{Suresh}

Rest in peace, Steve.

2011-10-05T15:24:00.000Z

Iraqi war crimes - are reasons enough for wikileaks

2010-12-14T13:33:00.012Z

Im sorry i cannot sit by and see The United States of America -- preach about first world democracy, the first world amendment to the US constitution and openly critisize China on its Human rights policy.

Whether you like the fact that US national diplomatic channels were published, or actually believe that operatives in the field are at risk -- you cannot disagree on the idea of wikileaks and preach the US constitution. War crimes in Iraq should be in the public domain. http://www.collateralmurder.com

Wikileaks has not broken any international laws by releasing this information, yet the actions of Amazon (in shutting down their EC2 hosting), EveryDNS (in removing their Internet naming address), PayPal (in stopping anyone in the world in sending e-funds to wikileaks), Mastercard and Visa (in stopping bank payments to wikileaks) has acted illegally.

This is the first documentary covering wikileaks. I urge you to watch it -- and as the wikilkeak founders said:

"Information [Truth] does not respect border. States are going to have to rethink how they approach information[Truth]. Any states that fails to do this will cease to exist". #wikileaks #amazon #paypal #visa #mastercard #opendns

The next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years.

2009-05-23T09:44:00.023Z

Professor Chris Martenson is a rare breed. A PhD scientist, previously a VP of a Fortune 300 company and an MBA from Cornell University.

Chris does a brilliant job of highlighting that the debt induced fiat monetary system which has driven our economic progress over the last 50-years is likely to fail in the future. In fact it was really nothing more than a sophisticated ponzi scheme which can only continue on the basis of perpetual compounded growth and a continued acquisition of real physical energy resources. The virtual economic economy is tied to the physical world -- this perpetual growth cannot continue forever as we are seeing with the massive de-leveraging across all asset classes in the current 2008 - 2010 recession.

Chapter 1 - Three Beliefs -

"The first is that the next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years. Why is this important? Because we tend to base our view of the future on our most recent experience. That’s just part of being a human. It is also a gigantic liability at key turning points. So I say that massive change is already upon us. When I first gave this material as a talk three years ago, I used to say, "Massive change is coming." Well, it’s here now, and the belief I hold is that it’s really just getting underway, and I’ll show you why I believe that. Next I believe that its possible – possible – that the pace and/or scope of change could overwhelm the ability of our key social and support institutions to adapt."

Chapter 2 - The Three "E"s -

"Massive change is upon us. To understand the nature of this change, we need to understand the three “E”s – the Economy, Energy, and the Environment"

Chapter 3 - Exponential Growth -

"Once an exponential function “turns the corner,” even though the percentage rate of growth might remain constant and possibly quite low, the amounts do not. They pile up faster and faster. Oil consumption, the US money supply, world population, worldwide water use, species extinction, and other critical areas all follow an exponential curve in their growth, and all have turned or will soon turn that critical corner."

Chapter 4 - Compounding is the Problem -

"If something is increasing over time on a percentage basis, it is growing exponentially. With exponential functions, the action really only heats up in the last few moments. There is simply not a lot of maneuvering room once you hop on the vertical portion of a compound graph."

Chapter 5 - Growth vs. Prosperity -

"For the past few hundred years we have been lulled into linking the two concepts, because there was always sufficient surplus energy that we could have both growth AND prosperity. But what’s going to happen when 100% of our surplus money or energy is being used to simply grow? And what happens if there’s not enough surplus to even fund growth alone?"

Chapter 6 - What is Money -

"Money should possess three characteristics. The first is that it should be a store of value. Historically, gold and silver filled this role perfectly because they were rare, took a lot of human energy to mine, and did not corrode or rust. By contrast, the US dollar pretty much constantly loses value over time"

Chapter 7 - Money Creation -

"John Kenneth Galbraith once famously said, “The process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled.” We’re about to discuss that very thing. Money creation is a bizarre thing to ponder. It is actually a very simple process, but it’s really difficult to accept. Money is loaned into existence. Conversely, when loans are paid back, money ‘disappears.’"

Chapter 8 - The Fed - Money Creation -

"All dollars are backed by debt. There are two kinds of money out there. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. And perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking."

Chapter 9 - A Brief History of US Money -

"The purpose of this section is to show you that the US government has radically shifted the rules during times of emergency and that our monetary system is really a lot younger than you might think."

Chapter 10 - Inflation -

"Most of us think of inflation as rising prices, but that’s not quite right. Inflation is not caused by rising prices. Rising prices are a symptom of inflation. Inflation is caused by the presence of too much money in relation to goods and services. What we experience is things going up in price, but in fact, inflation is really the value of your money going down, simply because there’s too much of it around. Inflation is, everywhere and always, a monetary phenomenon."

Chapter 11- How much is a Trillion? -

"A trillion is a very, very big number, and I think it would be worth spending a couple of minutes trying to get our arms around the concept. Make no mistake, we should not be lulled into complacency simply because it is too big to really get our minds around. Keep this lesson in mind as we discuss the total accumulated debts and liabilities of the US, which are many tens of trillions of dollars."

Chapter 12 - Debt -

"For you and me, there are only two ways to settle a debt: 1) Pay it off or 2) default on it. If you have a printing press like the government does, a third option exists: 3) Printing money to pay for the debt. So what is debt, really? Debt represents future consumption taken today. Our entire economic system, and by extension our way of life, is founded on debt, and debt is founded on the assumption that the future will always be bigger than the past. Therefore it is utterly vital that we examine this assumption closely, because if this assumption is false, so are a lot of other critical things that we may be taking for granted."

Chapter 13 - A National Failure to Save -

"A personal failure to save has been reflected by a state and local failure to save, which are mirrored by a corporate failure to save, all dwarfed by a failure to save at the federal government level. And capping it all off is a profound failure to invest. All of these deficits lie before us and lead me to conclude that the next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years."

Chapter 14 - Assets & Demographics -

"Our nation has a historic, never-before-seen level of debt and a historic failure to save. Along with debt and savings, one also has to consider assets. After all, does it really matter if you have no savings and a million dollars of debt, if you have assets worth 10 million?"

Chapter 15 - Bubbles -

"Bubbles used to happen once every generation or so, because it took time to forget the pain from the damage. Today we are facing the bursting of a second major asset bubble, housing, spaced less than ten years from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. This is simply astounding and thoroughly unprecedented. It is the largest bubble in all of history and will probably be the most destructive. And it is happening right now."

Chapter 16 - Fuzzy Numbers -

"Our economic recession, and possibly depression, can be partially explained by the extent to which we have chosen to provide ourselves with misleading economic data. Certainly if you share my concerns over stocks, bonds, and 401K holdings, or are a serious investor of any sort, you owe it to yourself to listen to this explanation of how wrong our measures of inflation and GDP really are."

Chapter 17a - Peak Oil -

"Peak Oil is simply a fact. Peak Oil is NOT synonymous with “running out of oil.” But the most urgent issue before us does not lie with identifying the precise moment of Peak Oil. What we need to be most concerned with is the day that world petroleum demand outstrips available supply. It is at that moment that the oil markets will change forever - and probably quite suddenly."

Chapter 17b - Energy Budgeting -

"With sufficient surplus energy, humans can construct remarkably complex creations in short order. Social complexity relies on surplus energy. Societies that unwillingly lose complexity are notoriously unpleasant places to live. Given this, shouldn’t we pay close attention to how much surplus energy we’ve got and where it comes from?"

Chapter 17c - Energy and the Economy -

"In theory, there’s nothing problematic with living in a world full of exponential growth and depletion curves – as long as the world does not have any boundaries. However, exponential functions take on enormous importance when they approach a physical boundary, as seems to be the case for oil in the very near future. Both discoveries and production indicate that we could be at oil’s exponential boundary already. What will happen to our exponential, debt-based money system? Is it even possible for it to function in a world without constant growth? These are important questions, and they deserve answers."

Chapter 18 - Environmental Data -

"Our money system requires continual economic growth, but energy depletion will run headlong into dwindling resource returns to limit future growth options. Overpopulation will increase competition and demand for fossil fuel energy sources such as crude oil and coal, as well as for natural gas and sources of alternative energy."

Chapter 19 - Future Shock -

"Money, credit, growth. Exponential growth. Debt, future, history. Failure to save. Assets, housing, bubble, financial panic. Demographics, wealth, boomers, falling values. Fuzzy numbers. Energy, oil, growth. Peak Oil. Environment, resources, exploitation, change."

Our beautiful Milky Way Galaxy - Texas Star Party

2009-05-21T21:03:00.007Z

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party taken on April 21-22, 2009.

Doctor Manhattan - Vishnu / Krishna

2009-05-04T16:44:00.008Z

Dr Manhattan's unusual hyperconsciousness allows him to perceive time in multiple facets. He slides through time and has a keen sense of predestination. For him, all time is simultaneous; all things happen at once. Therefore, he knows what "will" happen in "the future" but is incapable of doing anything about it. An obviously complex, distant, otherworldly character, Manhattan is ageless and indestructible but poignantly paradoxical in his fatalistic yet omnipotent existence.

Some even claim that Dr Manhattan might even be an indirect allegorical reference to Vishnu / Krishna.

Dr Manhattan appears to transcend space / time, talks metaphysically about reality, life and death. Dr. Manhattan seems beyond human, beyond super-hero, evolving god-like. He has a blue hue around him like Vishnu/Krishna.

Of course that in itself, doest mean anything, however lets roll back 60-years to the time of the first test of the Atomic Bomb.

In July 16th 1945, the Manhattan project, conducted the first atomic bomb tests, at Jornada del Muerto desert near the Trinity site in the White Sands Missile Range. Supervising scientist Robert Oppenheimer (a big believer of the Vedas/Upanishads) quoted Vishnu / Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita - "I am become death - the destroyer of worlds", just as the first Atomic bomb was detonated.

Afterwards, he recalls: "We knew the world would not be the same, few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multi-arm form and says - 'now i am become death, the destroyer of worlds.' -- i suppose we all thought that one way or another." - J. Robert Oppenheimer

Silent Revolution

2009-05-03T17:00:00.004Z

“On the surface of the world right now there is war and violence and things seem dark. But calmly and quietly, at the same time, something else is happening. Underground an inner revolution is taking place, and certain individuals are being called to a higher light. It is a silent revolution - from the inside out, from the ground up. This is a Global operation, a Spiritual Conspiracy.

There are sleeper cells in every nation on the planet. You won't see us on the T.V. You won't read about us in the newspaper. You won't hear about us on the radio. We don't seek any glory. We don't wear any uniform. We come in all shapes and sizes, colours and styles. Most of us work anonymously. We are quietly working behind the scenes in every country and culture of the world - cities big and small, mountains and valleys, in farms and villages, tribes and remote islands. You could pass by one of us on the street and not even notice. We go undercover. We remain behind the scenes.

It is of no concern to us who takes the final credit, but simply that the work gets done. Occasionally we spot each other in the street. We give a quiet nod and continue on our way. During the day many of us pretend we have "normal jobs." But behind the false storefront at night is where the real work takes a place. Some call us the Conscious Army. We are slowly creating a new world with the power of our minds and hearts. We follow, with passion and joy.

Our orders come from the Central Spiritual Intelligence. We are dropping soft, secret love bombs when no one is looking: Poems ~ Hugs ~ Music ~ Photography ~ Movies ~ Kind words ~ Smiles ~ Meditation and prayer ~ Dance - Art ~ Social activism ~ Websites - Blogs ~ Random acts of kindness.

We each express ourselves in our own unique ways with our own unique gifts and talents. “Be the change you want to see in the world” - that is the motto that fills our hearts. We know it is the only way real transformation takes place. We know that quietly and humbly we have the power of all the oceans combined. Our work is slow and meticulous. Like the formation of mountains, it is not even visible at first glance. And yet with it entire tectonic plates shall be moved in the centuries to come. Love is the new religion of the 21st century.

You don't have to be a highly educated person or have any exceptional knowledge to understand it. It comes from the intelligence of the heart, embedded in the timeless evolutionary pulse of all human beings. Be the change you want to see in the world. Nobody else can do it for you. We are now recruiting. Perhaps you will join us. Or already have. All are welcome. The door is open.”

~ Author Unknown

Mumbai Terror Attack - 26/11

2008-12-01T00:56:00.016Z

Im writing this article to get my thoughts out there but also to respond to many questions i have heard on twitter and clear up some of the disinformation and the dismissive reporting (blaming the cause on disenfranchised Muslims in India, blaming the cause on Kashmir, blaming the cause on Indian grown Hindu terrorists) that i have only heard from the British / UK press and TV channels.

The main objective was to attack US and British nationals.
That would certainly be the dominant view that has been expressed by the UK and US media, but it is not the main reason. Certainly the explicit targeting of UK and US nationals amongst other nationals, has Internationalized the situation. The objectives of the these terrorists are multi-dimensional, this is just one in a continued spate of attacks that have occurred in India over the last few years (one would argue 2 decades). Firstly, the idea is to split the secular line that has held India together for a Millenia, by creating a fault-line between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority the terrorists achieve their objective of creating civil disharmony across India. Secondly, it was meant to be an attack on Globalization, an attack on free-spirit, free market thinking, democracy and global commerce in a part of the country where foreigners like to do business. Places like the Taj Palace Hotel are where people "do business". In a country growing at 9% GDP, there is concentration of dynamic innovation and deal making that was happening in Mumbai. So by targeting Mumbai they wanted to fracture the heart of the financial a d business community at a time when the world economy was weak. Thirdly, it was an attack on foreign nationals to believe that India is not a safe place to do business and not a safe place to visit and a reminder to US/UK for their foreign policy in Afghanistan/Iraq, but it was not the main reason.

Al-Qaeda
The name Al-Qaeda has become a very simple label to be used for the various factions and sub groups that operate across the globe on an International, State, inner-State level. As such Al-Qaeda may not be a command and control hierarchy that is involved in these attacks -- But what is left of the Al-Qaeda infrastructure is firmly situated in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That there are many separate offshoot groups in Pakistan (like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad) that are linked to Al-Qaeda should hardly be surprising.

Predictably India blames Pakistan.
Lets be clear hear. What India has been saying for the last 10-20 years is that they are not happy that Pakistan is turning a blind eye whilst terrorist organizations are freely allowed to recruit, train and carry out cross-border terrorist activities. India has been very clear about this in the many negotiations and dialogues, where they have asked Pakistan to 'remove the terrorist infrastructure which is within Pakistani borders'. The fact that Pakistan has not removed these groups is viewed by India with much mistrust and seen as tacit indirect approval from Pakistan.

Lashkar e-Tayibba (LeT) - based in Pakistan.
What needs to understood is that there have been many bombs and attacks on India's sovereignty over the last 20-years... In the last 30-years over 4000 people have died from terrorist bombs in India that is second only to Iraq! Lashkar e-Tayyaba were identified in the Mumbai blasts in 2006 (article i wrote in 2006). Lashkar-e-Tayyaba were involved in the Ayodha bombings in 2005, the Hindu holy city of Varanasi in 2005. Certainly the terrorist that was caught had admitted he was trained by the LeT in Pakistan and satellite phone communications was intercepted back to Karachi in Pakistan. Let us not forget the machine gun attacks in the India Parliment in 2001 which led to 1M Indian armed forces facing the Pakistan border, was also traced back to the LeT.

On final point India's Elite National Security Guard (NSG) commandos were dispatched to deal with the terrorist threat at the Hotels and it took them 3-days to secure the Hotel. It was a highly organized mission that took over 3-6 months to plan; the terrorists had detailed internal maps of the hotels; were expertly trained at short-fire burst shooting of the AK47. Were operating for 3-days without sleep which means that they had taken performance drugs (e.g. Adrenalin, LSD, Cocain). Contrary to what the press has said, this was a highly trained and organized outfit. So its quite reasonable to make the connection with the LeT and therefore for India to blame Pakistan for the origins of these terrorists.

Secular Pakistan
This is a gross error -- Pakistan is not a secular country. Pakistan was created during the partition of India to be an Islamic Republic. They refer to it as the "Land of the Pure". When Pakistan was created, Hindus made up 20% of the population, today the Hindu population is 2%.

LeT - why would they deny involvement?
LeT have strong links with parts of the Pakistani Secret Service (ISI) which runs and operates within it own network separate to the state. This is a point that many people get confused about, Pakistan the State, the Army and the ISI Secret Service have had a long and independent / interdependent history. One would argue that the idea of Pakistan as a democratic state is a relatively new phenomenon. With the real institutional power and control being held through the ISI and Pakistan Army. The ISI were recipients of millions of dollars of funding from the Saudi's and the CIA which led to the creation of Madrassas (religious Schools) across Pakistan which was used to create the Taliban. Well when the Afghanistan war ended and Taliban took control of Afghanistan, what happened to the Madrassass and offshoots of the Taliban that stay in Pakistan. Well they are still in Pakistan fighting a proxy war with India over Kashmir. So organizations like the LeT have strong reasons to not admit anything because the links between LeT and ISI are far stronger and after the Mumbai attacks the pressure to reign them in will be stronger.

