brenda michelson › Comments

Roof rake...pine trees...red squirrels. One might think you're from Maine. Hope you had a Moxie when you were done! - David Lounsbury

in full disclosure, i'm 'from away'; the dogs though, owners of the tennis balls, are natives - brenda michelson

testing twitter & delicious; featuring my blog of course ;-) - brenda michelson

SOA can learn from cloud computing Service Design & Expandability. Cloud from SOA: Governance & Architecture driven. Service Design: "Those who deploy services in the cloud, such as Amazon, TheWebService, Force.com, have done a pretty good job with service design. You really have to do a good job in order to rent the darn things out. Many SOA projects have a tendency to build services that are too course-grained, too fine-grained, or just not at all well designed. The reality is that services that are not well defined and designed won't sell well when delivered on-demand, and thus those who provide services out of the cloud - which are most major cloud computing providers - have to spend a lot of time on the design of the services, including usability and durability. I urge those who build services within their SOA, no matter the enabling technology and standards involved, look at what's out there for rent as good examples of how services should be designed, developed, and deployed." - brenda michelson

"Q. Do you find yourself looking for certain qualities in a candidate more than you did several years ago? A. Adaptability and flexibility. One of the things that is mind-boggling right now is how much we have to change all the time. For anybody who’s into comfort and structure, it gets harder and harder to feel satisfied in the company. It’s almost like you have to embrace a lot of ambiguity and be adaptable and not get into the rigidness or expectation-setting that I think there used to be 10 years ago, when you could kind of plot it out and define where you were going to go. I think it’s a lot more fluid right now. It has to be. The people who really do the best are those who actually sense it, enjoy it almost, that lack of definition around their roles and what they can contribute." - brenda michelson

"The economic crisis has pummelled Sun, which never really recovered from the dotcom bust. As its share price plumbed new lows, IBM’s remained relatively unscathed—a reflection of its business, which has been protected by the computer giant’s global scope and the fact that it makes most of its money from software and services. In the months to come, more big fish will seek to swallow smaller fry. That is because something deeper is going on in the computer industry. Thanks to ever more powerful chips and new software, servers and other hardware can now be “virtualised”, meaning physically separate systems can act as one. This enables computing power to become a utility: it is generated somewhere on the network (“in the cloud”) and supplied as a service. To simplify their complex data centres and cut costs, more and more companies are thinking about building in-house computing utilities, called “private clouds”, or outsourcing computing to “public clouds” of the kind Sun launched..." - brenda michelson

"Amazon isn’t the de facto standard cloud services provider because it is complex - it is the leader because the company understands simplicity at a deep level, and minimum progress to declare victory. Competitors should take note - by the time you have established a once and future Fabric infrastructure Amazon is going to have created a billion dollar market. And what then? It will start offering more and more compelling fabric calls… People will start relying on things like SimpleDB and Simple Queue Service. Will that mean less portability? Sure it will…" - brenda michelson

"after quite a lull, the software architecture business has gotten rather exciting again...The hegemony of traditional 3 and 4-tier application models, heavyweight run-time platforms, and classical soa that has dominated for about a decade is now literally being torn asunder by a raft of new approaches for designing and architecting applications...incautious words but major changes are in the air and architects are reaching out for new solutions as they encounter novel new challenges in the field...these new advances either address increasingly well-understood shortcomings of existing approaches or add new capabilities that we haven't generally focused on before...Mainstays of application architecture such as the relational database model, monolithic run-times, and even deterministic behavior are being challenged by non-relational systems, cloud computing, and new pull-based systems where consistency and even data integrity sometimes take a backseat to uptime and performance." - brenda michelson

OSS SAS alternative: "R is..a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use. “R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.” It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations." - brenda michelson

the keep up with cocktail party/coffee shop conversations version of "What happened in 2008? Chances are you can't succinctly express your views on that complex question. But the American public will settle on one of four catch phrases over the next several months. Whatever bit of conventional wisdom wins out will have an impact on the economy. The contenders are as follows..." - brenda michelson

Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz on 5 key contributing factors to the economic crisis. Easy read, important to understand how we got here. "There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight. What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments." - brenda michelson

Event Processing as BI Megatrend...sounds so 80's, nonetheless..."Event processing opens new analytical possibilities. Before the financial services industry cratered, that was where most of the work in event or stream processing could be found. Now, while algorithmic trading and other processes still consume this technology, the spotlight shines brighter on emergent applications in healthcare, telecommunications, government intelligence, IT management, gaming and Web analytics. Network events, sensor data from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and surveillance data are among the new sources. Capturing events, correlating them and presenting the results of analytics in dashboards can potentially give organizations more actionable insight than traditional BI tools provide. However, to gain full business value, event processing must be deployed in an integrated fashion with not only BI and data warehouse systems but also process management and service-oriented architecture." - brenda michelson

