Tuesday, June 18, 2002

JRo essay: Telecommunications Implosion [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:51:21 PM

Ideas are free.  Meaningful implementation is rare.  This puts the patent dispute in perspective  (courtesy, Julio Gomez).  Kramer: What are you guys talking about? Seinfeld: They're re-opening the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center. Kramer: What? That was MY idea! Seinfeld: Which part of the idea was yours? The million dollars you don't HAVE, or the building you don't OWN? [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:47:19 PM

Open Source J2EE workflow products are heating up! There are now 4 production ready projects where 3 months ago there were none. [rebelutionary] 10:46:19 PM

Interesting Performance Stats on GenToo Linux. My buddy Demitrious just ran a real world benchmark test on GenToo Linux.  Stats.  Bottom Line?  What RedHat does in 5 seconds, GenToo does in 0 seconds (i.e. too fast to measure accurately).  That's impressive.  www.gentoo.org.  Demitrious likes it a lot and that makes me think it's good since he's hard to please (and a better hard core *nix guy than I am).[The FuzzyBlog!] 10:41:39 PM

Book Review IT Organization: Building A Worldclass Infrastructure by Harris Kern, Stuart Galup, Guy Nemiro Supporting business needs and aligning IT with business strategy are important issues that seem to be at the top of every CIO's agenda.  One of the ways to do this is to have a world class IT infrastructure.  Kern, who at one time was the CIO at Sun Microsystems, defines infrastructure as everything used in IT to support the business including the people, processes, and organization.  While he was CIO at Sun, Kern was ordered to "get rid of the mainframes" and replace them with Sun gear.  That experience set him on the road of discovering what it takes to build reliabile, highly available client-server systems.  Good information for anyone building web services as well.  The book is more than just Kern's musings; its built on top of site evaulations to over 40 Fortune-1000 companies.  The advice is based on the results of those vists and the problems that those organizations have in common.    [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] 10:58:13 AM

RSS on Steroids RSS is a great thing and I've quickly become adicted to the aggregated newsfeed that I get inside Radio.  Still, I'm looking for something more.  In fact, what I'm looking for is a commercial service one can buy from Moveover.com.  Admittedly, I'm not an RSS expert, but I've looked around a bit and it seems that its missing some critical pieces, like filtering, redundency elimination, etc.  The technical architecture of moreover.com shows some of those features.  As an example, I'd like to put a gadget on my weblog (like the Google box) that is an aggregation of RSS feeds from various technical news sources (like ZDNet, Inforweek, etc.) filtered by keyword.  Doesn't seem like building a filter for RSS feeds would be a huge job.  Maybe its time to break out my toolbox and code a little.  [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] 10:57:02 AM

Understanding XML In The Right SOAP, Daniel F. Savarese says: Whether you like it or not, Web services are here to stay. The fog has lifted and the structure of Web services has been revealed: XML in, XML out. Not very complicated. So why are so many programmers having a hard time getting their arms around Web services? Having taught over 130 students an enteprise computing course over the last three years, and having had quite a bit of experience using XML in large projects, I can think of a few reasons: Most of the computing literature on XML, SOAP, and web services in general fails to relate these technologies back to standard CS theory that any computer scientist should know (more on this in a minute). The writings on these technologies is full of hype and consequently makes them seem more complicated than they are. Most programmers aren't familiar with RPC or messaging to any great extent and so generalizations of these techniques are even more obtuse.  When I ask my students what they know about XML, I get parroted hype from some and honest admissions of confusion from the others.  I find that I can generally clear both up with a few simple statements: XML is a way of describing context free grammers. A DTD is a BNF for a particular grammer. XML parsers are interpreted versions of LEX/YACC.  Use XML and technologies based on it when you can justify the parsing and rendering cost of the more general representation that XML buys you. These statements allow anyone with a little CS theory to separate fact from hype and make some pretty good decisions about where to deploy XML based technologies.  [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] 10:55:31 AM

Forbes.  Patent Nonsense.  Gary Reback. >>>An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?" After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list. <<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Hmm.   Seems like a case where patents aren't serving their purpose of spurring innovation.  Sounds like it's more like a tax on being small. 9:42:15 AM

