Innolocity

FUSE Quickstart - a sneak preview

2008-11-14T07:48:00.004Z

Yes, we are busy to add new content to FUSEsource :). First we published a/the first set of FUSE TV videos and next we are going to publish a set of "FUSE Quickstart" screen casts. Take a look at the sneak preview and/or wait for the high-res versions to become available on FUSEsource later on this month.

Tip/Hint: The best way to get the sneak preview is to subscribe to the podcast and download all videos into iTunes :).

AMQP for dummies - A guide for managers

2008-10-28T15:17:00.001Z

(I start to like this "plane blogging" thing :))

Adrian blogged about Microsoft embracing AMQP.

Just from a technical point of view this is good news (assuming it will help the adoption of the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP)), because AMQP is a very cool (and extremely well thought through) standard.

Given that there might be a renewed interest in the standard, let me just try to explain (again) what it is good for: The main benefit of AMQP (besides a couple of very cool features in the standard itself) is that it will (finally and for the first time) allow messaging stacks to interoperate. Today we have lots of good payload formats/protocols (e.g. XML) and even better standard APIs (e.g. JMS), but no standard wire-level protocol to allow one messaging stack talk to another. That means that currently all of your messaging endpoints need to have the same message stack. This creates a huge, hidden vendor lock-in. Yes, your JMS API allows your to replace a JMS provider with another one, but then you need to do it for all endpoints at the same time, because the wire-level protocol is different (and proprietary) for each and every message broker implementation.

Means right now you can only build homogenous messaging infrastructures. AMQP would allow you to build heterogenous messaging infrastructures, break the vendor lock-in and enjoy the power of choice. AMQP is the HTTP of messaging. I see AMQP as an enabler for
innovation.

Social Networking - Del.icio.us rediscovered! or Do we need the Open Social API?

2008-10-28T14:34:00.001Z

(Blogging from a plane en-route from DUB to BOS using the email interface of blogger.com :))

The other day I updated my website with the details of my new employer and decided to give a second live to my del.icio.us account by using one of the widgets to include my reading list on my blog. I also had to decide, which of my social networks I reference on my site.

Currently I am using ...

Social-Networking: Linked-In, Facebook, Xing, Plaxo
Micro-Blogging: Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo
Bookmarks: Del.icio.us, Facebook
IM: AOL, Skype

... and there are probably a couple that I forgot/missed. For social-networking I decided to make Facebook, Xing and Plaxo point to my Linked-In presence, for micro-blogging I decided to make Facebook and Plaxo point to my Twitter account, for Bookmarks I will use Del.icio.us (because it is nicely integrated with NetNewsWire) and for IM I will use Skype.

The exercise made me thing about social networking. The power of social networking is to bring people together, but right now there is not one social network, there are probably hundred big ones (including mega-networks like youtube) and thousands of small ones. Each social network documents another shade of your personality/interests: What do you do? What do you like? What do you watch? What do you read? What do you publish (e.g. blogs and pictures)?

Initially I felt that having multiple implementations for the same shade of social networking was actually counter-productive, because it fragments the communities and increases the maintenance overhead (updating multiple sites with the same information).

In the meantime I changed my mind. I am a big fan of evolution and darwinism (mutation and selection, survival of the fittest). Therefore I believe for the time being having multiple implementations is actually beneficial, because this way innovative implementations have a chance to put a variation on a shade (e.g. using Facebook to create a private/personal presence and Linked-In to create a professional presence/identity).

But how do we deal with the fragmentation of the communities/networks and what do we do about maintaining these, at least partially, overlapping networks? Can we eat the cake and have it too?

Yes, we can. This is where the Open Social API can (and hopefully will) add value. This API will allow us to build meta-social-networks. With this API we will be able to update and maintain all of our social networks with one API and will also be able to learn more about our social networks (e.g. who is on all of my social networks). It is my expectation that this API will create new, innovative social-networking applications, which will turn the diversity of the networks into value.

