IT and more (a.k.a. Doing-IT-Right)

Meine Autorenseite bei Amazon

2011-12-10T15:27:00.001+01:00

Amazon hat meine Bücher auf dieser Seite zusammengefasst…

Apple-TV: Set Favorite Radio Stations...

2011-06-23T08:44:00.001+01:00

To set any internet radio station as favorite, just press the middle-button for a few seconds (see image below) while this station is playing... and a menu appears!

On the iPad Remote app it's even simpler - in the lower left corner you find a "favorite" button...

Preisausschreiben (von der JAX 2011)

2011-05-05T07:55:00.001+01:00

Auf der JAX 2011 habe ich folgendes "Preisausschreiben" ausgelobt:

Sie senden mir (an info@arc42.de) in 3-5 Sätzen Ihre Erfahrungen mit arc42

Bedingung: Wir dürfen diese Sätze (ganz oder teilweise) auf arc42.de zitieren.

Die ersten 10 20 Einsender erhalten einen coolen arc42-USB-Stick :-)

also - positive wie negative Kritik willkommen... danke für's mitmachen!

still in love with IntelliJ

2011-05-05T07:52:00.001+01:00

I used their Easter-Sales offer (40% off regular prices) to upgrade my 9.03 Ultimate license
to the current 10.0x version, plus I took some time to play around with the updated
Python-plugin.

Usually I used plain-IDLE to experiment with simple Python scripts and classes - but
IntelliJ really makes a difference. For example, you can configure a missing docstring
to issue a warning (or hint, if you don't want to be offended...)

The editor feels just right and project support greatly benefits from its established
Java-brother.

Having one single IDE for both Java (ok, and Grails, Groovy and Griffon) and Python is worth the few bucks you need to invest in the Ultimate license...

Macht Dueck zum Kanzler - endlich!

2011-04-17T21:44:00.001+01:00

Warum hat kaum ein Politiker oder Politikerin nur halb so viel Verstand und gute Ideen wie Gunther Dueck - Chief Scientist von IBM...

Er bringt unser Bildungsdilemma (oder soll ich -desaster schreiben?) auf den Punkt - her mit der Könnens-Gesellschaft und freiem Internet - mit Steinkohle und Auswendiglernen können unsere Kinder nichts mehr werden in der modernen Welt.

Schauen Sie mal rein - seine tolle Rede auf der re:publica. bei YouTube.

Find Stencils in OmniGraffle!

2011-04-17T08:34:00.001+01:00

Did you note the cool new stencil-search in OmniGraffle 5:

Instead of restricting the search to the locally installed stencils, you can now search Graffletopia, the online stencil-collection.

Imho another proof that the OmniGuys are more than mere mortals!

Thanx, OmniGroup!

innoQ-Fellowship

2011-01-06T15:16:00.001+01:00

Seit längerer Zeit haben wir mit dem Gedanken gespielt - jetzt endlich haben wir's
unter Dach und Fach: Seit Anfang Januar bin ich, begleitend zu meiner selbständigen Tätigkeit, zum innoQ-Fellow berufen worden.

Natürlich gab's seitens innoQ dazu eine Pressemitteilung:

Zum 1. Januar 2011 bekommt die innoQ prominente Verstärkung: Dr. Gernot Starke, renommierter Experte für das Thema Softwarearchitektur, ergänzt das Team in der Rolle eines "innoQ Fellow". Er unterstützt innoQ dabei in der strategische Entwicklung und stellt seine Expertise für gemeinsame Projekte zur Verfügung. Kunden können zukünftig aus einer Hand sowohl auf die persönlichen Expertise von Dr. Starke als auch auf das Know-How der anderen innoQ-Experten zurückgreifen.

