations. All of this is the core of ESB design, and none of this can be done without knowing the services the ESB invokes. And knowing those services requires knowing the services in the SOA that will use the ESB.

In this light, connecting the applications is the easy part. Connecting their business functionality is the much greater challenge. That cannot be achieved by building only an ESB.

Potential Disadvantages of ESB

• * You're stuck to a specific vendor, if your ESB does not adhere to open standards.
• * Additional translation layer on top of conventional messaging systems - added complexity.
• * No established industry standards, no clear product scoping, everything is pretty much vendor-centric.
• * The current state of Open-Source ESB's, September 2007, is not amusing:
• Both ServiceMix and Mule are pure horror to install and try-out. Both are, from my personal point-of-view, in research-state and not production-ready.
• Corrected due to comments from Andrew P: I tried the Sept-07 versions of both ServiceMix and Mule, both can be installed without problems. Apart from having improved their install & config process, both now have excellent documentation. Sorry for calling them "research-statte" - my fault.
  
• SOPERAs ESB cannot even be downloaded, they promised to snail-mail a DVD (which did not arrive so far, but it's only 6 weeks since I asked.).
• Haven't tried JBoss and others yet...

Further Resources

• Jean-Jacques Dubray on InfoQ: ESB-oriented architectures considered harmful.
• IBM on ESB (beware: that's vendor-related content!)
• Greg Flurry, also from IBM, clarifies what an ESB might be good for...
• Stefan Tilkov on ESB considered harmful.
• Rich Turner: To ESB or not to ESB?, and another article called ESB revisited.
• Loek Bakker on "Time's up for the ESB?"

Maaaany bugs fixed in Drools...

The Drools-team just published their maintenance release 4.0.1 with loads of bugfixes (described here).

Thanx for your good support, guys :-)

Sponsoring Internet-Radio!

Today I donated a few bucks to my favorite internet radio station (Whisperings). Although it's tempting to just consume streaming audio, the artists of out-of-mainstream-stations surely have more problems earning a decent income than we IT-people... and I'd like stations like that to be available for long!

Want to understand the REST architecture pattern?

For you guys who never heard of REST - it might be time to have a deeper look...

Via Pete Lacey I found a cute presentation on REST resources (some are "behind a registration wall", but at least free).

Really great: The audio-enhanced REST Take 5:

A Take 5 is an audio enhanced five minute PowerPoint show on a pertinent topic. The REST Take 5 is really 15 minutes, but gives a good 40,000 foot, managerial overview of REST.

(the registration at Burtongroup DID suck, but their support fixed it within the hour... why don't they support OpenID or the like??)

Good News for Security-aware Internet-Shoppers...

Maybe I'm the last one to notice - but PayPal offers a smart password-generating
device called "Security Key". It's one of those cute one-time password generators - and (currently) works for both EBay and PayPal accounts.

Why don't the banks offer those devices for free??

I'm actually using PayPal only for a few transactions per year - but that's likely to increase - as their device (which costs only 5Euro / 5 USDollars) drastically increases security...

Anybody out there already owns one? They are currently (in 2007) sold in US, Germany and Australia, with many more countries to be included soon...

Rules-Programming-Contest, Round 2

Round 2 of the JBoss-Drools puzzle contest just started...
(this time it was *me* who had to post the puzzle...)

Deadline for submissions is September 14th, 2007.
You can send your solutions to droolspuzzle@gmail.com

=====================================

• Three men, Abel, Locker and Snyder are married to Edith, Doris and Luisa, but not necessarily in this order.


• Each couple has one son.


• The sons are called Albert, Henry and Victor.


• Snyder is nor married to Luisa, neither is he Henry's father.


• Edit is not married to Locker and not Albert's mother.


• If Alberts father is either Locker or Snyder, then Luisa is Victor's mother.


• If Luisa is married to Locker, then Doris is not Albert's mother.

Who is married to whom and what are their sons called?

Taken from the German book "Denken als Spiel" by Willy Hochkeppel, 1973 (Thinking as a Game).
=====================================

The Rules of the Contest

More info on the contest.

We're looking forward to your contributions -
let the rules rule...

"Lock-Screen" on Mac

Working with *really* sensible data recently, I needed a quick way to lock my Mac... unlike Windows-XP, there's no predefined hotkey, even the beatiful Dockables did not provide a solution :-(

A little research revealed the following helpful command


/System/Library/CoreServices/"Menu Extras"/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend

Paste into an Automator workflow, save that (with file-type "application"), drag into the dock (and your application folder) - and you're all done!! You can even drag this to your finders' toolbar - cool!

(I know - there's an entry in the menu bar - but that's too hidden - and I needed a Quicksilver-enabled solution).

Intelligent backup solution

At least I found a backup solution which suits my needs: CrashPlan can either backup to a central server, but (really cool!) also to your other machines... (Mac, PC, Linux!!)

I had it up and running in a few minutes - tried their support (reactive, competent) and had 50GBytes backed up from my Mac to our family-PC (yes, we're still using it...) within a few hours...

Elegant UT - a cool addition to my backup strategy... (20-50 Euro).




Update (Sept 07): I verified the following things to make sure it works as expected:

• Simple restore of a file or a previous version. Crashplan can keep arbitrary versions :-)


• Restore from a different machine, so I can restore files even if the original machine is stolen, burnt down, drowned or otherwise unavailable.


• Asking support questions: The CrashPlan support guys are responsive, friendly and competent. Excellent marks here!

Finally: Lisp-plugin for Eclipse

We had to wait awfully long for a Eclipse-Lisp plugin (named Dandelion) to appear...

Version 1.0.5 even comes with support for Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) and with SBCL bundled (at least for MacOS and Linux).

I'm sure to blog some experiences one day (when my current customer projects will give me some time...)

Golfer-Riddle (Prolog-Version)

In my ongoing quest for improved awareness for rule-based systems, I solved the golfer-riddle in Prolog and published the solution together with an explanation here.

It's a pretty straightforward translation of the riddle itself - Prolog rocks!
(I'm open to improvisation suggestions...)

gcolor(blue).
gcolor(plaid).
gcolor(orange).
gcolor(red).

gpos(1).
gpos(2).
gpos(3).
gpos(4).

golfer( [_, C, P] ) :- gcolor(C), gpos(P).
		
golferRiddle( G1, G2, G3, G4) :-  golfer(G1),golfer(G2),golfer(G3), golfer( G4),
	G1 = [fred, FredCol, FredPos ], 
	G2 = [joe, JoeCol, 2],
	G3 = [tom, TomCol, TomPos], 
	TomPos =\= 1, TomPos =\= 4,
	TomCol \= orange,
	G4 = [bob, plaid, BobPos],
	
	/* unique colors */
	is_set([FredCol, JoeCol, TomCol, plaid]),
	
	/* unique positions */ 
	is_set([FredPos, TomPos, BobPos, 2]), 
	 
	/* Fred's right neighbour wears blue */
        plus( FredPos, 1, FP1),
        member( [_, blue, FP1], [G1, G2, G3, G4]).

Amazon: Success in a (not-so-small) logistical problem

For something not directly related to IT: Today (July 21st 2007) was a special day in three ways:

1. (12th) anniversary of our marriage - a reason to celebrate (what we did, read on).


2. First day of our first-holiday-ever in the Austrian moutains.


3. Harry-Potter's latest novel hits the stores, completely unrelated to the previous two events...

Now for the logistical problem: I preordered the Harry-Potter at Amazon and gave them our hotel address to deliver to. Beeing one of more than 100.000 Potter-addicts, I was really curious wether Amazon would succeed in delivering my parcel to the Austrian mountains on time.

To my surprise they did: When we arrived after a smooth 7-hour-ride, the "Deathly Hallows" awaited me...

Congratulations to Amazon and their logistics partner DHL: You earned mental bonus points today. Well done.

Virtualization on the Mac

Yesterday I installed the new version of Parallels Desktop (3.0). It feels a bit smoother, but still cannot handle two monitors... (my usual setup at home).

What every Windows user will surely like: The excellent snapshot manager, which allows even branches :-)

Too bad I don't have any graphics-intensive games to test the DirectX improvements...

Pragmatic Re-Re-Branding

A good move: The (awesome) rule-engine "Drools" is back- including a new version of its logo:



Mark Proctor writes in his blog:

"Having received community feedback 4.0 will start the push to reclaiming the Drools name.... So to help speed up this process, I would please encourage everyone now to use "JBoss Drools" in any articles, blogs, talks etc."

I'll start: JBoss-Rules will be called "JBoss-Drools" from now on (again)...

Why JSR 94 is a futile attempt to solve a no-problem

Q: What's a no-problem?

A: A problem which never occurs in practice but is defined to be one by some committee.

---
Q: What's JSR 94?

A: An initiative to define a Java runtime API for rule engines by providing a simple API to access a rule engine from Java. In theory, rule engines can be seamlessly interchanged if they comply to JSR 94.

---
Q: Why is JSR 94 solving a no-problem?

A: IMHO there at least two reasons:
1. JSR 94 covers only the rule engine API, but NOT the rule language (which might, one day, be covered by RuleML).
+ This API describes how a rule engine should be invoked from Java. That's (simple) infrastructure code - you need a couple of classes and interfaces for it.
+ If you change your rule-engine, just rewrite those few classes and you're set... at least with the infrastructure.
+ You'd have to rewrite (and re-test) ALL your business rules to change the engine - and rule languages are by no means similar to each other...
2. Who wants to change the database? In more than 20 years I have not seen a single customer migrating a productive system from one database to another - although database independency long seemed a crucial issue.
+ I've experienced cases where we used MySQL for development and Oracle for production - but they behaved differently, even with powerful OR-Mappers we could not resolve those issues.
+ Don't tell me anybody wants to try this with their business rules... nobody wants them in two different rule-languages.

---
Q: What do the rule-engine vendors say about it?

A: I don't care. SQL-vendors blubbered about interoperability for ages. But they always found ways around it.

---
Q: What shall I do if I care about rule engines?

A: Choose the best one for your purpose. And be prepared to stick to it for a long time.

Putting `make` to a good use...

I thought that make died a quiet death some years ago, at least for the web-guys. Now I started compiling a few web pages based upon Markdown - but how to automate the process of compiling markdown to html??

make to the rescue - It even contains a nice makefile template for the job... The first time I use perl for myself :-)

(I know, I shouldn't do such things in my holiday... but it's rainy and the children enjoy getting wet'n sandy jumping down the dunes)

My walkthrough of a JBoss-Rules Example...

I originally planned to blog on this later this year, but as Mark Proctor of JBoss
has already published it...

"Dr. Gernot Starke has created a walk through of the Golfing example which can be found here: http://rbs.gernotstarke.de/samples/samples/golfer-riddle-jbr.html.

It's great that someone has taken up the role of documenting our examples, this is something we've purposefully held back on doing, hoping the community would take up this role - Thank you Dr Starke."

my pleasure, Mark!

