A good friend of mine, Raven Zachary just announced the 'Obama 08 for iPhone' application which he has been working on in stealth mode since August.
Raven and I first met when we were the first members of the JBoss Customer Advisory Board back in 2004 @ the Four Seasons in Atlanta. I was with Aviva, and Raven was working for La Quinta. Since then, he went off into consulting, then as an analyst @ The 451 Group, and since a few months ago he has been following his obsession with the iPhone into a full-time role. It's always very satisfying to see someone get to work at their passion, and Raven has definetely found his sweet spot.
Congratulations Raven and the team on a major release and contribution to the political campaign. Now, if you can somehow make that app. talk to the voting machines in the US and allow Canadians with iPhones vote, you will guarantee Obama wins as most Canadians want him to win!
the iPhone goes political?
Apple waives white flag
From Apple iPhone Dev. Program:
"We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.
We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.
However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.
Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter."
About time is all I can say. I've never heard of such a restrictive NDA for a publicly available and promoted API. They were only hurting themselves. I suspect the release of the recent Android based G1 gave the final push required.
SOA 2001?
Google, the omni-present "don't be evil" company, just put up a circa 2001 index, in which you can search the web as it were 2001. Try it out. The lack of some of the results we take for granted today are interesting.
One example, search for "SOA".
open source moves
Rob Bearden of ex-JBoss fame and Benchmark Capital VC, takes over as President and COO of SpringSource. I greatly admire Rob, he did amazing things with the sales organization @ JBoss. I used to work for Rob for a time @ JBoss. Get all the details of this move @ The Register.
Some recent Springsource stories:
- SpringSource changes software maintenance policy.
- reports that Springsource's revenue has been going up like a rocket.
Looks like SpringSource is positioning itself nicely for an acquisition.
Ringside winds down?
Read some sad news today about Ringside Networks, a startup founded by some ex-JBossers Bob Bickel and Rich Friedman. The news from Bob is that they are apparently winding down... read Bob's post here.
There was incredible interest and excitement surrounding Ringside's social application server - a bridge to the islands of social communities out there like FB, MySpace and countless other regional ones.
Sad to hear they were not able to get the funding.
open source SOA
An interesting new book is due out shortly, from Jeff Davis through Manning.
I have been reviewing it, and I am very impressed by the quality of the writing, and for once, a book written to walk you through in small, managed stages through the process of putting together an end-to-end solution (a B2B sales order request) and includes very interesting and real-world technology concerns. The book uses Apache Synapse/WSO2 ESB as the basis for putting together the use-case, which includes:
- validation - is the request received valid?
- transformation - take the request and shape it to an internal data format
- protocol mediation - go from SOAP/XML to JMS and others
- legacy transports - legacy stuff like file polling
- custom mediators - take a CSV and transform it to the internal model
- error handling
- Esper - Complex Event Processing
- BPM - send sales requests into a wider, enterprise business process using jBPM as the engine
- data enriching - lookup a customers file when the requests comes in, and enrich the data with his information before it gets sent onto the business process.
- message splitting - use the iterator mediator
- QoS - use WSO2 ESB's Throttling capabilities for real-world throughput issues
Be sure to order your copy!
the Android comes alive
Google's Android platform just had it's first phone coming out party for T-Mobile. See the promo video for what is being called the "G1" here.
Some interesting details:
- will retail for $179 on October 22 (with 2 year contract)
- limited quantities will be available to T-Mobile customers (I ordered mine already) from this site
I'm happy Google is getting into this game, we need a platform to counter the Apple iPhone reign and RIM. RIM has enjoyed their top spot for to long, and hasn't done much with improving their design and handsets. Yes, I use a BB 8800 for daily use, and they are great for email, but suck for everything else. Now with 3 major platforms (BB, Apple, Google) we will have serious competition, and that's ultimately good for end-users. Options are good and mean lower prices.
Check out the video from the Google Mobile Team:
the land of Celine and Open Source?
In Matt Asay's blog recently, he writes about how he is surprised that the Green Party of Canada actually lists Open Source as a key party principle in their Looking Forward mission statement.
What I find quite funny from Matt, is this statement -
Personally, I find it a bit ironic to see open source on a liberal party's platform. Conservative politics tends to be about smaller, local government solutions, even Libertarian in nature. Open source is the same, favoring tight customization/systems integrator or customer-tailored solutions. Liberal politics? Big government solutions strike me as akin to proprietary software.