A bookmark to a very nice Google Tech Talk about the Open Social API is on my Del.icio.us page. Check it out.

Link of the Month - FUSE TV

2008-10-23T07:53:00.003+01:00

Great new content. Check out FUSEsource.com!

4 weeks ago we huddled in our "new" HQ in Bedford for Managment Meetings (and other fun :)). Debbie had the great idea to take advantage of our presence there and record a first set of FUSE TV sessions. Great fun! Check out the result.

And yes mea culpa, "aaaeeeehhhhhhmmmm" is not a german word. No Oscar for me (this time :)).

Link of the Month - FUSE is moving on ...

2008-10-19T06:36:00.002+01:00

... to FUSEsource.com. As part of the Progress acquisition we decided to change the host/domain name of the FUSE community website from open.iona.com to FUSEsource.com.

I like the new name better, because what we do here is not about a company (be it IONA or Progress). It is about a project. In our case FUSE.

The renaming will also allow us to role out more interesting stuff in the near future on a new, consistent family of good host/domain names. Stay tuned :).

The iPhone screen - Is it a problem or a solution?

2008-10-05T12:01:00.003+01:00

Lot's of interesting exciting stuff is going to happen with FUSE over the next couple of month.

Especially on the tooling side. The other day I was riding in the car with Oisin Hurley (Head of Tool Development for FUSE) and we discussed the value of having NOT a lot of screen real-estate, because it really makes you think about what the problem is the user wants/needs to solve and how you can guide the user through that process.

There is a good video-cast available from Apple, which talks about the principles of good UI design for the iPhone. I believe these principles are good principles regardless how much screen real-estate you have. To that extend designing UIs for limited screen real-estate is more a solution than a problem. It creates the right attitude :).

Other opinions? Thoughts?

Complex Event Processing - An exiting (new) frontier

2008-10-05T11:18:00.004+01:00

Through the merger (:)) with Progress, I got exposed to the new exciting field of (Real-Time) Complex Event Processing (CEP). There are a couple of obvious use cases in finance (e.g. algorithmic stock trading) and manufacturing (e.g. detecting possible problems in the assembly line, which might effect your just-in-time service-level-agreements).

Complex Event Processing or Intelligent Event Correlation is not what excites me. That was/is also possible using large data-warehouses and suitable data-mining solutions, but then you learn about it after the fact. It is not so much Complex Event Processing, it is more Complex Event Analysis.

What excites me is the real-time aspect. The possibility to re-act to a set of correlated events as they happen.

The longer I think about it the more use-cases I see. Last month a large (if not the largest) utility provider world-wide visited us in Dublin for a 4-day SOA workshop. Among other things, they are looking for a solution to detect failures in the power grid before they happen or narrow down the location of the failure (faulty transformer) after it happens (e.g. to get a repair team onsite faster).

Last night I found a talk on Google Talks describing a solution for Device-free Passive Localization for Wireless Environments. Another interesting use-case.

CEP is everywhere. I am dying to find out, what the value of a solution for this kind of problems is.

Effective Mac - Using Time Maschine

2008-09-30T23:11:00.003+01:00

On Saturday at 08:00am it happend to me. I move/dragged an email into a folder on my Mac and the machine froze. Diagnosis: Catastrophic harddisk failure.

But hey ... look at the bright side: I got to replace my 160GB disk with a bigger 250GB disk and got to test, if my Time Machine backup really works.

And there is where the problem starts. In an ill-conceived effort to minimize the disk space and the time I need for my backup, I excluded all directories besides my "User" directory. This will allow you to recover single files (and/or mails, photos, etc.), but will make it very hard to recover a machine, since Time Machine (when you run the app) cannot restore all data from a given date.