One final point, all the terrorists were supposed to kill to the death, it was not expected that any would be captured. But given that one was actually captured, why did he admit to being trained by LeT?

Why would Pakistan openly be involved in something like this?
I agree. It doesn't make sense for Pakistan "The State" to be involved in something like this. But please as i mentioned before there is a complex infrastructure made up of the ISI and the Pakistani Army that harbors Anti-Hindu, Anti-India ideologies that have fostered since the partition which then worsened under General Zia who Islamized Pakistan even further. Yes there is professional, educated middle-class buts its small, and has not had much voice so far. So to be clear here, when you talk about Pakistan you need to be clear which aspect you are talking about. By any standard Pakistan is a "failed state" and at risk of heading in the same direction as Somalia, this is not good for anyone to see happen. Only last month it had to borrow $7Bn from the IMF to ensure it didn't default on its debt liabilities. As i had mentioned there are parts of the ISI and the Pakistan Army that has an institutional memory which still even today cannot "get over" the fact that they lost India. You have to remember that the Mughals ruled India for 700-years when they invaded India and as such believe that they are the true rulers of India and the Hindus are their subjects. So after partition this has created a resentment that never really disappeared and a misguided insecure superiority complex which has defined Pakistani politics. This animosity is further worsened by the fact that when Pakistan looks at its economical growth in comparison to India which is seen as an emerging Super Power that will have the 3rd largest economy behind China and the USA by 2050. So there is much resentment and very little inertia to change current institutional thinking.

Pakistan - timebomb
As mentioned earlier, there is little inertia to change existing institutional thinking which hasn't evolved since the creation of Pakistan. So a country which was built around a Pro-Islam, Anti-Hindu, Anti-India ideology is still festering in many parts of the country and it will take time for that to change. But it cannot change unless its replaced with a new vision for the country, yet it has to do that whilst dealing with a Civil War which internally is eating up the country and with problems on both its borders while not being able to grow its economy. Yes its a failed state and it will unfortunately continue to be so for a long time. I am pretty sure that Barack Obamas No'1 concern is the safe keeping of the Nuclear Weapons in Pakistan (which were kindly donated by the Chinese).

What are the terrorists motivations?
India is not a country that had invaded another country in her 5000-year history, a reputation unequaled by any other civilization in history and based on the timeless deeply spiritual values of "Ahimsa", which means non-violence. The same philosophy followed by Mahatma Gandhi. In the last 2-years Islamic terrorists have bombed Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Assam, Orissa, Mumbai. Each one has been different and different number of people have died -- but yet India has not responded in a coordinated or directed response. It is a process of a thousand cuts that these terrorists intend to bleed India. Unlike 9/11.... Each attack is designed not to exceed a certain threshold, but as a total it is designed to test the limits and patience of the country. And the terrorists know that. They would not dare try something of the scale of 9/11, it simply doesn't make sense. But each individual attack is designed to push India further over the top.

And you may ask what is the point of this? -- Islamic Fundamentalism has moved beyond the issue of Kashmir. Kashmir is demarcated with a Line of Control and its borders will one day be remapped against those lines. There is more political alignment between India and Pakistan on this issue than most people realize. But Islamic Fundamentalism has already moved to Fascism and the only place left for it now is Anarchic Nihilism. You see the world is changing, people are getting wealthier, more educated, the internet is opening peoples eyes, telecommunication and media is making the world smaller, newer generations are giving up on the ideas of their parents generations and are learning at a much faster rate. They can see what is happening in India as a template of what could happen in Pakistan. That is why these attacks are designed to break India's resolve as they try and deal with Pakistan "The State" to ensure that both countries cannot move forward to second or third base.

Where did India go wrong?
Failure in Governance - the UPA Congress Party are a coalition government that needed to seek out other parties, minority parties to form a government. Each of these minority parties have their own expectations and motivations which need to be met. Which has made the Government very ineffective as it has to pander to everyone. Secondly with 15% of the population Muslim, that is a valuable vote that they cannot afford to disenfranchise, which has meant that targeting radical schools and groups within India has become impossible. In short the government has become limp through inaction at the risk of losing power, but general elections next May, it is a certainty that this current government will be out. To appease the minorities, when Congress came into power in 2004 the first thing they did was to dismantle and scrap Federal anti-terror laws. In short, the last 4-years of government has been viewed by most observers as spineless.

One final point -- Pseudo Intellectualism.
There is a pseudo intellectual view point common with many of intelligentsia press which likes to view that Pakistan is not responsible for these troubles and as such politicians and the press take a contrarian view from the most obvious answer. When you look at the mess that is in Kashmir, Pakistan, the Madrassas, the Taliban, Osama Bin Ladens hiding, its simply impossible to think that the problem is coming from somewhere else.

Mumbai Terror Attack 2008

2008-11-28T01:02:00.005Z

Sigh.... Head hurts...

Ive not had a chance to blog my thoughts out... Here is a list of my tweets... for the time being...

Social Capital of Brokerage

2008-02-10T11:47:00.000Z

"The more groups that you are attached to the more likely you are author of who are you are rather than you being defined by the group."

-- Professor Ronald S. Burt, Hobart W. Williams Professor of Sociology and Strategy, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Joost P2P TV

2007-03-02T10:16:00.000Z

Just received my invitation for Joost, the creators of Skype. These guys are working on what can only be described as a kick-ass P2P Video TV Streaming client. Interface and Controls seems very reminiscent of OS X applications like iPhoto, QT, etc..

Steve on DRM

2007-02-13T14:00:00.000Z

Like the opening sequences of the Outer Limits which starts out -- "There is nothing wrong with your television... We are now controlling the transmission.... We control the Horizontal and the Vertical".

Steve Jobs thoughts on music, deserves some attention. For me this is classic Jobs.

Listening to some of the bloggers out there, i feel people have been a bit disengenious to Steve Jobs. So the reason im adding to the views of Scoble, JP Rangaswami, Bill Thompson (of the British Broadcasting Corporation no less!) is to get some sense of balance to this discussion and present it for what it really means to the industry.

But before i do, lets remind ourselves of that Wayne Gretzky quote that Steve gave us at the MacWorld 2007 Keynote. "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."

That should reveal a lot to us.

- Lets be honest, digital content requires Digital Rights Management (DRM). Whether its music, videos, movies, books, photos. — In an increasingly digital world - we need such a framework, to suggest otherwise is pure folly.

To all the nay-sayers that suggest that we don't need DRM because its restrictive or its anti-libertarian, i ask them what are the alternatives? What do we tell the artists? DO we have a solution for them? Are we going to use an advertising model for music? Seriously. We need to have a better solution before suggesting that DRM sucks.

As long as the DarkNet exists, filesharing and tools like BitTorrent means that this problem will never go away. So we do need DRM to protect Digital Intellectual Property. This is not a question of ethics or morality or fairness, its a question of economics.

- Secondly, the consequence of this digital distribution means that one day record companies wont be selling CD’s. We all know that day will come and when that day arrives -- and Steve Jobs knows it will — we will have no choice but as consumers to pay with DRM.

But that day hasn’t arrived today — nobody wants to cannibilize sales or shrink the PIE. So we obviously live in this uneasy past and future worlds. The past, CD's (non-DRM) and the future, Digital(DRM). -- Steve Jobs knows that and he knows that the record companies know that!

Which is why he said what he said, because he is now the champion of the consumer cause -- fighting the evil-DRM, but at the end of the day, he knows that the record company can ill afford to do without it and so they became the bad guys. Steves' hands are tied he can only do what the record companies tell him.

All these side discussions about well he could release non-DRM stuff on iTunes or licensing the DRM to other companies -- are just side issues. The industry is still immature, its still growing, we are not ready for that debate yet, we need to agree that DRM is right or not, and if it isn't we need a soution for the artists. Figure that out first and frankly i don't think Steve Jobs cares, thats the recording companies problem and they already know the answer.

In the short run, let all these mindless journalists continue to discuss (on SecondLife - duh?) that the world doesn't need DRM and let them re-direct their attention to the European record companies. In the long-run, well, i think we need to go back to that quote from Wayne Gretzky. :)

MacWorld '07: Seems like 1984 all over again...

2007-01-10T12:47:00.001Z

For those not old enough to remember "1984"

I Miss You, Though I'm Not Quite Sure I Love You

2006-12-16T08:30:00.000Z

"I miss you, though I'm not quite sure I love you.
All I know's I like my music sad.
Crystal days I'm pensive, thinking of you,
And while you're gone, I'm never really glad.
I think of love as some enormous sea,
Tempestuous or still, but never ending,
Something that once there will always be.
But that is not the message that I'm sending.
Missing you, for me, is something new:
An opening into my changing heart.
Love is something that I won't yet do,
But feeling what I feel for you's a start.
Love, like prayer, should not be lightly said,
So I'll just say, "You're in my heart" instead!"

Saul Williams - Poet or Rapper?

2006-10-07T11:22:00.000Z

actually who cares.... this guy rocks!

rapper

poet

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

Amazon Unbox: they just don't get it do they?

2006-09-09T16:19:00.000Z

Why Amazon should stick to SOA and not waste time (here, and here, and here) with selling Movies to the consumer..

leave it to companies that do get it...

Amazon S3: Data Storage Services

2006-07-14T14:22:00.000Z

Its happening quicker than you and i probably realise.

Many of us are still struggling with laptop hard disks that are filled to the brim. We all carry our own USB keys. Many of us have bought unwieldy External USB hard disk enclosures and Network Attached Storage (NAS) that are now an emerging too fill the SOHO market segment.

But all of this is just, a precursor to where were heading. Which is online storage. No need to rely on localised hard disk storage.

Who says this better than Google: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc), .... We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today..... the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache"

Today, the only real large scale provider is Amazon. Amazon's s3 Web Services, provides a pay-as-you-go utility model for buying and using storage over the Internet. Essentially you need to sign-up for an Amazon S3 account, you are provided with your own Access ID and Secret Key for encrypting and decrypting your files on the network. If you lose it then you've lost your files its as simple as that.

Anyhow, i downloaded client tool (which relies on Amazon S3), called Jungle Disk (they even have a Mac client), and use that to connect to the Amazon service.

Its a fairly rudimentary client, but looking at the sheer size of resources behind Amazon S3 (e.g. Microsoft may be outsourcing some of their storage to them and smug-mug pass over 10Tb of pictures through Amazon S3) you kind of realise that this is a pretty sophisticated operation.

Am i ready to drop my iTunes music over into the big cloud, not yet. But its certainly the starting point for me to rationalise and make my content better shared between machines.

Mumbai 7-11 Blasts: "Govern or get out"

2006-07-13T13:27:00.000Z

After the killing of 190 and injuring 650 people in Mumbai -- this the outcome of 8 highly targeted bombs on the Mumbai metro during rush hour, one wonders how much more should the citizens of India take?

The choice of Mumbai was not designed to unsettle the financial capital, but really meant to raise communal tensions between the Hindu majority and muslim minority. The riots in Gujarat are still not forgotten by the locals and lets now forget about the Mumbai blasts in 1993.

We don't need to look that far back, only last year Islamic terrorists bombed the holy Hindu city of Varanasi.

It beggars belief that India now has a Prime Minister who is completely at ease at talking about macroeconomic and how the diaspora can be unleashed across globe, but yet when slapped in the face countless times with blatant attacks on Indian sovereignty, can only meekly state: "Do not be provoked by rumours. Do not let anyone divide us. Our strength lies in our unity."

Its time for India to step up and deal with these Al-Qaeda terrorists. Both Lashkar-e Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad are part of the terrorist infrastructure that has many sympathisers in Pakistan. This continued passive, tacit and turning a blind-eye support for terrorism must stop.

Opposition party, Advani, summarises it well about the situation for the Indian PM: "Govern or get out".

On another sad note, still lingering from the tragedy of the Mumbai bombs, im surprised at the lack of news coverage from the British press, in comparison to the London and Madrid bombings. Picked politics, captures my sentiments more succinctly, "clearly the death of nearly two hundred and injuries of thousands of wogs was not good enough for the Dail Mail, Daily Express or the Metro to make it front page news. Fuck them. "

This is a timley reminder, for me at least, of how important it is to continue blogging.

Time to move on....

2006-06-19T08:14:00.000Z

first Robert Scoble, then Bill Gates, and now Om Malik.... all within the space of a week....

is there some kind of cartel or collusion hapenning, where everyone agrees to ditch in their job at the same time for maximum news exposure?

I guess Gateas has realised that curing Aids in Africa is more important than the next operating system. But, why-oh-why, did he not make that noble decision about 5-years ago? -- it would have been better for everyones sake!

An inconvenient truth

2006-06-18T09:55:00.000Z

i think its time to wake up, i think its time to realise that guzzling chevs' and over heated Google datacentres are a no-no...

"How cool is that?"

2006-05-18T21:47:00.000Z

I have an article featured at Deepak Chopra's blog.

My personal blog has become way too techy over the years... perhaps it will change now :)

thanks
Suresh.

Apple MacWorld 2006: Lets start taking bets.....

2006-01-10T01:40:00.000Z

You can see Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld 2006 here (from Tues 10ths Jan 9pm Pacific Time)

1. Replacement of the iPod Shuffle with a Nano variant? (e.g. Shuffle with screen or 1Gb Nano)
50% probability

2. Full length wide-screen iPod 6G
20% probability

3. Mac-Mini on Intel + Front Row 2.0
90% probability

4. iBook on Intel
100% probability

5. 42" and 50" iMac Intel + Front Row 2.0 (although possibly not branded as iMac)
SK: 80% probability

6. iTunes 7.0 + QuickTime 7.0 (its been a whole 6-months after all!)
SK: 60% probability

7. more video and tv and movie content on iTunes (including and we can only hope -- the full catalogue of Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears music videos).
SK: 100% probability (not sure on the later)

8. iLife/iWork '06 Updates (This is a given stable of MacWorld -- im informed by Jody)
100% probability

9. Aperture price reduction (to take the fight to Adobe)
50% probabilty

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 + Extensions

2005-12-28T12:36:00.000Z

Over the last 2-months, ive been really getting into Firefox, ive found some quite useful extensions and scripts that extend the browser to my specific needs. For the hardcore browsers out there, download in the following order:

Firefox 1.5
The latest version of Firefox released in November 2005.
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Google Toolbar for Firefox
The best way to surf and browse the internet.
http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/

Google Blogger Web comment for Firefox
A dynamic list of wesbites/comments that people have made about the current page that you are browsing. http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/webcomments/index.html

Tabs Session Saver
Re-opens previously running tabs before your browser was shut/closed.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=436&application=firefox

Tabs Mix Plus
Provide a much detailed control of tab behaviour, a must for hardcore surfers.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1122&application=firefox

del.icio.us Toolbar for Firefox
A great way of tagging and bookmarking your favourite sites from any machine
(A pity that Yahoo have bought them)
http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1532

Greasemonkey Script Manager
A javascript engine which enables developers to write simple scripts to manipulate your web pages.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&amp;category=Popular&numpg=10&id=748

Greasmonkey script(s)
Hundreds and hundreds of user developed Javascript plugins for Greasemonkey.
http://userscripts.org/

Update:
One other one to keep an eye out for is AllPeers, its a file sharing extension which uses one of the Peer Networks (possibly BitTorrent) -- its not available yet.
http://www.allpeers.com/more_f.htm

Ray Ozzie memo: Microsofts Services strategy

2005-11-09T10:51:00.000Z

Dave Winer has posted 2 e-mail memos, from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, on the next step forward for the company.

Clearly Ray has had time to talk to the product teams, senior management and developers and has finally taken stock of the situation.

Ray Ozzie mentions some key tenents:

1. The power of the advertising-supported economic model.
2. The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model.
3. The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that “just work”.

Fundamentally, Ray's memo is a more than just a call to developers and product teams about service-enabling their assets. Its a an action-plan. Driven by end to end user-driven scenarios, something that Ray is very good at, from these use-cases, he will drive architectural design decisions and map that to current and fututure products/services.

I think this is not a good time for Microsoft, yet you can't but feel that finally they have someone at the top of Microsoft that actually gets it. What Mcirosoft has delivered as Ray has said is a 80% solution. In the post-"Vista/Office12" wave we will see a fantastic level of seamless integration of technology that weve not seen before, his past efforts with Notes and Groove should give us some inclination of the potential.

I have still some doubts though; Microsoft needs to balance Enterprise revenue models with Consumer/advertising revenue models. There needs to be harnomy between product and services -- the old mindset to lock-in services and products just won't cut it.

Windows "Live"

2005-11-02T10:19:00.000Z

Fantastic! -- Reported by TechCrunch. Its Windows even when its not Windows! "Windows Live (beta)" is Microsofts go-to-market branding that will encompass its next geneartion SAAS (Software As a Service) strategy.

Its the harmonisation between Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office applications, and Microsoft Services (Windows Live). We have seen this brand used in "Live" Meeting and XBOX "Live".

As Ray Ozzie mentioned here, the iPod and the Blackberry were "perfect examples" of how to create a tightly designed user experience from hardware, to software to services.