So I put up a white paper on evaluating open sourcing for software projects, link to the left.  I still have to play with the formatting and find a better way to include a link on my page templates. 9:39:08 AM

accessibility Mark Pilgrim at diveintomark.org is doing a thirty day series on making your web site more easily accessed by people with disabilities.   it's not a topic I have given a lot of thought to, but this is a really nice series -- very practical advice with clear information about implementing it. 8:04:41 AM

markets for chip fab on the topic of markets -- I was talking to my dad the other day.  He's been working with a couple of startups that will make devices for the telecom market.     One stumbling block he's been running into is that VCs don't want to invest in chip fabs anymore -- they feel like they've done more than enough of it, fabs are expensive to build and to operate, and many of the fabs they've invested in are going under utilized.   So, if you want funding, you can't have a fab in your budget. The problem is that all fabs are not alike -- you build a chip up by layering various compounds on to the wafer then using different techniques to etch them away leaving behind the device.  Not all fabs can use all compounds or apply all the etching techniques (admittedly my understanding of chip fabrication is pretty rudimentary ";->").   So, not every fab can produce every chip.    In fact, some chips require unique combinations that cannot be found in any single other fab -- hence the need to build your own fab.  If you had such a chip, you could get it fabricated by shuttling it from fab to fab to get all the work done.  There are lots of problems with this, but the main one is coordination.   Well run fabs have rigid schedules that are as full as they can be made as far in advance as possible.   So, to use fabs in sequence, you have to hit your schedule.   A delay at one fab could mean you miss your slot at the next -- and then your schedule is blown. So, you have these fabs at established startups  looking for more work to cover their operating expenses.  You have young startups that need fab capabilities and yet can't build their own.  But in between is this coordination problem.   Seems like something a market maker could fix. 7:52:50 AM

Reinventing the Bazaar: The Natural History of Markets I am reading an nice book on markets:  Reinventing the Bazaar: The Natural History of Markets.   The book is detailed look at how markets work and the role they can play in commerce.   Each chapter takes some key aspect of market mechanics (e.g. the role of ownership, the role of information, etc) and explores it with examples taken from the real world.   The examples are the best part, drawn from every corner of the world, markets big and small.    There is a slight bias in it, in favor of using free market mechanisms to solve the worlds problems.   But its not overwhelming -- the book shows both sides of markets and spends a fair amount of time showing the imperfections of markets in gory detail.  I am about 2/3s through the book -- so far, I'd give it a strong recommendation. 7:27:54 AM

web services sustain So, seems like a pretty sure bet that Web Services are a sustaining innovation, not a disruptive one -- People will probably deploy them on their existing application platforms, if and when they become available there.   The only thing they might influence is new purchases of software, where  they have become a checkbox item -- how good is your support?   how are your tools?   This is probably bad news for all those pure-play XML/SOAP companies out there since it means their leverage is weak and they're probably just  too late to the game to make it in the enterprise application server market.     It's probably bad news for Microsoft too -- I am sure they were hoping Web Services would let them leverage their position on the desktop to pry their way into the data center.   So far, I think the interop has been good enough to keep this from happening. 7:01:18 AM

Web services: Ready, set, wait. ...Existing standards, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) make up the initial building blocks for Web services... [Yahoo News Headlines - XML] Irony.   This is the second time the "Ready, set, wait" headline has been used in conjunction with a technoloy I'm working on.   6:52:31 AM

Tell me why I don't like Monday:. PwC: Consulting: in: name: change: sensation: [The Register] PwC consulting arm is separating from the mothership and becoming "Monday:".    Colon included.    Wonder if this has anything to do with what just happened to Arthur Andersen. 6:16:50 AM

Collapsing P2P Networks [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] An article that talks about ways you could attack P2P networks.  One way is to seed them with junk -- old hat in my opinion, surprising that it took so long to become common (just wait until spammers figure out how to use this).  Second way was more novel -- overloading it with downloads.   You don't like the commons?  Then abuse it. 6:08:38 AM