It's a long time... (forgot the count)

It's been a very long time (again) since I last posted here. Thought I will post something here to let myself know I have a blog :)

DELL Laptops - great design?

My laptop crashed a week back taking most of my data with it. Also the eject button of the PCMCIA card reader came out. I could still push the card and get it out, but the IT staff wanted to get it fixed. My initial thought was, the engineer from DELL would just remove the entire slot out and try to put the eject switch back into it, or replace the reader. Guess what he did? He replaced the mother board 'coz the reader comes as part of the motherboard (soldered to it) and not as a separate removable entity. Nice design, what say?

At least I (almost) got a brand new laptop ;)

_

After a long break...

The last post discussed what happened at Day 01 of the Architecture World, after which I don't remember why I stopped blogging (probably I lost interest). Months have passed since then, and the some events I attended also went unblogged - like the MS Tech Ed 2006. It was a two day event with differents tracks on Data, WinFX, Mobile & Embedded,... Most of the sessions on the data track were good, the video of WinFS was excellent (I later came to know that they are scrapping the Beta 2 of WinFS, and is being split of parts and integrated into other products like MS SQL Server, and ASP.NET). One other good thing happened there - there was a XBox gaming competition and guess what I participated (being a gamer) and came 3rd in the finals. What I got as a prize? - A Mouse Pad, a Stress Cube, and ... (I guess that was it). The guy who came 1st got a all-in-one USB kit. Isn't that unfair? ;)

I also attended a couple of internal trainings conducted by my company on Advanced Design Principles, Design Patterns Workshop, and JSF (JavaServer Faces). I will be attending a couple of trainings in the months to come...

Right now my interests are from writing a wigdet library in JavaScript, to understanding JVM,Java, and C++ design & implementation, to distributed & concurrency systems, to linux internals, and of course patterns & frameworks. Still unsure of what I will be doing the rest of this month... maybe spend the month trying out various games ;)

Architecture World 2006 - Day One

The day started off early in the morning (08:45) with the lighting of the lamp. It was followed by the Welcome speech by Sachin Khanna, Director Sales, Compuware and then a Sunil Dutt Jha went over the agenda.

Agenda:
- Covers EAF, MDA, SOA
- 2 keynotes - Dr. Thomas Mowbray (Day One) and Jon Kern (Day Two)
- 9 Presentations
- Panel discussion - Career paths for Software Architects

The first two speakers didn't seem to have the required presentation skills or the skills needed to talk to a large audience (about 450).

[1] Keynote: Enterprise System Planning Methodology - Beginning Large IT Systems Properly - Thomas Mowbray (2 hours)

Even Thomas didn't seem to have good presentation skills (wasn't live enough or I would go down to the level of saying - wasn't live at all).

- Lack of documentation is a Universal problem

His slides were damn crowded with data/information. Even the front row folks had trouble viewing it.

- Normally a project contains 1 Enterprise Architect and 1 or more Solution Architects

EA Principles:
- Result driven
- Visual
- Self contained
- Best Practices
- Actionable
- Long term view with short term benefits

By this time he was boring us to death. I suddenly heard closures and started to think about closures in Ruby and the article I read last week about it by Martin Fowler on his Bliki.

I have attended other seminars & conferences, but none was so boring as this. The case study Thomas used isn't enlighting enough.

Guess what's EAEF?
It's Enterprise Architecture Evaluation Framework - a framework to evaluate an architecture. Where is this going?

Thomas is really making me re-think about my becoming an Architect plan (I believe a lot would have thought the same way). Looks like all they (EAs) do is document, discuss, make powerpoints and posters. If you like that kind of thing, then that's the way to make *good* money.

He is boring us to death.

Posters

Posters

More Posters...

He spoke about Steven H. Spewak method (Enterprise Architecture Planning) and Infrastructure views.

[Re-engineering = Engineering the same thing over and over again.] :)

All his case studies were based on the District of Columbia project he is working on and talked mostly about how the Fedral government worked (which of course none was interested in knowing). This was visible as quite a number of people left the hall to take a break.

He talked about how to procure paper clips ;)

Center of Excellence - reminded me of my last job where I was a member of Software Engineering Center of Excellence division.

CBA - Cost Benefit Analysis

It finally came to an end. I could see a lot of releaved faces!


[2] Defining and realizing migration & modernization blueprints using EA - Sunil Jha

I am still editing this entry...(will post again shortly)

Architecture World 2006 at Bangalore

Architecture World 2006 is being held at IISc, Bangalore on May 09th & 10th. This is my first Architecture World conference and I will be posting about what happened at the end of each day.