Really? How does that statement jibe with what has happened the last 2 terms of US President Bush? He has easily created the largest government, in terms of programs and budget spending since any administration in the history of the USandA. Libertarian? That is a word that could never be used with Bush and his government. Why are American conservative voters under the illusion that they are living under a smaller government? Is the ideology of voting conservative, and calling oneself a conservative so blind to the facts in front of them? What's wrong with voting for a candidate or party (the better system i should point out ;-) that best represents what you really want in government, and not blindly voting like a lemming for what you "should" be voting for based on a label?
I don't consider Canada as being extremely liberal at all - we are a tolerant society, which is a big difference. In many ways, Canadians are very conservative with the one difference being we don't have the religious extremism that seems to permeate life, and politics in the USandA. Religious fervour and politics do not mix well here.
Are we perfect? Far from it. One of my biggest gripes with the land of snow and maple syrup:
- Monopolistic culture. We have a small set of large companies that have enjoyed protectionist policies from every government - liberal or conservative. Examples are no DirecTV - the cable and phone companies control all media. Little to no competition in the cell phone market is also a large problem(that is changing).
Am I voting Green? Doubtful. They have many other policy positions which I don't agree with.
Lastly, the truly offensive comment from Matt would be to mention Celine Dion as some sort of Canadian hallmark. Now that's a low blow!
SOA and PHP
At this week's ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara (This is the big PHP lovefest) - WSO2 announced the release of WSF/PHP 2.0. If you're a PHP developer and need to do web services or work with web services, WSO2, the open source SOA company (needles to say I work for WSO2) has just the platform for you: WSF/PHP.
At ZendCon, our marketing director interviews the lead and product manager for WSF/PHP. Check out the interview here.
WSF/PHP is the industry’s only PHP scripting language library that enables developers to create and consume both SOAP and REST Web services — with the security and reliability required for an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA).
welcome to the US-SR
I hear that DHS is going to be printing new signs welcoming travellers to the USA with the new official name: US-SR. The United States Socialist Republic. Credit for this name goes to Marc Fleury on his latest blog posting about the take over and nationalization of AIG, and others in the still raging economic meltdown.
Other blogs are calling it the USSRA (United States Socialist Republic of America) but i like the US-SR much better, has a certain panache and likeable quality to it. I can't wait for the T-shirt's to start printing. Do you think we could incorporate Che's picture into it somehow? A star-spangled sickle?
Other blogs are lighting up the netwaves - here are some good one's:
- RGE: The transformation of the USA into USSRA
- Guardian News: Highly unusual move nationalises insurer
- Comrades Bush, Paulson, and Barnanke welcome you to the USSRA
- USSRA - United Socialialist State Republic of America
Less government the republicans say? Well guess what... good luck with that! You just grew the government payroll by 116,000 last night and the H.R department at the White House is surely to be a busy one in the next couple of months as more and more 'critical' enterprises come for their due soon enough.
update - check out this video from Jim Cramer, which is a great commentary on the last day's events:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=858359962&play=1
where is future of the valley funding headed?
This interesting interview with Bill Hambrecht of WR Hambrecht & Co. - a legendary VC investor. His take on the current financial crisis - called the "Worst Financial Crisis Since the Depression", and the impact to new startups and companies who will need more rounds of financing. I suspect a lot of funding options will dry-up for new startups, but even that might be wrong as there have been a good many announcements lately about new offerings being done. Can the Valley go against the crisis somehow? Will the 2.0 bubble burst be the nail in the coffin for the financial crisis?
As with many things right now, who knows what will happen, and just how much turmoil this crisis will cause. The people predicting another depression, but worldwide this time, is downright scary.
meltdown continues melting...
Everyone now is aware of the economic malaise hitting the markets. There are tons of blogs and stories out there, the news is covering it like crazy. But some of you, like me, who don't have an economics background, nor work in the industry, are wondering just how the hell did all of this happen? I have finally found a story, in which a commenter actually walks through how all of this essentially started and how it's rippling through global economies like a virus - check out the story on the Economist.com's web site. The comment, from a reader I will paste below:
It would probably behoove everyone engaging in this debate to attempt to understand the roots of Lehman’s collapse, and of the liquidity mess itself. While many comments describe the troubled investment banks as “greedy” and “stupid;” such comments are both counterproductive and widely uniformed. The beginnings of this meltdown originated years ago in the conception of sub-prime adjustable-rate-mortgages (ARMS), originally handed out by quasi-governmental corporations to low-income prospective homeowners.
With the creation of these organizations, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the United States opened a derivative market that has since evolved into a situation in which mortgages and like loans were back-sold to banks (Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, etc…) who would then repackage them with various other debts into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), subsequently sold to investors world-wide via stock markets, most prominently the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Theoretically speaking, such practices yield a positive effect on the economy if one assumes the primary lenders like Countrywide are acting responsibly. Unfortunately, they were not. Once primary lenders discovered there was minimal risk on their end they began to lend irresponsibly, issuing loans to buyers with bad or no credit. Once these buyers defaulted, due to the recent crash of the U.S housing bubble, the larger banks who purchased via the derivative market got hurt, not the primary lenders.