Eine Verbindung zwischen Dr. Starke und innoQ gibt es schon lange: Neben der Zusammenarbeit in Kundenprojekten hat Dr. Starke zusammen mit innoQ Deutschland-Geschäftsführer Stefan Tilkov diverse Vorträge bei Konferenzen gehalten und das Buch "SOA-Expertenwissen" herausgegeben, an dem neben Gernot Starke und Stefan Tilkov auch diverse andere innoQ-Autoren beteiligt waren. Darüber hinaus sind Phillip Ghadir, Stefan Tilkov und Gernot Starke Gründungsmitglieder des iSAQB (International Software Architecture Qualification Board) und arbeiten dort gemeinsam an der Definition verbindlicher Standards zur Ausbildung von Software-Architekten mit.

Werbung für die Werbung

2010-12-03T15:26:00.001+01:00

Ich arbeite ja manchmal als Trainer für die Entwickler-Akademie, das nächste Mal im Februar 2011 in Köln ("Software Architecture Camp" mit iSAQB-Prüfung).

Nun haben die eine für meinen Geschmack sehr coole Anzeige für dieses Camp entworfen, die ich Ihnen gerne vorstelle (also Werbung für die Werbung).

Der jubelnde Mensch auf dem Gipfel vor farbenfrohem Himmel: So fühlen sich meine Kursteilnehmer, wenn Sie 'ne Übungsaufgabe gelöst haben :-)

again, Lisp...

2010-11-06T22:41:00.001+01:00

Although I'm currently not actively involved in anything close to Lisp, I try to follow every pair of round parenthesis I can find...

A very cool clip (and book)...

(I've not yet read the book, sigh, way too much {work} to do...)

(Baum-)Klettern in der südlichen Türkei

2010-10-14T19:51:00.001+01:00

Wer mal die Gelegenheit hat, in Side, Manavgat oder Sorgun Urlaub zu genießen, dem empfehle ich einen Abstecher in den wunderschönen Kletterpark am Stausee in Oymapinar (Nähe Manavgat).

Schön gelegen, interessante Parcours (für Kinder ab 1.20m Körpergröße schaffbar, für Erwachsene balancetechnisch teilweise anspruchsvoll!), technisch super-sicher gemacht.

Die Veranstalter fotografieren auf Wunsch - und brennen dann >200 (!!) Schnappschüsse auf CD - für einen ganz geringen Kostenbeitrag (bei uns 12€).

Insgesamt ein wunderschöner Ausflug - tolles Kontrastprogramm zum Strand!

42 rules - even in climateprediction

2010-08-10T20:21:00.001+01:00

I participate in a distributed climate prediction project
(using the cool BOINC software infrastructure) - and recently looked up my rank. The result astonished even me - a hardcore 42-enthusiast:

Neue Kolumne im Javamagazin: Knigge....

2010-07-01T20:33:00.001+01:00

Gemeinsam mit Peter Hruschka veröffentliche ich im Javamagazin
eine Kolumne über Verhaltensmuster von Softwarearchitekten.

Ihr Titel lautet "Knigge für Softwarearchitekten - Verhaltensmuster zwischen Vorbild und Desaster"

Netterweise steht die auf jaxenter online!

Die Folgen:

Folge 1a) Verhaltensspektrum zwischen Sonne und Finsternis

Folge 1b) Der Proaktive

Folge 2) Der Elfenbeinturm

Folge 3) Der Vielsehende

Folge 4) Strukturierte Faulheit

Folge 5) Der Diktator

Folge 6) Blick in den Rückspiegel

Folge 7) Anti-Muster: Zuviel des Guten

Folge 8) Der Multilinguist

Folge 9) Der Notationskrieger

Folge 10) Der Code-Held

Folge 11) Die Jongleuse

Folge 12) Der Vereinfachungskobold

Folge 13) Der Perfektionist

14) Der technische Risikomanager

Und damit wäre DIESE Staffel erstmal beendet. Ab Oktober 2011 geht's weiter - also lesen Sie fleissig das JavaMagazin, denn dort werden die weiteren Folgen zuerst veröffentlicht.