Is it "Engineering" or not? a debate...

A good writeup (by Eric Wise) why building software is not "engineering". Especially interesting: The comment by (famous) Steve McConell, who speaks strictly in favor of "YES, it's engineering".

I personally think it immature engineering - we're just learing how to "engineer" software... and in this learing process we sometimes simply build it.

thrilling video: practical common lisp :-)

Hey, people tell me to refrain from caring about lisp. I wont!

Go watch this cool video... a Google-Tech-Talk by one of my heroes,
Peter Seibel (who authored a fantastic book on lisp...)

and, just in case somebody cares: have a look an Peters' computer...

Groovy or JRuby for your Java projects?

imho the answer must be given in relation to YOUR project - I'm currently in favor of Groovy, as keeps much closer to the core Java platform. JRuby, on the other side, has a rather large Ruby-community as backbone...

A small writeup of the topic, including some interesting comments, comes from Kimchy.

For you guys loving photos, an interesting stack:



(from http://img279.imageshack.us/img279/7933/556328734c0eba44ec2bw.jpg)

They forgot, what a shame, the fantastic Groovy-in-Action, one of the best programming books I devoured within the last year(s).

fantastic GTD workflow poster

instead of drawing my own... i found fantastic GTD workflow posters at Anabubula. For example their gorgious GTD-workflow poster (free download).



Sample 1:




Sample 2:




The whole site looks cool :-)

HUGE collection of GTD tools

Via LifeHacker I found this impressively huge collection of
GTD-Tools.


Update: A while ago Gina (from Lifehacker) blogged about ThinkingRock -
not pretty, but their 4-color-striped GTD overview is impressive.


Update 2: My favorite GTD-tool is kGTD, based on OmniOutliner. The reason why I stick to this in favor of the clean-and-shiny stuff is simple: The outliner lets me add notes to entries and is extremly flexible in moving things around...

Cut the Knot...

you like interesting, fact-ladden read on math- and technical topics?
Then try out Cut-The-Knot, which presents abstract concepts in concrete
language - really good.

I liked their piece on the RETE algorithm...

Contains many applets which illustrate or demonstrate stuff.

arc42: Version 2.1 released

Tonight I released version 2.1 of our arc42 architecture template.

We enhanced the architectural aspects (chapter 9/10) and corrected
several minor bugs. Thanx to all bug-reporters...

My personal markdown cheat-sheet

Markdown (by famous John Gruber of Daring Fireball) is a nice and clean markup language to facilitate writing for the web. As the original doc spans 19 pages (too much for lazy folks like me), I summarize the most important commands/tags here.

Markdown enthusiasts, please forgive me. This list is not ment to be complete. Errors are mine, all credit to John Gruber!

---

Headings

Preceed heading with 1-6 hashes (#). Example:

# This is H1

Note: Closing #’s are optional.

---

Lists

Begin a list item with an asterisk (*), a plus (+) or minus (-).

To enumerate list items, preceed item with a dotted number:

1. first item

2. second item

1. third item (yes - markdown can handle it...)

yields:

1. first item

2. second item

3. third item (yes - markdown can handle it…)

Note: Markdown cares for the correct numbering, your actual numbers are ignored.

---

Horizontal Lines

To draw a horizontal line, just put *** or === on a line by themselves.

---

Emphasized text

Enclose a word in * or _ (underscore) to emphasize - both are rendered into `` tags. You might use ** to make things especially important :-)
For example: `important` yields important.

---

Links

1. Trivial: Surround link with < and >, like this: <http://www.gernotstarke.de> yields http://www.gernotstarke.de.

2. Simple way: [an example](http://www.it-and-more.blogspot.com/ "My Blog") for inline links, results in “an example for inline links”.

3. Reference links (cool!): This is [an example][id] for reference links. Some lines later you define your link-label on a line by itself:

`[id]: http://it-and-more.blogspot.com/ (with a title)

Yields: an example

1. Even cooler, implicit name shortcuts: I get 10 times more traffic from [Google][] than from [Yahoo][] or [MSN][].

and the links defined as follows:

[google]: http://google.com/ (Google)

[yahoo]: http://search.yahoo.com/ (Yahoo Search)

[msn]: http://search.msn.com/ (MSN Search)

Yields: I get 10 times more traffic from Google than from Yahoo or MSN.

This options is way shorter to write.

---

Images

Similar to links, start with !(exclamation mark). Example: ![Fireball](/http://farm1.static.flickr.com/166/375786793_420d06879f_s.jpg "small fireball").

You might use reference id’s, as in links… very practical.

---

Code Blocks

Want to write source code on web pages? Geek, aren’t you? Just indent every line of the block four spaces or 1 tab.

Note: Markdown behaves nicely, it converts ugly & and Umlaut-stuff like ÜÖÄ into proper HTML entities.

Single lines of code (or even single words) are wrapped with backtick-characters `.

---

Tables, Footnotes,

Gotta use HTML for such kind of things.

Guard Certain Directories by Encryption

For one of my current customers I have to encrypt the complete projects' data on my drives. One option would be to activate Apple's own FileVault - but that's way too restrictive.

Another option is to create an encrypted disk image with the (standard) disk tool - no 3rd party tools needed, up-and-running in less than a minute...

A nice and full-featured description is available on Macworld.

Motion and Coordination Heroes

I was watching the gorgious Cologne Pole Vault Festival on Sunday. Those guys left me deeply impressed: With the (immensely heavy!) pole they sprint with 10m/sec (which is world-class in itself), hit the ground on the spot the size of a handkerchief and somehow turn into a perfectly balanced handstand in approx a split-second....

Whow! A short video sequence (quicktime) shows the complexity - enjoy!

And a detailed photo session..

Systematic way to an effective desktop...

I regularly invest significant effort to improve my personal effectiveness, keep re-reading GTD (originally explained here), evaluate the tools I'm using et cetera. Within this ongoing quest I found a gorgious article on systematically uncluttering your desktop. Although Ethan shows it on a mac, the fundamental ideas are easily portable:

* clean up, no mercy
* fight desktop entropy
* fine-tune capture and access to your digital assets
* cruelty can be kind (throw away, YAGNI)

Even before following his advice, I had a pretty clean desktop, compared to others. But now I keep only four folders on the desktop: my inbox, an action-folder, a smart folder containing everything I touched during the last 48 hours plus a link to my personal archive.

Here's a screenshot of Ethans version:

SOA-Expertenwissen erschienen...

ab heute (30. Mai 2007) gibt's fast 900 Seiten geballtes SOA-Expertenwissen
als Buch - herausgegeben von Stefan Tilkov und mir :-) verfasst von 50 namhaften (deutsch & internationalen!) SOA-Cracks...

Wir haben eine hoffentlich informative Website dazu aufgebaut (designed by Dirk Hesse).

Eine ausführliche Ankündigung mit vielen Download-Links hat Stefan geblogt.

Interested in Rule-Engines (and their performance)?

an interesting writeup on rule-engine performance, comparison between
MS-Biztalk-Rule-Engine, Drools and Jess.... plus a rather lengthy (and friendly!) comment thread.

One summary: one should really care about rules and their management (most engines don't provide much support here!), less about details of rule algorithms... Your business simply doesn't care about RETE or not, unless their rules are interpreted correctly.

Would be nice if more commercial rule-engine providers would publish comparable benchmarks... maybe one of you readers could wake them up!

SOAX: Leseproben online

Der dpunkt-Verlag hat zum Buch SOA-Expertenwissen nun einige
Leseproben online. Viel Spass beim Schmökern.

Übrigens ist auch die neue Version der Website zum Buch seit einigen Tagen live, nunmehr basierend auf Textpattern und einem ordentlichen Design.

IT-Trends, live und in Farbe

Wer mal einen kompletten Rundumschlag sämtlicher gerade aktueller Trends der IT erleben möchte, den lade ich herzlich auf meinen IT-Trends-Workshop in Wien ein (17. Juli und 19. Oktober 2007). Von Web 2.0, AJAX, Online-Communities, über die Neuheiten der Software-Entwicklung (Ruby/Groovy/Rails/Grails), über Governance, Rule-Management, REST, SEDA, SOA, WS-(Pseudo-)Standards und Virtualisierung zu Media-Trends und Semantic-Web.

Interessant für Software-Entwickler, Projektleiter und alle IT'ler, die mal wieder einen weiten Blick über den Tellerrand eigener Projekte riskieren möchten.

Weitere Infos gibt's beim Konferenzveranstalter (CON.ECT) als pdf.

Ever heard of Prolog? Go, learn it!

Prolog was the language I used for my diploma thesis, back in the wild 80's (last century, internet had not been invented). I coded nearly everything in Prolog, rule processors, expert systems, user-interfaces (a real nuisance in Prolog, believe me!) and a persistence engine... (yep: store things, back then you had to do it on your own). Great fun, unstable implementations on the first commercial Unix machines.

As a reminiscence to that "wild age" - Learn Prolog Now. Contains links to several implementations (too bad they omitted XGP, one of the fancy Mac versions).

Btw: Prolog is much more fun than the current WS-* debate...

Always wanted to ask about RegEx but never dared to?

Maybe start with "The absolute bare minimum every programmer should know about regular expressions" - a tutorial post by Mike Malone.

I found it while exploring (sub-)reddit.

What consitutes "Enterprise-Class-Software"

I always thought the term "Enterprise-Software" to be underdefined. On the Glassfish-Wiki I found a somewhat longish but precise definition, covering many non-functional attributes, e.g. multiuser, i18n, scalability, high availability, reliability and so on.

In short: Everything a proper software architect should have on his (clear) mind...
(and, allow some self-marketing, will never forget if supported by our arc42-template).

tool for uber-bloggers

Hey - want to sign your mail with your latest blog-posting? Then BlogSigs might be interesting for you. Adam Pash (of LifeHacker) blogged it.

Imho: useless. Better give away your feeds' URL :-)

A new form of Art... with steamed milk

You like Latte Macciato as much as I do?
Want to impress your wife, friend or business partner with your artistry? Then combine both and learn the art of making latte...
(via LifeHacker)

SecondLife again: I did not expect...

to find "Deutsche Post" in SecondLife. Found via Frank Egger:

"you can send a post card of your avatar’s face or some other theme via second life to a real world address. i don’t know if this is really useful, but it’s a quite cool idea"

.

For this direct teleport to "PostTower" you need to have SecondLife installed. Very well done, SL'ish, with many signposts to help visitors to get along, video tutorials and the like. DPAG must have invested loads of (real!) money...

Why Cell-Phone-Software is a Sandtrap...

Alex Krupp posted some arguments on cellphone software. He's right, imho.

A long time ago, I briefly thought about (co-)founding a mobile-phone-gaming-software geekshop, but dropped the idea (lucky me...).

JAX 2007: Meine Handouts als Downloads...