It’s not hard to visualize how the initial collapse quickly ensued. While all this liquidity is being traded, re-traded, and multiplied everyone begins to lose sight of the fact that all this money does not yet physically exist. So, what happens when the borrower goes into foreclosure, and the money never will exist? Everyone gets hurt. Compound this to thousands of companies like Countrywide issuing hundreds of thousands of irresponsible loans to homeowners who then default on their mortgages when the interest rates rise and they can no longer pay. The end result is that the big banks lose billions, investors run away from hedge funds and the like, and the real estate market collapses into a downward spiral that, as of 2008, is still two or so years away from hitting rock-bottom. Sound familiar? Now let’s work on fixing the problem – in America and abroad.
Like most economic disasters, the sub-prime crisis needs to be dealt with at its roots. Brokerage firms across America must be regulated. To these ends, Congress must enact laws that would force these firms to issue loans only to buyers who are likely to fulfill their agreements, as well as mandate that the original lenders hold a certain percentage of their loan portfolios. Such measures would restore responsibility to lending, and while immediate profit for these firms, as well as the larger banks and their investors, would be cut in the short-run, this lower-risk environment would ensure that integral corporations like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers cease to collapse.
Though foreign economies are not significantly affected directly by the millions of American foreclosures, they are, in fact, ravaged by the products of the sub-prime meltdown Global corporations publicly traded in the international market place, such as CitiGroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, UBS, Goldman Sachs, and others, were so heavily invested in the American sub-prime mortgage market that the crisis was able to use these banks as a means to traverse borders and spread, like a virus, to nations thousands of miles away; the London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo Stock Exchanges in particular were damaged. Regardless of these incredible losses, cleanup should be secondary to immediate prevention of further re-enactment of the situation in the United States.
As problematic as it is, the sub-prime mortgage crisis is a part (granted: a large part) of the greater dilemma that has become to be known as the “credit crunch,” an issue which has grown so complex it far exceeds the bounds of any comment. Consumers must also learn to spend responsibly, especially in an environment where a piece of plastic, easily swiped, can ruin credit in a blink of an eye.
With the global political and economic environments becoming increasingly non-polar to a point where more than just a few major players decide the financial fate of society, it is key that each power, whether governmental or private, learn from one another and vow to never repeat previous mistakes. As Goldman Sachs’s Gerald Corrigan states, “It is indisputable that the global glut of liquidity played a role in the 'reach for yield' phenomenon…” (“Paradise Lost”) power-brokers everywhere must come to this realization as well as the epiphany that a more responsible loan market will yield even greater profits and simultaneously provide for healthier economies everywhere. Until then, humanity itself remains in default.
-Richard Gerbino
incredible reader for documents
Finally, someone has come along and developed something to truly replace printed documents, but reads and feels like holding a piece of paper. The Guardian notes a story about an annual event, the famous "Demo". The highlight for me was the product from LogicPaper which has a device which ups the Kindle from Amazon by leaps and bounds. I was thinking of getting a Kindle, but I'd rather wait for this thing to hit the stores.
Of interest also, the "Demo" conference apparently does not allow PowerPoint or other A/V aids, the speaker has just a few minutes to show their product using the product itself or other simple aids, like small cue cards. Very interesting to check out some of the presentations themselves, to see how top presenters handle this type of situation.
Twitter for the Enterprise?
TechChrunch just named Yammer their #1 of their Top 50 - it's basically twitter, but for a group, company/enterprise. Check it out... we're all using it now, and it's pretty cool just to be able to twitter updates to your colleagues. It has a desktop Adobe Air based app, along with a BlackBerry package. Very nice.
Yammer links for software clients:
BlackBerry client
Desktop client
what is Money Supply?
I've been reading Marc Fleury's blog about how he's investing his JBoss millions, and well, trying to learn as he goes along...not that I have my own millions to invest or anything, but I have started to wonder what the hell is really going on with the current global economic picture a.k.a the credit crisis.
Well, first of, I've had to learn a thing or two about a lot of the terms Marc throws around, like M4, M1, etc. What is this M# thing? It's simply a reporting mechanism to measure just how much "money" (and the term is really used loosely by governments) is available in the "system" at any given point in time. To read and learn more on this, head on over to Wikipedia for a great article as usual.