II Sc
II-Sc
Wisc
Disc
Misc
Edit...
Ignore all
Add to dictionary

colleagues
co leagues
co-leagues
colleague's
collages
Edit...
Revert to "coleagues"

StaX

StaX is a pull parsing Java XML API designed around the iterator design pattern. Read the Introduction to StAX for more information.

The other famous pull parsing API is XMLPULL. StaX is considered to be the next generation API which also addresses some of the issues in XMLPULL.

More information on StaX can also be found at Sun's JCP site

End of Days for the DOS Command Prompt

The new Microsoft Command Line shell called MSH or Monad which will finally replace the dumb, boring DOS Command prompt. The MSH syntax facilitates development with both functional and procedural idioms.

You can read a detailed report about MSH at ars technica

All the Java world needs is a Fancy name

All the Java world needs is a fancy name. This short blog by Martin Fowler explains how the name POJO (Plain Old Java Object) came into existence.

"The term was coined while Rebbecca Parsons, Josh MacKenzie and I were preparing for a talk at a conference in September 2000. In the talk we were pointing out the many benefits of encoding business logic into regular java objects rather than using Entity Beans. We wondered why people were so against using regular objects in their systems and concluded that it was because simple objects lacked a fancy name. So we gave them one, and it's caught on very nicely."

Give them (Java world) anything with a fancy name and they will start to use it and probably even write a couple of books on it :)

Start thinking about some fancy names, will you!

Just Released - Pattern Languages of Program Design 5

Just released. Till date I haven't read any of the books in this series. It been there in my 'Must Read' list for a long time (AFAIK, none of these is available in India. Might have to order thro' Amazon and get it shipped here).


More details later.

Template Change

Changed the template. Got a bored with the all black template. This seems to look a lot readable, visible than the previous one.

Still working on the website. That work has been stopped to attend to some urgent work at office. Learning Ruby and Rails. Will post my experiences with that (developing a web appliation using RoR) after I am done with that project.

meebo.com

A web browser based chat client. Offers support for AIM or ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN, and Jabber or Google Talk.

The webpage provides a window based environment, where the chat client and your instant message chats are displayed.

Very useful when companies don't allow their employees to install chat clients on their desktops/workstations.

For more information & to get a feel for it, visit meebo.com

eyeOS should have this feature in-built into their web based Desktop system.

eyeOS | Web Based Desktop System.

eyeOS | Web Based Desktop System. Taking your data and applications everywhere.

An application on the web that I expected a long time back. It's in the lines of Innuvo DCS (it's throwing up a blank page), RecipeXperience.

Tried it out, it's slow, and way too many screen refreshes. Every time I open or close an application window inside that, it refreshes the desktop (inside the webpage). RecipeXperience demo applications are better than this (but it's also bad - it's IE only).

The main advantage is for people who don't have a PC at home and need to use office or cyber cafe machines. They can store information on this web based desktop system and access it from any PC (of course w/internet connectivity) in the world.

Try it out!

A Conversation with Erich Gamma

A 4 part interview of Erich Gamma by Bill Venners (the guy who wrote Inside the Java Virtual Machine)

How to use Design Patterns
Right way to think about and use design patterns

Erich Gamma on Flexibility and Reuse
attitude developers should adopt towards flexibility and reuse

Design Principles from Design Patterns
design principles: program to an interface, not an implementation, and favor object composition over class inheritance.

Patterns and Practice
how design patterns are problem solution pairs, how design patterns help you understand intent and tradeoffs, and how to become a better designer through practice.

Google Page Creator

Google Labs has come up with another product called Google Page Creator

It's a cool tool specially aimed at people who want to host webpages of their own but don't know HTML or other scripting languages of the web. It has an in-place editor using which a nice looking page can be created within a few minutes.

I am working on my own web site using this. Will be publishing it after this weekend.

It's been a while... - III

Hmm... another 2 months have passed and still no updates to this site. Priorities changed, and I had to spend (and still spending) a lot of time to keep up with the technologies that my team is moving towards and on some pet projects.

I even have a account in Google Pages (see my next post about this). Working on a page on that as well. Will be publishing it after this weekend (hopefully).

It's been a while... - II

Hmm.. more than 3 months w/o any updates. Spent more time on office work and study. Lately been spending most of my free time reading Star Wars comics.

Will try & keep up with what I have been doing RSN.