Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

Lucene + Blazor, Part 5: Highlighting

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this final installment of my Blazor + Lucene.Net series, we’ll be adding highlights for the search terms found in the header and body text of each of our results. The implementation of highlighting makes use of the Lucene.Net.Highlighter library, plugging this library into a simple method that can be used as a filter for search results to highlight key terms.

The code and code narrative below reflects the changes that have been made on top of the first 4 posts. All source code is available online for this highlighting post.

Lucene + Blazor, Part 4: Faceting

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this fourth installment of my Blazor + Lucene.Net series, we’ll make the most significant updates to the classes, search function and UI to date. Facets enrich the query responses, enabling users to further tune the search results along specific, pre-defined vectors. The implementation of facets uses the Lucene.Net.Facet library to implement an additional faceted index over two attributes – Scholars and Universities – which are applied on top of the WaffleText class and data.

Lucene + Blazor, Part 3: Auto Complete

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this third installment of my Blazor + Lucene.Net series, I’ll start tackling some advanced Lucene functionality, namely auto-complete. For advanced Lucene work, the most important lessons is don’t roll your own functionality. If you go to the docs for the Lucene.Net API, you’ll see that a ton of additional functionality is built into Lucene via modules. Modules exist for faceting, highlighting, spatial search and autosuggest, amongst others. Lots of the examples and StackOverflow answers are roll-your-own solutions – don’t do it!!

Lucene + Blazor, Part 2: Results Paging

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the first installment of this series, we looked at returning results from a limited pool of items in a Lucene full text index. In this second installment, we significantly increase the number of generated items (3,000, by default) and add a numbered paging system, as used by the main commercial search engines and search sites.

The code and code narrative below reflects the changes that have been made since the first post. All source code is available online for this results paging post.

Lucene + Blazor, Part 1: Basic Search

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Lucene.NET is a C# port of the Java Lucene search engine library. Lucene.NET provides robust search and index capabilities enhanced by a wide array of support packages (e.g. auto-suggest, faceting) that enable the creation of robust search facilities within .NET applications.

While useful and recent tutorials exist on using Lucene.NET in a command line context, there is a dearth of tutorials on using Lucene.NET in a web context, especially with the current Blazor framework. This tutorial fills that gap, with this existing article being the first in a series that will illustrate the buildout of a Blazor-based search site.

Dotnet Lightweight Databases

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My popular dotnet-blazor-crud project has long used the EF Core InMemory database provider for data persistence. While this hasn’t caused me any issues – ever, I’ve been aspiring to move to a relational database versus an in-memory provider. SQLite is the obvious contender here, without going to a full out-of-process database. Getting started with SQLite and EF Core is pretty easy. The real question for me was how much work it would take to swap out the in memory provider for SQLite.

Mermaid Diagrams in Statiq

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

According to the definition on the Mermaid site, Mermaid is a JavaScript based diagramming and charting tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams dynamically. In short, when creating online Markdown-based documentation or publications, like with GitHub or with static site generators that use Markdown to generate content, you can move from static images to dynamically generated diagrams. Mermaid currently supports diagrams such as flowcharts, sequence diagrams, class diagrams, ER diagrams and Gantt charts with more diagrams being added.

Early Tech Publications

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In porting my blog to Statiq, I was forced to revisit a whole lot of content, most of which is more than a decade old. As part of this review, I cleaned up old broken links, of which there were many. I would estimate that 60% of the web links I had from my original blog pages were to sites or content that no longer existed. This says a lot about how the web has evolved and how much content turns over as time progresses.

Beckshome on Statiq

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

After 7 years of being dormant, the beckshome.com blog hummed back to life over the past month. It started with a full .NET hosted blog, moved to Wordpress and then was exported from Wordpress to create static content in 2015, which is where things stood for the past 7 years. I decided to go with a static site generator to modernize the site, specifically with Statiq, which is a .NET-based static site generator.

Technology Links - January 11, 2015

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Couple of exciting things to link to from last week:

Docker – O’Reilly released an awesome Introduction to Docker video. Total runtime is less than 2 hours. Definitely a recommended watch if you’re looking to get familiar with the Docker container. Free to those who have an O’Reilly Safari subscription.
Azure VM Images – Microsoft announces a host of Azure Virtual Machine Images for Visual Studio. A great way to get exposure to the other Visual Studio SKUs or run the newer versions of VS without having to deal with the headaches of an install.
App Development – Awesome article on how independent mobile app development works and can be quite lucrative.
Feature Toggles – Good course from Pluralsight on implementing feature toggles in .NET. Something architects should be aware but the process and patterns are not widely documented.

Top 5 Technologies in 2015

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The new year brought with it the chance to reflect on technologies that I see making a splash in the coming year. I’m enthralled by big data and analytics but I’m not a data scientist; likewise, I only see so much value in the wearables themselves, although they’ll certainly feed the big data beast. My list of technologies is strongly influenced by my background in software and devops — without being a list of language or tool features.

Web Hosting Provider Cutover

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I feel like I’m in the homestretch of my migration off of my current hosting provider – FullControl. Nothing against these guys; they’ve been an absolute stellar service provider. I just don’t need the dedicated virtual server I was paying for with them. It’s a short story that came down to rightsizing my hosting provider to align with my current needs. I’ll tell the somewhat longer version of the story in this blog post though since there are a couple of interesting corollaries along the way.

System.Security.SecureString

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to look into and make use of the Microsoft System.Security.SecureString class. This class is one of those dark corners of the .NET Framework that you don’t think about on a day-to-day basis but are really glad that it’s there when your security auditor starts asking questions about how PII data such as social security numbers are protected while resident in memory. The SecureString class takes care of this problem, helping you avoid a situation where unencrypted sensitive String data is left lingering around on the .NET heap. However, since this class does reference unmanaged memory buffers, its use is not entirely intuitive. I’ve attempted to demystify things with the explanation, drawing and code snippets in this post.

Offsite Backup Options

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been sitting on my offsite backup upgrade for a long while now and finally decided to pull the trigger this week. I’ve used MozyHome for many years but the Mozy rate hike 6 months back agitated me. Combine this with the fact that, for more money, I’m not even getting the amount of backup I used to get and it was clearly time to move on, even though I’m nowhere near the 18 billion Gigabytes of storage Mozy claims I’m using.

Team Foundation Server Project Archiving and History

Sun, 02 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One of the things I was really eager to do was help one of our clients manage the archival and history of projects within their TFS repository. Historically, VSS volumes sizes have gotten out of control over time, resulting in commensurately poor performance. Obviously, a SQL Server backing database offers lots of advantages over the Jet database engine but even SQL Server performance will degrade over time as the history volume in long-running projects backs up.

Making It Big In Software - The Book Review

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve included below my Amazon.com review of the book “Making It Big In Software: Get the Job, Work the Org, Become Great”. I diligently read this book from cover to cover and just couldn’t seem to like it. It became pretty monotonous after a while to go through what felt like a very academic handling of what could have been a very interesting topic. This is in stark contrast to the other book I’m reading now, “Delivering Happiness” by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, which is a pragmatic blow-by-blow tale of how someone actually made it big by leveraging technology. My review:

Top 5 .NET Developer Tools You Likely Never Heard Of

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Everybody loves lists of tools. Scott Hanselman’s annual list of Windows tools has been immensely popular over the years and has opened my eyes to a bunch of new tools. The topic of tools has also been the subject of some very popular books, such as Windows Developer Power Tools and Java Power Tools.

