So
As always, a compelling and insightful commentary by IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger (via AlwaysOn); this time discussing the effect that technology standards are having (or will have) on IT Strategy. One of the points that he makes is that standards aren't just about software leverage; hardware and web services standards are going to allow enterprises to grow and share in ways they couldn't easily before.
Now, what we have seen is the continuing emergence of standards as we keep going up the stack. In this world of grid computing, what you're really trying to do is share all kinds of IT resources—computing capacity, storage, files, applications, and so on—all built around the common standards that everybody uses. So you can essentially begin to virtualize the system so that people can access your resource without having to know precisely where that resource is. A very difficult example that must have been used in let's say supercomputing systems is that you can form a grid out of multiple supercomputers in a location or in a country, and when somebody submits a job they submit it to the grid. And then the systems themselves get their act together, find where they have capacity, and make sure they can access everything, but you're essentially sharing all the extreme capacity that wasn't there before.
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In what feels like a return to the heady 'spinning logo, flaming logo' days of early web design, Yusuke Kawasaki has created a way to produce cube image rotations in Javascript. While this is wonderful eyecandy and some pretty deft Javascript programming, I'm not entirely sure how useful this might be in practical terms. via Ajaxian
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I found this posting by Danny Weitzner on Privacy, practical obscurity and the power of the Semantic Web to be very thought provoking. It does an excellent job of summarizing the legal concept of 'practical obscurity' and provides some food for thought on what this might mean as more and more information can be joined together and made available through Semantic Web activities.
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I have tried several times today to add this new blog URL to my technorati profile. The profile update appears to just be broken — it doesn't give any error message; nor does it update my profile. If I try to add a new URL it adds two new blank sites instead.
I don't suppose anyone is paying too much attention because it is Easter weekend.
Perhaps this will get fixed sometime in the coming week.
UPDATE: 20.APR.2006 — Appears to be working now; I was able to add this blog and have it update properly.
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I thought that this was very creative — coloring Easter eggs using onioin skins and ferns. The results are pretty unique and part of the fun is figuring out what combination of things will produce interesting results.
So
Welcome to all who have made the transition from the old Blogger-based site to this shiny new Wordpress site. There may be a few glitches as I learn my way around Wordpress (and the new hosting service that I am using).
If you were subscribed to the previous site, please update your feed reader with the links to the right or manually update the feed URL to http://mobrec.com/feed .
* 2-way UML modeler for architecting and reverse engineering complex enterprise applications. UML tools generate diagrams and keep them in sync with source changes without adding markers to the source code. Full support for the current version of the UML specification is provided. * A set of XML infrastructure and visual editing tools which help enable developers to manage complexity in their XML files. These tools are intended to provide a base that can be extended by third parties. * Orchestration and SOA tools are included for building composite applications. These leading-edge SOA tools leverage the business integration technology and expertise from Sun's acquisition of SeeBeyond.
I am quite happy to see that there might finally be a decent open source two-way UML tool available. Last time I looked at this space, there was not much on offer and what was there was pretty sketchy.
Hey, I know that Sun's tools aren't as “cool” to use as Eclipse but there is no reason why the Eclipse community can't swallow hard and look at how to incorporate these new tools into their IDE.
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This week I saw an announcement on Ajaxian that several high powered engineers were leaving Sun Microsystems for JackBe. I recognized all of the names of the engineers from the influential Core J2EE Patterns book that they collectively co-authored.
Unfortunately, visiting the JackBe web site does not give a very good first impression, particularly the large-ish advert that might as well read “make your company fully buzzword compliant with our Ajax assessment!!”. This reminds me of around 8-10 years ago when every consulting company was offering a 'Java assessment' or 'Java Jumpstart' and how such things will give you a 'technical/competitive advantage' to anyone who would take the bait. Repeat the same for client-server, object-oriented programming, eCommerce, agile programming, INSERT_YOUR_FAVORITE_HERE.
This is not to say that Ajax does not have value (it does, when applied appropriately), but it is to say that anything can be oversold.
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I recently discovered a handy little tool at cl1p.net that lets you 'store' a chunk of text or a small (less than 2MB) file at a URL of your choosing and then retrieve it again using the same URL. As the site states, clip has some interesting use cases:
Getting around firewalls. With cl1p.net you can easily move data from one machine to another. All you need is a URL.
Enhance Instant Messages. Instant messaging clients do a poor job at sending large blocks of text. With cl1p.net you can create a cl1p and post the URL in an instant.
Improving productivity. Cl1p.net is the fastest way to post to the Internet. Why go to the trouble of logging into e-mail just to move data?