Auf der grandiosen JAX 2007 in Wiesbaden durfte ich einige Vorträge und Workshops halten:
* Gemeinsam mit Arne Koschel und Gerd Schneider (Software AG): SOA Governance Best (+ Worst) Practices
* Methodische Architekturbewertung
* Gemeinsam mit Achim Baier (itemis): Praxisworkshop Architekturbewertung

Downloads gibt's hier auf meiner Website.

Ordnung 2.0: Weg durch den Info-Dschungel

Im OBJEKTSpektrum (Ausgabe Mai/Juni 2007) habe ich mal beschrieben, wie die Ordnungskonzepte "Ordner" (Folder) und "Etiketten" (Tags) funktionieren und was Sie selbst damit anfangen können...

Netterweise gibts den Artikel auch zum Download als pdf.

Aus dem Abstract:

Wie halten Sie Ordnung in den Dateien und E-Mails auf Ihrem Rechner? Grübeln Sie noch, wohin Sie eine bestimmte Datei speichern sollen, oder ordnen Sie schon in Web-2.0-Manier? Lesen Sie hier den Reality-Check von "Tags-versus-Folders".

Aah - eine Kleinigkeit mögen die Mac-User unter Ihnen vielleicht ausprobieren: Tag-Support mit Quicksilver, beschrieben in Lifehacker, vor langer Zeit :-)

Digitally signed mails considered unreliable

After six month of usage I finally stopped digitally signing my outgoing
E-Mails (I was using a notary-supported Thawte certificate).

What sounds like a bright idea proved to be unreliable in practice: Several large
corporations (I won't name them here) refuse to accept signed mails (a quote: signatures are untrustworthy), some of them even did not notify the sender.

In my humble opinion these corporations have a false sense of security -
signed E-Mails really provide authentication. But: At least four of my clients
refuse to accept signed mails - I constantly had to switch between signed and unsigned mode, what a hassle!

Therefore I return to having "unsigned mail" as my default - sigh...

Why doesn't better technology win? Why has the concept of "ignorance" ever been invented?

SOAX: Our Toolchain for Editing and Writing

Together with Stefan I took the adventure of editing the 750+ pages (german) SOA-Expertenwissen book. It took us nearly 12 month to complete, time enough to gain some (further) experience with the various tools that helped us master this quest (btw: I'll surely talk about several aspects of the books' content in future posts here).
Let us start right at the beginning, some nice day in May 2006: Günther Fuhrmeister motivated both of us to start - and we began with sketching and refining the books' mainline, its goals, motivation and target audience. Call it distributed brainstorming what we did by then - Mindmaps (based on MindManager) provided the needed support for creativity and order. Just in case you don't practice mindmapping: start with it, no kidding!

Ok - we developed the initial structure and many ideas for prospective authors (around 40 by June/July 2006) - but how to organize that many (distributed) contributors? We used the web-only database DabbleDB to get things going: Both editors and the publisher could get a timely overview of the books' progress. It took about 2-3 month to discuss individual contributions with the designated authors, to re-align the structure according to the ongoing discussions with the authors.

When the structure stabilized and we received the first couple of contributions, we set up a subversion repository (remotely accessible) and transfered the contents of our Dabble-database to an outliner document (we editors both use Macs, so OmniOutliner was the first choice here). First little problem here: OmniOutliner documents are stored in directories (not in single files) - subversion sometimes doesn't like that... be prepared for trouble in case of conflicts...

Right - subversion saved our neck several times. Never ever begin a real-world IT project without version control in place. Never. (You DID know that, did you?)

Starting September/October, contributions (and new authors) flooded our desks. All authors stuck to Microsoft Word (tm) for their texts - but diagrams were drawn in a variety of formats (mostly Visio, Powerpoint and OmniGraffle, a few with OpenOffice). No problem here - the publisher could deal with those formats.

Mixing Word-files (doc-format) between Mac and Windows is no problem in just about 94% of all (our) cases. We had more then 50 files to deal with - 3 (three) made real trouble: Hangups and loss-of-formating - on our Macs... can you imagine our disappointment? We called NeoOffice (based on OpenOffice) to the rescue - which managed all problematic files without any disturbance. Changelogs and comments within Word files really helped all stakeholders, although version-management with Word is a nuisance. No way around manually verifying you have the correct document version at hand... which subversion could have done a lot better (merged, detected conflicts) with pure text files.

Then we began setting up the books' website. I initially used RapidWeaver - but we encountered serious problems in committing our website sources (rw3-format). RapidWeaver pretty often crashed upon trying to open updated files - therefore we had to compress them and check-in (commit) the zip-files. Unneccessary burden! We'll switch to the textpattern content management system (I'm still very happy with RapidWeaver for my own website, which I manage on my own... Conclusion: RapidWeaver is not ready for distributed workgroups).

My personal conclusion:

• MindManager and OmniOutliner to structure and manage - yes, again, with pleasure.


• Word (tm) for writing and editing: A compromise, and not a pretty good one: It distracts authors from producing contend, suffers from severe featuritis and (unneccessarily) motivates everybody (myself included!) to care about the most worthless aspect of writing: layout. We all wasted hours with layouting - let publisher care about that (they do it faster and better!).


• Next time I will talk my publisher into some pure textual format (like markdown, textile or some of those evil xml-dialects)... just to refrain myself from that layouting mumbo-jumbo. Markup'ed files can be spell-checked as (least as) good as doc-files, changes between versions can often be resolved by subversionn.


• Ok - once upon a time I tried DITA - which I found to be a straight overdose of markup.


• RapidWeaver: Only for personal sites with one editor.


• If you manage distributed teams and do NOT know skype, look for another job.


• Writing books on a Mac is surely more fun than on other machines, but still a lot of work (oh - you could have guessed that before...).

Further references

A series of posts from Pragmatic Dave on writing books...

Frank Jagla pointed me to Ulysses - which I did not use so far, but it looks promising.

Neu: Requirements-Engineering: Grundlagen, Prinzipien, Techniken

Endlich gibt's auf dem deutschen Büchermarkt ein Pendant zum (hervorragenden) RE-Buch der Sophisten: Klaus Pohl, renommierter Professor der Uni Duisburg-Essen sowie wissenschaftlicher Direktor des Software-Engineering Research Center (Lero) Irland, hat sein fundiertes (und praxiserprobtes!) Wissen als Buch herausgebracht: stolze 740 Seiten geballte "RE-Kraft": Requirements-Engineering, Grundlagen, Prinzipien, Techniken.

Mir gefällt der hohe Stellenwert, den sowohl "Ziele" wie auch "Szenarien" in seinem Werk erhalten - beide für meine (ausschliesslich praxisgeprägte) Sicht extrem wichtig.

Klaus - well done!

JBoss Rules Experience Report (and V 3.0.6 released)...

good news to all Drools-users - they just released version 3.0.6 of JBoss-Rules.

In my current project we use pretty simple rules without dynamic assertions and all that non-declarative salience mumbo-jumbo - and Drools worked fine since Version 2.x. We're really happy with the product. We're by no means happy with their handling of bugs, though - but as we encountered no critical ones so far, that's ok too.

Rule-understandability has improved a lot since Drools 2.0, so has the documentation (all right - its a little away from perfect). Overall result after more than 12 month of experience: very positive.

SOAX: Ab sofort bei Amazon...

obwohl der Erscheinungstermin erst Anfang Mai liegt, hat Amazon
das Buch jetzt schon im Katalog...

SOAX: Gerade im Layout

das Buch "SOA-Expertenwissen", (Hrsg. Stefan Tilkov & Gernot Starke) befindet sich gerade im (finalen) Layout beim dpunkt-Verlag. Wir rechnen mit über 650 Seiten - Erscheinungstermin ist momentan noch mit Anfang/Mitte Mai geplant. Alles wird gut :-)

my current favorite radio station...

is, of course, a stream, Solo Piano Radio. Provided by the artists themselves its audible via iTunes and available in a free and commercial version...

Crowdsourcing - A Million Heads ...

are better than one. Nice article on the wisdom of crowds, especially in the lights of web 2.0:

A quote:

"Crowdsourcing can be looked at as an application of the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the knowledge and talents of a group of people is leveraged to create content and solve problems."

(unusable) External Storage: Amazon S3 via JungleDisk

Very often I'm tempted to backup my data externally, e.g. with my Webhoster or other companies far away from my home (where fire or robbery could easily get hold of ALL my backup media...)

These days I continued my ongoing quest for reliable and effective external storage: I installed JungleDisk, a very nice frontend to the low-cost Amazon S3 storage service. With only 15US-Cents per month-GB and 20US-Cents per transfer-GB it is within my personally set limits, paid via well-known and proven Amazon.

Sounds like a good start, does it? Installation went smoothly, configuration in a blink of an eye. Once I'd entered my Amazon S3 account info, an additional disk-icon appeared on the desktop.

I dragged a few smaller files onto the drive - and "whoops" they were transmitted. Fine. Still a theory-scenario, as my real backup-sets are pretty big.

First try: iBackup - my favorite tool for USB-drive-based backups. It took a while and iBackup cancelled the backup with the message "not enough space on target". An obvious lie - as Amazon would give me terabytes, if I wanted them... I was still optimistic, as there are stronger weapons lying around.

Second try: rsync, psync and their brother psyncX: Defined a small backup-set of approx 700MB and pushed the "start" button around midnight. Came back early morning, 7h: still 400MB left. I waited a few more hours: Shock: only 30-50MB average upload rate per hour. Definitely not enough for serious work. Then I tried to delete a directory within the remote drive. Deleting took more than 30 minutes. A single directory with approx 100 files in it...

Summary: Really cool application (based on WebDAV) - works find, lousy (upload) performance (here in Cologne, Germany).

No way I can use that kind of backup-mechanism for real backups... I simply don't have that much time to backup... It definitely has to backup approx. 1-10GB per 12hrs. So I'm back to USB drives, which I afterwards carry to friends living far away. Next option: upgrade my webhosting-plan with a few gigs - as plain-old-ftp still works fine.

Update (march 24th): I gave MozyBackup a try, but the Mac-Version kept crashing even before the first backup was completed. The end of my patience is near: I decided to get some decent external USB-drives and deposit them out of my house...

3D on your Desktop

watch this demo - looks cool. Was linked by Bumptop (found via
Peter Hruschka).

So überlebte ich das Service-Desaster...

Ein Providerwechsel - das riecht nach Ärger. Dennoch habe ich mich an den Wechsel von meinem Ex-Provider (die 1&1 Internet AG) herangewagt - allzu problematisch erwiesen sich dort die miserable ftp-Performance und der desolate Support meines Exchange-Mail Paketes. Also - Mut gefasst, neuen Provider (HostEurope) ausgesucht und gründlich getestet (Einige Supportanfragen per Mail und Telefon - perfekte und schnelle Antworten in allen Fällen).