The better/only way to do it, is to backup everything (including all apps, system folders, libraries) and just exclude a folder (e.g. the download folder), which has recoverable (fast changing, big, volatile) data in it (e.g. my iTunes Library). Basically reverse my backup strategy. This will create Time Machine backups, which include a snapshot of the entire system (including the operating system).

These backups can then be used with the migration assistant to restore the machine with the last backup or even better you boot from the install DVD and use the restore from Time Machine utility to restore to a backup of your choice.

I can tell you, restoring a system file by file is tedious :).

Effective Mac - Open Source Mac

2008-09-10T09:32:00.002+01:00

Was looking for an opensource search engine for the Mac and found this interesting website. I am already using half of the apps, but will take a look at the other half too :).

Effective Mac - Growl back to work

2008-09-07T08:10:00.004+01:00

Stumbled over James's blog entry about useful software for the Mac and added Growl to my list of software that you need have/use to be effective, but was not able to make it work with X-Chat (AquaChat). Confronted with the option to figure out what is wrong or to try something new, I took the easy way out: I tried Colloquy. This worked out of the box. I know need to find out how to make my Twitter tweeds show up in Growl.

Open Source Business Models - Open-Core Licensing

2008-09-02T09:54:00.006+01:00

OH NO, please!!! YABOOSBM!!! Yet another blog entry on open-source business models :).

Ok, let's make it as short and as sweet as possible :).

This morning I was reading Matt Aslett's comment on Andrew Lampitt's blog entry on "Open-Core" licensing (which actually contains a link to a good presentation by MySQL chief Marten Mickos).

What I like about the approach is that it tries to take the emotion out of the discussion. We obviously all know in our head that open-source is about free speech and not free beer, but the heart then still reacts (at least sometimes) disappointed, when companies show that they are not pursuing an open-source strategy for purely philosophical and/or altruistic reasons. In that context some of the hybrid models (e.g. selling closed-source features on top of a open-source core) got a bad reputation and got dismissed as "bait-and-switch" models.

The value of open-source is NOT in the absence of a desire to make money with it. This is actually healthy and will make sure the approach/model with survive in the long-run.

For me an interesting value of open-source is that it redefines the customer-vendor relationship. It creates a very open, honest pay-as-you-go relationship. Customers are not forced to give large sums of money to a vendor up-front and trust the vendor that it will do the right things with this money. Open-source is the ultimate customer empowerment tool (within limits as discussed by Matt Asay).

A very interesting side effect of this is that it allows the CFO to shift money from his capital expense budget to his operational expense budget, which in general makes his business more manageable.

These are good reasons for open-source. And yes, to keep it alive, we have to find ways to make money with it and share the ROI over the entire delivery/value-chain.

Shortening the list of open-source business models in Marten's presentation, I right now see the following main models in the market:

Open-Core Model - have an open-source core and sell closed-source features on top of it (e.g. SugarCRM)
Dual Licensing Model- one product/project that gets licensed with a viral, GPL-style license and a commercial closed-source license (e.g. MySQL)
Services Models - where you get to download a productized version of an open-source project and pay a fee for the support you get on it

All of these (and variations/combinations of these) are good valid models, which can deliver a lot of value to customers.

It remains to be seen, which one will proof to be the most innovative one.

Open Source Innovation - Fact or Fiction

2008-08-25T14:25:00.012+01:00

Is Open Source Innovation an oxymoron? Is Open-source fostering innovation or killing it?

There are two school of thoughts out there: First, there are lots of people, who say that open-source is not fostering innovation or even killing it, because it is just about the reimplementation of already solved problems and that it actually kills innovation, because it keeps people from implementing solutions that can not be protected from being reimplemented as an open-source solution. Second there are at least as many people, who say that open-source is actually creating/fostering innovation, because a company can not hide behind a bad implementation and will always be forced to look for ways to make its solution better, faster and more affordable.