Next, head on over to this article which describe what the US Federal Reserve did in 2006 when it stopped reporting on the M3 numbers. Why did they do it? The author has his theories of course, and they sound pretty bang on to my uneducated ears. A followup article picks up the story once more and the implications are not good. Depression, really?
Up till now i've only been skimming the financial news, as what most affects my daily life are things like the price of oil, and the US exchange rate. But as you start to dig a little deeper into things, it would seem to me that the economic outlook is pretty dire. I even began asking a friend of mine who was a former head economist at a major bank what he thought about what was going on. His reply was scary: "expect to see a lot of dead by the side of the road before this is all said and done". He means banks, investment houses, and even economic systems... the worst is yet to come basically is what i'm reading from the tea leaves.
In Canada things don't seem to be quite as dire as in the US right now. We have several things going for us:
- much tighter credit lending policies. Canada has never been a big fan of giving out consumer credit unless you could *really* prove you were worthy of it. We don't have many people with huge mortgages (there are some surely) but not as many as in the US.
- Oil. We're floating in it. The reserves in the Alberta tar sand fields are massive, and with the high price of oil these days Canada is reaping the rewards in jobs, direct money to provincial and federal coffers, etc. We also have large off-shore oil projects in NFLD. Check out the oil reserves table here.
- No housing collapse. We just have not seen the house price drops seen in other places, not yet anyways.
Outsourcing to the USA?
Now here's something you don't see a lot written about - manufacturing jobs being outsourced to the USA, from of all places, the EU! In this article by the Financial Times, it's pointed out that many states are now offering such lucrative terms to open up shop in the US locations, that as one exec. put it "you would be stupid to turn them down at the moment. It is one of the low-cost locations to be in at the moment.”
Now, if only these states would offer incentives for US based firms to STAY in the US instead of moving operations to Mexico or Asia. In fact, why not remove all tax incentives for any firm which chooses to relocate outside of the USA?
Anyhow, it was very interesting to read that the USA is now being considered a cheap place to manufacture, along with traditional third-world locations in Asia and LATAM.
FireFox keeps moving - someone mentioned Chrome?
Many people (myself included) and news organizations have been writing about Google's new Chrome browser - I for one can't even test it since I run OSX. Luckily for us, the guys over @ Mozilla haven't stopped their hectic pace of release for FireFox. The latest Alpha for the 3.1 release promises some pretty exciting and interesting features. Check it out here.
For all the 'promise' and hype surrounding Chrome, i doubt they could release anything to compell me to move from FireFox fulltime. The AdBlock Plus addon (I haven't seen ad's in 18 months now i think) makes my web surfing painless without the silly banner ads distracting web pages. I use maybe 5 or 6 other addons which I find very useful. FireFox 2 was painfully slow compared to the new 3 platform. Performance might be the only reason I look at another browser in the near future.
If FireFox and the large community behind it keep plugging away and improving it like they seem to consistently do, I see no reason why FireFox can't reach even higher usage then IE.
blogging constellations
Jonathan Marsh of WSO2 just posted a mashup that as he describes it
- provides a visualization of a set of feeds
- providing an intuitive sense of activity in a set of blogs
- frequency and size of posts,
- cross-links between the feeds
- highlighting links to "domains of interest"
Check out the Mashup here, and try adding your set of blogs to see how they all relate and reference one another.
google launches Chrome browser
Google has just launched a new, Open Source browser they're calling Chrome. According to google, this earlye Beta is only for Windows, with a Mac and Linux release to come shortly. Unfortunately since I only have Macs or linux boxes, I can't test it. Send me your feedback once you've had a chance to take it for a spin.
According to google:
Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.
I like the idea of each tab having it's own isolated sandbox vm and memory - sounds like a grea idea. Can't wait to try it out.
Update - someone out there of course ran some performance tests (JavaScript) comparing IE, FireFox and Chrome. Read the results and run your own tests here. Chrome clearly is superior on the performance side.
not considering open source could cost you, in court
Microsoft does not need to send in Seinfeld to the province of Quebec it seems to rescue its adoption problems. The Quebec province has spent over $25 million in licenses this year alone and that has an open source organization angry about tax payers money being wasted. A lawsuit was filed in July by the Quebec open-source software association (FACIL) claiming that the procurement department for the province does not 'even consider' Microsoft alternatives, a move it says violates the law in the province on public tendering processes.
It will be interesting to see the outcome of this suit, and if other jurisdictions will set presidence in their arguments. If entire federal government institutions like those in France, Holland, etc. have adoption open source so widely, why can't the Quebec provincial gov't do so? I can't see any valid reason they have for at least not considering something like Open Ofiice, or Linux.
R.T.G wrote: September 15, 2008 15:18