Dropbox and Cactuses or Cacti?

2010-05-31T21:22:00.001+01:00

I really like Dropbox and their fantastic sync service - a serious and valuable software, highly reliable, stable and efficient.

Once in a while I even read some of their forum discussions - you get quick responses and no-nonsense discussions.

But today they (aahm - some users) talked about Caci or Cactuses. Yes - the plants with spikes or stings. Made me laugh...

Glaskugel: Architektur in 2020

2010-05-24T18:08:00.001+01:00

Die Zeitschrift dotnetpro hat mich zur Zukunft von Software-Architekten befragt - und das Ergebnis im Rahmen eines gemeinsamen Glaskugel Artikels veröffentlicht (in dem auch noch Stefan Edlich und Michael Wiedeking ihre Meinungen zu Non-SQL beziehungsweise Programmiersprachen darlegen).

In Kurzform meine Thesen für die Zukunft von Software-Architekten:

Standardisierung von Aufgaben und Ausbildung: Hier gibt es vielversprechende Ansätze (beispielsweise iSAQB und der sehr enterprise-lastige TOGAF).

Anforderungsanalyse wird von Software-Architekten wahrgenommen. Im Bauwesen und großen Teilen der Ingenieurdisziplinen gibt es kein Requirements Engineering, sondern Konstrukteure. Das wird bei Software zukünftig ebenfalls so sein!

Projektmanager werden zu organisatorischen Erfüllungsgehilfen von Software-Architekten. Wer kennt schon den Projektleiter des genialen Kuppelbaus auf dem Berliner Reichstages? Niemand. Die meisten haben von Sir Norman Foster, dem Architekten, aber schon gehört!

Nichtfunktionale Merkmale als wesentliches Erfolgskriterium. Von der Einstellung Hauptsache es funktioniert... müssen wir uns ganz schnell verabschieden. Es geht um Qualität und Langlebigkeit!

Um Größenordnungen verbesserte und komplexere Werkzeuge. Nur noch wenige Eingeweihte werden die Interna zukünftiger Entwicklungswerkzeuge verstehen. Sie werden ungeheuer viele Details vor uns Normalbürgern wegabstrahieren - einen Vorgeschmack gibt das für Kinder entwickelte Programmiertool Scratch - das beispielsweise das komplexe Thema Threading verbirgt - und zwar perfekt!

Als Software-Architekten haben wir eine wirklich spannende Zukunft vor uns!

Patterns-kompakt: Neue Website...

2010-05-17T19:46:00.001+01:00

Zu Karl Eilebrechts und meinem Buch (besser: Büchlein) Patterns-kompakt hat Karl in intensiver Fleissarbeit die Website aktualisiert und für neue Probekapitel gesorgt - danke!

iSAQB Certified Architecture Professional Training...

2010-05-17T06:50:00.001+01:00

Das nächste öffentliche Software Architecture Bootcamp, mit
der Möglichkeit zur Zertifizierungsprüfung zum iSAQB-CAP
findet vom 20.-23. September 2010 in Mainz statt...

Es gibt nur 12 Plätze - prima für intensive Arbeit, viele praktische Übungen und Erfahrungsaustausch.

Nähere Infos bei der Entwickler-Akademie!

Feindbild Realität: Was Entwickler nicht gerne hören...

2010-05-17T06:44:00.001+01:00

In diesem Vortrag habe ich einiges Material von Wolfgang Keller verarbeitet und um freche Thesen zur aktuellen und zukünftigen Tätigkeit von Software-Entwicklern ergänzt... Wolfgang hat netterweise eine pdf-Version davon online gestellt, danke!

Firefox 3.6: Buildin Tab-Preview

2010-05-03T20:39:00.001+01:00

Like ALT-TAB let's you quickly switch between your running apps, a pretty cool Firefox (V 3.6) feature enables tab-switching with preview!