These tool discussions are also recurring themes on all of the major discussion forums. It seems that every so often one of these questions hits StackOverflow and everyone chimes in with their favorite current tools. Invariably, for the .NET tool lists, there are some tools that always show up and; enjoying near universal advocacy in the .NET developer community. This includes tools like Reflector and Fiddler on the free side and Ants Profiler and Resharper on the commercial side.

Fiddler Demo - Camtasia for Mac

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I was up at Penn State IST school this past week giving a lecture to a class as part of our recruiting. As part of the class, which was about application integration, I touched on the HTTP protocol. I believe that it’s extremely important that everyone starting out in web application programming or web-based integration have a deep knowledge of the HTTP protocol. Although you should eventually read a book about HTTP and ultimately read the protocol itself, sometimes it’s easier to learn by tinkering. Along these lines, I thought it would be interesting to provide a quick demo of using Fiddler to inspect the HTTP protocol. I’ve included the screencast here. My apologies for the speed of the screencast. I was in a hurry to get it done and it sounds like I had an energy drink of five too many when I did the voice-over.

WCF Performance Counter Sizing - Do the Math

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Performance counters for WCF have been available ever since the first release of WCF with the .NET 3.0 Framework. As long as these counters have been available, Microsoft has been cautioning about the memory requirements and potential performance degradation associated with insufficient shared memory allocation. I thought that I had heard at the PDC that WCF 4 would fix some of this but going back to the WCF session video, it looks as if these counters won’t really be addressed by WCF 4 but instead superseded by the ETW instrumentation present in AppFabric. So, until everyone moves to AppFabric, I see a need for a bit more guidance than the “allocate enough memory” that Microsoft offers us.

About Me

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been blogging for 4 years now and never have filled out the “About Me” section on my blog. I’ve had good intentions for a while but just never got around to it because my vision involved scanning in a bunch of older materials. I’ve finally carved out a bit of time to update the default blurb with suitable material, which you can find here. Unless you’ve known me for a long while, you’re sure to find out an interesting new thing or two. Give it a look!

Redgate Reflector Pro

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As many of you likely know, Lutz Roeder turned over control of one of the “must have” .NET developer tools, .NET Reflector to Red Gate software. True to their promise, RedGate has continued to support the free version of Reflector and make continued improvements, including the addition of a Visual Studio plugin to jump into Reflector and the support of .NET 4 assemblies with their most recent release of the tool.

Lightweight, Aspect-Oriented Instrumentation with PostSharp, NLog, and SQLite

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

How would you like to achieve detailed exception and trace logging, including method timing and correlation all within a lightweight in-memory database that you can easily manage and query, as exhibited below?

All of this requiring nothing more of you than simply decorating your methods with a very simple attribute, as highlighted below.

In this post, I’m going to demonstrate how to configure PostSharp, an aspect-oriented framework, along with NLog and SQLite to achieve the benefits highlighted above. Before I get into the details of the configuration and aspect source code, I’ll provide a bit of background on PostSharp.

Watch Out! .NET Web Services and the XML Serializer

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you know that something works a certain way but you haven’t really internalized it, you haven’t grok’ed it, until you experience it firsthand. Such was my knowledge of the interaction between .NET web services and the XML Serializer a couple of weeks ago.

While troubleshooting calls made from a smart client to back-end web services, I was using Process Monitor to see what was going on under the hood. It didn’t dawn on me at first why I was seeing dynamic generation of temporary C# files and compilation of these files using the C# compiler (csc.exe) as shown in the image below. Since the services in question were provided by a legacy mainframe and were necessarily granular and immutable, the client application was generating a lot of new proxies, meaning a lot of wasted time.

Book Review: Ultra-Fast ASP.NET

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I picked up this gem of a book when it first came out in eBook format during the PDC. I sent it over to my Kindle and got through the entire book during session downtimes. I planned on being the first to post a review of this book on Amazon but I’ve sat it out too long and will now be the fifth review.

The first four reviewers did a pretty respectable job of providing and overview of Mr. Kiessig’s qualifications and the book content and have all awarded the book the entirely deserved 5 start rating. Rather than pile on more information about Rick Kiessig or what’s in the book, I’m going to tell you why, as a person who has spent a good amount of time looking at .NET application performance, I recommend this book to every person I work with as mandatory reading:

SQLite and .NET - Agility Tips and Tricks

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

For quick and easy prototypes, you’ve got to admire ASP.NET MVC and WCF RIA Services. These approaches may not be perfect out-of-the-box but they’re structured much better than the old “bind a dataset to a grid and let it fly” approach of 2003. As easy as these approaches are, I’m always looking for ways to make things easier. I get a lot of bang for my buck by using SQLite as an in-memory database whenever I create a new MVC or RIA Services solution. In fact, I create 4 SQLite databases with each new solution: one each for application data, test data, membership/role data, and logging/tracing data. Below I’ve described the techniques I make use of to utilize each of these databases.

Microsoft Service and Integration Technologies - WCF 4.0, AppFabric, BizTalk 2010

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One of the things I’m often asked to do for clients is to create an applicability matrix. That is, which technology applies best to which particular challenges in an enterprise? There would seem to be an acute need for this type of clarification in the realm of Microsoft’s service technologies. With the recent releases of Web Process Activations Services (WAS) on Windows Server 2008, WCF 3.5 and 4.0, Windows Server AppFabric, BizTalk 2009 and 2010, and Windows Azure AppFabric, the waters of Microsoft’s service and integration technologies is muddy indeed. In this post, I’m going to provide some clarification; explaining what new service and integration offerings are on the way from Microsoft, offering a frame of reference on how I see them applying to enterprise customers, and furnishing references to materials you can use to educate yourself in these technologies.

PowerBuilder and .NET

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had the opportunity to spend the last week or so investigating a system integration challenge involving PowerBuilder and .NET communicating with web services hosted on a mainframe. It’s been an interesting experience that’s enabled me to dive deep into .NET and to learn a bit about where PowerBuilder is at and where it’s heading. My outtakes follow:

What’s .NET got to do with it? I was totally perplexed at first when I got asked to assist with a challenge integrating a PowerBuilder client with mainframe web services. I saw .NET in the middle of the diagram but was perplexed “what’s .NET have to do with a PowerBuilder client-to- mainframe integration?”

WCF Concurrency and Instancing

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been ranting to some colleagues about a particularly useful table that showed the interactions between WCF’s InstanceContextMode and ConcurrencyMode behaviors. I referenced it in a conversation again today and decided that I needed to go hunt down the phantom table so that it haunted me no longer.

I thought the table was in Lowy’s Programming WCF Services. Full attribution to Essential Windows Communication Foundation: For .NET Framework 3.5, one of my other favorite WCF books. I’ve copied the table below so that I can refer to it by hyperlink forever more.

Logging to SQLite with NLog

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of those seemingly trite blog entries – unless you’re actually trying to integrate System.Data.SQLite with NLog, in which case it’s invaluable. SQLite and NLog really are the perfect combination for lightweight logging. You avoid the sprawl of file-based logs over time, can execute SQL queries against your logs and have an absolutely minimal database footprint to deal with. If only you can get the configuration correct…

The NLog documentation provides some hints to get you going in the right direction for database-based logging. However, no matter how much spelunking I did around the Net, I couldn’t find a definitive answer on how to configure NLog to use SQLite. The configuration file that worked for me can be found below. Exact mileage may vary based upon your project setup. This should get you 95% of the way there though. Happy logging!