Event Processing case study from Streambase: "In 2007, just as the credit crisis was breaking, BlueCrest set up a team..to develop a state-of-the-art market data management system. BlueCrest trades 24 hours a day, six days a week, across multiple markets using a wide range of data feeds. As markets move day to day and week to week, BlueCrest needed to rapidly reconfigure data feed connections and plug the data into real-time models while optimizing management of the necessary data feed licenses. BlueCrest devised a solution that combines the rapid time-to-market event processing capabilities of StreamBase with the instant storage and retrieval functionality of Vertica. It provides a total market data management solution that is able to meet the needs of low-latency trading and the demanding innovation of their quantitative analysts to achieve greater profitability." - brenda michelson

Speaking of Open Source, Mike Kavis shares his open source SOA stack preference and points out a few others. - brenda michelson

One more on Open Source. I wrote an open source considerations paper in October 2005. This post excerpts those 'considerations', which practitioners tell me still hold. Folks have incorporated some of these key points into new Open Source strategies for their organizations. - brenda michelson

If you need some examples of Open Source Adoption and an exec friendly article on open source, check this one out. "As the recession puts pressure on tech spending, many companies are turning to open-source software to handle more IT tasks" - brenda michelson

Intro to Kaizen for Development Series, check out the 5 posts to date. "Kaizen means loosely translated continuous improvement. It is a bundle of techniques applied by Japanese manufacturing companies. The goal of Kaizen is to break out of the notion that there is a fixed cost-time-quality tradeoff. Traditional thinking was that if you wanted higher quality it would imply more cost and longer production times. Kaizen posits that with the right process improvements you can get higher quality at lower cost and faster speed."..."I have found that Kaizen practices are also highly applicable to software development. Yet it seems that not that many folks in the software development community are familiar with the tenets and practices of Kaizen. So I am planning to write a series of posts that describes Kaizen principles and how they are applicable to software development." - brenda michelson

i'm confused. since the business process alliance is microsoft led (http://tinyurl.com/5bhmzr), how does that "suggest the company will not create its own proprietary language" in creating a modeling language for Project Oslo? - brenda michelson

3 research initiatives: reduce electricity needs, replace copper wires with light pulses (photonic interconnections) and software & services for instrumentation/measurement of energy use-- carbon emissions, total energy use and energy consumption. - brenda michelson

prediction market provider - brenda michelson

It'll be interesting to track participation & accuracy of Mashable's new prediction market. "The basic premise is to have the Mashable audience predict future events, specifically those pertaining to the Web and social networking space." - brenda michelson

EPTS announcement. Elemental Links is a founding member. My primary interests are event processing usage scenarios for business value and dev & dissemination of event processing best practices. Ok, no surprise on those. - brenda michelson

Twitter's bad architecture is a boon to FF. "Friendfeed is the latest craze on the blogosphere and it has already spawned more than two dozen third party tools and scripts to enhance the way we use this new service" - brenda michelson

For all you Vi fans: Goosh a command line interface for Google - brenda michelson

mashlets are user-oriented micro-applications that are secure and governed for enterprise use, providing the face..of a mashup to be embedded in a web page...context-sensitive and dynamic, allowing multiple mashlets on a single page to interact. - brenda michelson

"a lot of companies that think they have a solid methodology for, I don’t know, scheduling flights in and out of major hub airports, in fact have something closer to a mythology about how their business is supposed to work. In some fantasy world." - brenda michelson

can't you see it, a wearable twitter, instead of "what are you doing" your clothes show "what you are thinking"--could be problematic..."Flexible electronic paper and electronic clothing will change the way information is projected and harnessed at a pers - brenda michelson

easy, quick video by David Berlind of ZDNet explaining mashups; and yes, you could easily interchange API and Service on his whiteboard drawing - brenda michelson

Google App Engine, in a nutshell, Google has opened up their infrastructure to the masses in the form of a Python API. Article is "crib" of the GAE doc...and shows the build of an application using the SDK. - brenda michelson

Finally "disposable software"; Gartner 2010-web mashups dominant model for the creation for new enterprise applications. "create possibilities for a new class of short-term or disposable apps that would not normally attract dev dollars," Cearley said. - brenda michelson

"The EA is not there to design an app, or figure out what the interfaces are. They are there to make sure that all of the apps in the portfolio continue to be "about" building systems for the enterprise...[EAs] take the long view. No one else is paid to - brenda michelson