I tend to keep my Firefox running for days without restarting, collecting numerous tabs...

Then I found this short post describing the setup - quite simple:

Just enter

about:config

in the address line and change two settings:


browser.allTabs.previews
browser.ctrlTab.previews

With Firefox 3.6.3 I only needed to toggle the first of these,
the second changed automatically...

Thanx, Timbob!

ANTLR plugin on IntelliJ abandoned

2010-03-24T22:12:00.001+01:00

too bad - one more plugin that doesn't work properly with my beloved IntelliJ: ANTLR works grammar development.

I inquired with Terence Parr, the definitive source for all ANTLR infos - and he admitted that the ANTLR plugin for IntelliJ has been abandoned, as it was "too difficult to get it to run properly".

Rescue is on its way - ANTLRv3IDE for Eclipse (3.5 onwards). Great plugin, great docu.

Math on Macs as it should be...

2010-03-24T22:09:00.001+01:00

great idea - implement a calculator without those ugly buttons:

Soulver!

I bought the iPhone version - best calculating experience
since the old HP RPN times. Enter your queries in the left pane,
immediately see your results on the right.

UI designers - take a deep breath and a good look! Just in case you care: Mac OS only.

Update (March 25th): The guys from SpeedCrunch notified me of their
(free and open source) alternative, running on a plethora of platforms (aah, it's Qt).

Thanx, I'm impressed. It makes me double my effort to find myself some free time to fiddle around with Qt...

Readable websites - no ads, no junk

2010-03-06T22:26:00.001+01:00

The German magazin "Die Zeit" featured a very useful bookmarklet
in their March 4th edition, from lab.arc90.com, called "readability".

Try for yourself - works like a charm!

Watch the 1:13min video...

(btw: it's open source, code available here)

[OOP 2010] Und wieder: IT'ler lernen kommunizieren...

2010-01-10T16:33:00.001+01:00

Wie bereits im vergangenen Jahr findet auch auf der OOP 2010 wieder mal
ein echtes Highlight für die Kommunikationsfähigkeit von IT'lern statt:

Alice Heiliger, Rody Shaw und Andreas Goerlich präsentieren ihren
ganztägigen Workshop:

Wie dirigiere ich (m)ein Team?

Am Montag den 25. Januar erleben, lernen und üben Sie dabei Teamdynamik und Führung "live". Die Trainer arbeiten mit professionellen Musikern, und Sie schlüpfen in die Dirigentenrolle.

Aus dieser Analogie (Dirigent = Team-/Projektleiter) leiten die drei
wertvolle und zeitlose Tipps und Praktiken für den täglichen Umgang
von Menschen miteinander ab - interessant, spannend und für uns IT'ler
sehr nützlich.

Ich durfte diesen Workshop in einer Kurzform im letzten Jahr genießen - und möchte ihn wirklich weiterempfehlen!!

See Climate Change happening...

2009-10-15T06:51:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-10-03T21:38:00.001+01:00

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!)

Update again (March-Mai 2010): They are live again - better than ever. Great tool, way better than all the other crap I tested...

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

2009-10-03T10:36:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-09-13T14:10:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-13T08:58:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-09-07T21:00:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-09-02T07:34:00.001+01:00

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"...

2009-09-02T07:13:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-08-26T06:52:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-07-09T12:33:00.001+01:00

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.

(Update September 2010: Link aktualisiert!)

Kandidat für "Nutzloseste Website"...

2009-06-27T21:16:00.001+01:00

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

2009-06-23T09:58:00.001+01:00

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

2009-06-10T08:02:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-04-26T13:21:00.001+01:00

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

2009-03-24T15:20:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-03-07T11:44:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-03-01T16:35:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-03-01T16:32:00.001+01:00

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...

2008-12-01T20:58:00.001+01:00

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

2008-12-01T20:47:00.001+01:00

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...