Microsoft's Guide to Claims Based Identity and Access Control

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Three months after the PDC conference and I’m finally catching up on the reading materials I collected in LA. One of the books I picked up was a copy of the Patterns and Practices Group’s A Guide to Claims Based Identity and Access Control. It turns out that this book just RTM’ed and is now available online in PDF and HTML formats.

This book is unique in the Microsoft world. You can find all kinds of books that scratch the surface of application and web service security. If you’re looking to dive deep and understand Claims-based identify and federated security, you were relegated to piecing bits of information from blogs, MSDN, and other sources – until this book arrived. The books takes a topic that is complex and difficult to comprehend and approaches it from the perspective of several personas: a security specialist, software architect, developer, and operations manager. While this is by no means an O’Reilly Heads-First style book, the persona approach, professional illustrations, simple metaphors, and meaningful examples go a long way towards making the material much more digestible.

Xobni - The Outlook Plug-In with the Wow Factor

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Outlook plays an important role in my day-to-day work. It’s the one omnipresent desktop application – the first thing I open when I start Windows and sticking around as long as Windows is running. Over the years, I’ve adopted, tailored, and shared several techniques for inbox, to-do list, and archive file management. Even with these techniques, I’m always looking for ways that Outlook can meet me half way and make the task of managing the daily email avalanche a little bit easier.

Facebook Me!

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Facebook has long been for me one of the last unexplored realms of social networking. Finally, when trying to convince new recruits to join me in using Twitter, I realized that so many of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues were hooked on Facebook, I stood little chance of winning them over to Twitter without a deeper understanding of where Facebook fits in the social networking mix. I turned to the book “Facebook Me!” by Dave Awl to provide a solid background in how Facebook might work best for me and to help me understand how to integrate Facebook with the rest of the Web 2.0 applications I use. My review of this book from Amazon.com can be found below.

SEO with the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When ScottGu puts the time into creating a mini-tutorial for a new technology, it’s usually something worth investigating. After seeing his tutorial / overview of the new IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit, I decided I ought to give it a look. With the new blog running WordPress on IIS, this seemed especially timely and relevant.

As Scott mentions in his blog, a prerequisite to getting the IIS SEO Toolkit up and running is the installation of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. I was surprised how easy this installation went. When the installation is complete, you’ll have a new icon on your desktop and a new “Management” section within the IIS admin tool. The Installer looks like a great tool although I’m sure that some (myself included) will be leery about Microsoft installing server-related software on their machines.

Generating Production Volume Data with SQL Data Generator

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sure if I had a nickel for each time a software project was impacted by introducing production volume data into the testing life cycle either too late, or worse even – not at all, I’d be a rich man and wouldn’t be writing this blog entry. When you think about it, it’s really no wonder that we find ourselves in this situation. Developers new to the craft have no experience to draw on dealing with millions of rows of data. Experienced developers and DBAs often pass on war stories of hand crafted scripts and the perils of migrating data from production to lower environments, further reinforcing the belief that emulating production volumes of data is work restricted to the gods of IT.

WordPress on IIS7

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I had long planned the move from the .NET-based DasBlog blogging engine to WordPress but just couldn’t seem to make the time to complete the move. I finally pulled the trigger and cutover to WordPress a couple of weeks ago. The process was not nearly as painful as I imagined and I’m now beginning to reap the rewards of working on a blogging platform that’s more broadly integrated into the Web ecosystem. This blog entry is a collection of the key technical takeaways from my migration. Hopefully they will be helpful for other people looking to migrate to WordPress, especially on the Microsoft IIS platform.

The Twitter Book

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Since jumping back on the blogging bandwagon, I’ve been looking to get more familiar with the top social networking sites. I’ve had some experiences with most of the major players except Twitter, which I never did manage to get into. I decided to give Twitter a fair chance and see if it worked for me. In order to do this, I felt some basic background / guidance was necessary before jumping in heads-first. Turns out that The Twitter Book from Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein was really all that I needed. My Amazon review follows:

Release-It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A review long overdue for a Jolt Award winner and one of the best architecture books on my bookshelf, Release-It!

I’ve recommended this book to many colleagues of mine and haven’t heard a disappointing review to date. I’ve heard the terms ‘pessimistic’ and ‘realistic’ used with equal frequency to describe this book. Having just completed my second reading, I can affirm that these terms are both representative take-aways. Nygard openly admits to being more than a bit paranoid about the way he approaches enterprise application architecture. Although this may seem alarming to many new to the IT field, those of us who have been around for a while recognize this as a necessary, at times life saving, defense mechanism.

Wordpress for Business Bloggers

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

After more than a year-long hiatus, this entry marks my return to blogging. One of the things I decided to do to get myself back into the spirit of blogging was to change my blogging engine. I made the move from the .NET-based DasBlog to the more mainstream WordPress platform. I will be providing more information about the migration process (specifically, WordPress on IIS 7), helpful tools and tutorials, and useful WordPress plugins in an upcoming blog post.

Already Dead

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I had to really lay into this movie in my Amazon.com review. I tend to write reviews for products that I’m impressed with and just keep quite on products that don’t really impress. This movie, however, was the exception. It got such good reviews on Amazon that I felt compelled to give it a look. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) had some of the best information on this flick outside of Amazon. It didn’t make the mainstream movie reviews sites like Rottentomatoes.com since it never made it to the box office. 2 stars was probably a bit harsh, 2.5 would have been more appropriate. I felt the genuine need to remove this movie from the 5 star plateau though as this is genuinely deceitful. My Amazon review follows:

The Virtue of Static IIS Machine Keys

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Having non-static machine keys when hosting on IIS is just one of those things that’s just bound to cause trouble eventually. This holds true equally for single server hosting environments and load balanced web farm environments. Especially if your goal is to shield your users from any knowledge of IIS lifecycle activities (e.g. application pool recycles), the use of static machine keys is to be strongly recommended. The implications of static versus dynamic keys are enumerated for several different hosting situations below:

VisualSVN

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been contemplating the move towards a self-hosted Subversion repository for quite a while. My earlier attempts worked but left me with a lot of inconvenient and sometimes quirky side effects. These experiences always led me back to hosting Subversion on Linux, which is really where it works most naturally. Recently, however, I decided to retry my luck with Subversion hosting on Windows and I made the call to go with a “package” instead of doing the Apache / Subversion integration myself.

VMware Fusion

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been busy since returning from vacation on getting my new iMac up and running. Aside from the machine being a physical work of art, it’s also been performing very well and runs so silent that I’m hearing all kinds of new noises in my house that I wasn’t aware of before. This doesn’t mean that I’ve completely forsaken Windows. In fact, the move to the Mac has allowed me to finally move to Vista on my home machine and install Visual Studio 2008, which is killing my work laptop. For those of you remotely familiar with the Mac, running Windows side-by-side with OS X has been possible since the release of the Intel-based Macs. This started with Boot Camp and gained serious traction with the release of Parallels. Most recently, VMware jumped into this space with their Fusion product for the Mac. I went with Fusion due to reviews on both Apple’s site and Amazon.com that seemed to indicate that Fusion was more stable and that there were far more converts from Parallels to Fusion than in the opposite direction.

Life in HD

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After a long hiatus, I just got done working my way through a 6 month photo backlog, arranging and backing up photos and picking the best ones out for uploading to Flickr. You can find the new photos in the photo section of my blog. I was working my way through videos as well and preparing to convert some of these to Flash for uploading. If you look at the videos section of my blog, you’ll notice that there are no new videos. So what happened?