I think we will see a great example of that with the XBOX 360, a huge investment by Microsoft which goes beyond just gaming, it could easily become the centre-point for many of Microsofts other strategies around building tightly coupled hardware/software/services.

In terms of the announcements yesterday?
- early 90's - Microsofts energy was put into creating Windows "New Technology" (NT)
- mid 90's - Micorsofts energy was put into embedding Internet/Media experience into Windows.
- 2000's - Microsofts energy was put into .NET and Web Services strategy.

They stumbled a bit after that, and had this grand vision of connection people, devices, and services through "hailstorm".

The last 5 -years has been painful partly through trying to converge technologies streams into a big bang product roadmap, most of which will be released soon, .NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, Vista, SQL 2005.

But in the next 5-years, we'll see Microsoft tinkering less in that space, with putting more of a concerted effort on the User experience (not User Interface / not Product!) but my Identity, my Devices, my Work, my Perrsonalisation and my Events.

We will see a new abstraction of "the Windows API". It won't be Win32 or WinFX. But more likely WinLive Web Services API. All XML based contracts.

Ray Ozzie spent a long time talking about Ad Revenues being a $150bn industry by 2015. So wheres the lock-in? That bit is not clear. You'll still need Windows to truly use these Services. Microsoft needs to tread carefully here, but i suspect they are realising that lock-in through their software platform (to generate license revenues) isn't going to run in the long-term (not outside the Enterprise anyway), its going to be about converting users into revenue generating consumers for advertisers.

MSN used to be a place where Microsoft used to place executives before retirement. If i were to believe how Microsoft is positioning MSN against Windows Live, its clear to me one is designed for syndicated content (where current advertisers are at) and the other eventually will become the place for contextualised content (and where advertisers might go to in the future.)

Google Base -- for a new Generation...

2005-10-27T17:39:00.000Z

With all the multitude of ways of storing infromation, both structured and un-structured, we still dont seem fully liberated even when we store what is essentially simple data-sets, lists, hierarchically-structured information... on the Web.

Our information, like bookmarks, to-do lists, recently listening to music, wishlists, birthdays, calendars are all sitting on different peoples websites....

Google has realised that there are many companies (Web 2.0 style) that are offering just that... But in reality... there are only a couple of ways to skin a cat...

And whilst people are getting excited that Google Base is supposed to kill e-bay, we just need to realise that there's just a bunch of journalists and Marketing research Analysts out just getting a bit excited.

Its not about killing e-bay. (far from it)

But it is about thinking about solving a problem implemented many times before, in a simple and easy way and (as Garret Rogets over at ZDNET says...) about making money through search on this structured data.

Google wants to build a hosted database service, which relies on Google's highly scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure, to provide an easy way for users to create their own data. That is searchable through its Search engine, that can provide targetted ads to subscribers of that data.

Think about it, you could expose that data, using RSS/Web Services (cos its SOA world out there), and you can then skin your own application using AJAX or Ruby on Rails...

Google has spent most of the last few years trying to organise the worlds data, most of which has been unstructured in web sites. Google is trying to find ways to organise structured information in a way that has never been done before. But also to unlock data held in websites which have been closed to Googles spider, in short this is a great monetization opportunity for advertisers who will be able to aggregate better quality information about subscribers.

And what we will be witnessing are the first steps of unleashing a new paradigm for building data-centric web applications.

OJOS: Collaborative Machine Intelligence

2005-10-19T11:56:00.000Z

This is a company who has been getting a lot of attention from people. They have, in a very short space of time, acquired office space, developers, some very smart Computer Scientists and loads of VC money.

I think they have come up with an idea, which hasn't been thought about before and extends and builds on the principles of Web 2.0.

In short: Riya (formerly OJOS) = Flickr + Tagging + Human Learning + Visual Processing + AI = Automated Photo Tagging.

The software and Computer Science research to get computers to recognise a visual image has been improving in relation to the processing power available. Yet with all these advances nothing could bootstrap the machine learning process better than the ability for humans to 'teach' a computer on how to identify an image. This is where the collaborative tagging capability comes into play.

We have seen examples of where collaborative filtering to use the wisdom and knowledge of crowds to accurately determine whether an e-mail message is SPAM.

I think Riya is trying to take advantage of all the images that have been human "tagged" and correlate this with its own AI / Pattern Recognition engine.

In short... after the 1000th image of an iPod is uploaded on a blogger site or Flickr, Riya will have learned not only physical dimensional qualities about an image -- but also tagged data about it... -- Anyway thats my take on what these folks are up to...

Y! Messenger & MSN Messenger

2005-10-13T07:34:00.000Z

So... When the large Portal players (who in the past never gave a damn about interoperability) all of a sudden decide to play fair and interoperate. -- What are we supposed to think....?

Sunnyvale, CA, and Redmond, WA -- October 12, 2005 -- Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO - News) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT - News) today announced a landmark agreement to connect users of their consumer instant messaging (IM) services on a global basis. The industry’s first interoperability agreement between two distinct leading global consumer IM providers will give MSN® Messenger and Yahoo!® Messenger users the ability to interact with each other, forming what is expected to be the largest consumer IM community in the world, estimated to be more than 275 million strong.

That all of a sudden they give a damn about us? err no.
- More likely that Microsoft couldn't get the right deal with AOL.
- More likely that MSN and Yahoo! look at this pragmatically as a way keeping their respective registered users, rather than lose them.

As mentioned at Om Maliks Blog,
"Somehow with a move like that, and a potential AOL/MSN alliance it is starting to look like we will be having a three way dance between the Portal IM players [excluding AOL], Skype and Google."

"Indigo" for Linux

2005-10-10T11:14:00.000Z

Paul Freemantle, a work associate back in the days... has now left IBM and has co-founded a new Web Services Infrastructure company called WSO2. -- "Oxygenating the Web Services platform".

No, this is not Web 2.0, its not AJAX, its not Google, its not about Ad Revenues! -- Its all about enterprise plumbing grunt that is supposed to miraculously work in the background.

Perhaps its harsh to use the term "Indigo for Linux" -- but im sure the world needs higher level frameworks than what is provided by WS-*.

In fact many of the founders of WSO2 helped contribute to many of the WS-* standards and Apache stacks. There purpose, they claim, is more ambitious than delivering "Indigo" for Linux, it is to build a Web Services platform "which treats Web services as first class components instead of as a facade to some existing platform like J2EE". Hmm... im a bit behind on whats going with Apache projects -- but is there a workflow/orchestration framework?

Check out more here on Apache Axis 2 the follow up to Apache SOAP.

The Self-Aware Universe

2005-10-09T20:19:00.000Z

Not prone to plugging books....

But i have recently started reading this book... an interesting theory which for those with an understanding of Indian philosophy may recognise. The book drives straight into the field of quantum theory, human thought and the idea of universal consciousness..

Written by a Physics Professor, whose approach is scientific, he covers the subject of modern scientific thought and mathematics whilst blending in views on Spirituality, the Psychology of Religion, Philosophy, Life and God.

Oh and i have to admit from what Ive read to date, there's a lot i don't fully understand! But then again, the views of Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Einstein weren't meant for the masses!

More on Web 2.0

2005-10-02T13:02:00.000Z

On the eve of the Web 2.0 conference, Tim O'Reilly delves deeper here on what he means when he talks about Web 2.0 and how it is different to Web 1.0.

Let me try and use an example to make the point regarding Web 2.0, the company i work for this week sent an e-mail to everyone announcing the arrival of our new corporate Portal... realising that all the employees may not know what a 'Portal' is the e-mail continued with a suitable definition of the Portal, of it being a "gateway to your information" and further to that it would be like "My Yahoo" -- Woo! WTF?

Since when has My Yahoo been an authoritative gateway to my information and when has that been personalised to my interests. And here's the problems this so called Portal of ours (that they've spent millions on building). It is SO 1998. aka Web 1.0

Anyway, lets dive down into some of what Tim is saying, he covers a lot, and it really is worth going through it.

Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> Blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
directories --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

He admits that there is a danger of this becoming very gimmicky with companies marketing similiar types of applications without really understanding the essence of what makes these companies or styles unique. For that let us understand in more detail the essential principles that appear to make Web 2.0 different to Web 1.0

The web as a platform can be highlighted with several examples,

"Google vs. Netscape -- If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0, if only because their respective IPOs were defining events for each era. So let's start with a comparison of these two companies and their
positioning. "

In many ways, within the context of Web 2.0, Netscape is much closer to say a Microsoft or an Oracle or a SAP or a Lotus. For the reason being that even though Netscpae was different than those others in the same category, they were essentially about selling software products, and their business model was tied to selling shrink-wrapped software products to the Enterprise. Google living out in the internet -- builds software services, with frequent updates, its business model is not at all tied to the enterprise.
"Double Click vs' Google Adsense and Yahoo Overture -- Like Google, DoubleClick is a true child of the internet era. It harnesses software as a service, has a core competency in data management, and, as noted above, was a pioneer in web services long before web services even had a name. However, DoubleClick was ultimately limited by its business model. It bought into the '90s notion that the web was about publishing, not participation; that advertisers, not consumers, ought to call the shots; that size mattered, and that the internet was increasingly being dominated by the top websites as measured by MediaMetrix and other web ad scoring companies. "

Here again we see the differences, subtle, but yet powerfully change the game. DoubleClick believed that the advertiser should be in control and had the power to determine who to advertise to, they falsely focused on the 20% of the largest sites, ignoring the long-tail 80%. Google worked out how to create advertising space to even the smallest website -- in short it scaled downwards as well as upwards, scooping up revenues across the board and with the added benefit of targeting relevant ads.

"Akami vs. BitTorrent -- Like DoubleClick, Akamai is optimized
to do business with the head, not the tail, with the center, not the edges.
While it serves the benefit of the individuals at the edge of the web by
smoothing their access to the high-demand sites at the center, it collects its
revenue from those central sites. "

BitTorrent does treat the Web as a Platform.... but it treats the software as a platform only when its highly connected. That is it relies on the principle of network effects.

"BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it. "
Collective Intelligence

"Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. As users add new content, and new sites, it is bound in to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it. Much as synapses form in the brain, with associations becoming stronger through repetition or intensity, the web of connections grows organically as an output of the collective activity of all web users."

I really like what Tim is saying here, who hasn't wondered whether this constant chatter of ideas, drivel, thoughts isn't in some way being modelled and represented digitally through blogs and the internet... are we in the process of discovering meta-models for a global consciousness?

His further examples of Yahoo (with its re-focus on providing a personal content platform for the individual), Google (due respects to the incremental improvements achieved through page ranking -- the inclusion of human opinion in the page ranking weightings), ebay (whose ability to direct buyers and sellers better through the critical mass it has created in its network), Amazon ( who understands the science of user engagement and the ability to generate use interacts flows around the product its sales --? related products -- wish-lists -- Listmania! -- people who bought this also bought....)

Added to this he talks about other companies/services that are harness the network effect of services; Wikipedia (the complete global democratisation of content and information; -- the last bastion of hope to preserve THE truth); Flickr/del.icio.us (sites that have created collaborative communities through users being able to label pictures and sites based on keywords -- often referred to as labels or "tags" -- this created unusually divergent clusters of communities that may not have been at first obviously identifiable); Cloudmark (Collaborative spam filtering -- no need to have complex software algorithms to determine if something is spam, use a global rating system determined by humans!);

Debatably, Tim says that :

"You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0."

I am of course troubled with this, since it reeks of exclusivity, and there is nothing wrong with advertising or marketing something like Orkut, GMail (being opposite examples of this exclusivity), however behind that remark is an important principle, and that reaching a critical mass of collaboration is key to the success of a Web 2.0 application, whilst advertising can help, maintaining such a critical mass is altogether a different ball game (look at friendster today).

"The lesson: Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era."

END of the Software Release Cycle

When Mark Lucovsky (former distinguished engineer at Microsoft NOW working for Google) said:

I am not sure I believe anymore, that Microsoft "knows how to ship software".

He was of course talking about his frustrations at Microsoft's inability to deploy innovative products out there in a timely fashion... but really this is another important principle that is differentiated with Web 2.0

As i had mentioned previously, there are key competencies that Web 2.0 company needs to understand that means building a services-oriented operational organisation

"It's no accident that Google's system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google's success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors."

Its a 24-7 operation, not just keeping a site up, but listening to users, responding to users, implementing changes. Microsoft has done an exceptional job to reaching out to users, people like Robert Scoble have brought Microsoft into our living rooms.... but you know what? so what if they heard us back in 2003 at the PDC, Microsoft's business model is still built around selling shrink-wrapped software to large enterprises -- listening to users is only one part of it, the second is the rapid ability to respond and deploy that feedback..
Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency. A web developer at a major online service remarked: "We put up two or three new features on some part of the site every day, and if users don't adopt them, we take them down. If they like them, we roll them out to the entire
site."

Lightweight programming models
A discussion close to my heart... We all know whats going on in the WS-* world... and we know that people in the da big house also know whats going on with WWF and Indigo. We all know one day WS-*/WWF will make our lives easy.

Yet what has clearly defined Web 2.0 has been quite the opposite of all that enterprise wire-gook which we know is important (but which has become confusing as hell due to corporates and standard bodies)

In Summary, as mentioned by Julian Bond
- REST / [POX] not XMLRPC, XMLRPC not SOAP, SOAP, not WS*
- RSS , not custom XML schema, Simple XML schema not obfuscated RDF

"This same quest for simplicity can be seen in other "organic" web services. Google's recent release of Google Maps is a case in point. Google Maps' simple AJAX (JavaScript and XML) interface was quickly decrypted by hackers, who then proceeded to remix the data into new services."

Of course the problem with AJAX, is that every f***ing company and product under the sun will become 'AJAX-compliant'. But likewise that does not make it 'Web 2.0'.

Software above the level of a device

Hardware (devices/users) --> Software (devices/PC) --> Services (Internet) --> Content (creators)

In this category there are very few babies that can really claim this, but there are many that would like to compete in this space. Back in the 70's in a very limited way IBM had this with its control of the Software/Operating system and Hardware. And even Microsoft during the 80's/90's managed this to a considerable extent with its OS/API/IBM compatible PCs.

But nothing quite as powerful as demonstrated by the digital distribution ecosystem that Apple has created with iTunes, iTunes Music Store and the iPod. There are many aspects that Apple i think needs to work on (user feedback, rapid improvements to its products/services), but with the recent addition of a Podcasting network, we are seeing the dynamics of this platform changing by enpowering content creators... So whilst today this may be Podcasters.... tomorrow that could become an environment for a new generation of music artists to bypass the music labels.

"To date, iTunes is the best exemplar of this principle. This application seamlessly reaches from the handheld device to a massive web back-end, with the PC acting as a local cache and control station. There have been many previous attempts to bring web content to portable devices, but the iPod/iTunes combination is one of the first such applications designed from the ground up to span multiple devices. TiVo is another good example."

Rich User Experience
No discussion on Web 2.0 and rich user-experience would be complete with a 2.0 discussion on web interface.

We know whats happening with AJAX, and the world can thank Google for Google Mail and Google Maps for showing us this....

But it won't end here, Microsoft with XAML, its declarative HTML-esque language for creating rich-user interfaces that can be deployed on the Window Vista (Windows Presentation Framework) run-time and companies like Laszlo systems (who are building a similar declarative development environment which can generate DHTML and Flash applications) are also having a say on things.

These latter examples, are laudable efforts, buts lets remember the tenet, lowest-common-denominator, i don't think XAML/WPF run-times will become available for Linux or OS X so it makes hard to build those Web 2.0 style services if you limit your audience.

Meme map on Web 2.0

2005-09-27T17:30:00.001Z

Tim O'Reilleys meme map on the Web 2.0 conference succinctly summarises how we are going to communicate, collaborate, share and do work in the future....

This has been a long time coming... but it starts to show how emergent systems and disruptive technologies are starting to show a template of how this may all get mashed up together.

companies like Google get it... companies like Microsoft will get there eventually and probably quicker than we think....

If we look at his map.... we see flickr, del.icio.us and craigslist representing the flat taxonomy school (tagging).
We then have GMail, Google Maps, start.com (they have earned some respect) and AJAX bigging up themselves on the web UI space (did you know that Sergey was really into HCI - figures -- right?)
We now understand the power of feedback loops and reputations systems and no one does it better than ebaY and amazon.
Power to the people -- enabling the long tail, Google Adesense and Google Local is an example of how to exploit the non-profitable 80% market..
Blogs -- are a way of recording chatter, lots of chatter, entwining hard and loose relationships through trackback/commenting. Cluster maps will allow us to see new relationships and correlations that we just wouldn't not have imagined.
Power to the people -- go forth and scribe!; Wikipedia; this is a classic example of anarchy; or as Tim O'Reilley puts it Radical Trust. It's not a perfect system; but imperfect systems are an important process in the grand cosmic scheme of things. And in the end this controlled chaos usually works out fine in the end.
Power to the nodes -- BitTorrent; is a peer-to-peer technology that scales up as more people use the network; perfectly designed for high performance peer2peer digital distribution. Again we see fault-tolerance and multi-node networks working together in harmony to deliver information in scaleable fashion.