Nun: Bei 1&1 kündigen bedarf des kostenpflichtigen Anrufs, um von dort auf die Vertrags-Website verwiesen zu werden. Dort ist kündigen zwar schnell - aber mit Risiken verbunden: Ich habe drei Domänen gleichzeitig zu verschiedenen Ablaufterminen gekündigt, um das Risiko zu verteilen (eine im Nachhinein domänen-rettende Idee).

Erste Domäne (starke-team.de): problemlos - Umzug innerhalb von 2 Tagen. Zweite Domäne: 1&1 zieht selbständig die Kündigung einige Tage vor und... eh' ich mich versehe hat ein Domaingrabber die Domain in der Hand. Ok - die wollte ich sowieso nicht mehr. Nun wird's spannend - jetzt folgt meine Homepage, gernotstarke.de: Gekündigt zum 31.3... aber 1&1 schaltet mehr als zwei Wochen vor Vertragsende den gesamten Webspace ab und meine Homepage ist klinisch tot.

Naja, beim neuen Provider ist alles vorbereitet - alle Dateien hochgeladen, er wartet nur noch auf die Transferfreigabe von 1&1 (die ich mit meiner schriftlichen Kündigung natürlich dort hingefaxt habe - ). Könnte ja jetzt schnell gehen... dachte ich.
Bei 1&1 angerufen, technischer Support (gebührenpflichtig, 01805-000415).

• 12. März: 10h morgens: "Nein, Sie müssen das nochmal faxen." Ich schicke um 10:05 das Fax.
  
• 12. März 17h: "Nein, Fax ist bisher nicht angekommen. Das kann aber 2 Tage dauern. Faxen Sie erneut." Ok - ich faxe erneut.
• 13. März, 8h: "Nein, nicht angekommen. Aber Sie könnten beim KK-Team anrufen". Ich rufe dort an.
• 13. März, 8:10h, KK-Team: "Wir warten auf das Fax, rufen Sie später wieder an."
• 13. März, 13h, KK-Team: "Die Fax-Nr war ja auch falsch, faxen Sie an ". Ich faxe an .
• 14. März, 8h, KK-Team: "Nein, wir als KK-Team sind gar nicht zuständig. Das Kündigungsteam muss die Kündigungsmodalitäten ändern. Rufen Sie an." Ich rufe dort an.
• 14. März, 8:15h, , bisher schlimmste Voice-Recognition-Pleite: "Ich verstehe Ihr Problem, kann Ihnen nicht helfen. Versuchen Sie ...."

Also - ich bekam 4 Telefonnummern und 4 verschiedene Faxnummern genannt. Es dauerte bis zum 15. März 12h, bis mein fax vom 12. März von 1&1 erkannt und bearbeitet wurde - eine einzige Rückmeldung habe ich in der ganzen Zeit per Mail erhalten ("Wir benötigen Ihre Kündigung erneut schriflich, bitte faxen Sie an <4.faxnr>.") - und diverse Meinungen über
den Bearbeitungsstand.

Mein Fazit: Prozesse nicht im Griff, miese Telefon-Software, Support an andere Firmen delegiert, die nur eingeschränkten Zugriff auf den Datenbestand haben, zu lange Durchlaufzeiten... Ich bin heilfroh, DORT endlich weg zu sein.

Mein Tipp für 1&1-Leidende:

1. Mail an kuendigungsbearbeitung@1und1.de mit cc: an beschwerdeteam@1und1.de
2. Fax an 0721-91374230 UND an 01805-334505 UND an 0721 -91374 23870.
3. Telefonisch bei 01805-001006 (Vertragsabt.) und 0800-333 2201 (KK-Team, die kennen sich noch am besten aus)

Puh - back to real work...

Homepage (gernotstarke.de) was down

Due to the immense inflexibility and customer-disorientation of
my (previous!) webhoster (1 und 1), my homepage has
been disconnected from the web for a few days.

I'm really sorry for any inconvenience caused by this event - some explanation will follow.

But: It's up again (now hosted by HostEurope)

Wirtschaftsinformatik 2007: Architekturdokumentation

Beitrag von Gernot Starke und Peter Hruschka zur "8. Internationale Tagung für Wirtschaftsinformatik", 28.Feb-2.März 2007, Karlsruhe - zum ersten Mal stelle ich arc42 auf einer internationalen (wissenschaftlichen) Konferenz vor.

Aus dem Abstract:
IT-Entwicklungsprojekte verwenden heute immer noch ungebührlich viel Zeit zur Entwicklung projektspezifischer Strukturen für die Dokumentation von Software- und IT-Architekturen. Durch die Verwendung von Strukturvorlagen lässt sich einerseits dieser Aufwand erheblich reduzieren, andererseits die Qualität von Architekturdokumentation deutlich steigern. DerBeitrag stellt die arc42-Schablone zur Architekturdokumentation vor, die sich in vielen kommerziellen, industriellen und Open-Source Projekten bewährt hat.

Ich werde das arc42-Template erstmals auf einer internationalen akademischen Konferenz präsentieren. Konferenzbeitrag von Peter Hruschka und Gernot Starke.

Download auf meiner Website.

Bruce Schneier on "Secure Passwords"

Good ol' Bruce describes the inner workings of a Password-Recovery-Toolkit, PRTK, (although his post is titled "Choosing Secure Passwords) and how this biesty app tries to guess passwords. Interesting read - although it does not help me in remembering good passwords.

If you're security-aware, then hurry off my blog to read the full story... (but remember to come back :-)

Knipsen Sie digital?

dann könnte es Ihnen vielleicht gefallen, aus Ihren Bildern ein "Mosaikbild" zu berechnen, d.h. hunderte Ihrer Fotos als Mosaik eines anderen Bildes zusammenzubauen...

Wem das zuviel Arbeit ist, der lässt MozoDojo für sich rechnen - irgendwie cool (und kostenfrei).

Ich hab's mit etwa 1000 Urlaubsfotos als "Input" ausprobiert - nur mittelprächtig :-(
Falls Sie also VIEL mehr Bilder ihr eigen nennen, und ihren Mac auch mal einige Stunden entbehren können - nur zu...

AJAX - endlich mal eine realistisch/kritische Würdigung

Markus Eisele schreibt in der iX einen Artikel über AJAX im echten Leben. Endlich mal eine aus meiner Sicht realistische Darstellung, die über das techno-fokussierte Über-Lob hinausgeht - danke!

Think: Let the cloud of helpful darkness fall upon your apps

oh, what a great idea: Avoid the myth of multitasking, concentrate on ONE thing at a time (pretty difficult, with multiple windows open and several sources of distraction always available).

The guys from Freeverse found a simple-yet-clever solution called think (oops - for Mac only). Just add a (graphical) curtain (called backdrop) to your screen - nice thing, very useable.

Here's a list of appropriate keyboard shortcuts:

Command+Option+Return will raise Think and show its dashboard

Commond+Control+Return will re-focus on the illuminated app

Command+Option+Tab will illuminate the frontmost app - sending others behind the curtain.

One more SOA-definition: "a mess waiting to happen"

While editing our forthcoming SOA-book (german) I found a nice definition of SOA by Jim Kobielus in a Network-World article:

"...SOA also is a mess waiting to happen.
By encouraging widespread reuse of scattered software components, SOA threatens to transform the enterprise network into a complex, sprawling unmanageable mesh."

He gives this definition in the context for his call-for-governance...

JBoss -= 1

JBoss founder and visionary Marc Fleury quits his job at Red Hat (remember: the company that invested lousy 300+ million US$ in JBoss...), writes Heise (in German).

He's now both rich and has lots of spare time - I wonder what a creative, agressive and resourceful young man like him plans to accomplish next. I bet it takes less than 12 month until he's back in the OpenSource sphere. Anybody bets agains me?

On the other hand I'm sure the positive development at JBoss will continue - I'm deeply impressed with some of their products (e.e. JBoss Rules) - they dramatically improved during the last few month.

Web 2.0 in motion...

Lawrence Lessig pointed me to a wonderful video at YouTube,
explaining Web 2.0, tagging and other stuff...

great job... although the music isn't as cool as the movie...

at least: OpenUP process available

It had been announced a long time ago - but now its available: The OpenUP software development process from the Eclipse process framework project.

From the OpenUP docs:

"OpenUP/Basic is an iterative software development process that is minimal, complete and extensible."

And from the Process Framework website:

The Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) aims at producing a customizable software proess engineering framework.

hhm - what a goal...


Although the authors claim that Windows-32 is required, it works fine on Mac OS-X, at least with Firefox - Safari fails to display anything :-(

HDR-Images: high-contrast artwork for (nearly) everybody

SPIEGEL-Online berichtet über HDR-Fotografie - eine faszinierende Kombi aus
Kunst und Software. Ziemlich geniale Fotostrecken, bei flickr gibt's ganz viele weitere Beispiele. Ich mag Wat Arun at Sunset. Mehr auch im HDR-Pool.

(German) Tutorial on REST (with Rails)

Thomas and Ralf provide a (german) tutorial on implementing REST-ful architectures with Ruby-on-Rails.

Astonishing: 25Gigabyte FREE online backup storage

Today I tried out MediaMax - a pretty cool online backup and file management service. These guys offer 25Gigabyte of free (yes - free, no cost, no ads, no pain) storage - although in their free version you are only allowed 1Gig of free download per month.

I don't care - I long for offsite-backup space. And even the premium plan (4.95US$/month) isn't that expensive - and gives you 100Gig storage plus 10GByte download per month.

Their upload-applet worked in both Safari and Firefox, even plain-ftp upload is possible. Too bad that upload-speed in DSL is such a nuisance...

Another little piece in my personal backup strategy (which includes an OpenSuse powered Raid-1 subversion server, an external USB-drive, and a user-friendly interface for Unix-tar...)

Scrum Reference Card

A nice overview of Scrum - too bad it's only available as (un-scaling) gif.

btw: found via InfoQ and Deborah Hartman.

Deutschland, Wiege des Unfugs und der Kompliziertheit

Neben Vorratsdatenspeicherung, überbordenden Finanzämter und der kropfartig
grassierenden Bundesagentur für Arbeitslosenverweigerungsverhinderung schlägt jetzt sogar das Handelsgesetz seltsame Blüten: Heise berichtet über die gesetzliche Regelung, nach der jeder Kaufmann zukünftig sämtliche formale Information über sein Unternehmen jeder (ja: jeder: E-Mail und SMS...) Kommunikation beifügen muss.

Wir werden also wieder E-Mail Signaturen einführen, die 25 Zeilen lang sind...

Schwachsinn in Perfektion. Stefan schreibt dazu:
in welcher Situation reicht es nicht, auf den Homepage-Link zu klicken? Gibt es jemanden, der E-Mails empfangen, aber keinen Browser benutzen kann?

Ich werde noch zum Pessimisten - langsam können Sie mit mir wetten, wie lange dieses Land solchen Blödsinn noch verkraftet, bevor ALLE schlauen Leute auswandern oder aussterben. Gute Nacht, Heimatland.

Was ist 1.58991842?