Netbeans 6.0 as a Rails IDE

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve posted about how impressed I was with NetBeans as a Java IDE and the incredible progress this product has made in the last couple of years. I knew for a while that Ruby on Rails and JRuby support was coming for the next major Netbeans release (v 6.0), but I hesitated moving from RadRails to NetBeans until the feature set had stabilized. Last week, the Netbeans 6.0 beta was released and, with RadRails stagnating somewhat under the Aptana brand, I caved in and made the switch.

Simple_Captcha on Windows

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Another in the installment of Rails on Windows “gotchas”, there are some things to be wary of when working with the Simple_Captcha plugin in the Windows environment. In terms of basic background, the Simple_Captcha plugin facilitates the integration of CAPTCHA (Computer Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) image recognition tests, like the example below, into a Rails application. Facilitates is perhaps not a strong enough term. The plugin makes CAPTCHA integration dirt simple.

The SOA Chasm

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

During a discussion the other day, I found myself repeatedly asking the question of how many organizations could make the leap from an organization dabbling in services (SOA believers) to an organization living SOA and benefiting from services (SOA achievers). I kept referring to the SOA chasm, this nearly insurmountable gap that needs to be crossed to move from an SOA believer to an SOA achiever. The image below is my visualization of this gap.

Microsoft Publication: SOA in the Real World

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Tad Anderson posted about the release of an SOA-related e-book from Microsoft concerning Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This is one area in which Microsoft has remained notably quiet compared with competing enterprise software vendors such as IBM and Sun. As Tad points out in his post, Microsoft has made some forays into SOA publications and they have been pretty readable.

Their most recent publication, SOA in the Real World (mirrored here), is one of the better pieces of SOA writing that I’ve encountered, vendor-specific or otherwise. It uses Microsoft technologies to illustrate certain principles but it manages to maintain a largely implementation-agnostic viewpoint. The e-book has multiple authors but it was edited together in a very seamless way, which is not always the easiest thing to pull off.

Functional Testing Attachment_Fu

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I was performing functional tests on my models that employed Attachment_Fu this morning and thought it would be worthwhile to share the code since it was a bit of a hassle pulling it together. Kudos to Mike Subelsky for his introduction to functional testing Attachment_Fu. It got me going in the right direction. What proved difficult once again was the multi-model controller. Once I got over that hump, I was on my way. As you can see from all the detail in the HTTP POST below, that was not an entirely easy task.

Attachment_Fu on Windows

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing my Rails on Windows thread, I’m going to spend a bit of time on something that’s brought me both some substantial gains and some minor woes lately, running the Attachment_Fu plugin on Windows. I’ll start off with some general Attachment_Fu information and then get into some of the quirks, which are, as expected, mostly specific to the Windows environment.

First, for those not in the know, Attachment_Fu is a Rails plugin that allows you to store binary data (e.g. images, video, documents) and associate it with other models in your Rails application. Metadata (content type, size, height, width) about the attachment is stored in a separate model. Attachment_Fu’s sweet spot is handling images. It can handle automatic image conversion and thumbnailing using a number of popular image processors such as ImageScience, RMagick, or minmagick. Although not provided, you can imagine that Attachment_Fu might be extended to handle other types of binary processing utilities such as PDF converters or audio/video transcoding software. The other very cool thing about Attachment_Fu is that it provides support for pluggable persistence mechanisms. Out of the box, it allows for storage on the file system, as binary information in a database or on Amazon’s S3 storage service.

iTunes Exclusive - Five for Fighting

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had some really good experiences with some of the iTunes Original collections, which include a mix of pre-existing songs, original versions of hits and artist narrations. I’ve especially enjoyed the iTunes Originals with Rob Thomas. This weekend, I picked up my first iTunes Exclusive Live Sessions mix. The Live Sessions series at 5 or 6 songs per collection offers only about half the music of your average Original collection but, as the title indicates, it’s all live music.

Podcast Creation from Rails

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been putting a good deal of time recently into converting GeoGlue from .NET to Rails. One of the things that I’m looking to get into the alpha release is the dynamic creation of podcasts. This is really nothing special since a podcast is little more than a special case of an RSS feed that points at external media files (i.e. audio or video).

I plan on covering the audio/video entry in an upcoming post about the nuances of the Attachment_Fu plugin on Windows. In this post, I’m going to just lay out the code for the podcast creation, since this is nothing more that a simple rxml file. I’ve sprinkled in comments liberally but most of the code should be fairly self explanatory to those familiar with Ruby and RSS feeds.

Rails on Windows - Part 1 (Capistrano on Windows)

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

As soon as you’ve spent some time dealing with Rails, you’re bound to hear the fact quoted that the entire Core Rails Team does their work on Macs. There are likely several reasons for this: (1) these folks really like Macs (you can’t fault them for that); (2) they’re getting kickbacks to use Powerbooks (could be; not likely though); or (3) Rails is fun, and using Windows puts a bit of damper on that fun. I think the last answer is the most likely even though I’d like to think that Steve Jobs has some skin in the Rails game.

Web 2.0 Bus

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I feel as if someone tacked a “show me your enterprise service bus” sign onto my back and I’ve been walking around blissfully unaware of this fact for months now. Client presentations, vendor presentations, casual conversations – everyone wants to show off their visuals of an ESB, SOA, and next generation architectures. Thank goodness there’s no fine print on my sign restricting me from asking tough (and not so tough) questions.

IT Trends in State Government

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

With the 2007 NASCIO IT recognition award submission process closed and the evaluation process in full swing, I’m anxiously awaiting the publication of the nominations from across the country. It’s always interesting to see what new and innovative practices are being applied in different state governments. With Web 2.0, blogging, wikis, multi-media, and social computing firmly established in the Internet at large (see Time Person of the Year 2006), it’s high time that this wave hits the government sector, which usually lags behind in such trends by a couple of years.

REST Web Services - Seminal Tome for the Web Services Generation

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Every IT generation has its seminal tome that transcends time and connects the dots in a way that no book had before it. For the object oriented generation in the 1980s, it was the Gang of Four (GoF) book. For the application architecture generation in the 1990s, it was Fowler’s book on patterns (PoEAA). “RESTful Web Services” will be, in my opinion, that book for the 2000s Web services generation.

Spring Batch - Java Batch Processing

Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Eliminating or reducing enterprise system batch processing is the bane of many architects looking to convert large-scale legacy systems to current platforms. Some believe, rightly or wrongly so, that mainframe-style batch has no place in modern system architectures and attempt to eradicate its existence entirely. Others are a bit more accepting and attempt to understand the role that batch processing fills in enterprise application architectural space. Even for these people, finding people with the skills to engineer batch processing systems with these newer technologies is not an easy proposition since little or nothing has been written about batch on the Java or .NET platforms.

Live Search Maps for Firefox

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The Microsoft Live Search Maps update to include Firefox support that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago was released sooner than I expected. The updated maps API supporting Firefox has not yet been released but word has it that this is imminent as well. I’ve put together a brief screencast of Live Search Maps running in Firefox. Omitted from the screencast are the features that have been available in Firefox for a while, like bird’s eye view. Focus is given explicitly to navigating with the 3D control.

Creating GeoRSS Feeds in C#

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The recent announcement that Google will support GeoRSS in addition to KML as a data format for geographic content in Google Maps is long overdue. This is one of those rare areas where Google trailed both Microsoft and Yahoo and did not seem at all willing to budge. Google’s announcement also seals the deal on GeoRSS as the way to syndicate geo-specific data. However, despite the obvious importance of GeoRSS, there is little written material on producing GeoRSS feeds.