Yet in all of this... as Scoble says no one mentioned RSS [and Podcasting]... surely the Tivo 'style' publish / subscribe model needs to be mentioned. RSS is being used in more ways than people had imagined (and probably in ways it shouldn't be used). Nevertheless, given the information overload we face and the urgency to get back in control, we are unwise to exclude RSS and (Podcasting with a healthy mixture of flat tagging thrown in) to radically sharpen our ability to control information.

No i don't work for Apple or Google

2005-09-08T16:19:00.000Z

but i wish i did :)

Talk about Google Talk

2005-09-01T17:25:00.000Z

Ahh... Google.. What can you say about them?

Ive been using Google Talk (GTalk) for the last week or so... and i am a complete convert. I have now stopped using Yahoo! Messenger and will probably come off MSN Messenger in the next 6-months.

Why? -- I mean its just another friggin' IM Client and not that functional either, right?

Well its the principle. In each generation there has been a company that truly dominated and influenced the computing era. In the 70's it was IBM, in the 80's we went through this painful transformational phase -- where it seemed like nothing terribly exciting happened, but out of that pain came the 90's and the Internet which Microsoft dominated through Windows. But if we were to look today and to the future, to find the one company that will leaved a marked and lasting impression on our day-to-day lives, that company is surely Google.

We can dismiss efforts like Google Talk but that would be missing point. I genuinely believe that when Google puts its mind to a concept or an idea, it has the ability to execute. To support that execution it has a global infrastructure platform to deploy onto and fairly robust advertising business model based on AdWords. It makes the effort in creating these applications effortless and much like Windows, can create the network effect due to the large number of users that would adopt it. In short it has the power to be life-changing.

But here's the point, just creating software doesn't mean people will come. The trick is to build software (and Services) that are simple, easy, intuitive and innovative.

Yeah-- but what i fear Google? - The companies mantra "do not be evil" -- is a value based ideology that sits very comfortably with the open-source free-thinking Wikipedia Internet oneness of humanity. Google believes in being benevolent. There is no reason to fear Google.

So that's the difference with Google. They have bright smart people that 'get it' and they have the platform to execute.

Getting back to Google Talk (GTalk), I'd like to congratulate the GTalk Development team Joe Beda, Chad Thornton, Gayle Laakmann and David Bau on a brilliant start to unify IM/Voice/Mail.

Don't trust what you see...

2005-08-13T21:10:00.000Z

"Your eyes can deceive you; don't trust them." - Obi Wan Kenobi

The 2 Squares labelled A and B are actually the same colour.

Check it out for youself if you don't believe me. Copy it into Paint /Photoshop and place the squares next to each other.

Weird huh? -- Why should you believe anything you see.

Visual aggregration of Google News

2005-08-11T10:40:00.000Z

An interesting way to read Google News

http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

"Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe."

BTW -- heres an alternative approach http://www.tenbyten.org/10x10.html, but i prefer NewsMap.

"Stay hungry. Stay Foolish" - says Steve Jobs to Stanford grads.

2005-06-18T09:29:00.000Z

A very inspiring speech from Steve Jobs... he has a lots of of love and passion to share ... and as he says "you got to love what you do".

Apple - OS X - "Tiger" - "Leopard" - Intel - "Well done Jobs!"

2005-06-13T13:35:00.000Z

Over the last few years, Apple has slowly started doing the right things. After the release of the iPod, the Mac G5, the macMini, the PowerBook, the new swanky Apple Stores, the release of OS X "Tiger", the groundswell emergence of PodCasting, the switch from PowerPC to Intel, the success of iTunes, the iPod "Halo" effect, it really is time for me to take stock of what is going on...

And i think, (i really do think), it looks interesting. It may even be the first indications of an Apple Tsunami....

Firstly, it was a master stroke by Steve Jobs, to switch Mac OS X to BSD Unix (Darwin project). Smart move Jobs.
Secondly, taking a leaf out of the Linux Open Source community. Make Darwin lean and mean, and based on a managed community distribution.
by letting Apple engineers innovate where they really like to in the Usability/User Mode Operating System. Voila 18-months later -- from a tub of baby fat -- out comes OS X "Tiger"!
Lets talk about OS X "Tiger"- Spotlight;Dashboard Widgets;iChat;Automator; Safari RSS; QuickTime (H.264) -- its remarkable the sheer number of tightly integrated features that are offered in what is an interim update.
Not only that. Jobs promises another release of OS X, "Leopard", by end of 2006, the same as when "Longhorn" is promised.
In the space of 2 years, Apple, has single-handedly re-invented the digital music market, and with a bit of luck may even become a significant part of the music industry supply-chain.

Look at the facts:

iPod sales. (5.3Millions units sold in 1Q 2005 -- 558% up from last year! - 15 Million sold worldwide -- It has 80% market-share of all hard-drive music players)
iTunes sales. (Half a Billion songs sold to-date! 1 Million sold in the first week -- 70% market-share for all online music download -- the Largest online music company in the World!).
iPod Shuffle sales (Apple has a 58% market-share of ALL Flash-players -- it has achieved this in only 6 months!)

Now what has the iPod, iTunes, iMac, iPod Shuffle got to do with anything...? Well its given many people the opportunity to look at Apple products, Apple software, Apple operating systems. This "Halo-effect" as analysts calls it has created a 10% conversion rate, not bad given the number of iPod sales...

Parallel to that -- the decision of Apple to switch from IBM Power PC (PPC) chips to Intel Pentium chips -- will have created another shudder at Redmond, afterall, Microsoft will be hyping up Longhorn with a lot of fanfare at about the same time that OS X "Leopard" comes to market. Given the technical advantage OS X "Tiger" already has over what we know about Longhorn, no doubt people will be looking with interest.

In fact you can see that the battlines are drawn, Steve Jobs is taking a more aggressive stance, trying to create the awareness in the consumer.

In fact, it certainly increases the pressure for Microsoft to get something out of the door in the same time frame as OS X "Leopard". Lets not also forget that with open-source virtualisation products like wine or hardware virtualisation like the dual-core Pentium M, running Windows apps on Apple OS X will be really easy.

I will certainly be looking forward to owning my first Apple Macintosh come this time next year 2006.

MBA - Left & Right brain economy

2005-05-16T21:46:00.000Z

Dan Pink as well as being a contributing writer for Wired magazine, was also in da big house (The White House) as the chief speech writer to Vice President Al Gore.

His book "A Whole New Mind" attempts to move the whole upside-down thinking (Charles Handy - "Age of Unreason") and emergent thinking (Steve Johnson - "Emergence") theories forward... In it he talks about how Western economies have been built on the left-sided brain rationale of analytics, sequence, logic and reduction -- "aka The Knowledge Worker".

He says, that this mindset is so deeply rooted, that even though industries have disappeared or are disappearing rapidly by taking advantage of globalisation and outsourcing - no serious thought has been given to how our institutions -- schools, colleges and universities should deal with the situation.

Should Western corporations continue to accept churned-out MBA grads that are not properly prepared with the additional supporting ride-side brain conceptual skills that are more and more likely to be required?

As Marc Cecere of Forrester Research says, "As corporations bred a generation of leaders focused on reducing costs, outsourcing and calculating investment metrics. Somehow we now expect them to move move from the cost-cutting mind-set to more innovative and strategic work."

Information Overload

2005-03-22T11:53:00.000Z

I think i am overwhelmed with Information.....

According to trendwatching.com - "New production processes, mass (!) distribution, technologies and communication channels, all enabling global economies of scale and scope, allow for virtually everything to be made and broadcast, at whatever specification, and whatever batch size.

- *China* India* Eastern Europe * $29 DVD players * Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Group's 8,530 TEU container ships * Airbus 380 * New H&M and Zara collections every week * Podcasting * Virtual worlds * 254 TV channels * Google AdWords. * RSS Overload * [Reality TV * Bulgarian property markets * BitTorrent * WiMax * geek to chic Nokia phones * Bvulgari and Gucci lines in Mumbai and Shanghai *]"

This pretty much sums up my symbiotic world, where the Hyper-World consumes the Real-World, through the Internet.

And what is left of the Real world?Global Warming, Geopolitical tensions in the Middle-East, the Falling Dollar, Islamic Fundamentalism, Consumer ridden dept, US Trade Deficit, ,Global Dimming, Social Unrest in Western/Eastern Europe, Property Bubbles, US Borrowing Deficit, rise in Nationalism, Fall in Education standards in schools, loss of morality on T.V., American Imperialism, Reduction in Shareholder value, loss of confidence in Money market currencies, Liberalised attitudes to Drugs, Increased Child pregnancy, Post-Tsunami mass guilt-driven donation appeals, Juvenile disorder, Political Correctness.... The list goes on....

Is the Real World and Hyper-Virtual world poles-apart?, do we care about both as much, or are we slowly leaving one behind.....?

I think back to the book that i read 2 years back... "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurziewel

Annoying Rich-media Flash Ads

2005-01-11T15:10:00.000Z

Pissing people off is not a great way of creating customer loyalty.

I don't know about you, but if im reading a particular page/website... there is usually a good reason for it, and i don't particulary like that web page being hijacked by some oversized and loud Flash advert.

When will advertisers realise that sticking a big ad in front of your customer is not going to convince them of much at all... except maybe installing software to disable it... Who worries about pop-up ads anymore?

If advertisers really want to convince us to buy something, they need to start using more passive marketing methods... Take for example, Google Ads, its highly targetted and doesn't piss people off.

Federated Identity Management

2004-12-13T15:47:00.000Z

Well ok. Not the most interesting subject.... But nevertheless here i was, sitting on the train on my way to work... and guess what... im listening to these folks from IBM, Microsoft, Sun and HP talking about Federated ID Management... What the heck!

I have not payed much attention in this space for some time... well not since the days of Microsoft Passport and Sun's Liberty Alliance (if it wasn't an alliance then.. it sure is now).

Anyhow... I got thinking that i'd actually forgotten what it was like to listen to people talk. You know that kind of chatty... comfy... night time radio chat ... Ovaltine moment... Right now most forms of communications rely on me actually writing or reading something... we use IM, SMS Messaging, e-mails, blogs... so it was pretty refreshing to hear these folks talk on my iPod.

I got to hear these legends who are responsible for others things including the WS-* specs talk about:

SAML, WS-Security, Liberty, Oasis.
Microsoft and Sun's differing view on how standards should be created.
Convergence between Liberty and WS-Security.
Why ID management is important enough that there aren't differing standards.
I liked Microsofts idea of a more informal trust management solution (Infocard) that meets the needs of ad-hoc/social/personal/collaborative situations, much like what is used in Groove and PGP) - Although the Liberty folks thought that Enterprises weren't interested in that... (i think thats an old skool security mindset.)

Anyhow getting back to Ovaltine... I like idea of an online directory based - offline radio broadcasting data cache. This time round the revolution will be Podcast.... right?

Google Desktop

2004-10-14T16:48:00.000Z

Google has a cunning way of keeping their little ideas slowly creep up on you.... We'd all heard about the Google Search desktop.. looks like its arrived!

This site here provides more information on their ambitions beyond just search... (e.g. gBrowser).

Following on from what a few people have been saying regarding Googles strategy a couple of things are probably clear now:

- They will leverage their vast knowlede of Global Internet Server infrastructure.

- They are focused on building Service Oriented Applications (this means server-side apps)

- If they do venture into the Browser space, it will be tightly integrated through all their server side applications (Search, Gmail, Picasso/Hello, Blogger, Google News, Google Groups) using XML Web Services.

- Their own cookie-based authentication works across applications.

Well all this leads me to believe that if they do extend Gbrowser (they may build it via a Web Services layer) that exposes this via a Mozilla type application.

Ive even heard one person say that Google are going to create a rebranded version of Mozilla/Firefox that integrates Google apps re-written in XUL instead of HTML. XUL is essentially an XML-based UI language that allows you to describe Windows-like user interfaces in XML.

This would allow Google to develop browser-based network-centric applications that have rich UI functionality that web developers only dream about. Think about it...

Some goodies...

2004-09-28T13:02:00.000Z

Annoyed with how long Acrobat 6 takes to load up? Have you noticed how the latest version of Adobe Acrobat has really piled on the functionality, memory footprint, and consequently the time it takes to start up? Well this little bit of code can disable 95% of the plug-ins on start up. Anti-Bloatware cop, now that i like.
Using GMail, who isn't right? Well this little bit of code, allows you to be notified when you get mail... Well hidden on Googles part.

"Going somewhere Solo?"

2004-09-20T23:23:00.000Z

I came across this website the other day.... and what with George Lucas releasing his '2004 version' of the Star Wars trilogy, i say 2004 edition, since he will now doubt tinker with it for a few years more...

Anyhow the website, pretty much sums up my sentiments on the specific subject...

Spider-Raja

2004-09-03T09:38:00.000Z

Whatever next!?

Yes it looks like our intrepid superhero is making his way to the streets of Mumbai and Delhi... Were talking about Spiderman India!

"Pavitr [Prabhakar] leaps around rickshaws and scooters in Indian streets, while swinging from monuments such as the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal."

This could be amazing...

Just imagine...

Spiderman teaming up with Indian mythological gods (e.g. Hanuman aka Monkeyman! or Ganesha aka ElephantMan).... fighting the 8-tentacled Dr Octupus or maybe even the 10-headed Ravana!

Friendster

2004-09-01T13:40:00.000Z

Ok i admit it i've gone and done it... (no i didn't put an order for the new G5 iMac!)

I finally got round to signing up for Friendster last week, i had originally thought about joining it last October, but curiosity finally got the better of me....

Thoughts...? Well i used to use sixdegrees.com about 5 years ago, and it was based on the notion, actually a theory, that everyone in the world is connected to each other by just 6 people.. Its a great theory, but seemingly impossible mathematically or physically to prove, but with the internet these type of social networks are quite easy to prove and validate. Anyhow the website disappeared all of a sudden around 2000...

So it was with this thinking, and with a more net-savvy population, i stumbled onto Friendster.

So heres the things you can do...
- create a profile of your 'interests', 'jobs', 'books', 'movies', 't.v. programmes', 'about me', 'who id like to meet'...
- stick mugshots of yourself up on the site..
- invite your friends to join in (and do the same).
- create social networks (1st degree, 2nd degree, 3rd degree ) of associations..
- search people against any-one of the above profiles..

yeah... and?
Well i dont know what all the fuss is..... it probably would be more fun... if everyone i knew used friendster... and then it would be fun to see how this six-degrees theory would work...

If i want to find people who read the same books or listen to same music or watch the same movies... theres a much more powerful database of that information available... its called amazon... thats if they decide they want to go down the social computing route...

"River of Gods" SF novel by Ian McDonald

2004-07-13T14:51:00.000Z

India set in 2047, where there has been no Monsoon for 2.5 years, a population nearing 2 Billion people, strife at the holy city of Varanasi, AI Machines being hunted down by a Dharma cop called Krishna, genetically enhanced Brahmins, a melting pot of philosophy, meta-physics, cyberpunk interspersed by the sights, sounds and values of India... Literally out of this world!

More on this new SF novel by Ian McDonald, when i get round to reading it...!!!

Here's some comments..
The first indication that McDonald is profoundly alert to issues of society and culture is the simple fact that River of Gods is set in India. It is refreshing to see a vision of the future that is less than completely Western in focus, and which clearly recognises that countries such as India are currently advancing rapidly in terms of scientific research and business interests. River of Gods is a book that acknowledges that the future is bound to bring huge cultural and political shifts in global power, and it also recognises that events of great significance can, do and will happen elsewhere than in the West.

But of course, this distinction between multiplicity and singularity is a little simplistic, philosophically speaking. The Hindu gods are ultimately all manifestations of the one reality, all incarnations out of the fundamental Brahma. Likewise, the many separate programs and functions that make up an [(AI)]aeai are all ultimately part of a single mind, a single consciousness. And in just the same way, the multiple plot strands of River of Gods, told from the point of view of so many different people, are all ultimately part of the one story. Each character's personal narrative comes together with all the others to form one vast and complex single story. And what a story it is!

You can read another review from the Guardian here.

iPod snobs?

2004-07-02T13:37:00.000Z

This article in the New York Press, talks about the all too often human psyche of jealousy.

"THE BLINDING WHITE cords flowing out of my sublimely waxed ears say it all: I'm in no mood for talking, and my income bracket makes cumbersome CDs so unnecessary, so Second Wave. With thousands of songs from my iPod at my polished fingertips, I can now walk through life effortlessly, angelically, shielded by the anodized aluminum of my futuristic listening device. I can strut with confidence and disinterest past those in my chosen path. I'm cut off from your dirty world by my ear buds and their enhanced sound and noise-suppression features. I'm a creature of advertising, a walking cliche with 25-minute skip protection and Volkswagen dreams. Shit, my profile even resembles the faceless, platonic form in the billboard."

I mean, give me a break!... I take great offence that we iPod'ians should be marginalised as some sort of fashion conscious, Sunday Times reading, urbanite clique.

Were not Volkswagen drivers, we don't wink when we see another iPod'ian on the train.