Nein - keine verkapselte Darstellung der 42 (obwohl die Ziffern dort vorkommen) - sondern die 16.4-te Wurzel aus 2007.

Völlig cool ist, dass Sie diese Rechenaufgabe Google stellen können - einfach
"16.4th root of 2007" in die Google-Suchmaske eintippen - fertig.

Auf einer Abendveranstaltung der OOP 2007 hat der Kopfrechenmeister Dr. Gerhard Mittring diese Aufgabe in knappen 10 Sekunden gelöst - sehenswert - aber ich persönlich habe häufiger google zur Verfügung als Herrn Mittring...

Relaunch meiner Website

rechtzeitig zur OOP 2007 habe ich meine Website mal kräftig überarbeitet - neudeutsch heisst das wohl relaunch. Neue Struktur, viel neuer Inhalt, hoffentlich mehr Übersicht.

Freue mich über Feedback dazu...

Meine Highlights der OOP 2007 in München

Ab morgen beginnt die OOP 2007 in München - hier meine persönliche Besuchsliste (aus heutiger Sicht :-)

<eigenwerbung IT-Trends (mit M. Bohlen, P.Hruschka und G. Starke), Dienstag 9h />

Writing Smaller Software (Charles Weir), Dienstag 17:45

AUTOSAR (Helmut Fennel), Mittwoch 14:30

Ausbildungsprogramm für Software-Architekten (Buchmann, Erker), Donnerstag, 11h

Architektur-Zehnkamp (P. Hruschka), Donnerstag 11h

<eigenwerbung> Tipps zur Völkerverständigung in der IT-Welt (G. Starke), Donnerstag 14:30h />

Flexible Produktlinien (L. Dewanto, F. Egger), Donnerstag 17h

Ruby-on-Rails (Stefan Tilkov), Freitag 9h

Insgesamt ist der SOA-Track sicherlich prima (den haben Stefan Tilkov und ich organisiert) - dort hören Sie viele Praxisberichte zu SOA.

...und natürlich die Stand- und Randgespräche - ich freue mich auf (wieder!) viele davon! Für viele Besucher, mich inklusive, die Hauptsache!

Linkdump: Ruby & Rails (on Mac)

While preparing our talk on IT-Trends for OOP 2007 (Januar 22-25 in Munich) I had to upgrade my Mac to newer versions of Ruby and Rails - and found some gorgious links on these topics:

• Build Ruby, Rails and other really important stuff from scratch on Mac OS Tiger. Be careful - you might get your hands really geeky. Fundamental starting point.


• Use Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X. Ooops - until today I did not know that Apple had Rails-related stuff in their portfolio (alas - its a great company, so I should have guessed...)


• If you prefer clean hands and GUI: Try Locomotive - a simple and more-or-less intuitive tool to support your Rails development on Mac OS X.

Sind wir zu blöd? Das Zeitalter der Überforderung

si genialer Artikel von Detlef Schmalenberg im Kölner-Stadt-Anzeiger trug den Titel "Bin ich zu blöd" und beschrieb anhand (pointierter) Beispiele die hohe, teilweise überbordende, Kompliziertheit und Komplexität des modernen Alltags.

Schmalenberg spricht in diesem Bericht von der "galoppierenden Spezialisierung" - ein Trend, den wir in der Informatik ebenfalls mit voller Härte erleben. Wo gestern noch fundiertes Grundlagenwissen genügte, hervorragende IT-Systeme zu bauen, da braucht es heutzutage zusätzlich eine Plethora unterschiedlicher Frameworks und Produkte, um Software "reif" zu machen.

In Trainings rege ich seit langem an, dass Architekten jeden Morgen ihren persönlichen simpled starten sollten, um systematisch und kontinuierlich Dinge zu vereinfachen. Leider versäumen das viele...

Ralf Westphal hat das unter einem ganz anderen Blickwinkel betrachtet, nämlich dem der IT-Fachzeitschriften ("Quo vadis, Fachzeitschriften?").

Keep Your Ideas Organized

I'm always fond of tipps on organizing (my) ideas, loose-pointers, notes-for-future-projects and such stuff. I found a (free) tool named IdeaKnot (Mac and PC versions available), which fulfills my needs - simple and unobtrusive. It allows ideas to be tagged in groups, has a rich-text description field and a simple search function - all I need.

Sechs+1 Tipps für effektive Architekturkommunikation

Hier einige Tipps, wie IT-Architekten die Ergebnisse ihrer Arbeit effektiv (d.h. zielgerichtet) und effizient (mit angemessenem Aufwand) an ihre Projektbeteiligten kommunizieren können:

1. Arbeiten Sie iterativ, d.h. holen Sie aktiv Feedback ein, auch für Architekturentscheidungen und Dokumentation (nicht nur für Sourcecode!)


2. Verwenden Sie Strukturschablonen, wie Volere (für Anforderungsanalyse) oder arc42 (für IT-Architekturen).


3. Verhalten Sie sich strukturiert faul: Arbeiten Sie in hierarchisch, beginnen vom Abstrakten zum Detaillierten und hören sofort auf, wenn Ihnen auf einer Abstraktionsebene Dinge genau genug erscheinen. Ihre Erfahrung und Ihre Stakeholder (siehe Punkt 1) werden Ihnen sagen, was genug ist.


4. Dokumentieren Sie (schriftlich) erwartete Änderungen architekturrelevanter Aspekte, beispielsweise Anforderungen oder technische Faktoren. Dadurch wissen Sie, wo Sie Flexibilität benötigen und wo nicht (sie müssen das wissen, denn Flexibilität ist teuer, auch wenn's manchmal anders aussieht...)


5. Identifizieren Sie (aktiv) die Leser Ihrer Dokumente und Modelle - denn die geben Ihnen Hinweise, ob Ihre Arbeit gut genug ist (siehe Punkt 1). Das klingt banal - aber denken Sie über den Tellerrand der reinen Entwicklung hinaus: Administratoren, Operators, DB-Admins, Facharchitekten und auch Systemanalytiker können von Architekturergebnissen profitieren (und SIE als Architekt von deren Kommentaren!)


6. 
   Arbeiten Sie parallel - quasi gleichzeitig an mehreren
   

   
   

   
   
   • Sichten (Kontext-, Baustein-, Laufzeit- und Verteilungssicht)
   
   
   • Hierarchieebenen (abstrakt und detailliert)
   
   
   • Bearbeitungsrichtungen (Top-Down und Bottom-Up)
   
   

   
   

   
   


7. Praktizieren Sie Kommunikation: Erklären Sie Ihre Architekturen, häufig und für verschiedene Stakeholder - und beachten Sie dabei Punkt 1! Nur so lernen Sie kommunizieren.

So - und nun viel Erfolg! (Ich freue mich über Feedback dazu - und weitere Tipps...)

"Second Life" and the Power of Groups

Only recently I heard about the immensly popular online-game "Second Life" - where literally millions of (real) people inhabit a virtual world - community-building in perfection. Statistics from October 2006 count more than 30.000 residents logged in every day!

IBM took up the idea of community building and invited more than 300.000 employees, partners and clients to form their own community - and develop new ideas for products and services (I found this interesting report in Newsweek!). IBM's boss declared that they will spend significant amounts (> 100 Million US$) on those ideas. Cute idea - let everybody from your workforce and partners help you to collect and shape ideas - that's a way to realize group-potential!

I hurried to open a (free!) secondlife account - meet me there (Zorg42).

Update (Sun. 26th): Frank (see comment) wrote about this stuff - and pointed to Entropia (which supports only Windows-XP clients, SecondLife supports both Windows and MacOS).

Things we ABSOLUTELY don't need...

People research strange things. Some guys from Akishima Laboratories (Osake University) came up with a machine that can paint on water by creating waves in a cylindrical tank. Watch yourself. If you come up with a (practical) application for that thing (called AMOEBA), let me know. On the other hand, it surely is great fun building absolutely useless high-tech geek-stuff - if the funding is right :-)

Workgroup file sharing on Mac and Windows

To prepare a joint-presentation or other workgroup-stuff, a shared (auto-sync) folder without the need of a central server is a nice thing to have. A few years of Groove definitely spoilt me - but there will be no Mac version in the near future (remember: Groove-founder Ray Ozzie, see also here,  way back also foundet Lotus and is now chief software architect for Microsoft) .

Now I found FolderShare - a free service by a small company called ByteTaxi (which was aquired by Microsoft in 2005). They provide clients for both Windows and MacOS, no fancy features but pure p2p file sharing, encrypted, closed workgroups, fast, no-hassle. It's operated mostly in a browser (I tried Firefox and IE under Windows and OmniWeb and Firefox on Mac - no problems).

Groove still is way cooler - but Windows-only :-(  Foldershare does what it's supposed to do - seems to be "here-to-stay". At least for me and my (small) workgroup :-)

10 Jahre Sophist

Die  SOPHISTEN, industrielle und praktische Wegbereiter des methodischen Requirements-Engineering, feierten am 14. November 2006 ihr 10-jähriges Firmenjubiläum. Erstens herzlichen Glückwunsch an Chris Rupp, ihren "Rolo" und das gesamte Team.

Zweitens Glückwunsch zu dieser Feier (aah - ich durfte neben dem genialen Ambiente des Nürnberger Presseclubs auch noch eine kleine Rede halten) - nice crowd. Die Anwesenheit so vieler hochkarätiger Kunden bestätigt, dass es auch in Zeiten der Sparwut auch noch intensive und freundliche Partnerschaften gibt - das schaffen jedoch nach meiner Einschätzung nur sehr wenige Unternehmen. Also - weiter so.

(Mein...) Highlight des Tages: Gerhard Wohland's Vortrag über Denkwerkzeuge - wirklich denkwürdig! Niemals habe ich jemanden vorher derart druckreif sprechen hören!

(Kleine Randbemerkung: Schick, dass man im Presseclub das offene WLAN des benachbarten iMAX Kinos mitverwenden kann :-)

Prio-Konferenz: dotNET und mehr

Prioconference fand vom 14.-15. November im wunderschönen Kurort Baden-Baden statt - gediegenes Ambiente, geniale Location (an die Veranstalter: Toll ausgesucht!). Klarer Schwerpunkt: dotNET - in allen Varianten (was beim Veranstalter dotNETpro auch nicht wundert). Gute 200 TeilnehmernInnen sorgten für idealen Füllstand der Vorträge.

Neu (und gut!) an dieser Veranstaltung war das Konzept der Vorab-Strukturierung: Die wesentlichen Themen hatten die Veranstalter im Vorfeld identifiziert und dann dazu passende Sprecher ausgesucht. Somit war bereits a priori gewährleistet, dass Inhalte auch zueinander passen und es weder Überschneidungen noch Auslassungen gibt. In diesem Sinne hat Ralf Westphal eine gute Hand für die Themen bewiesen.