Ruby on Rails in State Government

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The more I use Ruby on Rails, the more I become convinced that it is damn near the perfect framework for state government Web-based applications. Ruby on Rails in State GovernmentThat said, I don’t know of a single state, local, or municipal government that is experimenting with Rails in any meaningful fashion. I have a bunch of stored Google queries that have yielded woefully little information about the penetration of Rails into state government over the past year or so. I fear that is because there really has been little or no penetration.

RadRails Now Under Aptana

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

For those Rails developers using RadRails as your IDE, you might have noticed that, in the last several days, the RadRails site has slipped off of the face of the earth. Due to a very unfortunate run-in with their registrar and DNS provider, the nice folks at RadRails are apparently stuck in DNS purgatory. This little mishap coincided with the announcement of the Aptana IDE / RadRails merger. Due to the site outage, many folks missed out on the announcement all together… so I’ll repeat Aptana and RadRails are merging. The location of the RadRails download on SourceForge has not changed.

Case Management Systems - 3 Compelling Alternative Visual Metaphors

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent the better part of the last 6 years dealing with state government systems that manage information about citizens receiving government services. As creative as state government can be in some areas, presenting new and interesting visual metaphors for the management of citizen and case (i.e. collections of citizens) information is certainly not a forte. This problem is not solely the fault of state governments. Rather, it’s the product of state government business leaders’ lack of knowledge of the available options, educational obligation complacency on part of government’s IT partners, and the real or perceived difficulty of being visually creative in an environment where accessibility compliance is not an option.

Software Process Customization and The Development Case

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most common misunderstandings or missteps in following a particular software process is to follow that process in a blind, one-size-fits all fashion. This is especially true if you are mandated organizationally to use a particular software process. Just as the founding fathers could not have foreseen the challenges of the modern world when authoring the Constitution, there is no way that the creators of a generic software process could understand the nuances of every particular project where their process would be used.

Hosting Flash Video

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I finally got around to adding videos to the site that I’ve been accumulating over the last couple of years. I’ve blogged about investigating Flash video a number of times before. After putting a number of videos on YouTube and being disappointed with the quality of the end product after their compression and resizing process was completed, I decided to go it on my own.

The decision to make this move provided the necessary impetus to do the final research and prototyping necessary to make this a reality. From my experience, I’ve come up with the three things that you’ll need to host Flash Videos, aside from the source video itself, of course.

Building Applications in the Cloud

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In the first of my beginning-of-the-month speed blogs, I’d like to start with the topic that I’ve been putting off longest, building applications on top of Amazon’s Web services. For those of you that think of Amazon.com as just a book store, or an e-commerce platform, or [add your assumption here], think again. In the last year or so, Amazon has released a number of services that have not only established them as a first-class platform, but have pushed the envelope considerably on the idea of virtualization.

Mis-queue - How the Dow lost 200 Points in the Blink of an Eye

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In the final installment of this March 1st trilogy, I’ll hit something really topical, the precipitous fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) two days ago on February 26th. For those of you just diligently minding your stakes in the market, you probably got wind that all the major indexes tanked pretty badly on the 26th. The Dow, however, tanked in a rather unnatural fashion that was quite different from the others.

SOA Governance

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you work in the IT world today, you have a greater chance of not finding a Starbucks on a randomly selected block in Manhattan than you do of not hearing the term “SOA” during your daily workday. It’s unfortunately not nearly as often that I hear or read something about SOA that sounds reasonable, practicable, and overcomes my otherwise skeptic view of all the hype that so often masquerades as SOA. The recent ITConverations Podcast with Todd Biske and Ed Vasquez from MomentumSI is just the sort of real-world advice that avoids the hype and gives a heavy dose of ground truth reality.

Adding Flickr's Flash Photo Viewer to Your Blog

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

One of my original intents of registering the beckshome.com domain name was to publish photos of my new baby son or daughter. That was two years and two daughters ago and, until this weekend, photos were nowhere to be found on my blog. I host my blog on the Windows platform and had no desire/time to do any of the following: (a) buy a separate package for image management; (b) cobble together an ASP.NET solution to manage my photos; (c) switch blogging software to a tool like Community Server that has integrated photo management. Furthermore, I already manage my photos on Flickr and I’m more than happy with the service, user experience, and the cost-benefit. What I really needed was a way to integrate my existing Flickr photos into my current .NET-based blog (DasBlog). The pursuit of this goal is what this blog entry is all about.

Learn from the Worm - Pennsylvania Trout Fishing 2007

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I realize that the title of this blog post is something that one would probably not associate with a blog that purports to cover technology. Bear with me please and surf over to YouTube (or view below) to look at the video posted by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. I think you will agree that the video is very well done. Much like the partnership between Google and the Pennsylvania Tourism Office that I blogged about a couple of months back, this posting to YouTube represents some signs of forward thinking, Web-based focus, and creativity on the part of state government.

The Innovation Engine at Yahoo - Pipes, OmniFind and TagMaps

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The innovation engine at Yahoo is heating up, looking to get Yahoo back in the race with the “Big Boys”, rivals Google and Microsoft. In an environment categorized by copycat service offerings and one-upmanship, Yahoo’s offerings are refreshingly unique. I cover three of the most recent services that I’ve been playing around with and that I think will prove entertaining to my readers as well – Pipes, OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, and TagMaps.

Founders at Work

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t like to do book reviews back-to-back but Founders at Work has kept me pretty busy reading (and not writing) over the last couple of weeks. The book definitely deserves a five star rating and at $13 for the e-book version, it really is a great deal. My review follows…

This is an absolute must read if you’re job, your passion, or both (if you’re lucky) has anything to do with creating technical innovation. “Founders at Work” is a wonderfully meander through the stories of successful company founders – across several decades. Far from focusing on just those who made it big during the first dot-com boom or those who are profiting from Web 2.0, Jessica also includes some of the true pioneers in the field. She recognizes that, not only do these industry veterans have valuable stories to convey but, since many of them are helping to steer companies and venture capital funds to this day, their advice is quite topical and current.

Windows Power Tools

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Windows Power Tools is a collection of brief tutorials and overviews of freeware and open source .NET development tools. What kind of rating you might give this book depends largely upon what type of background that you’re coming from. If you’re the kind who has stuck religiously to the Microsoft Press series of books and acknowledge only the old testament, than this book will be either an epiphany (5 stars) or outright blasphemy (1 star). If continuous integration, test-driven development, and object relational mapping (new testament type stuff) are terms that you are fairly conversant with, then this book will probably land somewhere in the 2-4 star range.

Software Engineering, Ethics and the FBI Virtual Case File System

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Technologists who spend their time working on line of business projects are typically exposed to subtle and not-so-subtle messages about business ethics. Most recently, the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has touched most of our lives in some way, shape, or form. At a bare minimum, it has heightened our awareness of how terribly wrong things can go when the trust afforded certain practices (accounting and reporting, in the case of SOX) proves to be misplaced.

Value == Services + Device

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The Technology and Venture Capitalism Podcast on IT Conversations featured some interesting guests who brought a lot of good ideas to the table. Phil Windley, the moderator, got the guests to kick around the concept of patterns for applications that are good prospective candidates for funding in the VC world. The discussion started with the simple advertising-only model (a’la Google) and the group then moved onto the Apple iTunes / iPod model.

Energy Policy Act of 2005

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Try this on for size – the EPAct2005 is the Y2K of Y2K’07. No, this is not an anagram. No sooner is 2006 behind us and folks are already worried about “the next Y2K”, the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Between January 1st and January 3rd, I’ve received no fewer than 8 emails on this topic. These emails include everything from details about software and hardware that will require some form of remediation to EPAct2005-related business opportunities.