Im sorry, the only reason they moan about people who have iPod's, (heh heh, im gonna say it), is because they can't affort one! I feel a whole lot better now. :)

I can think of a few people that fit this particular quote! :-)

2004-06-11T08:51:00.000Z

"He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Groucho Marx

BluePod - Apple Rendezvous & Wifi

2004-06-03T09:54:00.000Z

I have seen the future and i believe this small Eastern-European software company has cracked it...

They taken the Apple Rendezvous presence protocol and ported it on to .NET/Pocket PC through Wifi.

Perrsonally i would have liked to seen support for GPRS and Bluetooth, rather that Wi-fi, since they are more pervasive....

check out the article..

IT-Analysis.com

So Don

2004-04-12T22:02:00.000Z

I noticed this little snippet from Don Boxs spoutlet...

Earlier this week, I wanted to install a significant piece of Microsoft software on my machine. The first step of the setup program was not "Install" but rather "Plan." When I selected that step, I was prompted by a ~100K HTML file with all of the prereqs, QFEs and side effects I needed to understand before installing. Given that I have almost no additional time nor room in my brain to process this data, I opted to not install the software and instead dedicate that time to letting the product manager know why "he lost me at hello." Hopefully it will get fixed.

Is it me or is he getting just a little bit irritated with the pre-reqs for installing BizTalk 2004?

Of course this is all just speculation.... :-)

How to learn about BizTalk 2004

2004-04-06T09:08:00.000Z

People have been dropping me e-mails asking me what is the best way to get into BizTalk and how to learn it.... My advice is to stop reading blogs, and start playing with the code! Only kidding!

To that end the i would highly recommend downloading the newly updated BizTalk 2004 SDK. There are loads of examples that include (orchestrations convering compensation, adapter patterns including the SQL adapter, using the BAM API, invoking the Business Rules engine, Custom Pipelines, building custom Functoids, creating WMI scripts). Its a fantastic resource, so get your head buried in that stuff and you'll be fine...

Also to reduce anyones day-to-day stress, its worth keeping an eye on the Microsooft Knowledge Base for known issues with BizTalk 2004.

Also MSDN has posted some new articles on process integration using BizTalk 2004 and service-oriented integration

More deliberations around Bus topology with BizTalk

2004-03-31T11:10:00.000Z

Scoott Woodgate has posted an excellent whitepaper that describes the guts of BizTalk 2004, particularly around the architecture of the MessageBox and Logical Hosts.

The question i posed to Scott, was that within the context of subscriptions, how does this 'BizTalk Group' or 'MessageBox network' work across an enterprise WAN? My earlier understanding came down to how practical will it be run a globally distributed MessageBox architecture, are there latency issues that make this unworkable, and therefore we need look other multi-cast approaches to delivering an ESB?

From a BizTalk perspective does that mean we have no choice, but to employ Zonal BizTalk Groups, and all the implications that go with that from an Operational/Admin/Routing point of view.

thoughts please...

Groove Networks

2004-03-27T03:22:00.000Z

I haven't blogged about Groove Networks, which is strange since its a real cool technology, and ive been watching it on and off for the last 3 years... Actually i remember using it way back when the first beta came out, though the problem back then was that machines were not powerful enough for the task, unlike today.

Anyway, Groove have come out with Groove 3.0 (beta), and well, i reckon they have taken a very great technology (way ahead of anything Microsoft has currently or will have in the next 5 years) and made its even more pervasive with the way it integrates into Windows.

Check here for a quick review on the product. I really ought to get more excited about this technology in my blog (it deserves it), though lately my excitement has been mostly on BizTalk 2004.

A Danish poem

2004-03-07T23:32:00.000Z

"The noble art of losing face may one day save the human race". I like that quote, i really do.

XML Web Services in BizTalk 2004

2004-02-06T18:17:00.000Z

Joe Klug from Microsoft, had lots of new snippets on the Web Services support in BizTalk 2004 server:

1. Publishing a Web Service
Through the BizTalk Web Services Publishing Wizard.
(i) expose an orchestration or a schema as a Web Service.
(ii) support of unknown SOAP headers.

2. Consuming a Web Service
Add Web Reference
(i) through this you can re-use and aggregate existing Web Services.

3. SOAP Headers
- SOAP Headers are supported for published and consumed web services. A known SOAP header is as defined in the WSDL, and unknown headers are sent in message but not defined in the WSDL (so BizTalk wouldn't know about them), and aren't supported when consuming a web service.

4. WSDL extension
- WSDL Extension - supports 2 SOAP extensions. You can replace the schema defined within the WSDL; this is useful since due to a limitation in the current version of ASP.NET (will be fixed in Whidbey) the generated file can produce some loss of information during the class conversion (e.g. maxOccurs and minOccurs).

5. Type-Agnostic Ports
- BizTalk 2004 allows for the creation of Type-Agnostic ports which is a port that can receive any type of XML document:-
(i) Its means that the Message type is an XML Document (System.XML.XMLDocument .NET namespace)
(ii) Such a document could also be a multi-part message type.

Here is a pattern of how you could abstract the web services layer across all your BizTalk subscriptions.

(i) You could create a dummy orchestration using this type-agnostic port which receives and sends a XML document.
(ii) You could publish it as a web service, but never actually deploy that orchestration.
(iii) You could create multiple orchestrations that subscribe to different types of message, but only have single web service receive point for multiple different message types.

6. WSE Adapter for BizTalk 2004
- Hopefully by the end of 2Q2004 (Beta in Feb/March) Microsoft will release a WSE Adapter for BizTalk 2004. This will be based on WSE 2.0, and be fully configured through policy assertions rather than code. WSE standards for Web Services Extensions, and provides a mechanism to deliver a product-grade Web Services stack that can be used across server Operating Systems and products. Since OS release-cycles occur every 3-4 years, WSE contains the latest Web Services specifications. Therefore this BizTalk adapter will piggyback on the WSE life-cycle, and will very likely become the future 'Indigo' adapter for BizTalk. There will need be some form of migration from WSE to the Indigo Message bus (can't say Indigo!)

7. SSO confusion in Sharepoint and BizTalk 2004
- Microsoft BizTalk 2004 Server and SharePoint both employ different solutions for Single-Sign On (SSO), from what is understood SharePoint will change its SSO solution to support BizTalk. It will be possible to generate BTS SSO tickets when using Web Services (SOAP headers).

Microsoft are in the process of writing a whitepaper to clarify this all, since architecturally its a bit confusing that there are different approaches to SSO, including an agreement between the two product groups going forward about supporting a 'Single' single sign-on solution (well done Microsoft - duh!)

The New Face of the Silicon Age

2004-01-29T13:17:00.000Z

Another piece of commentary from Wired magazine, which talks about globalization and outsourcing of IT jobs, and how India's dominance in the knowledge-based 21st Century is causing plight for the pissed-off programmer.

...Some US firms now outsource their PowerPoint presentations to India, a blow to the pride of managers everywhere. From this perspective, India looks like an artificial intelligence, the superbrain that never arrived in silico. No wonder workers tremble... .. .

. .. ...The Bhagavad Gita opens with two armies facing each other across a field of battle. One of the warriors is Prince Arjuna, who discovers that his charioteer is the Hindu god Krishna. The book relates the dialog between the god and the warrior - about how to survive and, more important, how to live. One stanza seems apt in this moment of fear and discontent. "Your very nature will drive you to fight," Lord Krishna tells Arjuna. "The only choice is what to fight against." Read more from Wired Magazine....

BizTalk 2004 and Microsoft position on ESB and Indigo

2004-01-28T15:18:00.000Z

Below is some discussion about Microsofts definition on what is or isn't an ESB, and how that relates to BizTalk 2004. Included are some comments from Don Box on Indigo, and how Indigo fits in with the SOA model. Scott Woodgate then pitches in on the BizTalk strategy to leverage the underlying platform. And how this will continue in the future with the support of Indigo adapters for cross enterprise connectivity.

This thread appeared (although its not there now) on microsofts public forums microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.indigo and first reported by winfx247.com

Question/
Will this still be a function of BizTalk and if so how will you guys reposition BizTalk from EAI to ESB. As I understand it Indigo will serve as a message bus, I think it will be important for you guys to soon make it clear what you plans are in this area.

Answer/
Don Box [MSFT] (VIP)
I'm not sure what ESB is, but here's the Indigo/BTS story.

Indigo can work with existing BTS implementations in that they both support SOAP and WSDL.

The version of BTS after Jupiter will use Indigo directly. This brings Indigo's security, RM, and TX stack to BTS.

DB

----- Marlon Smith wrote: -----

Will this still be a function of BizTalk and if so how will you guys reposition BizTalk from EAI to ESB. As I understand it Indigo will serve as a message bus, I think it will be important for you guys to soon make it clear what you plans are in this area.

Christian Weyer
I guess by ESB he means Enterprise Service Bus ... just like adding a new
word to the SOA buzzword bingo :-)
http://www.cbdiforum.com/public/news/index.php3?id=1326

Cheers,
--
Christian Weyer
[Microsoft Regional Director, Germany]
[MVP ASP.NET & XML Web Services]

** XML Web Services: http://www.xmlwebservices.cc/
** Weblog: http://weblogs.asp.net/cweyer/

"Don Box [MSFT]" wrote in message
news:52D46B5F-B004-4BE6-BB3F-63168434F7F5@microsoft.com...
[Original message clipped]

a message bus, I think it will be important for you guys to soon make it
clear what you plans are in this area.

--
Christian Weyer
[Microsoft Regional Director, Germany]
[MVP ASP.NET & XML Web Services]

** XML Web Services: http://www.xmlwebservices.cc/
** Weblog: http://weblogs.asp.net/cweyer/
--
Scott Woodgate $MS$
--
I'll jump into this thread as the BizTalk guy. What Don says is correct but
I'd like to break it down for everyone:

- Indigo provides support for secure, reliable, transacted "web" services
which is obviously pretty important :)

- Indigo unifies ASP.NET, DCOM, COM+ etc. This point is important because
today BizTalk Server 2004 uses ASP.NET ASMX APIs under the covers for its
web services support (we didn't build our own WS stack we leveraged the one
in the platform and provided value add infrastructure around it for
transformations, graphical point and click etc.) and tommorrow we will
transition those APIs to Indigo

- Indigo is a transport in the terminology of BizTalk Server (just as MSMQ,
MQSeries, Web Services)

- Because Indigo is a transport and BizTalk Server has an extensible adapter
framework for transports (application or technology) I demonstrated a
prototype at PDC an "Indigo" adapter (cf. the Web Service adapter we use
today). Adapter is probably a funny word to use its just the generic point
in the architecture to plugin transport support the support will be native
in the next generation in the "Longhorn" timeframe when Indigo ships.

- Adding to that Indigo is an API (not a set of tools). One of the cool
things BTS2004 provides even in an all "web services" environment is super
rich tracking infrastructure and a variety of design/management tools.

- BTS2004 will continue to support heterogeneous "messaging" <- which is an
overloaded word in case you didn't notice microsoft message queuing does
messaging biztalk server does "messaging" they are different but related
things, same thing with indigo which provides the migration path from msmq
and biztalk server, and of course orchestration/workflow moving further
forward (and a bunch of other innovations :))

- BizTalk Server will continue to support EAI, I'll dodge the ESB point
because there are various analyst interpretations there, and SOA as it
does in 2004 in the future obviously enhanced with the underlying platform
that Indigo provides.

My PDC presentation for those who are interested is at
http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/scottwoo. I'll probably put up a video of the
demo in the next few days. The important thing here is that both BizTalk
Server and Indigo are innovating together to move forward the platform and
the server in the "Longhorn" timeframe and your investment in BizTalk Server
2004 is a strong investment to move forward.

Cheers,
Scott.

--
Scott Woodgate $MS$ (VIP)
--
From a BizTalk Server perspective we are all about leveraging what is in the
platform and then adding value on top of it. As these lower level management
features/functionalities become available in the platform we will leverage
(and actually in some cases enhance them directly) and continue to innovate
on top of them.

Cheers,
Scott.

BizTalk and Publish/Subscribe, EAI and the Enterprise Service Bus concept

2004-01-28T14:25:00.000Z

So every-1 is talking about enterprise service bus architectures (basically pub/subscribe) and how that is a more cost effective and easier approach to EAI than the traditional hub/spoke model. Well first off, the notion of an ESB was first banded around by Sonic Software (of SonicMQ fame), and then legitimised by Gartner and more recently by IBM. Sonic have a product called Sonic ESB that they believe differentiates them from the traditional EAI vendors.

Their definition of an ESB as i could understand it is that it must have the following characteristics:-
- must be a 1st generation product (i.e. built after 2000)
- it must be built from the ground-up using XML, XSD, XSLT standards.
- MOM(asynch, pub/sub, store & forward) / Transformation / Content based routing.
- Highly connected (e.g. Web Services / J2EE)
- Monitoring (Helath and Activity Tracking)
- Distributed deployment.
- Single point of management / control.
- Location / Technology transparency.
- Fault Avoidance (ease-of-use) / Fault Tolerance (intelligent routing) / Redundancy.

In simple terms here is how ive differentiated ESB and EAI.
ESB - Simple intelligent routing, distributed peer-based architecture.
EAI - MOM, explicit routing, central hub, service broker.

On the face of things it looks like BizTalk 2004 has a lot of these features, but im not yet sure that BizTalk has a fully distributed deployment architecture that provides location transparency and a single point of management, i may be wrong - ( im just writing my current thoughts!), but i think the issue may related to how you can distribute BizTalk servers across an enterprise with multiple data-centers (over a WAN).

BizTalk 2004 has the concept of a BizTalk group (a domain or federated group in other words), which is effectively the scope for Administration, Routing, Message Tracking and all other services. All related BizTalk receive and processing servers are part of this scope. All servers within a particulary BizTalk group use the same MessageBox. This is an important point, since how and where you deploy your servers are impacted on the fact of the single MessageBox design.

Lets think about this, once a message is received (through the Receive Port and Receive Pipeline) it ends up in the MessageBox (where any meta-data like promoted properties of the schema are stored). Any interested parties ( whether its a map, rules engine, an orchestration or even a send port/pipeline) can subscribe to that message.

The MessageBox relies completely on SQL sever for its persistence, and since BizTalk does have a scale-out story by having multiple MessageBoxes (you still need to have a master MessageBox database - i am planning to test this.) you may be able to deploy those MessageBoxes in a distributed manner, although im not sure that is its primary design. I assume that it was designed to improve the scalability of the primary Master MessageBox. In any case there are better ways of improving the scalability, namely scale-up SQL Server (more on this later).

So BizTalk allows you to have multiple MessagesBoxes, you may be able to distribute these across the enterprise (although this may not be its primary design, and may introduce considerable latency issues), but assuming it does, it means that all the distributed BizTalk receive/processing servers can be part of a single BizTalk Group, and if that is the case you get the complete benefits of location transparency, and a single point of management.

BizTalk 2004 is starting to heat up...!

2004-01-20T18:02:00.000Z

Just received the Release Candidate on BizTalk 2004 (BTSEvalRC - 74367-000-0000007-05479). It sure has been tidied up. Not only that, but there seems to be generally more chatter on the forums and with a lot more material popping up.

Anyway this entry will be a placeholder of references (heres a few for starters):-

BizTalk PowerToys from luke nyswonger.
El Grego ( i don't know his name) has a sample which shows how to use the Enterprise Instrument Framework to generate an application event (in this case a suspended message caused by a send port retry failure). Although BizTalk generates a plethora of WMI events that can be picked up by MOM (and NetIQ soon).
Martijn Hoogendoorn has a Suspended Queue Listener Windows Service which basically listens out for the WMI event and allows you to then do what you want with it... It works in real-time and batch mode as well... Get it here.
Brian Loesgens has some cool code that implements service windows for send/receive locations. Get it here.
Stephan Bouillon has a real cool component that replaces the standard XML validator used in the BizTalk default pipeline. Rather than the standard behaviour of suspending the message it sends an error to the messagebox, this allows you to have a error handling orchestration that can subsribe to these messages... This greatly improves the end-to-end management of BizTalk, product team why did you not think about this!!?!
Another bright chap Stephen Thomas has some interesting pieces on sequential convoying, etc...
Jeff Lynch is doing some pretty harcore mapping examples, especially around conditional outputs for linenumbers.
Giles Zunino has a good example of how you can archive any messages as they are passing through the BizTalk pipeline. This i see as a standard service that ought to be provided by BizTalk, and perhaps through HAT you can achieve this. However companies may have compliance issues which deem the need for a more legally watertight solution. Anyhow something that i had been thinking about also.
The Core Engineering team from the Biztalk product team are now getting on the case, this really does raise the quality of information coming out. No other vendor can match this openness. Well done Kevin B Smith and Lou Graber
Jan Thielens Blog has some good best practices on BizTalk 2004, particularly around foundation components like error logging, exceptionstions, and XML dis-assembly (since the product documentation only covers CSV)
Mike Holdorf's been keeping it real with some pains and best practices on BizTalk.
Charles Young from Solidsoft has some interesting articles on BizTalk Orchestrations and Transactions.
Carlo Poli has is having some fun with versioning BizTalk assemblies over here...
A new book on BizTalk 2004 development on Amazon.
Another Christoph has some development learnings on using BizTalk orchestrations.
The Middleware company has released a .NET community for serverside, enterprise specialists, its called strangely enough, theServerside.NET!!
Some early ideas on naming standards for BizTalk orchestrations.
Scott Woodgate who is the programme manager of the BizTalk Server / Jupiter Programme.
An interesting presentation from Claesen Christof on BizTalk 2004 and how it can be used as a Enterprise Service Bus. And another on a simple and easy BizTalk 2004 overview.
Darren Jefford is having some fun with MSMQT and MSI Exception handling at his blog over here.. way to go!
The gotdotnet community has a number of code samples and its own special workspace for BizTalk.
Mike Woods has his own msn workspace which include the hands on labs that was available at TechEd and PDC.
You can find many of the presentations and videos from the PDC 2003 here . (its only here for 6 months so hurry!)
You can find many of the presentations and videos from the various TechEds 2003 here.
Benjamin Mitchell has some interesting things to say regarding Indigo, BizTalk and Yukon (Service broker). More on his comments later.
Microsoft's BizTalk 2004 beta newsgroup.
Microsofts BizTalk public newgroup on all things BizTalk.