Let's first contemplate on the nature of innovation. As previously discussed there is a difference between innovation and creativity: You can ask people to be creative, but you can't really ask them to be innovative, because innovation is something that get's established after the fact, means it get's established by the traction you get with your ideas in a give business context and the impact they have on the business and the market.

I personally believe that you cannot orchestrate or manage or create innovation. It just happens. It happens in a more darwinistic way: Through diversity/competition/mutation and selection. What you can do is to create an environment, which cherishes diversity/creativity and competition. This will increase the likelyhood that some of your ideas turn into real innovation. In that context you probably want to set up a number of small units to shoot at the same target and want to make them compete for the best implementation. This is why open-source is innovative and/or creates innovation. It is not the a/the project that is innovative. It is the competition between the projects that creates the innovation. One good discussion on this can be found in "Innovation Happens Elsewhere, by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel".

One other way to put more structure into the discussion is to segment innovation into ...

Business Model Innovation - a new creative way to make money with something (might be closed-source or open-source)
Solution Innovation - a new creative way to solve a given (old or new) problem
Implementation Innovation - a new creative way to implement a given solution

Open-source is clearly a good fit to drive implementation innovation. If you do not like a given implementation, you can always take the source code and make it better or even reimplement a given solution (e.g. a customer relationship management solution) or a given standard (e.g. JBI) with a new implementation.

Question is, if open-source and/or open-source concepts are also suitable to drive solution- and/or business-model-innovation? This leads to the next bigger question: In the past the value of a company was determined by the solutions they own. This is why pharmaceutical companies try to protect their products with patents and other means. I am not sure that will stay this way going forward. Instead we might see a world in which your solutions matter less, but your ability to detect problems and develop solutions will determine the value of your company to a much larger extend.

In such a world, open-source concepts might actually be very suitable to foster innovation on the solution level.

Solid State Disks - Level 5 cache

2008-08-25T13:25:00.005+01:00

Last month I had the pleasure to spend 2 hours in the car with Klaus Grieger. Klaus and myself know each other from ObjectDesign and Versant. Right now he is a partner with CIMT AG in Germany. As always talking to him was invigorating. He is one of the most innovative people I know.

The topic of the drive was the future of Solid State Disks (SSDs). His thought was/is that with the arrival of in-expensive, fast SSDs we can potentially rethink the way we structure memory and storage in general. Right now, we "load" executables from a "disk" into "main memory". What if, we turn the disk into a level 5 CPU cache, means programs never get loaded and/or started. They get installed into "memory" and will stay there all the time. Instructions get fetched into lower-level CPU caches on as needed basis. This would/could probably work for instructions, but not for data. Means for data you would still needs a disk with a file-system.

Hhhhmmmmmm, ... can somebody help me to think this through?

Embedded Software Engineering - Can we avoid another software crisis

2008-08-12T13:01:00.013+01:00

The term "software crisis" was coined 1968 by F.L. Bauer during the first NATO Software Engineering Conference in Garmisch, Germany and was used by Dijkstra in his very famous lecture on "The humble programmer":

[The major cause of the software crisis is] that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem.

– Edsger Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer

Right now there are lots of people who are saying two things: First, embedded devices and embedded software will change and transform our way of life in a similar or even stronger way than the arrival of the internet and second, the resulting software engineering challenges are huge.

There are a lot of drivers/trends behind this, but two of the more critical ones are the arrival of multi-core processor architectures for embedded devices and the resulting increase in processing power that comes with it (see quote above :)). And secondly the increasing demand to make embedded devices talk to each other (e.g. make Electronic Control Units (ECUs) on the car talk to each other and then make cars talk to each other).

The lack of abstraction that we have in embedded software engineering makes more than 50% of all embedded software projects being later, over budget or not deliver on expectations.

This sounds and looks like a first class software (engineering) crisis. What do we do?

Killing the problem with people (e.g. throw more people at the problem) is a very popular approach, especially with the emergence of cheap off-shore development centers in India and other places, but creates a huge liability, because over time it does not scale very well and the management and maintenance burden has the potential to become an even bigger problem.