Den Eröffnungsvortrag hielt ein wahrer Guru - Miguel de Icaza, bekannt als Gründer des Gnome-Projektes und des schon legendären Mono-Projektes (das macht übrigens die wichtigsten Teile des .NET Frameworks unter Linux und MacOS lauffähig - und öffnet damit für Windows-Entwickler neue Welten für Deployment).

Miguel's Talk war mind-boggling: Selten durfte ich einem derart kurzweiligen, vielseitigen und überzeugenden Vortrag zuhören - der Mann (junger Kerl, völlig ohne Allüren) wurde vom Time-Magazin als einer der Top-100 Innovatoren des neuen Jahrtausends gekürt - zu Recht! Da baut er als Demo flugs unter Windows eine kleine Forms-Applikation zusammen, die er dann unter (VMWare sei dank) unter Linux startet. Kategorie ultracool! Gegen Ende seines Vortrags trat das Kind-im-Manne zutage - da demonstrierte er (unter MacOS X), wie man unter Mono coole Echtzeitstrategiespiele bauen kann.

Ich durfte mit meinem Vortrag über "Software-Produktion" den Kontext für die übrigen Themen aufspannen: Anforderungsanalyse, Architektur, Entwicklung, Test, Betrieb - in all diesen Disziplinen müssen IT'ler heutzutage professioneller arbeiten, um unserem dynamischen Markt zu genügen.

Enterprise-Architektur

Einige aktuelle Infos zum Thema "Enterprise-Architektur":

1. Von einem der erfahrensten Enterprise-Architekten, nämlich Wolfgang Keller, gibt's jetzt (endlich) das lang ersehnte Buch zum Thema. Gute Einführung und Übersicht, viele Ratschläge, allerdings nur für Praktiker mit etwas Berufserfahrung. Für diese jedoch 5 Sterne - absolut empfehlenswert.


2. Ein weiterer erfahrener Enterprise-Architekt, Gernot Dern, hat sein Buch (Management von IT-Architekturen) mittlerweile in der zweiten Auflage (ISBN 3528058161) veröffentlicht. Er hat meiner Meinung nach die gründlichste Aufarbeitung der so genannten "Architekturpyramide", inklusive der passenden Begriffsklärungen.


3. Die Computerwoche hat, animiert übrigens durch meinen Vortrag auf den SOA-Technology-Days der Deutschen Post, einen Artikel zum Thema "Enterprise-Architektur" geschrieben. Das pdf dazu ist glücklicherweise über Wolfgang Kellers "objectarchitects" online verfügbar.

Es gibt noch Vernunft in Deutschland!!

Na, das ist ja mal eine GUTE Nachricht: Der BGH hat beschlossen, dass die von der EU geforderte Vorratsdatenspeicherung mit geltendem Recht nicht zu vereinbaren ist.

Ich finde, diese Art der angeblichen Verbrechensprävention wäre mit dem klassischen Begriff der Vernunft nicht vereinbar gewesen. Hätte nichts, aber auch GAR nichts genutzt und immens viel gekostet...

Mal schauen, wie lange es vom Tisch bleibt...

Gerücht begraben: Festplatte DOCH älter als SOA-Ansätze...

Peter Roßbach hat mich netterweise darauf hingewiesen, dass IBM (laut Wikipedia) bereits 1956 eine (Art) Festplatte gebaut und an Kunden vermietet hat.

Ich hatte vorher auf meinem WJAX-Vortrag die These vertreten, dass die zentralen Ideen von SOA bereits vor der Erfindung der Festplatte (und nach der Erfindung des C-Compilers) entstanden - aber lose Kopplung, klare Schnittstellung und Metadaten waren sicherlich 1956 noch nicht en vogue.

Jedoch bleibe ich dabei: Die Grundideen von SOA schwirren (unter anderen Überschriften) schon lange durch die IT-Welt...

Workshop zu Software-Architektur

Mastering Software-Architectures -  vom dynamischen Referentenduo Peter Hruschka und Gernot Starke. Im schicken und praktischen Münchener Hotel Eden-Wolf, Nähe Hauptbahnhof, findet vom 12.-15. Dezember 2006 mal wieder der beliebte Architekturworkshop statt.

Aktuell dieses Mal: Vorstellung des arc42-Templates Version 2.1, das zur OOP im Januar 2007 live gehen wird. Gegenüber der Version 1.5 wurden diverse Details geändert und viele Hinweise von Anwendern eingearbeitet.

Noch (Stand 5. November) sind übrigens noch wenige Plätze frei - Anmeldung gerne per Mail an "info<at>arc42.de". Mehr Infos hier.

ever forgot to attach a file to your email?

Did you ever forgot to attach a file to an email you just wrote - similar to the following:

"Dear Bill, please find attached my combined patches to your Vista Kernel. I fixed 975.765 critical and 658.230 fatal errors."

You found the mail appealing, pressed the "send" button - and desaster stroke: Bill received the mail, but without the attachment. The product was delivered without your valuable contribution :-)

Stefan was really nice - he attached the screenshot of a fancy mail.app plugin names attachment scanner (oh - did I mention this is for Mac-users only?), that checks the wording of your messages for hints of attachments - and warns you if you send the mail without the precious contents.

Celebrity Contra MDA?

In Gregor-the-Guru Hohpe's writeup of 2006 JAOO-Conference I found an interesting statement on MDA:

"... we discussed the trend towards MDC –Model-driven Crap."

As I'm personally more a friend than a foe of model-driven approaches, I'll let Gregor speak for himself. You got to come to your own conclusion concerning models, meta and such stuff. At least I found out in real projects that MD-approaches CAN help some people!

Logistik für Architekten

Lords-of-the-Logistic, was zum Schmunzeln - via Frank.

Book review: "FIT for Developing Software"

By Rick Mugridge and Ward Cunningham (yes, the c2-guy and wiki-inventor), Prentice Hall 2005. A very convincing book - if you don't yet know or use the FIT acceptance testing framework (plus its comanion FITNESSE, the acceptance-testing-wiki), this book will surely motivate you to give those two a try! If you never had the opportunity to use FIT in a real project - that'l surely change. The book, brilliantly structured, well written, carefully edited, contains starting points for many projects to come. Five stars!

My next quest will be the evaluation of the different FIT implementations - as a few of my current projects are non-Java - but that'll be covered in a future posting.

Revival: Nethack: Old game, still fun

As the Apple Mac I'm curently using is a real *ix machine, reminding me of my prior life - when that operating system was still in its infancies. Back then we worked unmanly hours - in the quest of fulfilling both our diploma thesis and our wish to explore the unknown... Nethack was the game of choice in those days - played by numerous players within the computer science departement of the RWTH Aachen. This game had two positive aspects: First it tought me the vocabulary needed to understand Harry Potter in his native tongue (otherwise I would have failed to understand potions, spells and other wizard's speak) and second it was available on every machine I used since then.

Only recently I met the unchallenged champions of the game (aka suru) and found out that the famous blogger Eric S. Raymond authored the Nethack manual... and I still did never manage to find that Amulet of Yendor. Have fun - but be warned: Once you manage to decently play the game, you'll probably never be the same gamer again.

Organize myself and my ideas

Some while ago I investigated methods and tools to support my self- of. I read every available book on time- and self-management (and even gave trainings on those subjects - but that was long before you were probably conceived). I started with a Palm-Pilot - and seriously failed with it.

Ok - after trying out many approaches, I finally reached GTD (getting things done), by pretty famous David Allen. (you find a very concise summary here).  I'm happy (only happy, not perfectly happy) with kGTD, a (naturally Mac) Omni-Outliner-based implementation of this method (the guys from OmniGroup a currently implementing a native version called OmniFocus). Supported by a variety of MindMaps (to brainstorm and structure ideas of single projects) it works as my "self-organizing-infrastructure. No more to-do lists on paper!

I added two utilities to this setup:

• iClip to record documents, links and arbitrary snippets of information - too bad it does not directly link into my gtd-tasks and projects.


• Notational Velocity - a minimalistic notetaking-and-finding application of astonishing productivity and usefulness.

schon cool - Tourismus im All...

Gute Pausenlektüre - Space-Blog der ersten weiblichen Weltraumtouristin - ehemals aus Iran nach USA geflohen und dort eine bilderbuchhafte Karriere hingelegt - in wenigen Jahren eine Firma aufgebaut und für >500 Mio$ verkauft - jetzt Mäzenin und Astronomie-Studentin :-) Kompliment, Frau Ansari.

Wie gefährlich ist Sicherheit?

Das Karlsruher  CM-Network (zur Förderung der Zusammenarbeit von Industrie und Wissenschaft) veranstaltet am 28. Oktober 2006 das 7. Herbst-Symposium "Wie gefährlich ist Sicherheit".

Beschränkte Teilnehmerzahl - interessante Vorträge.

Update vom 5.Nov. 2006: Mein Vortrag (Sicherheit in Architektonien) steht ab sofort dort zum Download bereit.

SOA Technology Days, 20.-21.September 2006, Bonn

They promised a vendor-neutral symposium and kept their faith - really! Excellent networking opportunity. I gave a talk on Enterprise Architecture - and had the whole impressive crowd (>250 attendees) to myself....

ISO-Images mit MacOS brennen

OK - mir merkt man die >15 Jahre Windows an. Mit welcher Software, fragte ich mich, brenne ich denn nur ISO-Images auf dem Mac? Die Antwort ist einfach - mit MacOS selbst (via MacOS X Hints).

Patterns-kompakt: 2. Auflage erschienen

Das Buch "Patterns kompakt" erschien Anfang September in der zweiten, deutlich erweiterten Auflage.
Es fasst die wichtigsten Entwurfsmuster zusammen, die Sie für Software-Entwicklung  benötigen. Software-Entwickler,-Architekten und -Designer finden darin effektiv anwendbare Lösungen
für tägliche Entwurfsprobleme.
€(D) 14,- / €(A) 14,40 / sFr 22,-
ISBN 3-8274-1591-8

Coolness - redefined.

via Frank I learned about the final redefinition of coolness.

Gute Idee: Bücher als pdf

Der Bonner Galileo-Verlag hat's professionalisiert, was Bruce Eckel seinerzeit mit seinem "Thinking-in-Java" das erste Mal stilvoll vorführte: Gute Literatur als pdf kostenfrei zum Download anbieten.

Dies ist beileibe kein pauschales Lob aller Galileo-Bücher, sondern ein Lob für diese Initiative. Sicher für manche IT-Praktiker hilfreich: "Praxisbuch Objektorientierung" - mit Beispielen verschiedener OO-Programmiersprachen.

Never argue with your customer - but move on to _real_ communication!

A nice post by Esther Derby (which I happen to not know personally). She describes three rules of communication - which are _very_ valid in conversations between client and consultant (and equally valid between managers and software-developers!):

1. Never argue with your customer - you'll always lose.


2. Consider the context: It does not matter if it runs on YOUR machine - if it fails at the customers`site!


3. Consider that you might have different definitions for the same words.

Next time I visit my optician, I'll remember Esther, for sure!