More to come soon...

P900 and playing DVD ( using MPEG4)

2004-01-08T11:05:00.000Z

This is a fantastic example of what you can do with the new Sony Ericsson P900. Its built in MP4 player (actually the p800 has this too, but not a great screen) allows you to play a full-length movie.

To do this, you will need to rip (from dvd to mpeg), encode (convert to mp4), and transfer (to memory stick)

WinFS - Why its a big deal..

2003-12-04T02:12:00.000Z

The following snippet from Ray Ozzie succinctly sums up why he reckongs WinFS is a big deal. These things take time, but WinFS will open up some really fascinating changes that we can expect in the next 5 years (or so). The 'network-effect' of WinFS, assuming we end up ubiquitously storing primary schemas types about at least our identities and profiles, means we will be able to do some pretty amazing things with personal communication and collaboration. Searching my digital assets, (i.e music, photos, documents) against standard schemas that make cross-referencing, searching and inferencing of my content, and content that i am interested in, extremely easy. IMHO, this makes WinFS the most significant part of Longhorn.

"No - the "big deal" about WinFS IMHO isn't Search. Like Web Services - it's about the fact that it's an attempt to get a higher level of interoperability between programs through agreement on schemas. Hopefully, toward the goal of bootstrapping network effects, and unintended/innovative consequences, on the client. WinFS defines an extensible object model and persistence mechanism, as well a rich and extensible "relationship" mechanism that can be used to intertwingle objects with that are somehow related to one another. Some kinds of stock relationships are obvious: common Author, common Artist, common Location, common Priority, etc. Some may be more subtle or domain-specific: common Project, common Client, common Contributors, or even manual and thus not-easily-described ties." More....

The proud owner of an iPod 20Gb

2003-11-29T01:22:00.000Z

I am now the proud owner of an iPod (3rd generation) 20Gb. Its just quite simply fantastic. Yeah, you can buy cheaper imitations, but they are just that, imitations.

Its by far the slimmest device, thanks to the use of the new 1.8" hdd from toshiba, and seamlessly integrates with USB on my pc.

My next plan is to get hold of the iTrip, essentially, an FM transmitter, which allows me to be my own personal pirate radion station on the move ;-). The reality is that i can hook it up to my car-radio and tune it in.. More on that once ive gotten it working...

Home made Pizza

2003-11-12T00:14:00.000Z

The trick is to make a good tomato sauce for the pizza base.

- 4 x tomatoes.
- 1tbs Tomatoe puree.
- a big dollop of tomato pesto
- mixed herbs.
- 2 tbs Olive oil.
- 50ml x water.
- 1 clove of garlic.

Reduce in a sauce pan for 15mins..

You can make or buy your own pizza base, its something that i haven't learned to do, but i would like to.

Spread the tomato sauce evenly (but not too heavily) over the pizza base.

Sprinkle liberally with mozarella cheese.

Place in the oven for 12 minutes.

Now, when it comes out, its ready to *serve*. Just add the 2 SPECIAL ingredients. Prosciutto Ham and Rocket leaves.

Place up to 10 strips of prosciutto / parma ham over the pizza. And then sprinkle Rocket leaves over that (lots of it). I like rocket leaves there is something quite rustic and peppery about the flavour and smell.

Finally, sprinkle some sea salt & ground pepper and your ready to eat. trust me its simply gorgeous. :)

So, What EXACTLY is the Matrix!!!??

2003-11-11T01:01:00.001Z

I came back come from seeing The Matrix Revolutions (yes i know the picture above relates to Reloaded) late on Saturday night, was i the only person who when the lights went up looked around at everyone else and thought, WTF?

Now before i get started, let me say that i did like the Matrix Revolutions. But that is because i can see the 'big-picture' - maybe because as a s/w architect i need to look at the world through many eyes.

RANT
So let me get this off my chest before we proceed. Firstly i have read and heard many reviews of the Matrix movies, and they range from "its got great special-effects, but theres no story" or "NEO is all-powerful its boring watching him fight Agent Smith" or "all the actions seqeunces were just there to fill up the movie" to "I didn't understand a word that the Architect was talking about" to "well i never liked Phantom Menace anyway.." . Jeez!

Get a hold of yourself, and stop trying to be so DAMNED cynical, the problem is that opnions are like arseholes, everyone has one. Its easier and 'smarter' to be critical than to admit that you liked something, or even to attempt to address the subjects that the Warchowski artists were trying to raise in the movies.

'So what other movies does Suresh like?' - i hear you say. Well i liked Solaris, i liked Mullholland Drive, and i liked the Pirates of the Caribbean, its ok folks, you don't lose your street cred for saying that you like this movie, or that you dig Keira Knightly, or thought that Johnny Deppwas excellent.

You see, its ok if you used to fancy Britney, or would like to groove like Beyonce or wish that your girlfriend had a bum like Kylie or youve realised Saira Mohan is such a doll, or you REALLY do think Christina Aguilerra is DIRRRRTY! Its ok, we still love you, the point is, you should see the beauty in what you see, so you don't have to be critical to be accepted, everyone forgives you, you mom still loves you, you weren't the only person that your school music teacher was stern at, and you know what?, you can give a two-finger salute to all those people that said that you wouldn't amount to much, cos they were wrong! Right. Now that i've gotten that off my chest, back to the Matrix movies.

DIFFERENT LEVELS
These movies can be seen on different levels, and each movie offers us more to think about, more to re-evaluate. I think this movie has since the days of Star Wars, brought to the masses a rare combination of philosophy, religion, mythology, meta-physics with references to buddhism, greek mythology, hindu philosophy, and gnostic christianity that was cleverly spun through a 'post modern-generation Y-ultra-geek-comic book-anime-kung-fu-action-fetish culture-dystoptian future' story, that would otherwise have been ignored by todays generation. (if you thought writing that was hard, just try saying it!!)

SUMMARY
In short, if you liked big guns, kung-fu, or wanted to get past the 'dollar-a-quote, strawberry gum, quasi-religious diatribe' (as ive heard it described!) then you would have got something out of it. The Warchowskis artists should be applauded for achieving this, but i will not sympathise with the person, that is critical, and that was neither entertained, nor wanted to learn or think.

I think the Wachowski Brothers should tackle another Matrix movie, perhaps they can introduce the notion of another human cancer that seems rife in this world, and that is human cynicism and apathy.

IT-Analysis.com - Will the Process Integrators Integrate?

2003-11-10T13:37:00.000Z

This article by Peter Abrahams is spot on on the current vendors marketplace for ETL/EAI/BPM...

Its exactly what ive been thinking over the last year... Ultimately the application server (read IDE) vendors that will win in this space. EAI and BPM is not a black box solution, so it will be driven by the businesses and the developers implementing the solutions.

LA Universal Studios

2003-10-30T16:59:00.000Z

A special thanks to Scott Woodgate for enduring a whole evening with us at Universal Studios.

Between Jody, Chris and myself we felt priviliged!

BTW, 1.8 Million lines of code in BizTalk 2004 i was right!

pdc updates

2003-10-27T17:27:00.001Z

This years PDC was primarily focused on the following:

- Windows 2005 / 2006 (aka Longhorn)
- SQL Server 2004 (aka Yukon)
- Visual Studio 2004 (aka Whidbey)

There was off course a whole load of other things going on at the PDC namely (previews on BizTalk Jupiter and ASP.NET v2.0 - more about this further below), but it was really hard not to get drawn into the thrust of the conference which was the next generation of Windows Server (Longhorn), reckoned by Microsoft, to be their biggest release since Windows 95, and its obvious to see why.

WinFS is pretty cool. A new file system that relies on SQL Server, and sits on top of NTFS that provides an application layer to the file system. Through the definition of schemas, and schema relationships, (Yes were talking MetaData!) WinFS is able to build dynamic views on all object types. Additionally other core appilcations like Contacts become a primary WinFS schema type, with a UI that is bound against it. For example. this means that application vendors can take advantage of this rather than building its own silo based contact list. As Jim Allchin said, "Data is trapped in the application.". WinFS will allow us to get to that data more easily, to build more meaningful relationships across these types, and allow us to search and give us contextual access.

Finally, the task centric view of the desktop will eventually appear, and we will be able to say good ridance to the file based one that we have endured for the 20 - 30 years. And not a moment too soon, given the sheer amount of data we are capturing in our hard disks every day. Its good to see that Microsoft are finally able to execute on the vision of an object oriented desktop, where previous attempts like Cairo, Pink and Taligent back in the very early 90's failed.

As an aside, its reckoned, that within the next decade or so disk storage will become so cheap that we will be able to record every second of our lives from the day we are born till we die... Imagine being able to fast-forward or rewind through ones complete recored life, i kid you not. it will will happen. Anyway, i don't think that WinFS needs to contend with such challenges (just yet).

As an aside, it wil be interesting to see how WinFS/LongHorn compares to the work sponsored by Mitch Kapoors and the Chandler product. Whilst trying to solve simliar problems of Information management on the desktop. Chandler approach takes an e-mail centric way of solving this.

built in rss reader in longhorn - oh yes.

Avalon - a Unified presentation model for web and windows, yes thats right, both!; Microsoft has taken the next evolutionary steps from the .NET framework, which had already unifiied Windows apps (System.Windows.Forms via Win32), Web apps (System.Web via IIS), Web Services (System.Web.Services via WSE) and replaced this all with a new UI framework called Avalon which will will be acessed through the new Windows API (WinFX).

This means for the first time ever, a developer can focus on the functionality of the application, rather than worry about what programming model or skills are required to deploy it.

Now lets be clear about this, the Avalon UI, will be accessilble through the .NET framework(don't know what release it will be called) or through a new XML declarative programming language called XAML. XAML is Microsofts attempt to offer a first class scripting language that is superior to DHTML, that when compiled (or interpreted) will run as managed IL code in the .NET framework. There are intermediary formats known as BAML and CAML (yes!) that allows binary and IL representations of the XAML code for faster over the wire delivery.

** Now let me just re-iterate, Microsoft has produced a new XML based declarative language which which maps 1-to-1 to the new WinFX UI/Avalon object namesapce for building applications for the web and windows. This is a fundamental change to how people will write UI applications in the future!! **

This is earliest evidence of what Microsoft has been saying for the last few years that to get the full richness of developing applications you need a much richer language than HTML. Writing managed code or XAML to the Avalon UI, means that you are writing directly to DirectX and not GDI, so you will get some pretty fancy looking vecor based user interface on the desktop (much like Macromedia Flash). This is probably earliest evidence that HTML's time is slowly coming to an end.

The benefits are obvious for developers will be able to build applications without worrying about web or windows, which is fine as long as your operating system or browser can render XAML! I suspect we won't be hearing the last about XAML and it may end up changing a bit in the course of the next 2-3 years!

Indigo - boy where do i even start with this... In short its a transport API that will converge the different middleware layers that are Enterprise Services, .NET remoting, MSMQ, COM+/MTS exposed through a web Services framework. This Web Services framework is based on existing work Microsoft has been doing to build a Web Services Architectures (known as GXA or GWA) and their work with OASIS on WS-n standards (where n=("policy" | "security" | "transactions" | "Coordination" ....etc..). Anyhow, my head is still hurting going through Don Box's sessions...entertaining as they may be ;-)

Longhorn identity management is another area which deserved more attention, this will be managed at the OS layer through a simple trust model where a physical exchange (on the phone) of the fingerprint of the users public key is used to establish identity. There is much more to this, but i didn't have time to go through it (just yet!)

BizTalk Jupiter - Well its not exactly Jupiter, but the early signs of how they intend to componentize some of the functionality in BizTalk and make it 're-hostable' in other server products like CMS, Commerce Server. In the demonstrations that they had at the PDC, they showed how the lightweight orchestration engine could be used within Windows SharePoint Server. What was remarkable was the seamless integration between Microsoft Word and SharePoint, with the worflow process being managed both server and client side.

BizTalk Indigo - Additionally, Scott Woodgate's presentation showed the integration points between BizTalk 2004 Server and future products like Yukon (SQL Server) and Indigo (Longhorn). He actually showed us how we could easily bind an indogo adapter to a BizTalk port and and undertake a regular BizTalk orchestration with out having to worry about the complexities of reliability, transactionality, assured delivery of Web Services... Also he showed how in SQL Server (Yukon) you could do control flow process management of a ETL through the SQL Server DTS. The DTS as we know it has changed substantially from the previous version, and offers a palette of orchestration components for managing this process. I preumse this orchestration engine has been embedded in Yukon.

ASP.net 2.0 - From what i understand the design goals for the dev team was to reduce the amount of code written by a developer by 50%. That a pretty phenonmenal challenge, and shows they are making the lives of developers easier (read: redundant). Features include ADO.NET (much less code), Master Page templates, pagination of the grid controls, login and authentication controls, user personalisation, VB.NET debugging improvements. I don't want to elaborate on this too much as there is probably a whole load of stuff out there.

LA fires

2003-10-27T00:24:00.000Z

l dont know what the cost of an AT&T gprs call from Houston is, but right now i couldnt care!

Ive been waiting at the exec lounges at Continental for the last 6 hours! waiting to get on a flight to LA for this years PDC.

Anyhow, lessons learned from Houston:

1. Belleaire Broiler Burger bar
2. Big trucks
3. carwash for 50 cents.
4. Houstonian hospitality

How the brain thinks - scary!

2003-09-17T22:52:00.000Z

i found this at Mitch Kapor's Weblog:
"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat
ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you
can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed
ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Web services, SOA and Service Bus architectures

2003-09-11T16:51:00.000Z

This is an interesting article which talks about the roles of Web Services, Services Oriented Architectures (SOA), and the role of EAI.

I have to say that there is a lot new thinking in this area, which a lot of vendors are struggling to come to terms with, its far from clear, many have a legacy to protect, and a vision that they need to articulate.

With all of this, its too easy to look at nirvana and think that we will someday be connected in this enterprise-galactic glue of process managed asynchronous messaging that is location, technology, and vendor transparent!

Whats clear, is that the ideas are much further ahead than where most enterprises in reality are at.

P800 phone blog

2003-08-24T00:21:00.000Z

"this is a test on my SE P800. cool it works! The Opera browser has done a really good good job in rendering the pages in edit mode.... thankfully the blospot templates are coded in XHTML"

I have since then been doing more research into how i can use my P800/Symbian phone to upload pictures/commentary on the fly... it seemed to me that it would be a great (some would say sad!) idea to be able to use the camera to provide visual commentary supporting my text that is updated to my site...

I am really surprised that the Mobile carriers haven't jumped on to this, or then perhaps i shouldn't be surprised as they are only now moving up the protocol stack ( i.e. MMS!) and from their point of view anything that moves into the application stack is a control point for revenue generating services (think DoCoMo). So maybe if they were to bundle anything as useful as a phone-blog software on their phones they need to figure out a way of making money on it.

Companies like Jataayu (another privately held Indian software company) are making inroads with the big telco-carriers by licensing their apps onto their phones... perhaps time to offer them a mobile-blog app? - one for the boys there, i will let you know their response...

India IT superpower by 2006?

2003-08-12T09:25:00.000Z

India is very likely to become an IT superpower by 2006, according Gartner who were recently quoted at a UK outsourcing conference. For many this may not seem a surprise, although the fact that Gartner believes this powershift in IT will occur so soon may raise a few eyebrows.

Whilst the UK has been slow to get onto the offshoring bandwagon the US has been slowly moving call-centres, back-office functions, and IT infrastructure to India over the past decade. Lured by the number of highly competent engineers that India produces every year, and coupled that with the fact that this english speaking workforce are cheap and have a hardworking and loyal work ethic second to none.

In the UK, there has definetely been a noticeable increase in high profiled announcements of companies striking deals to transfer callcentre and do BPO work in India. Driven by bottom line revenues, this shift, stategically makes sense since these sames companies also get the additional value of the talented IT market.