Deloitte "States of Transition" Podcast

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Over the holidays, I had the chance to catch up with some back reading and Podcasts and there was one, in particular, that caught my attention. The book / Podcast combo on transforming state governments by Deloitte & Touche provided some really interesting, innovative, no-holds-barred analysis of the problems that state governments are facing in the early 21st century. Recorded the day after the 2006 elections, Deloitte’s Bob Campbell and Bill Eggers collaborate with Deloitte advisor, former governor of Pennsylvania and first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge to produce an excellent Podcast. The Podcast serves as a solid introduction to the more extensive analysis in their book, States of Transition: Tackling government’s toughest policy and management challenges.

Drinking from the Microsoft Fire Hose

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

What Tad Anderson said in a recent post about Microsoft as a “technology factory” really got me thinking. I particularly identified with his quote that “Microsoft has buried the average learner, and presented quite the challenge for the best workaholic out there.” With all of the things that he mentioned in his post plus the release of Vista, the coming release of Enterprise Library 3.0, software factory work from the Patterns and Practices group, not to mention C# 3.0, Lambda expressions, and… oh yeah, F#, it’s hard keeping your head above water as a Microsoft application development technology specialist these days.

State Government Pattlet - Case

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve added a second state government pattlet to the portfolio. This one is for the case entity. Although a bit more simplistic than our previous pattlet, Case still has some very interesting nuances, such as the use of aspect-oriented techniques to account for associating the writing of case history records with various case-related transactions.

In addition, I have made some minor revisions to the Case Transfer pattlet, upped the version number, and reposted that as well. I’ve also started added these pattlets to two open source pattern repositories.

Reusable Asset Specification (RAS) and the Reuse Process

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In my efforts to understand what drives software reuse or the lack thereof, I’ve been looking for formal reuse standards, processes, and practices. I’ve been examining technology agnostic materials as well as researching the approaches taken by each of the respective major camps – software factories for Microsoft and Model Driven Development (MDD) from the Java community. This post, in particular, is more concerned with technology agnostic materials.

Being a long time believer in Scott Ambler’s Enterprise Unified Process (EUP), the strategic reuse discipline contained in the EUP was the first place I turned for process guidance. The reuse discipline, like the rest of the EUP disciplines, is structured in the same fashion as any other RUP discipline, which makes learning pretty intuitive if you’re familiar with the RUP. The workflow of the strategic reuse discipline is illustrated in the image below. The workflow is pretty straightforward and the harvest, buy, build, evolve approach to the preparation of assets agrees with what I’ve observed in practice. If you’re interested in this process, you can check out a brief synopsis of the strategic reuse discipline or purchases Scott’s book on the EUP.

Confusion over Configuration

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

My initial experiences with Oracle’s TopLink object-relational mapping tool have been less than pleasant. TopLink is the default Java Persistence API provider when creating persistence units for EJB3 style beans in NetBeans. When using TopLink out of the box with NetBeans, the tool’s default behavior is to behave in a case-sensitive fashion with respect to table and column names. This results in awful “Table XXXXX does not exist” errors, where XXXXX is, of course, the capitalized table name.

Pennsylvania Civil War Trails on Google Earth

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The Governor’s office announced an exciting new partnership between Google Earth, Carnegie Mellon University, NASA, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office, and the National Civil War museum that will allow virtual tourists from all over the world to experience Pennsylvania’s Civil War trails first hand. The partnership will be creating Gigapixel Panoramas (Gigapans), enabling users to visualize these destinations with a great degree of detail.

It’s hard to tell what this consortium is going to bring together exactly, but it sounds very promising. There has been talk of even introducing a time-based element into the visualization, which would be very cool, given the nature of the subject. For a quick look at other Gigapan type work, I’d recommend xRez. I find it hard to make much out of the landscapes but their panorama of downtown Boston is simply awesome.

Web 2.0'ish Tools

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Following up on my This Digital Life post last month, a couple of folks have sent me emails asking if I had some recommendations around other Web 2.0 tools. In the sprit of a recent podcast that defined Web 2.0 as “really anything that’s cool online nowadays”, I decided to post some Web 2.0’ish tools that I highly recommend. Some of these tools I’ve been using for a year or more (a mighty long time in the Web 2.0 world) and some I’ve been using for just a couple of weeks. Most are, with the exception of Central Desktop, free services. Enjoy and let me know if you find these useful.

Yinzers

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t spent any time in Pittsburgh, you can ignore this post. If you have spent some portion of your life there or know someone who has, have I got a great gift idea for you. “Chipped Ham Sam”, the first in a line of Yappin ‘Yinzers dolls is available for purchase at http://www.yappinyinzers.com. Check out the site and poke Sam in the belly for one of 9 witty Pittsburghese sayings.

IIS and Apache Side-by-Side

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend, I set out on the daunting task of trying to add an Apache Web server to my existing Windows 2003 production server installation. “Why would you go about doing such a crazy thing”, you might ask. The answer is that, in short, it’s the only way to host an HTTP-accessible instance of Subversion on a Windows box. I’m looking to consolidate all of my hosted software: .NET, Java, and infrastructure, onto a single platform. Since I use Subversion to enable my location independence with respect to computers I use, this application needed to be ported as well.

Attenuation and Other Great Ideas

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

IT Conversations pushed out a great series of podcasts again last week. As always, good things seem to come in three. In this case, the three were IP telephony, transportation networks, and collaboration. The diverse range of technologies and topics covered in these three podcasts represent a microcosm of the IT Conversation offering; just reaffirming their commitment to appeal to an intellectual audience (myself excluded) with a broad set of interests.

SOA Directions in State Government

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been kicking around some ideas in this area for a while, in hope of bringing them together in some coherent fashion. The image below represents the fruits of my labors. I’m not sure that it’s prefect or that I won’t look back on this as a sophomoric effort several months from now. The visual does, however, touch on several major observations I’ve made recently and allow me to illustrate them in a fairly clear and succinct fashion. Some of the terms are heavily overloaded and thus a bit more discussion of each of these trends is provided below for clarification.

E-Government Practices

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I had the extremely good fortune to stumble upon a document on XML.gov that describes the cohesion between the varying areas of state government work that I am involved in. The document, a report on the E-Government Act of 2002, Section 212, was a revelation of previously unknown relationships between many areas of my work. Despite the fact that the document was written for the federal government, it appears to be very applicable to state government as well.

Netbeans Visual Web Pack Technology Preview Released

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

If you completely missed the milestone, NetBeans version 5.5 was released last week. The IDE contains all of the functionality that’s been around in the beta and pre-release versions for months now, including:

Support for Java Enterprise Edition 5 (i.e. the Java Persistence, EJB3, and JAX-WS 2.0 specifications
Support for Subversion up to version 1.4
Developer collaboration features
SOA support (XML, BPEL, or Java web services) through the free Enterprise Pack
Performance and memory usage monitoring (including remote JVMs) though the free NetBeans profiler

In addition to all of the aforementioned features, which are part of the official 5.5 release, the Visual Web Pack Technology Preview was also released. This long-awaited feature brings to NetBeans a rich JSF-based UI. For those of you that have used Sun’s Studio Creator product, this addition to NetBeans will be both welcome and natural.

Project Oversight in the State Government

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I ran across some very unique work from the state of Missouri in the area of project oversight the other day. Missouri’s well documented approach to project oversight is not only a great state government practice; it is by far the best documented practice in the public or private sector that I could find in this area. The project oversight methodology was nominated for a NASCIO recognition award in 2004 under the State IT Management category.