More thoughtful approaches first segment the embedded market from a requirements point of view and then look for much more systematic approaches to address the requirements in the given segment. One way to segment the market would be along the lines of the real-time requirements. Working assumption would be that there is a hard real-time market, a soft real-time market and an embedded market (no real-time requirements, but the software must run on devices with limited CPU and memory capabilities).

The segment with the strongest growth is the last one. Addressing the software engineering issues in this segment will give us the biggest bang for the buck.

One way to go about it is to use existing approaches that have (kind of) worked for the first two (real-time) segments and also use them in the embedded space, e.g. using integrated tool-chains to generate a lot of the source code (also known as Model-Driven Software-Development (MDSD)). This gives you good initial results in terms of productivity, but has the potential to create hard to maintain, monolithic, tightly-coupled monster systems.

The most promising approach right now is to introduce the idea of Software Product Lines (SPLs) to the domain of embedded software engineering and combine it with MDSD. This will give you the productivity gains you are looking for, but will also allow you to enforce a/the necessary level of reuse to ensure the long-term maintainability of the system.

In that context abstractions become pivotal. Without abstractions there is no way to create good boundaries for reuse. The first level of abstraction is the operating system and here is good news, because more and more embedded systems are based on standard operating systems (e.g. embedded Linux). But the layer above that is still under construction. What is needed is a platform that will allow you to build business-level software components and integrate them on the device and/or even reuse them over device boundaries.

Interesting efforts in this context are ...

OSGi - a component deployment platform for embedded devices for components and services implemented in JAVA
The Virtual Function Bus (VFB) in AUTOSAR - a common software infrastructure for automotive systems of all vehicle domains based on standardized interfaces
Various embedded software engineering platforms for mobile devices like LiMo, Moblin and Android

Complementary to these efforts you need a way to distribute/access these components over process or even hardware boundaries. The IONA Professional Services Organization has implemented a solution called Artix/E, that provides a transport-independent, high-performance, component platform for the embedded market.

Can we avoid the embedded software crisis? Yes, we can! Check it out.

Randy Pausch - about elephants, walls, rooms and TVs

2008-08-04T08:35:00.003+01:00

Last week Randy Pausch died. With all the hype around his cancer and "the last lecture", it was/is kind of hard to see who he was or what he was. Yesterday I tried to find out a little bit more and watched his presentation on time management. Good presentation, but not something that we haven't heard before. In the end I have to agree with him: He is a smart professor, but there are lots of smart professors out there. What made him unique was not what he did, but why he did it and how he did it. From what I saw of him, he had a passionate ambition to make learning fun. His students were his customers and he felt an obligation to deliver value to them. He found his purpose and lived it. And this makes him a role model.

Here are my personal take-aways ...

if there is an elephant in the room ... then talk about it!
"experience is what you get, when you don't get what you want"
walls are there to show you how much you really want something
if your children want to paint their room ... let them do it!
switch off the godd.... television

In this blog I am not talking about how he dealt with his cancer, because I believe that this is not something he wants to be remembered for.

RESTful Services - Dana Gardner, Adrian Trenaman, Roland Tritsch - wrapping it up

2008-07-16T21:45:00.002+01:00

The Webinar went very well. I think we had over 50 poeple that showed up. The archived webinar and the source code will be available on open.iona.com.

Check it out.

Effective Mac - call me slow

2008-07-13T07:13:00.002+01:00

You can call me slow, but it took me only a year to find the RSS reader that everybody else is using. David Greco finally pointed me to NetNewsWire. This seems to be it :).

Link of the month - Google Twitter (GTwit)

2008-07-08T07:59:00.002+01:00

Micro-blogging (Twitter, Pounce, Facebook, ...) just go a little bit easier. Check out GTwit. It is a light-weight Google App, that allows you to access your Twitter account from any browser you might have access to. It is based on the Twitter API. It stores all tweets that you send/receive in a private "Google-Cloud" and allows you to search on them by whatever you like (word, person, tag).