This of course, is all very depressing if you happen to be a skilled IT worker in the US or the UK, what and how should these workers should adapt is a tough question that i have been thinking about, and i simply don't really know where this is all going to take us. My feeling is that perhaps after 40-50 years of sustained growth in the western world we are seeing signs of a global balance. Try telling my younger cousins from India, who used to be in awe of the fact that i lived/worked in a foreign country, he doesn't feel like that anymore....

So, when the economy eventually picks up (assuming it doesn't suffer the fate of Japan's 10 year depression) things may be fine again, and we may forget about all those jobs that went abroad. Then again.

This time round we may need to bear in mind that the very countries that the UK and US are outsourcing to are expected to be creating much of the economic growth in the next 25 years. The question we must ask is with the loss of intellectual knowledge brought about through outsourcing these jobs may not come back. With the population in India (1.1Bn) and China (1.3Bn) accounting for one-third of the planet, both these countries have the fastest growing middle-class in south-east Asia that will need its time-free money-abundant lives filled.

And where will this leave us?

Will the U.K. become a nation of hedge fund managers and hairdressers? And will the U.S. simply continue in its preserve of Movies, Media, Military, and the high speed delivery of pizza. A laughing matter not.

Tech.Ed03, Barcelona, July 2003 - presentations

2003-08-12T09:22:00.000Z

Phew...

Just finished posting my ramblings from my recent visit to TechEd 2003. My postings are in the order in which i viewed the presentations, so as you go further forward, you may see some duplication on the material that was presented.

All in all. I enjoyed this years Tech Ed presentations. So what was i able to take back about Microsoft and their products:.

Windows 2003 just works. They have built on top of the stability of the previous release to offer (i) NLB and improved clustering, (ii) .NET framework 1.1, (iii) Web Services & UDDI, Virtual Shadow Copy, ....and much more im sure!

Office 2003. I didn't attend any of the seesions on Office, but from what ive read to date. I am impressed. I think the way that they are opening up Word using XML and XSD will really expand the way people will start to build producitivty applications. That coupled with InfoPane, which provides a context sensitive client side panel embedded in Word, which allows developers to build workflow based applications that leverage on XML and Web Services. Additionally they released InfoPath, an XML Forms editor that can be used send XML data to BizTalk... I really don't know where Office 2003 and InfoPath are going... but i think it will really open up new oportunites for building apps... i would recommend taking the time to follow these new developments.

BizTalk 2004. Of course, you could not go to TechEd without seeing the announcements for BizTalk Server 2004 (which by the way is an absolute darling of a product). This is more a reflection of how how quickly Micrsoft has taken leadership position in the EAI space in a very short space of time. While companies like SAP are making noises of their NetWeaver / SAP XI platform strategy, and IBM still in the process of integrating (and rebranding to IBM WBI) its recent acquisition of CrossWorlds and its ICS Server / Collaborations product... Oh and lets not talk about TIBCO's continual acquisition of products (last one being Talarian?), it sort of makes me think that these companies are really struggling to deliver a cohesive strategy. So I think Microsoft have really stolen a lead, with its organic development, that is in line with its product stack and their Jupiter product strategy. This is additionally supported by Microsoft entering the Gartner Magic Leader/Ability to Execute Quadrant, which means they must now be taken very seriously!

BizTalk 2004 introduction

2003-08-12T09:09:00.000Z

Design goals
- Focus on making integration projects easier.
- Provide standardized way of building the solution.
- Provide standardized ways of making information available to information workers.
- Accelerating Web Services as way of unlocking legacy systems.
- BizTalk 2004 is Project Voyager (Jupiter v1) – Jupiter roadmap converges the other Windows Servers systems (e.g. Content Management, and Commerce).
Standards
- In BizTalk 2000/2002 documents were supported using XDR, BizTalk 2004 now supports XSD .

- The Web Services-Interoperability group (WS-I) gathers a set of standards known as profiles that can work together in an interoperable way (e.g. SOAP 1.1, WSDL x.y, HTTP 1.1, WS-Security, etc.). In BizTalk 2004 the WS-I basic profile is supported.

- BizTalk 2004 has a number of standard adapters automatically built into it (e.g. FTP. SOAP, SMTP, etc), and allows for newer adapters to be easily updated into the product.

- All schema mappings are executed internally using XSLT.

- BizTalk 2004 orchestrations can be imported and exported using the Web Services orchestration standards BPEL .

- BPEL is also GXA compliant

XML web services
- Compared to BizTalk 2002, which had 7 different development tools, all development in BizTalk 2004 uses Visual Studio 2003.

- Consequently, all the BizTalk ‘components’ are compiled to IL, and managed as a standard a .NET assembly. (Well mostly)

- Additionally a BizTalk orchestration can itself be exposed as a Web Service using ASP.NET

Architecture
- Additional adapters are expected at the time of shipping BizTalk 2004.
- BizTalk 2004 has the concept of a Message Pipeline (they used to be called Channel’s in BizTalk 2002) that provides the decode/encode, decrypt/encrypt, parse, and extract of the messages.

- After a message goes through a Message Pipeline it ends up in the Message Box (in the past with BizTalk 2002, such state was stored in many places like the database, filesystem, WebDAV). This is all now persisted in MessageBox.

- In summary a typical solution flow would like: -
TransportàReceive pipelineàMessageBoxàOrchestrationàSend pipelineàTransport

- Built on top of MessageBox are additional services like Correlation & Content Routing, and Activation and Instance Management.

- Tracking tools and monitoring tools have been substantially improved from Biztalk 2002.

- Information workers have additional services that they use BizTalk for, namely around Business Intelligence (business activity monitoring, and human workflow)

MessageBox
- The MessageBox is central to the BizTalk architecture.
- All messages are persisted on SQL Server 2000 SP3.
- The messages are treated as rich objects with properties.
- MessageBox is based on stateless pub/sub architecture.
- This makes it very easy to scale out.
- Correlations are a way of declaratively identifying messages through its complete lifecycle within BizTalk (i.e. how do we know that this PO is related to this Acknowledgement)
- Large message support (can stream messages up to 2Gb without any problems.)

Scalability
- System is mostly stateless. (Most of the routing occurs inside SQL Server)

- Except for the following:-
o Persisted orchestrations, (long running transactions)
o Message correlations, (must be routed to correct machine – in some cases)
o Hydration/dehydration,
o MSMQ (session based protocols)

- Can use NLB (windows or hardware) to scale front-end to the MessageBox (SQL servers)

- MessageBox is therefore the bottleneck; however they can also be scaled out. Although one of the MessageBox must be the master MessageBox.

- The Master database MessageBox can therefore take advantage of standard SQL Server clustering; this is an improvement over what could be done with BizTalk 2002, which was quite difficult.

Security
- MessageBox is secured, stops other hosts from accessing it.

- Individual BizTalk processes can be targeted to specific hosts (secured using Service Accounts)

- No guest messages to be allows through the receive pipeline (must be authenticated - through this default behaviour can be disabled).

Developer user experience
- Visual studio is de-facto user experience for anyone working with BizTalk 2004. (Mapper, Editor, Orchestration designer, Pipeline designer)

- Schema mapper provides 98% of what is normally done with XSLT. (Also possible to launch to an external XSLT engine.)

- Functoids based on .NET (drag and drop)

- The BizTalk orchestration designer is much more sophisticated in BizTalk 2004. BizTalk 2002 had 6 shapes whereas BizTalk 2004 has 22 shapes.

- BizTalk orchestrations can now be composed of other orchestrations, making the task of designing the orchestrations more manageable compared to the cumbersome and complex approach in BizTalk 2002.

- Parallel actions. Looping constructs. Compensation constructs (long running.)

Information worker
- Exposed functionality through Ms-Office 2003, specifically using InfoPath 2003, it will be possible to route XML documents using Web Services through a BizTalk orchestration.

- Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) are a set of services that rely on SQL OLAP to analyse the data from the documents and/or processes to provide the business information worker with a view on the business process in real-time.

- The BAM information is presented to the end-user using Microsoft Office tools.

- BizTalk 2004 also contains a highly scaleable business rules inference engine.

- An Information worker can be more proactive about how the business is running, my taking the metrics that the business uses, and then run through the orchestration, analyse them using Business Activity monitoring, and then re-apply changes to the business rules based on the newer information.

- The rules composer is used to create the rules. The rules are always version managed, so any changes are made to newer versions, and not the deployed ruleset.

- The deployment of the ruleset is very easy, and independent of the BizTalk deployment assembly. This allows the business users to modify the ruleset without having to re-deploy the BizTalk orchestrations.

- The separation of the business rules from the business process makes good sense, since the business rules change more frequently than the business process.

Trading Partner Management
- BizTalk offers an improved SEED package, which is an easily distributable BizTalk package for trading partners (includes SharePoint Team Services, and InfoPath).

- BizTalk makes it easier to manage relationships with thousands of trading partners and separates this from the business process.

- Additionally, BizTalk 2004 introduces the concept of Service Links. Service Links offer a way dynamically binding a port to a partner at run-time, based on partner or message data. This is different to content based routing where the end ports are already bound.

Human based workflow
- Human-based-Workflow is a new feature provided in BizTalk 2004, which provide a layer of services on top of the Business Activity Monitoring Services in BizTalk 2004 that allow Office 2003 to track human based Office workflow activities.

- These human based workflows are characterised by the fact that they are task oriented using tools like Office 2003; that the workflows can be modified in run-time; process is ad-hoc and semi-structured;

- Human-Based-Workflows leverages the BizTalk Orchestration engine, and built on top of BPEL.

Automating Business Processes and Web Services using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004

2003-08-12T09:08:00.001Z

Orchestration is document-centric using XSD rather than XDR. Concurrency, decision branching, transaction processing are additional components available in the orchestration.

New in BizTalk 2004
- Integration with the .NET framework.

- Orchestration designer generates MSIL. (Fully compiled unlike BizTalk 2002, which was sort of interpreted.)

- Orchestration and Messaging engines are now combined.

- Deployment model is based on the standard .NET assemblies using Visual Studio.Net

- More complex business processes can now be constructed.

- Can compose orchestrations (abstraction to other orchestrations.) – allowing developers to build a library of orchestrations.

- Custom and advanced correlation.

- n:m schema mapping (now you can map several schemas to several schemas n:m)

- Flexible binding options (early, late, dynamic)
2002 just had early binding- static addressed for testing.
2004 now has late binding - for orchestration binding.
Note: (This is separate to port binding, which can be done later closer to time of physical production.)

- Move from 6 different tools in BizTalk 2002, down to a 1 single tightly integrated tool.

Basic features
- Send & Receive Message - building blocks for the business processes.

- Ports - named locations where we will be sending and receiving messages from (addresses, URI)

- Conditional Branching based on Boolean (decision) or message type. (Listen)

- Document Transformation (can integrate with the BizTalk mapper)

- Parallel Actions (fork and join, concurrency / synchronization)

- While Statement (while xyz do this… etc. etc. etc.!)

Advanced
- Transactions
ACID transactions (same as what was in BizTalk 2002)
Long Running, compensation.

- Exception Handling (in BizTalk 2002 wasn't very rich model, now improved vastly, more programming centric C# model)

- Service Links (a concept in BPEL4S - a collection of ports that describe a particular action with your trading partner. At runtime you can determine trading partner to communicate with rather than coding port at design time.)

- Flexible Business Policies. (This refers to the rules inference engine capability.)

Port Binding
In BizTalk 2004 there are a number of options for binding ports:

- Specify now (URI, filename, etc.)
- Specify later (at some later time, the administrator determines where this message will be received from)
- Direct binding (communicate with other running orchestrations instances, or talk to the pub/sub MessageBox) … not clear on this one –SK.
- Dynamic (the reply to address is determined at runtime.)

- Using the BizTalk Orchestration designer a developer can easily drag a web port type and link it to a Visual Studio code Web Reference. In effect using the BizTalk designer a developer is able to bind a web port to a WSDL interface, which is bound to the auto-generated proxy code generated by Visual Studio.

Web services in BizTalk.
- Web Services Publishing Wizard – allows you to publish an Orchestration as a web service. By selecting the port that you want to expose, and by defining a target namespace, SOAP headers and Single-Sign on services. Visual Studio will create an ASP.net project.

- BizTalk 2004 provides features that allow for a more robust environment for building web services, for example when an Orchestration is exposed as a Web Service, BizTalk will track and ensure retries to make sure of guaranteed execution.

Administering, Deploying, and Managing BizTalk 2004

2003-08-12T09:08:00.000Z

BizTalk administrator
- MessageBox’s are assigned to a SQL Server database.

- Can now isolate BizTalk Orchestration Applications, MessageBox, Processing, Adapters, and Tracking onto specific hosts.

- These Hosts can then be mapped onto server instances.

- ReceiveLocations - where document flow in. (E.g. SharePoint, file, etc.)

- SendPortGroup - multiple subscribers (1:M)

Hosts - default host’s setup when BizTalk installed. "BizTalkServerApplication"

Note: The whole area regarding how BizTalk can scale up/across was brushed over rather quickly, and therefore its unclear how BizTalk 2004 takes advantage of any of the new features of NLB cluster and Server cluster capabilities in Windows 2003 or whether its independent of BizTalk.

Deploying Applications
- Developer use Visual Studio to produce Orchestrations, Pipelines, Schemas, Maps, and Rules. By using abstractions of the physical locations, and then wrapping them up in .NET assemblies.

- Scaling issues can be more easily managed when the administrator connects them up to the real physical world.

- BizTalk explorer is used to create the physical environment to the logical BizTalk application. (i.e. orchestration ports to physical ports, and mapping of applications to Hosts)

- Deployment wizard tool (is not part of Visual Studio) is used to create a deployment script. The tool ensures that the BizTalk assembly is registered in the GAC .

Demo
Use Visual Studio to deploy application à puts the assembly into the GAC. à Then use BizTalk explorer to set-up the send and receive ports. à Specify the physical locations. à
After that you need to bind the orchestration to the newly created send/receive ports.

How to move from dev to test to production? à Use "BizTalk Deployment Wizard" application à "export .NET assembly binding to a file." à specify assembly, specify location to place the BizTalk assembly binding file. à Creates xml script. à How to deploy to multiple machines? à Add a new project within visual studio. "BTSInstaller" à Build the project to create an MSI package.

Securing BizTalk
- BizTalk relies fully on SQL Server roles for access permissions (e.g. MessageBox, Configuration database, Tracking database.)

- Hosts are a generic container for a pipeline, or an orchestration or an adapter, and therefore becomes a security boundary.

- BizTalk provides the ability to isolate apps within hosts.

- Process isolation ensures code does not impact other hosts.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
- BizTalk can accept encrypted S/MIME v2/v3 messages.
- BizTalk global address book is used for storing partner’s certificate (only public key)
- BizTalk server hosts has its own private key (they use the MY Certificate Store)

Authentication of Senders
- BizTalk will ensure hosts are trusted as well as the messages from these hosts.
- Adapters can be set to authenticate senders if required.
- If authentication is not required, then the sent message will be assigned a Guest ID.
- Establishing authentication of the message is a way to stop DoS attacks.

Note: Currently, the rejected messages cannot be trapped or re-routed.

Building an End-to-End Enterprise Application Integration Solution with BizTalk Server 2004
Terminology
- There is a one to many (1:M) relationship against (receive port: receive location)

- Receive location (m) à receive port (1) à Published to MessageBox à Send port Subscribes to the MessageBox.

- Filter expressions are used against the send port to determine the messages that arrive.

- In BizTalk 2002 the terminology is different (receive function à channels à send ports)

- The receive pipeline is a stateless engine that parses, decrypts, and transforms. (Configured to the receive Port)

- This is connected to the MessageBox (running in SQL Server); this is the PUBLISHING of the message, (you can also promote any specific properties of the message)

- Very symmetrical architecture...

- A business process will SUBSCRIBE to a message...

Adapter framework
- AIC is symmetrical on send and receive ports. (on BizTalk 2002 this was just the send ports)

- Will have an FTP adapter.
- Will have a SQL adapter.

BizTalk orchestration 2004
- Performance will be 10 times that of BizTalk 2002 orchestration.

- Very simple super-scale out.

- Can import/export BPEL orchestrations.

- Nested processes / built in correlation.
BPEL
- Business process contract interoperable across business boundaries... (Sort of like WSDL contract used for Web Services)

- OASIS 105 members expected to get a standard out (some time soon!)

- BPEL is implemented fully with Web Services.

Note: BizTalk 2004 Beta tips. Install sqlxml 3.0 sp1, turn off msmq...

Building Solutions Using the BizTalk 2004 Rules Engine

2003-08-12T09:07:00.001Z

Manual processes have evolved to Automated process islands (e.g. ERPs!) as a result of evolving business processes we create connected processes (BizTalk2002 - externalising the process outside application) to one that is even more agile using BizTalk2004 (orchestration + business rules)

- Start with the premise that Processes DO CHANGE. Actually, the process tends to be the SAME. It is the policy within that PROCESS that CHANGES.

- Tracking is fundamental to the orchestration and rules.

- The Rules engine is a lightweight .NET application component that can run as an In-process within a BizTalk host.

- Developer will be able to drop a rules engine component into the BizTalk Orchestration designer.