SOA Practices

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last several months, I’ve really been trying to get my arms around SOA and develop a meaningful opinion and knowledge base on this so often used, even more often abused, and ever-more-frequently maligned three letter acronym (TLA). Along the way, I’ve discovered a couple of great resources that have helped shape my thinking and hone my implementation skills on the topic:

Prentice Hall’s Service-Oriented Computing Series – Right now this series consists of just two books by Thomas Erl, “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design” and “Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services”. These two books, however, are tantamount to the old and new testament; literally comprising the SOA bible. The series is also slated to be expanded into a more complete collection, along the lines of Addison-Wesley’s Martin Fowler and Kent Beck signature series.

Getting Real - Revisited

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous posting, I reviewed the 37signals book Getting Real and encouraged folks to pick up a copy. The good news is that the full text for this book has recently been released online. You can find the HTML version of the book here. You no longer have any excuse not to read it.

Great Audio

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a pretty dedicated listener of both the Wall Street Journal Audio Edition and the IT Conversations podcast site. This morning, I caught some great audio from both of them.

IT Conversations – The IT Conversations audio came from the Software 2006 conference series. The focus of the podcast in question was a CIO panel at that conference. Toby Redshaw and Con Goedman, IT executives from Motorola and Shell International, respectively, provide some great insights into the user-focused mentality that it takes to succeed as an IT executive in the corporate world. They are both quite candid, with Mr.Redshaw providing some especially interesting insights and sound bytes. I’ve quoted a couple below:

Hierarchy of State Government Reuse

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been re-reading Scott Ambler’s excellent work on the Enterprise Unified Process and focusing my attention on the strategic reuse discipline, in particular. Dealing with this on a day-in, day-out basis, I’m trying to apply this particularly to the business domain that I work in, state government. I like the way that Scott went about illustrating the enterprise management disciplines with the traditional RUP workflow maps. Above and beyond this, he borrows from an earlier article of his, A Realistic Look at Object-Oriented Reuse, to create a couple of diagrams that really hit home. I’ve taken the opportunity to adopt these diagrams to enterprise work being done in state government. The adopted diagram can be found below.

The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

On September 26th, President Bush signed into law the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The represents the first piece of legislation sponsored by upstart Illinois senator Barack Obama to make it into law. Being touted as the “Google for Government”, the law directs the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to oversee the creation of a single comprehensive searchable Web site that would include information on all federal grants, contracts, and other funding awarded to public and private organizations. As the President mentioned at the signing, the federal government issues more than $400 billion in grants, and more than $300 billion in contracts to corporations, associations, and state and local governments. These range from reputable grants to operate state Medicaid systems to questionable allocation of funds such as the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to build a bridge to a virtually uninhabited island in Alaska, the so called “bridge to nowhere”. Although at way to high a level to be a true comparison, the Death and Taxes graph provides a good representation of what we might end up seeing.

This Digital Life

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’m often asked about tools and technologies that I use on a daily basis. Like everyone else out there, I lead a pretty busy life and I’m always trying to find ways to be more efficient or to use tools that better support the way I work and live. Below you can find a list of the tools and technologies that make my life easier in some way or the other. I’ve cataloged these tools using some general categories to help delineate functionality. As much as possible, I tried to avoid the mundane things and concentrate on smaller niche tools or new technologies that you might not have heard of or actively use and which might enable you to tweak a bit more efficiency or productivity out of your day. Enjoy and please feel free to add comments citing tools that you believe might be of interest to others.

Fowler and Schneier - Seperated at Birth?

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve posted my last entry. To get myself back in the groove of things, I thought that it might be nice to post something lighthearted and entertaining that your average tech weenie would enjoy. Now I don’t know if you follow the gurus of the technology world but my research has turned up a set of long lost brothers amongst the talking (or blogging) heads. Check out the two pictures below. The one on the left is Bruce Schneier, cryptography and computer security wunderkind and designer of several cryptographic algorithms, including Blowfish and Twofish. The one on the right is Martin Fowler, refactoring, pattern, and agile god.

Business Logic Reuse - What Color is Your Box?

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoyed Harry Piereson’s well thought-out response to David Chappel’s entry on SOA and the Reality of Reuse. I couldn’t have said it better myself, though that won’t stop me from trying. The way I see it, David brings to light the fact that the emperor has no clothes and then Harry tells you why the emperor is naked. The focus on business context in Harry’s entry really caused me to think about why business logic reuse fails.

Programming Atlas

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Programming Atlas, by Christopher Wentz, has not yet officially been released but I’ve had the chance to read it and keep up with progress through the O’Reilly Rough Cuts program. With its last update happening over a month ago, I anticipate that its now press ready and that a review of the book would be appropriate at this time.

Even though Atlas has not yet been officially released, this book is already a late comer to the market. It’s been beaten to market by a variety of AJAX texts that included some coverage of Atlas and at least one dedicated Atlas book from Apress. With all the press around Ajax and the huge Microsoft ASP.NET programmers market, putting out a book in the Atlas category is an opportunity that won’t be ignored by the major publishing houses. After trying out Atlas for a while during its Community Technology Preview (CTP) release and seeing the fairly extensive documentation and examples released by both Microsoft and the community, I tend to think that it’s an opportunity that they might best have chosen to ignore just the same.

State Government Pattlet - Case Transfer

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Following up on a long-standing desire to get domain knowledge out of our heads and onto paper, a colleague and I engaged in writing our first state government pattlet. We spent about two weeks of our spare time putting together an abstract approach to case transfer based upon our varied experiences. We finally have a draft version which we feel comfortable sharing online.

As far as I know, this is a first-of-its-kind endeavor for state government. We drew heavily on Fowler’s Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models as background material for documenting the patterns. The underlying analysis, design, and approach are all original, though. Please understand that the pattlet is not perfect. We’ve marked it as a 0.1 version to reflect its state and we intend to update it over the next couple of weeks.

NASCIO 2006 Recognition Awards

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The nominations for the 2006 NASCIO state government recognition awards are now available online. There is some really interesting and innovative stuff in here.

BSCoE can be found under Cross Boundary Collaboration and Partnerships and JNET, which I’ve blogged about in the past, can be found under Data, Information, and Knowledge Management. Happy reading.

Microsoft Versus Open Source - Does Anybody Really Care About This?

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The article summary “Microsoft vs. Open Source: Who Will Win?” from the Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge magazine bubbled up on the del.icio.us most popular list this morning. Being that this is one of the “classic debates”, I felt compelled to give it a read. As one might expect of an economic publication from HBS, the material is relatively academic in nature. Some of the suggestions for folks in Redmond to remain competitive with the open source community sound great in theory but are unlikely to ever cut it outside the ivory towers. Price discrimination on Windows software is one repeated suggestion. At first glance, this appears very logical, since the marginal costs of distributing additional copies of Windows are near nil. However, this would lead to a very rapid deterioration in pricing structure leaving little or no pricing transparency. People are agreeable with paying $300 for an iPod because they know that everyone else is in the same boat. People hate contracting for packaged software and buying cars because they always feel like they are getting screwed by the salesman who uses some secret formula to determine the price of the goods. Is this a perception that would increase Microsoft’s ability to remain competitive? I highly doubt it.

GeoCast - Pennsylvania State Capitol Centennial

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

On October 4, 2006, the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building celebrates the centennial anniversary of its dedication. In honor of this special event, I have created a GeoCast for the Capitol building, its art, and some surrounding points of interest. This GeoCast can be downloaded or streamed in MP3 format by clicking the link below or by going to the Pennsylvania category on GeoGlue.com.