Check it out.

The iPhone - and what you can learn from thinking about it

2008-07-06T06:25:00.003+01:00

On Sunday I went to the driving range and while Alexandros was working on my early retirement plan (aka. he making lots of money with golf and I am managing his career), I was reading an article on Businessweek about the new iPhone 3G contracts. The article made me think again.

It made me think about two presentations that I saw recently: One by Michael Crossey from Aepona at the Mobile Monday in Belfast and the other one by Peter Moeckel from T-Labs (the R&D think-tank of Deutsche Telekom) at the OSGi community event in Berlin. Both are saying the same thing: Mobile Phone Operators are struggling to maintain their value proposition in the food/value chain. More and more applications are totally provider-independent and just use the network as a bit-pipe. Even worse, customers actually have either no or a bad perception of the underlying network operator.

Lets take a look at the current situation. I have a mobile phone and I am willing to spend EUR 100,-/month for that luxury (e.g. like I am willing to pay a certain amount of money for the luxury to have a dish washer). Right now and in general, there are three parties I am spending this money with:

the device/platform provider
the network operator
(and to a much lesser extend) 3rd party application/service/content providers

Going to a Vodafone, O2 or T-Mobile shop is actually the wrong way around and is just a desperate attempt by the mobile phone operators to make sure that existing customers stay with them. People do not buy a "contract". They buy a and/or feel loyalty for a device (e.g. the iPhone) or a platform (e.g. Palm OS, Windows Mobile). Means normally you should go to an Apple-, Nokia- or HTC-Store. Most customers have an emotional relationship with the hardware and/or the operating system that runs on it, but not with the network operator (or at least not a positive one).

When the network operators realized that people do not buy contracts, but hardware, they approached the device manufactures and said "Hey Mr. Device-Manufacturer, give me 1M of your phones, make me a good price and I sell it for you". They then give away the device for a fraction of the prize to make people sign up for their contracts. The result is, that people buy devices and pay for these devices through contracts. Means today most of the money flows through the network operator, but a certain fraction of this money (my EUR 100,-/month) ends up in the pockets of the device manufacturer. Interesting enough, right now I am spending close to nothing on 3rd party (value-add) applications/services.

In the next 5 years all of this is going to change. The Mobile Phone Operators will get a lot of pressure from customers, politicians and competing technologies (e.g. WiMax) to drop their prices for voice and data services. At the same time the Mobile Phone Operators have created an acceptance in the market to spend a certain amount of money on/with the mobile phone (e.g. in my case EUR 100,-/month). In the end some customers will just to be happy to save money, but others will be willing to spend the saved money on something else.

The companies who have a good answer for the question, what this something else is, will win. Means the future of the mobile market is not in the network and/or the device. Instead the future is in mobile applications, services, solutions and content. And to enable such a market you need to provide a platform to connect the customers/consumers/users with the application/solution/content-providers. And this is what Apple is doing right now. They (and a lot of other poeple) realized that the future is in applications and content. Means they will create some applications themselves and will also provide a platform (aka. AppStore) to allow others to sell applications and content (against a fee).

Today I am spending a 100% of my monthly budget, buy paying my mobile phone bill. My prediction is that in 5 years from now this will drop to below 50% and that I will spend the remaining +50% on monthly subscriptions for applications, services and content. Becoming a platform- and/or application/content-provider in such a world will make you a winner.