IT-architects, please note: blog for arc42

arc42, the portal for software-architecture, now maintains its own blog.

Informationssysteme sind Wirtschaftsgut!

Ich habe ein neues Editorial für arc42 geschrieben - und weise darin auf die häufige Fehlbehandlung hin, die der Informationstechnik in vielen Unternehmen immer noch zuteil wird.

Upcoming Presentations and Talks (September 06 - January 07)

I learned from Stefan that it might be useful to inform you about my upcoming speaking engagements. Here's what's fixed so far from September 2006 until January 2007:

• 19.-20. Sept. 06: CON.ECT: 2-day public course: SOA and Business Integration (Vienna)


• 21.Sept. 06: SOA Technology Days, Bonn: "Enterprise Architecture"


• 28. Oct. 06: CM-Workshop, Karlsruhe: "Der Faktor Sicherheit in Software-Architekturen" (public, but limited attendance)


• 6. Nov. 06: W-Jax 2006, München: "Untiefen von SOA-Projekten"


• 14. Nov. 06: 10th anniversary of Sophist-Group: "Reisebericht aus Architektonien" (semi-public)


• 15. Nov. 06: Prio-Conference, Baden-Baden: "Software-Produktionsprozess"


• 27. Nov. 06: iX-Conference on better Software, Frankfurt: Half-Day tutorial: "42 für Architekten: Effektive Architekturkommunikation"


• 12.-15. Dez. 06: Intensivtraining Software-Architektur (public), Munich, together with Peter Hruschka.


• 22.-25. Jan. 07: OOP-Conference, Munich: Together with Stefan Tilkov I'll be Track-Chair of the 5-day SOA-Track. With Peter Hruschka I'll be managing the Software-Architecture day and with Matthias Bohlen and Peter Hruschka I'll be talking on "IT-Trends (nicht nur) für Manager".

plus some private engagements, that's practical boredom-avoidance for a while :-)

REST on Rails

Bruce Tate, well-known author of award-winning Java books (Better, Faster, Lighter Java) now takes the R-Train: Apart from releasing a book called From Java to Ruby he has written about two hot topics in one article: REST on Rails.

Quote:

The core abstraction in REST is a remote resource instead of a remote procedure call.

In a nutshell, REST queries and manipulates resources with HTTP.

Why there will always be tears

It is not IT, but well worth digesting: Daniel Gilbert, Harvard professor, reasoned "He who cast the first stone probably didn't" - and gives some pretty good examples of (mismatched) action and reaction. (free registration required, unless you already have an NYT account)

His conclusion: "Until we learn to stop trusting everything
our brains tell us about others — and to start trusting others themselves — there will continue to be tears".

Pretty fundamental stuff!

Full article appeared in NY-Times, came to me via Peter Hruschka and Tom DeMarco from Atlantic Systems Guild - thanx, guys.

Powered by Qumana

Some useful software for Mac OS X

• Desktop blog editor qumana, currently available for free (beta version).


• Managing multiple iPhoto libraries with iPhotoBuddy (freeware)


• Let the mac to the typing: typeIt4me (27€)


• kgtd: Outliner-support for the GTD (getting-things-done) productivity method (book published by David Allen)


• Dobry backuper - for scheduled backups, either incremental, versioned or full. This is one of the things I preferred under Windows - a "real-time" backup with autoversioning (approx 30US$).


• RemoteDesktop - a cool client (by Microsoft) to connect to Windows machines. Way better than vnc or similar stuff - freeware!


• BurnXFree to burn CD's and DVD's, freeware, proudly made in Argentinia.


• SerialMail to send mails to more than one recipient (as I'm sometimes coordinating larger groups of people, this is really helpful. Do not use it for spam, will you?! Donationware.


• Of course, no Mac-SW-list will ever be complete without Quicksilver - the smoothest application experience I ever had - really! Freeware.


• Witch to switch to specific windows of applications (apple-tab just takes you to the app - not what I always want)


• Oh - I'm using the whole OmniWare palette...

Tags: mac, software, gimmicks

Powered by Qumana

Scrum Master

I'm now a certified Scrum master. Just in case you need Scrum training or Scrum-oriented coaching in your agile & iterative projects, I'll be most happy to support you.
Further info:

• Scrum Alliance
• ControlChaos, original Scrum website
  

Titelseite der iX 08'2006...

Das erste Mal in meiner Laufbahn (ok, es ist eher ein Wanderweg) als Schreiberling hat einer meiner Artikel es auf die Titelseite der Zeitschrift iX gebracht: Auf nach Analytistan heisst er - die Ausgabe gibt's ab 13. Juli beim Zeitschriftenhändler. Den ersten drei Kommentatoren schenke ich ein Freiexemplar...

Ergänzung (5.Aug.06): Ein Teil des Artikels steht nun bei heise.de online...

Fine Use of (integrated) Camera

At first I thought the integrated camera of my MacBook was playstuff - but finally I'm convinced: A little app called booxter helps me organize my (pretty fat!) bookshelf. The sole problem I had was: "how to I get all my books entered into the app"?

Camera-to-the-rescue: Booxter recognizes the barcode with the ISBN-number printed on every books' backside. I was really astonished that it works - no hassle...

The process is now pure fun: hold the book into the "eye" of the MacBook - wait for the "click" - and a few seconds later any of 10 configurable search engines (Amazon, Library-of-Congress etc) returns title, author, cover, description and other useful information about your book. Took me 5 seconds per book (min), 15 max. Deal, isn't it?

For 15 Euro I call that a bargain for guys who love books and need assistance in keeping overview. 5 star rating!

it made me run for the apple store :-)

Good things come to those who wait: The famous MindManager is available in a Mac-version. It literally made me run for the Apple store.

New comments (August 2006), after several weeks of more-or-less intensive usage:

• from build 548 the spotlight integration really works


• I'm missing the web export from the windows version


• I'm missing the "send-to-mindmanager" feature to create new maps from existing topics


• I'm using MindManager more and more in union with OmniOutliner - too bad I cannot link from topics to single entries within an outline (OmniGroup told me this is an upcoming feature of V4)

Nonsense 2.0

Web 2.0: quite established term, since Tim O'Reilly published his scene-setting & eye-opening article on that topic. Its mostly about user-experience, social networking and the like. Go read it, just in case you're not familiar with web 2.0.

Later came Identity 2.0 - a fantastic presentation. Even later cam OpenSource 2.0 (brief report in German)...

Then some sh** hit some fan: An undisclosed company came up with Security 2.0.(via Stefan). Which actually made me think of some further developments in this "too-dot-oh" direction: Is the term "nonsense 2.0" copyrightable? Or is this stuff just too-dot-oh-much for me?

By the way: I'm forty-too-dot-oh years old, and my cars' licence plate carries the number six-four-too-dot-oh. Gosh, somebody hopefully will find out that I'm modern-too-dot-oh.

In case you're agile AND don't like to read much...

have a look at the short Agile Work Cheat Sheet. I summarizes the fundamental ideas which help to successify (not only IT-) projects...

Hint (don't tell your boss that I told you!): hack' your managers' windooze-box and make the cheat-sheet his or hers browser-homepage :-)

Summary of "Golden Rules of Consulting"

Quite a long time ago I collected some ideas on the general topic of consulting from various internet sources. My favourite result came from the Old Dominion University, an educational institution, somewhere in the U.S. The rules were presumably written up by Dr. Yoon.

I found these set of rules fits to my personal style - so I'd like to summarize the basic ideas here

• First-time customers buy "what you know". Repeating customers buy "who you are".
• Know your customers: Make sure what you're offering is what they are willing to pay good money for.
• Give your customers more than they expect.
• Aim higher than you commit. Work better than you promised.
  
• The high road is a two-way street. There is seldom a need to work for a bad customer.
• Learn when to "no bid": When you and your customer are mismatched, don't take the work.
• Retrain yourself constantly. Learn a "big new thing" every year.
• Contributing is marketing (aah, see arc42 for one of my personal examples)
• Slow times come when you can least handle them. Same is valid for fast times.
  

Agile Development with .NET

A recent survey of a development site (lets call it "FooBar" here, to keep my client undisclosed) positively surprised me: A team of >20 persons in a highly productive (agile & iterative) setting, completely based on (new!) Microsoft tool-chain with Visual-Studio Team Server as the foundation. Forget about the old days, when Visual-Source-Safe did everything to ruin your day (Alain called it source destruction system...)- now its Team-Foundation-Server (TFS) making your day, really!

Until now I was really fond of Twiki/bugzilla/Excel combination to track and manage iterative development, even in non-Java environments. My positive impression of TFS changed that:

• The "FooBar" guys integrated their favorite UML-tool seamlessly into TFS: Whenever somebody changes a use-case or activity-diagram, corresponding features or tasks are created (or updated) within TFS
• The project-internal decision process is mapped onto TFS entries
• TFS handles the complete bug-tracking (sorry to say, Joel, might make FogBugz life harder)
• The iteration-coach can export burndown-charts and calculate development speed based only on TFS data - making that a really agile experience.

So - all that is possible with Wikis, Bugzilla and Excel- but certainly less integrated. I'll get myself a license asap :-)

nice logo...

for Lispniks:

Travel Tipps for Analysts

Michael Stal proposed to send Market Analysts to some lonely island. I partly agree - but decision-makers in our industry (as in many others!) are NOT engineers, so they cannot evaluate technology based upon programming experience and technical risks. So we might end up sending decision-makers into a similar direction - what might end up in contraproductive vacuum, although programmers would surely love it (only until the end of the current project budget ... ).

I'll love Micha's conclusion:

"Why do you think, these guys have become market analysts and not software engineers?"

A little more on Lisp

I recently blogged about a simple Lisp IDE - now I'm back with more news on that topic
(why I care about Lisp? Read on...). Two more options for the motivated parenthesist:

• Lispworks (Personal Edition) is a real IDE, great documentation. Dozens of cool features (ORB, COM/Automation, SQL integration...) - personal edition is limited to 5 hours per session, which is ok to try it out.
• The real hands-on-feeling comes up with LispBox - you'll find emacs-based, hassle-free, out-of-the-box versions. They are companions to one of the best books I've read during the last month - Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel.

Why I care about the ancient language? Because its a highly productive language to develop prototypes, to explore requirements and to build mission-critical systems. And a few people got rich by using Lisp. Lisp is pretty comparable to Ruby (without the current hype, though).

And: Lisp has interstellar experience. Ruby doesn't.
Expect more on Lisp in the near future :-)

JavaSPEKTRUM Blog (German)

Die Zeitschrift JavaSPEKTRUM hat den Sprung in den Hyperraum der Blogosphäre erfolgreich eingeleitet - und Stefan Tilkov hat einen (seiner Blogger-Ehre würdigen) Startbeitrag dazu geschrieben. Well done!!

IBM on Software-Architecture

In IBM's RationalEdge online magazine I found a series of articles on software architecture and software architects. I liked it for its broad coverage - but do not expect too many details from it. Nice read on the train...