What are rules?
- Basically they are predicates. (i.e. if then )
- Modify business policies (NOT processes) in real-time without rebuilding/redeploying.

Design goals.
- Rules engine can also be hosted in a WinForms component, or wherever!
- Security roles, define who can change these rules.

- Version management is also important; once rules are saved they are saved in SQL server. When they are published the ruleset they become immutable (i.e. they cannot be changed.)

- Rules engines can use English based vocabularies that map to .NET classes, database tables, XML Schemas.

Architecture
- Instantiates the Policy Class... queries the Rules Store... holds rules in the rules cache.

- The Rules engine uses multiple Rules stores (XML / SQL Server / OleDB)

- Forward chaining inference mechanism.... [Finds all true statement.]

- Efficient pattern matching.
- Performance and scalability optimised.

- Eager-match algorithm for smaller rules sets & Microsoft patented algorithm for large rule sets.

Design Patterns
The following design patterns describe when to call the Rules Engine: -

- To dynamically determine which orchestration to call.

- To determine the path within the orchestration. [Using inference]

- To execute logic instead of burying it in the code.

When to use what?
When should you code in the rule policy and when should you code in the orchestration?

Rules.
- When there are a large number of permutations to encode in control.
- Fact-based inference where control cannot be predefined.
- Point-in-time evaluations

Orchestration.
- Workflows that require formal Control structures, long running semantics, and messaging.
- When Control flow is well understood and performance is critical.
- Visibility and tracking are important. (Process rather than policy)

Advanced Business Process Orchestration in BizTalk 2004

2003-08-12T09:07:00.000Z

Transaction Scopes
Atomic transaction properties.
- Scope is a DTC Transaction.

- Timeout - how long it takes before we decide it’s a failed attempt.
- Retry - do you want to retry transactions.
- Isolation (read committed / seriazable) – database term.
- Synchronized - can only access transactions at the beginning and end of the synchronized transaction. [And not between]

Long Running Transactions.
- Business processes typically last longer than a few seconds.
- Atomic transactions are too resource intensive.

Nested Transactions.
- In BizTalk 2004 it is possible to have transactions inside transactions.
- When inner txn aborts, it does not necessarily mean that outer txn is aborted.

- Atomic transaction compensation is used to undo an atomic transaction within a longer running transaction.

Demo
Drag and drop scope shape component into orchestration designer à Can specify Atomic txn properties à Atomic transactions don't have exceptions since by their very nature they are rolled-back.

Correlation
Correlation is a new feature in BizTalk 2004 to ensure that a message is correctly identified throughout the duration of its orchestration life cycle.

- Routes an incoming document to the appropriate instance of the business process.
- Property promotion. [Within each document, identify a property within a document that is unique within that business process.]

- Correlation sets are a collection of these promoted properties.

- Promoted fields are used for correlation.
- Distinguished fields are used for run-time calculations.

Note: Distinguished fields are different to Promoted fields.

Partner management
[A lot of work has been put into this functionality.]
- When the same business process applies across suppliers with different schemas.

- The business process can be bound to a Role. But doesn't bind the actual end-points.

- Orchestration Designer is used to define which is the best shipper to use at run-time. (i.e. how to make the decision about which supplier to use.)

Human Workflow Services using BizTalk 2004

2003-08-12T09:06:00.002Z

Human oriented workflow is an area that has never been tackled by Microsoft before.

- Almost anything can be regarded as workflow.

- Ad-hoc tasks, collaborations, non-intrusive workflow, pervasive workflow, spans groupware, LOB, and systems management.

- Human Workflow Services are more focused on ad-hoc Task oriented stuff (fill out forms, organise events, campaigns, review document, RFP, recruiting, etc.)

- Provides Document Tracking displayed visually.

Demo #1
An example of an ad-hoc type workflow à Receive a document à Forward it to a distribution list à Person in distribution list à Opens the document in Word 2003. à Context sensitive task pane (SmartDocs) allows the user to à Delegate the document to another person in dist. List à This person approves the document.

Original sender of the document à Accesses the Workbench à Which shows dynamically a pictorial rendition of the tracking stream (i.e. what’s been happening to that document)

Demo #2
Utility called "sn.exe" that creates public/private key-pair (e.g. sn -k .snk) [creates a key-pair.]

Drag and drop "GAC Attribute" to AssemblyInfo.* à specify key-pair filename à then build.

Data Access Patterns: Messages or Data?

2003-08-12T09:06:00.001Z

Layer: Architectural unit. (Presentation is equivalent to Facade)
Tier: Deployment unit.
Service: Functional unit.

- It used to be one service per tier.
- Tiers used to blend architecture and deployment.

That’s all going to change.
- Database is the least flexible in most architectures.
- Presentation is the most flexible.

- Presentation service - public interface whether its COM or presentation or GUI...

- Application logic sits in between.

- Near services or far services have different characteristics.

o Near Services (closely related machines, same organisation, reliable connection, trust domain, interoperable)

o Far services (Larger, less frequent messages, more interoperable, decoupled app logic, only related through contract, less common)

- The .NET Dataset is a very powerful mechanism, as it shifts loads away from data source.

- Identify tables that are updated {almost never, hardly ever, time to time, and pretty often} and whether it’s a read/only or read/write operation.

- The general rule of thumb is to minimize updates... whenever possible.

R/O Pattern.
Easy to replicate, multiple instances..

Deploying Visual Studio.NET Applications (incl. BizTalk 2004!)

- Microsoft has removed ‘dll hell’, although this may now have been replaced with ‘version hell’.

When deploying à Add a new project to system à Setup and Deployment Projects ("Web Setup Project") in Visual Studio.NET à Add Project Output à specify (Project name) includes compiled code, aspx, asmx files, etc.

- Visual Studio will detect Dependencies (i.e. .NET assemblies, COM, dll, etc.) that also need to be added...

- Creates a setup.exe, setup.ini, .msi (setup.exe only needed for pre-Win2k machines that don't have the auto-installer).

- All Visual Studio.net applications uses the app.config XML file. [Automatically created by Visual Studio]

- Visual Studio allows programmatic component properties to be mapped to the app.config configuration file, therefore allowing these properties to be modified during run-time!

Global Assembly Cache (GAC)
- Only deploy to GAC if you have something to share.

- Assemblies must have a strong name (i.e. they must be digitally signed.) [particularly when you have multiple versions.]

Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF v3)

2003-08-12T09:06:00.000Z

MSF --> <--MOF

- MSF v1 (1991)
- MSF v2 (1998)
- MSF v3 (2003)

- MSF is related to MOF (Microsoft Operational Framework)
- MSF has been developed over the last 10 years. [Standish Groups?]

- Success rate on projects improved from 16% to 28%
- Challenged projects reduced from 53% to 49% [pain! but succeeded]
- Failed projects from 31% to 23% [failure, cancelled]

5 reasons why projects fail.
- Separation of goal and function.
(Programmers motivations or consultants’ motivations are going to be different)
- Separation of business and technology
- Lack of common language and process.
- Failure to communicate and act as a team.
- Process that are inflexible to change. (E.g. SSADM)

Projects on average:
- Cost overrun 189%
- Time overrun 222%
- Functionality delivered 61%
TEAMS
- Program manager [represents the constraints.]
- Product management [what is the user’s requirements.]
- User experience
- Development [any technology specialist incl. architect.]
- Test [ensure quality assurance, during all stages of project.]
- Release management [deployability, support, future operational needs.]
MSF Process model.
- Envisioning [Vision/scope approved, finding a focus.... get team together... business problems. who are the users.. 3-4 page vision documents]
- Planning [Project plans approved.]
- Developing [Scope complete.]
- Stabilizing [Release readiness approved. Move to production when the jelly wobbles the least...!]
- Deploying [Run pilots. Pre-production testing. Change management issues. ]

Sample documents at http://www.microsoft.com/msf

DEVELOPMENT - Public Daily Builds
- Public Daily Build - Biggest improvement in software development.
- Building the product in an executable on a daily basis. Feels like a coherent whole.

- A strong indicator that a team is functional.
- A way to make the product and its progress VISIBLE.
- Focus on breadth NOT depth.
- Solves one major problem integration build.

- n x Daily build(s) lead to internal release.

- On a 4-6 months project (2 months build) ... first daily build will take 5 days or so...

- BVT - Build Verification Test.... minimal level of compatibility.

Tips.
- 2 days of failed daily builds in a row is a problem, get the other programmers together to fix before continuing with other responsibilities.

- Use source code control. (VSS, Rational ClearCase)

- Each developer works locally (all code and executables on every workstation).

- Define quality levels. (BVT, TST, IDW, IDS, IDC)

- Automate the complete build process (batch files.)

- Upgrade to Visual Studio.NET supports daily build process [How?]

- Focus on high quality competent programmers.

Changing Role of Architects
- Systems Analysts no longer good enough.
- Today an architect must be an analyst, dba, programmer, and project manager.

Enterprise / Solution Architects must also consider the following views:
- Portfolio Management.
- Finances & Costs.
- Governance.
- Vendor Management.
- Technology Strategy and Innovation.
- Business Processes.
- Project life-cycle (i.e. MSF architecture, design, implementation, operations)

Case Study: Architecting Scaleable, Secure, Reliable Architectures

2003-08-12T09:05:00.001Z

- Application built using Windows 2003, SQL Server 2000, .NET framework 1.1 running on a UNISYS ES7000 32 ways server
Application
- Directory tree control driven from XML.
- Fat client talks .NET remoting to hub instance based CLR application that talks to server instance (ES7000)

- Deployment scenario that is flexible enough to support different technologies and architectures of the various departments/local municipals accessing it.

What’s important?
- ES7000 - crossbar interconnect - 16.Gb/s switched network between server components (i.e. CPU, Memory, IO, PCI, etc…)

Scalability
- Server activated objects are always better than client activated objects.
- Class factory design pattern.

Data
- Partition data locally.
- Minimal updates to global data.

Threading
- Minimize synchronization between threads.
- Use thread pools. (Don’t start and stop threads.)

Data access
- Dedicated connections per thread.
- Used connection pooling

Heap usage
- Few, large, long-lived items rather than many, small volatile items.

Security
- .net framework 1.1 - take advantage of.
- Workstation and server use of pki/certificates.
- .net reflection to verify signatures of the assembly.
- Encryption is escrowed
- Access to SQL is through Stored Procedures only.
- All access methods for SQL Server over the network are turned off.
- Application code resides on the same server as the sql server.

Reliability
Microsoft cluster services
Unisys cluster application defender (fail-over and recovery. watches and monitors)
Geo Spans (clusters across 200Km)

2003-08-06T10:30:00.000Z

Wow... This is fantastic news, Ricky Gervais and the team that brought you "The Office" are planning 2-part christmas special. on BBC1 this winter.

One thing is for sure, there really isn't much good television programmes on anymore, its all full of cooking, diy, and chat show programmes. And most of the humour is tired, crass, and trying to be pseudo-intellectually funny.

Thats why when something which relies on the art of comic timing, and body language to be funny, its no wonder that people put it on the same pedestal as other great classics (e.g. Faulty Towers). How the tediousness and banality of daily office life could be brought to life through these guys is nothing short of sheer genius.

Ricky Gervais ("David Brent") and MacKenzie Crook("Gareth Keenan") i take my hat off to you. No, not even that. I would shake your hand Sir.

2003-04-22T21:18:00.000Z

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 2 years... you can't but have realised that there is a new Matrix movie coming out this May... in fact 2 matrix movies in 2003... What a joy.. "Matrix 2: Reloaded", "Matrix 3:Revolutions"

For those that think this is all some sci-fi geek fetish about Trinity wearing rubber and PVC... Woah. Stop and recognize. Think again... Read up on the philosophy of the matrix.

These guys at Warner Bros have managed to get together some of the best brilliant minds on theology, philisophy, and science fiction... and they bring you a number of interesting articles relating to the Philiospy of the Marix.. its definetly worth your time... [ more to talk about this soon... ]

2003-04-11T09:36:00.000Z

Separated at birth!?

Bush and Blair

Bert and Ernie

2003-04-10T09:05:00.000Z

I really have to say that right now... my hat goes off to Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf...

The ministor of mis(Information) for Iraq...

I have never seen anyone like al-Sahhaf who has shown such up-beat optimism and lies in the face of the largest U.S. military build up ever...! This guy will down in history as being one of the most entertaining spokesperson for the now fallen brutal Iraqi regime!

Here are some recent quotes...

"STOP ASKING STUPID QUESTIONS!!"

What? Don't ask stupid questions"

"No, I am not scared and neither should you be!"

"We have retaken the airport! There are no Americans there! The film they broadcast to you is a lie! I will take you there and show you . . . in one hour!" (he never did).

Coalition forces "are not near Baghdad. ... They are not even [within] 100 miles."

"Coalition forces have no control over the city of Umm Qasr in southern Iraq."

The Republican Guard is in "full control of Saddam International Airport."

"Today we slaughtered [U.S. troops] in the airport. They are surrounded; we are hitting them with rockets."

"U.S. troops are committing suicide."

"U.S. troops were poisoned yesterday."

"Be assured Baghdad is safe, secure and great. There is no presence of American infidels in the city of Baghdad, at all”

“They are superpower of villains. They are superpower of Al Capone.”

“Those only deserve to be hit with shoes.”

I think the British Labour government could use this guy.. he has talent!

If you would like to support his cause... then buy his t-shirt...
Support Al-Sahhaf and buy his t-shirt!!

2003-04-04T10:35:00.000Z

Well Happy New year, 2003...

Its now April.. would you beleive and the sun is finally out...

April is an important month for me as Manchester United are at a critical stage in their Champions League and Premiership run....
We have to play Liverpool (5th April), Real Madrid (8th April), Newcastle (12th April), Arsenal (16th April), Real Madris (23rd April)

as you can see... United are going to have to play their best football that theyve ever played in the last 8 years.. to win the premiership and the champions League...

interesting times ahead.. indeed..

2002-12-30T02:05:00.000Z

boo hoo...

what a dull and boring xmas this has been...

Pooja is away... and ive ended up watching Mary Poppins for the first time... that how lousy things are on t.v...

Recently ive been catching up with the 'i love 80s' series on t.v. it starts at midnight and goes on until around 2am....

im becoming a bit of a night owl... still all this silence can be inspirational...

2002-11-30T00:03:00.000Z

Well..

I have 2 weeks off from work. Im using this time to basically do some DIY.. Nothing too heavy.. im putting up some blinds, getting a fireplace put in, fixing up some wardrobes for the bedroom...

I am listening to Mercury Rev - All is Dream i would higly recoommend it.

Ive got my housewarming party on the 14th Dec. I have far too much decent music sitting on my MP3 jukebox(my pc)... i need an effective solution to allow it to get hooked up to my home/AV system..

2002-11-16T09:58:00.000Z

Well.

More re-arrangements to the flat.. a new AV stand for my tv and hi-fi kit..... The living rooms looks a bit too geeky for my liking.. it looks a bit like my bedroom when i was a teenager..

hmm..

still the new speaker stands look cool.

My new Pioneer DV-656A-K

2002-11-10T22:45:00.000Z

greetings... its been a few days...

And ive finally gotten around to upgrading by 15 years stereo amplifer(Denon), speakers(Mission) and CD player(Marantz). I bought those items way back before i started university. I of all people take my music and its re-production very seriously. And to listened for so long with such outdated system amazes me.. I think in the end i started losing interest with my music ( and it was only recently after listening to MP3 on my PC that i realised how much i liked music again - but thats anothe story).

So there you are.. a new DVD player ( that plays CD very well) - Pioneer DV-656A-K and a new Marantz AV receiver ( good in 2Channel as well as 6.1 Dolby DTS.) And a wonder full pair(!) of KEF Q1s loudspeakers... and not forgetting GED cables all round... im feeling rather poor..

As for Saturday.. well its was the lord mayors fireworks display.. and me and Pooja met up with a whole load of friends (Krish, Nisha, Ashok, Hatem, Jess, Rash and Neil.). Personally i thought the fireworks were pretty lame.. and the indian restaurant was well.. *average*.

As for Sunday.. i spent more money... i picked up a quite nice antique firepace with a limestone mantle.. such is life.. but home doesn't feel home until its complete.. and ive only been in my place 3 months or so...

More later..

2002-11-05T13:02:00.000Z

Felt *really shit* this morning, called work. told that im in not in any good state to come in. Feeling awfully tired at the moment.

Hmm.. must do more reading on trends and directions on Content Management systems,.... where is the Portal world..going.. is it hype... or (as always re-inventing the world to keep us with a job!)

First up... Im arranging a meet up with some old friends from IBM.. and we're looking to go to an Indian restaurant, so that Peter can savour some real *authentic* South Indian food.. so we may end up going to Rasa.. then again Chowki is another place that i've heard that might be good..

Amazing!.. i just heard from another ex-IBM'er .. in what must seem 2 -3 years...

2002-11-05T12:54:00.000Z

Well this is my first ( or is it my second?) attempt to try and use this blogging software.

I am particularly interested to see where this technology will go, and what social changes it will make to the way that we communicate on the internet.