Mobile Payment - what is needed

2008-07-04T12:37:00.001+01:00

in the last 4 weeks, i was talking to sailesh panchal (Enterprise Architect - Payments at Lloyds TSB) and hermann sauer (EDS - Integration Engineering Lead EMEA North/Central) about the future of mobile payment.

there is clearly a need and a benefit to find a solution, but implementations are not available yet (leaving aside lots of POCs that are out there).

one obvious driver is the need to find a replacement for cheque payments. cheque payments are expensive and slow, means neither banks nor customers/retailers like them, but they are still a popular means of settling bills in the UK, Ireland and other countries. in the UK the national payments council has just released the national payments plan, which states that one the ambitions is to find a suitable replacement for cheque payments by 2013. a first step into that direction is the Faster Payment Service that got launched in May 2008.

today (in Ireland) i am using cheques to pay my utility bills and my dentist. in germany i haven't used cheques in a long time. in general i am getting an invoice (e.g. from my doctor) and just pay by electronic funds transfer (EFT). in some cases (e.g. utility bills) i allow direct debit on my account and last but not least for some i have a standing order (e.g. rent). for everything else i am using cash and/or a credit card. i know that this is maybe a simplistic way to look at it, but it allows us to focus on the real nature of a cheque. what can a cheque do, that i cannot do otherwise?

a cheque allows me to give money to somebody with no bank account, means i can write a cheque and the person can go the next bank and can get cash for it
the payment can be anonymous, means even if the person has a bank account the decision might be not to use any means of EFT

a good summary what a cheque is all about can be found here. the question for me is, what problem mobile payment solutions will solve. currently i cannot see, how they can possibly address the two capabilities that i described above and everything else makes them just another way to transfer money besides EFT and plastic cards.

where is the value in mobile payment? what problems will mobile payments solutions solve? replacing cheques (probably no)? competing with ETF and plastic (probably yes, but then the question is what makes mobile payment solutions superior to EFT and plastic)?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Effective Mac - the beginning of a journey

2008-07-04T08:04:00.002+01:00

yesterday i finally finished my upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

overall it went well. i did an erase and install (as a 20 year windows user i feel much more comfortable with clean installs. maybe next time if will try it the mac-way :)) and also used the exercise to clean up my disk and the way i work. the biggest problem was that leopard does not come with iLife, means you need to find your old tiger CDs and reinstall iLife from there (or buy (!?!?) iLife 08, no comment).

using a mac is like using any other tool. just using it is not going to give you the maximum ROI. using it effectively is going to make the difference.

therefore i decided to start a little series of blogs and i am going to call it "Effective Mac".

this is the first one and i just want to give a summary of tools that i am using on my mac. please feel free to comment and add to this list.

mail - looked at a couple of options, but for the time being will stick with mail.app. using YAI to deal with exchange invitations and will probably checkout MailTags.
calendar and contacts - have not looked around and will stick with iCal and AdressBook.
todos - did look at the functionality in iCal and did not really like it. did a little bit of research and finally settled for iGTD (get things done).
browser - currently using safari and occasionally firefox (especially, if i am in london heathrow airport. the safari browser cannot get me onto the bingo wifi network there). also looked at Flock to get a grip on my social networking (xing, linked-in, pulse, facebook - it is madness).
RSS reader - looked at safari (and a couple of other browsers) and the wonderful TimesReader (looks very good. almost like a newspaper), but settled for the new RSS reader in mail.app.
communication - using iChat (AIM), Skype, Aqua X-Chat (IRC) and Twitterific (James also pointed me to GTwit, but i still need to makeup mind, if and how i am going to use it). tried to find a universal "chat" client. stumbled over Fire, but it does not support SSL enabled IRC server (and keeps on crashing on me).
programming - still like my emacs :). using Aqua-Emacs, but have also started to use Dashcode for my web developement.
brainstorming - using Freemind for my mindmaps and OmniOutliner for structured bullet list type brainstorming.

let me know, what you think about the toolset. anything missing? anything that could/should be replaced by a better tool?

Software Engineering Radio - talking about OSGi, Rest, Opensource, ...