Critical Note on Hosted Services and Web 2.0

These days new Web 2.0 startups and services appear in large numbers - Ajax, Ruby and the like really started something new.

But let's sit back and reflect a little on potential drawbacks of such applications. Take Backpack or Google-Mail as examples: Do we really want them for our work?

Some arguments why we (oops - I personally!) might NOT want services like that:

• Security: I'm consulting highly sensitive clients from a variety of industries. Usually I have to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA), which disallows most communication about the project-at-hand. NDA's force me to apply tight security measures to the documents, models and other information processed and produces during the project. Just in case I trusted the provider of any hosted service (which I do not...), are the carriers reliable? Is my ISP reliable? Those guys did obviously NOT sign my NDA - so I'm not allowed to divulge any client- or project related information to them. To be more precise: I have to actively take measures so they cannot access the project-information. No hosted service provides the kind of security I need for sensitive data like that. On some of my machines I even keep parts of my harddisk crypted :-)


• Security, part 2: What, if the provider of my hosted service is located within the USA - and is beeing approached by the homeland-security guys? Nobody will care about my personal data, even the mere thought of keeping my data private will not cross the mind of my service providers' admin... Feel free to replace USA by any other country, rogue or not...


• Reliability: Can I rely on the data beeing stored in some obscure datacenter? Or will some unhappy employee of some Web 2.0 startup begin manipulating data one day? Do you include MD5 hashes in your documents when you upload it to your favorite hosted service? I bet you don't... (I did never do it)


• Availability: They all tell us about backups, redundant servers and the like. What if their business-model doesn't work out? Will there be backups even in the future, when I still need my data? Again, I trust my own backups (which I test regularly!).


• Availability, part 2: I'm pretty fond of my Internet-service-provider - they have approx 99% uptime of my DSL connection. But on a few occasions the net simply wasn't available at times when I needed to work.

My conclusion: There simply is no free lunch. And Web 2.0 will definitely NOT, unlike 42, be the answer to all our problems...

Weekend Fun: On Waterfall Projects...

(via Peter) I stumbled across a (fictious) IT conference called Waterfall 2006 - a really good April 1st. joke of some guys from the agile alliance. They wrote up summaries for pseudo-talks they won't ever give - dramatically funny, good read!

Get organized

I'm getting fond of backpackit, a hosted service to manage to-do lists, reminders, arbitrary notes and appoinments. I needed a while to get used to the idea to leave these info on the internet only, with no local copy on my notebook - but it works fine :-)

Backpackit has a cool mail-in feature - you send a mail to your backpackit-page and you're done. Just put a token like "todo:" in the subject line and backpackit automatically inserts it at the right place.

You can selectively share certain pages or items with others - making backpackit a simple collaboration tool. Try out the writeboard facility for group authoring - quite fancy.

Backpackit is imho an brilliant example of Web 2.0 software - no installation, just browser-based, neat and functional UI, both free and commercial accounts available. By the way, its written in Ruby by 37Signals.

Only drawback (or is it a feature?): It works only online. You can get used to this, believe me!

PS: Mac-Users: Go for packrat, a small app wich uses the backpackit-web-service-API to enable offline usage...

Mac-OS Virtualization Solution in SWR3 Radio News!

oh - a few guys were blogging about the first real virtualization solution to enable Windows-XP on the oh-so-shiny MacBook (from a russian company called Parallels). Good news - but the imho interesting thing is, that even the German pop-radio station SWR3 reported that in its afternoon-news today!
No SAP release, no Eclipse milestone, no JBoss announcement and no single piece of Oracle software ever made it that far - whow! I should have bought Apple shares a while ago - I bet MacBook sales will skyrocket within the next 12 month.

Using multiple Itunes libraries?

Want to switch between different iTunes libraries on Windows? Then Steve Roys' Libra might be just right for you (it works very fine for me - I'm using itunes at home attached to a raid-server with >40Gig of music and switch to a rather slim library on-the-go.... Its supposed to work with serveral ipods too - but I did not test that.

Au weia - Geschwätz zum Quadrat

Via Frank E. erreichte mich folgender Kurzfilm -
ein realistisches Bild unserer verbal verkommenen
Branche.

EU-Commissioner and VISTA

oops - EU is getting rough'n tough with Steve Ballmer and his colleagues - the (german) Computerwoche newsletter explained how. Tenor of this message: EU requires Microsoft to design & deliver VISTA Europe-compliant :-)

Need a Common-Lisp-IDE?

Just in case you need a Common-Lisp IDE at your fingertips - I recently stumbled across a pretty neat (Win32-based) implementation called Ufasoft Common Lisp . Those guys could need some marketing & webdesign advice, though... (My personal lisp experience dates back into the last millenium - I'll continue experimenting with it during the upcoming easter holidays.)

Talk on Groove on MacOS

I asked Marc Olson (who works at Microsoft to integrate Groove into the Office toolsuite) wether Groove-2007 would be available in a MacOS version - that was his answer (within a day):

Hi Gernot,

Thanks for your interest in Groove 2007. At this time we don't have plans for a Mac specific version, but we are working with our Mac Office team to determine how to move forward with Groove on the Mac platform. The switch to Intel chips, of course, makes the future a little harder to navigate.

Groove does function fine under Virtual PC so that's an option for today's hardware.

Marc

Pickaxe temporarily unavailable? Try this...

just in case you're playing around with Ruby - and you do not have the famous pickaxe book at your fingertips (either you tried to save some money - which was a bad idea, or your so-called friends never gave that cool bunch of paperized knowledge back to you...):
Try the (german) tutorial - well done Sascha, ruby-in-small-doses, good content, digestible.

Our cat just took a nap on top of my pickaxe-copy... so I needed some ruby-centric diversion :-)

Joomla: Content Management, cool yet simple

Thanx to Matthias I found out about Joomla, a powerful php/mysql/apache based content management solution. Alas, there is also Zope and others around, I quite know that... but on the first glimpse Joomla seems to be what I was looking for: It can manage both static and dynamic content and has a sleak UI. I installed it locally with the free XAMPP preconfigured server suite (site in german) but that was just my convenience shortcut...

VMware Server is now available for free!

via Joel Spolsky I stumbled across the announcment, that VMware Server edition is now available for free. VMware is quite well-known for its cool software allowing multiple operating systems to co-exist on the same machine at the same time. Used it once to have several versions of MS* in parallel.

Spammers are improving...

I receive the bill from my favoured telecom provider (T-Com) once per month via E-Mail. Today I got one again, only slightly out of its regular rythm. The sender informed me that this month more than 730€ were due - way tooooo much to be true. But, what made me suspicious, they informed me that starting from February they would not sent pdf-invoices again - I had to login to some website to download the pdf myself.

Sounds like pretty standard spam-or-phishing - but THIS one was really close to the original. The mail contained none of the spam-typical typos or grammatical mistakes - the wording was copied exactly from the T-Com originals. I became even more curious now and compared it bytewise to one of the original monthly T-Com mails - only to discover that only three minor things were wrong:

• My T-Com account number,


• my wife's name in the mail header (we both are listed at T-Com as account holders) and


• the mail was adressed to my web.de address - not the one listed with T-Com
.

Dear me - those spammers really get better...

Maximaler Bürokratenlevel überschritten - Es reicht!

Seit einigen Jahren erlaubt das deutsche Steuerrecht die so genannten Minijobs bis zu einer monatlichen Vergütung von €400. Bis dato durfte man/frau seine auf diese Weise Beschäftigten per Formular an die Minijob-Zentrale bei der Bundesknappschaft in Essen melden. Etwas angestaubtes Verfahren, aber einfach und funktionierte.

Nun hat der typische Bürokratenwahn in seiner schlimmsten Form zugeschlagen:

• In einer Fat-Client Anwendung namens sv-net (was allein ja nicht sooo schlimm wäre) müssen Minijobber nun elektronisch gemeldet werden. Üblerweise scheint dieses Stück Software leider unzureichend getestet - diverse Plausibilisierungen funktionieren nicht...
  


• Die Gestaltung der (Un-)benutzungsoberflächen erinnert an Folterwerkzeuge - da hat jemand die unsympathischen Steuerformulare abgemalt und eine grottige Anwendung drumherum versündigt.


• Nun der Hammer: Die Tätigkeiten der Minijobber müssen nun exakt (numerisch!) bezeichnet werden. Hierzu gibt es eine lange Liste mit Schlüsselwerten - und deren Inhalt ist Realsatire: Da wird fein säuberlich zwischen Büroangestellte, Büroassistent, Bürobote, Bürohelfer, Bürokraft, Bürohilfskraft und Bürodiener unterschieden - welche Beamten-Schnarchnase hat sich denn bitte das überlegt? Und wem soll diese Info bitte helfen??

Liebe Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsverhinderung, -verzögerung und -vermeidung sowie Bundesknapp(-an-Effektivität-)schaft: Es reicht.

Comparison of VM-based languages

Steve Yegge (formerly working at amazon.com, currently with google) has been blogging about programming languages and similar stuff for quite a while - but now I discovered quite a jewel in his many writings: He implemented one game (sokoban) in several VM-based languages and compared the results. He started with some kind of design ideas on the game. Java programmers beware: Steve's not so fond of the J in JVM... (brought to my attention by Frank Jagla).
Bring some time - and be prepared for some fundamental critics either. Nice read!

How to Create Your Own Installer

Thorsten the geek Kaman has written up a no fluff just stuff introduction the Java-based open source installer generator IzPack. Just in case you need (or want!) to generate a nice'n easy installer for your software - have a look at his article (oops - no online version so far :-() or grab IzPack and try for yourself.

Well done, Thorsten!

Software Engineering Podcast

A bunch of experienced software coaches recently started to speak about software engineering in their se-radio podcast.

• You never heard a podcast before? Time to get started. Grab your favorite mp3 player and go for www.se-radio.net.
  
• You do not know about software engineering? Maybe you're wrong in this blog... but you might get something out of listening to the cast...
• You just got the impression that I'm biased? True. I'm one of them.
  

Low-impact UML tool?!

You just wanna draw UML, without much of code generation and other fancy stuff? Image export and a little Eclipse integration is good enough for you? I recently stumbled across UMLet, a fast and free UML tool - might suit your needs... I tried it, found it ok for simple applications (and stayed with MagicDraw and Enterprise Architect due to their impressive functionality!)

Last Change March 27th: corrected URL.

thanx and best wishes to U all

I'd like to wish my dear readers a merry X-mas and a happy, healthy, succesful and prosperous new year.

Wanted: Autoren

Die renomierte IT-Fachzeitschrift OBJEKTspektrum (zu dessen Fachbeirat ich seit längerem gehören darf...) sucht qualifizierte thematisch interessante Beiträge für die kommenden Ausgaben. Wenn Sie also zu IT-Themen schon immer mal einen Artikel schreiben wollten - nur zu! Autoreninfo zum OBJEKTspektrumMehr Info gibts hier.