2008-11-09T23:23:00.001+01:00

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"

2008-05-27T16:29:00.001+01:00

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

2008-05-27T16:28:00.001+01:00

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"

2008-04-23T09:28:00.001+01:00

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

2008-04-21T15:32:00.001+01:00
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

2008-04-19T08:36:00.001+01:00
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

2008-04-07T22:14:00.001+01:00
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...

2008-03-05T13:08:00.001+01:00
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...

2008-02-23T18:29:00.001+01:00
The German OBJECTspektrum just published my latest article on "Domänenzentrierte Entwicklung" -
supported by this blog entry.

Store arbitrary documents in Google-Mail

2008-02-13T17:55:00.001+01:00
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...

2008-01-11T19:07:00.001+01:00
(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...

2008-01-01T22:06:00.001+01:00
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...

2008-01-01T12:17:00.001+01:00
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"...

2007-12-22T12:24:00.001+01:00
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

2007-12-21T18:05:00.001+01:00
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)

2007-12-14T18:51:00.001+01:00
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

2007-11-30T21:14:00.001+01:00
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.

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

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

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

2007-11-28T10:34:00.001+01:00
(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

2007-11-27T15:35:00.001+01:00
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

2007-11-26T18:21:00.001+01:00
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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

(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...

(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!).

(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...

(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

2007-11-22T16:26:00.001+01:00
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

2007-11-21T18:29:00.001+01:00
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?

2007-11-21T14:43:00.001+01:00
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

2007-11-16T15:12:00.001+01:00
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...

2007-11-15T15:31:00.001+01:00
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

2007-11-11T16:56:00.001+01:00
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

2007-11-07T22:04:00.001+01:00
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...

2007-11-07T16:36:00.001+01:00
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...

2007-11-07T15:20:00.001+01:00
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?

2007-10-29T16:51:00.001+01:00
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

2007-10-29T16:44:00.001+01:00
(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:

Install MD to any tmp-directory.

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

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

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

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

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

save info.plist

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

2007-10-27T14:58:00.001+01:00
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)

2007-10-26T11:00:00.001+01:00
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...

2007-10-19T13:22:00.001+01:00
VERY funny short film about a young father fighting back:

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

Big Bucks on the Run

2007-10-12T19:51:00.001+01:00
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...

2007-10-08T20:12:00.001+01:00
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!).

Scott Reed, 1596 overall, 37 for Drools

Christiano Guiffrida, 1682 overall, 33ms for Drools

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

John Kirchmeier, 1760 overall, 53 for Drools

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

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

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...

2007-09-30T17:38:00.001+01:00
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?

2007-09-21T06:34:00.001+01:00
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

2007-09-11T14:24:00.001+01:00
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

2007-09-11T08:01:00.001+01:00
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

2007-09-10T13:14:00.001+01:00
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 ...

2007-09-09T15:33:00.001+01:00
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:

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)

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

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.

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.)

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...

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

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:

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.

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

2007-09-04T21:44:00.001+01:00
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
"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).
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).
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...

2007-08-31T16:49:00.001+01:00
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!

2007-08-28T08:29:00.001+01:00
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?

2007-08-25T07:57:00.001+01:00
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...

2007-08-22T21:40:00.001+01:00
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

2007-08-19T18:56:00.001+01:00
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

2007-08-15T15:04:00.001+01:00
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

2007-08-11T13:42:00.001+01:00
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

2007-08-03T18:00:00.001+01:00
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)

2007-07-28T06:47:00.001+01:00
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

2007-07-22T19:53:00.001+01:00
For something not directly related to IT: Today (July 21st 2007) was a special day in three ways:

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

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

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

2007-07-19T17:16:00.001+01:00
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

2007-07-18T18:14:00.001+01:00
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

2007-07-13T08:12:00.001+01:00
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...

2007-07-13T08:11:00.001+01:00
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...

2007-07-02T09:08:00.001+01:00
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!