2008-06-23T13:30:00.003+01:00

In the last four weeks a lot of people asked me about this "show" I am listening to on my way to work. It is called Software Engineering Radio and talks about trends and technologies in Software Engineering (OSGi, Rest, Opensource, ...). I was told that one of the next issues will be an interview with Peter Kriens on the current state of affairs with respect to OSGi.

Check it out.

2008 OSGi Community Event - talking about trains

2008-06-23T12:04:00.003+01:00

Two weeks ago I attended the OSGi Community Event in Berlin.

One of the presentations was from Deutsche Bahn about their new Mobile Integration Platform (MIP). It was not only in this presentation that I felt that OSGi has become the ICE of deployment platforms. A 300 km/h high-speed trend/train with a lot of momentum. Think about it: Do you want to be on the train or in front of it.

There were lots of good and interesting presentations. Here are a couple of highlights ...

Deutsche Bahn: Mobile Integration Platform - using OSGi to bridge the gap between the lifecyle of a vehicle (e.g. train) and software (e.g. an application). Vehicles have a much longer lifecycle than software. A huge challenge with a lot of opportunity, but only the tip of the iceberg. After you have tapped into the vehicle and can really access it (anytime, anywhere) I would predict a new dimension of integration challenges that will arise on the backend side to make all the relevant information available to the train and also to process the information that comes from the train. Interesting. Very interesting.
Deutsche Telekom/T-Labs: "We catalyze technology-based innovations" - very good presentation on the role of OSGi as an enabler for innovation. As previously discussed, currently (Mobile) Telekom Operators look for ways to maintain or even increase their relevance in the value-chain. If they do nothing they might turn into (more or less) value-less bit-pipes. OSGi is the kind/type of technology that will allow them to innovate faster and to roll-out these innovations to the customers, much faster than previously possible.
Sprint: Titan - the next generation mobile service platform ("Browser with AJAX is JUST NOT ENOUGH"). Earlier this year Sprint released its new mobile software development platform called Titan. This platform is a show-case, how Java technologies can come together to create a portable mobile software engineering platform that can bring applications to a wide variety of devices. OSGi is clearly a key enabler to make this happen.

BTW, this does not mean that the presentations I am not mentioning were not interesting. It means that I had to step out of the room for a meeting or a call and missed that specific presentation :).

Last but not least, we (IONA :)) showed a demo of the current status of the Distributed OSGi Reference Implementation. Overall a very energizing, educational, interesting event. I recommend you put it into your calendar for next year :).

RESTful Services - Dana Gardner, Adrian Trenaman, Roland Tritsch

2008-06-17T09:18:00.003+01:00

Everybody is talking about REST. We do too :).

Join us on July, 15th for this existing Webinar on REST and RESTful Services. Will include a live demo of a RESTful iPhone integration.

CU there.

Innovation on Innovation - How to make elephants dance

2008-06-05T17:27:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I went out and had a pint with Sailesh Panchal. He is an Enterprise Architect with the payments division of Lloyds TSB in London. Part of his responsibility is to foster innovation in Lloyds.

Obviously innovation needs to be directed towards a measurable goal/target/impact for the customer and/or the company. To judge, if an/the idea was just a good idea or a real innovation, you must be able to show some measurable ROI in a defined timeframe. Depending on the "size" of the innovation and the size of the organizations these timeframes can be easily 6 month or more. That's a long way down the road.

Question is: What kind of signposts can you create to judge ideas earlier?

We are looking for innovative ideas to foster, measure and rank (by value and relevance) innovative ideas in large enterprises. Sailesh is currently contemplating about implementing a system/culture, where the value of ideas gets rated by the number of citations that are made, means if you and your idea gets cited a lot the likelyhood that it is a good idea is high(er).

Just wondering ... communities.iona.com is implemented with Jive. We have a ranking for the number of posts a given individual creates. But there are markups that you can use to reference other docs and threads. Just wondering, if it would be possible to have a ranking for the docs and threads that get referenced the most?

Just wondering ...