If you are interested in further information about the Capitol or the centennial celebration activities, the Capitol Preservation Committee website provides a treasure trove of information. If you can’t make the trip to Harrisburg but would like to experience the Capitol’s beauty, a QuickTime virtual tour is available on line as well.

Disappointing Destiny

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t seen the materials yet on the Destiny USA project, it’s worth giving them a look. The official site is a masterpiece of Flash animation and in the Wikipedia entry, as always, you can find all of the details. The goal of the Destiny project is to create a one-of-a-kind eco-tourism complex encompassing shopping, entertainment, dining, and hotel accommodations in Syracuse, New York. The shopping complex would surpass the Mall of America as the country’s largest mall. The “green” touches included everything from a 100% fossil fuel free / sustainable energy operating goal and organically grown food in the restaurants to a glass-enclosed indoor park and 20 acre artificial lake. In addition, there are plans to create a research laboratory near Destiny for research into renewable energy, security, sustainable design, and more.

Software Engineering Processes and the BSCoE SEP

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In addition to the technical assets that I’ve mentioned in previous blog postings, BSCoE also makes a set of software process assets available. These software process assets are arranged into disciplines and collected under the umbrella of BSCoE’s Software Engineering Process (SEP). Information about the BSCoE SEP is available online to the general public.

The SEP is based roughly upon the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF). Those looking at the sample assets will notice the similarities with the standard RUP templates. The process component of the SEP is specifically vague, leaving decisions such as formality versus agility, process activities, and roles to the projects employing the SEP. In particular, projects have several options for SEP customization including document-driven (RUP-style development case), local modifications to the process, or modifications with intent to contribute back changes to BSCoE for inclusion in the master SEP distribution. The SEP is conceptually similar in some ways to Ivar Jacobson’s new Essential Unified Process (EssUP). However, whereas the EssUP variability comes through the selection of practices, SEP’s variability comes through the selection of artifacts.

Next Generation Coordination Mechnanisms - Harnessing the Power of Many

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Just as I was doing a bit of mindmapping of ideas around Internet and societal convergence, my RSS reader buzzed with a new post from Dion Hinchcliffe on Social Computing and Internet Singularity. Dion didn’t go into great details; referring instead to ideas he had articulated in earlier posts. His posting was, however, enough to prompt me to pull together my thoughts, give them a bit more structure and then send them into the great wide world to begin a life of their own.

Java Versus .NET - The Race

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not well-versed in the nuances of NASCAR racing and don’t understand the spectacle very well so when I say this, please take it with a grain of salt. The whole Java versus .NET thing seems to me like a NASCAR race, one car edging ahead of the other and then again giving up ground to the competitor… on and on again for countless monotonous laps. I am in the process of re-immersing myself in the newer releases of Java. It has been years since I dealt with Java on a regular basis – the 1.1 through 1.4 days. This week, I had the chance to see a lightweight EJB 3 container in action, working through Oracle’s slick new IDE with integrated Java Server Faces (JSF) and Object Relational Mapping tool (Toplink, in this case) support. Suffice it to say that I was floored with the progress the Java community had made away from the monolithic J2EE / EJB 2.1 towards the lightweight model espoused by frameworks such as Spring. Just when it appeared that the Java car was pulling ahead ready to steal the race, along comes the announcement of the Community Technology Preview of ADO.NET vNext. NASCAR fans, we’ve got ourselves a race again. Below I offer a preview of some of the aforementioned technologies:

Agile Methods and Special Operations Units

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I tried answering Tad Anderson’s comment within the bounds of my August 8th posting but eventually decided that this topic really warranted a posting of its own. My thoughts around using Extreme Programming and other Agile approaches to software development are pretty well formed. As an ex-soldier, military analogies seem to work particularly well for me:

On the high end, the truly capable XP team is small, lightweight, and meets the requirements Tad set forth in his post. In many ways, effective Agile teams parallel our military’s elite special forces (e.g. SEALs, Green Berets, Delta Force, etc).
In the middle, there are well-trained, capable teams that practice UP, ICONIX, and other iterative processes with varying degrees of agility. These teams may infuse certain XP practices into their process as they are needed. The individuals on these teams may have the mettle to be elite special forces. However, due to project requirements, team size, or other factors they are not “active operators”, in military parlance. These folks operate in a fashion analogous to our highly-skilled tactical units, such as the 82nd Airborne, 10th Mountain, and the like.
On the lower end (of the agility scale, that is) are teams that mirror our more traditional Army units: infantry, mechanized infantry, armor, artillery, etc. Their capabilities are more geared toward larger, more structured engagements. Backing these capabilities are detailed approaches and tactics, significantly greater support and infrastructure requirements, and longer lead times to get a team on the ground to effectively engage the problem.

So where does this leave us? To me, at least, it’s pretty clear that, on software projects, as in combat, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. I would no more likely try to tackle building an air traffic control system with XP than I would send in a special forces team to face off against a Soviet armored column. Analogously, I would neither call in the third armored division to handle a jungle-based guerilla insurgency nor try to use CMM level 5 processes to build a simple Web-based e-commerce application.

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

When I purchased this book almost 3 weeks ago, I was surprised to find that it had been on the shelves for 3 months already. Books that unify advanced architectural concepts such as Domain-Driven Design and design patterns are few and far between. This is especially true in the .NET world since many of the source materials originated in the Java realm.

Nilsson does a rather unique job of puling together some of the best domain-driven, object-oriented patterns and approaches and explain them using .NET-specific examples. The pros and cons, as I see them, are taken from my Amazon.com review and reprinted below:

Geocast - Three Mile Island, Harrisburg, PA

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant which, at least figuratively speaking, is located right in my back yard, was the site of the nation’s worst nuclear disaster in March of 1979. What better site to select for my first custom Geocast then something so near and dear to the locals’ hearts.

Sure, the recording quality is not great but it just further proves that it doesn’t take too much to create a Geocast, convert it to an MP3, and upload it for consumption. I’ve included a link to the file below but you can, of course, also find this under the Pennsylvania category on GeoGlue.com.

Anna Sophia and Her Spoon on YouTube

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

With two little girls running around the house, I have plenty of material to fuel my zeal to experiment with online audio and video. I uploaded a cut of Anna using her own utensils for the first time.

Aside from the family and sentimental value, I learned a couple of things for a first timer:

Use firewire and not USB for video transfer. This makes all the difference in the world.
Don’t use the WMV format. I uploaded WMV instead of AVI at the recommended screen size and after the conversion to Flash, there’s quite a bit of residual fuzz.
YouTube is slow in the evening (8:00 – 11:00 EDT). Video playback drags quite a bit. This will impact willingness to leverage YouTube video content externally.
There doesn’t appear to be the ability to download YouTube video. I believe this option is provided on Google Video. Once again, this impacts ability to integrate into other applications.

All-in-all, YouTube makes uploading and sharing video an easy process. I can’t say that I understand their revenue model but someone is paying the one million dollar network costs they ring up monthly with their content distribution network and, at least for now, it’s not me.

Continuous Integration and .NET: An Update

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I received an email from one of my clients a couple of days back referring to a quote of mine on Cenqua’s website under their Clover.NET product. This brought me back to an article I wrote for Dr.Dobb’s Journal when build tools, unit testing products, and continuous integration were making their way from the Java world over to .NET. I decided to meander over to Dr.Dobb’s site (I still call it a site although a barrage of emails from CMP Media constantly reminds me that it’s a new and improved portal) and see if the article is still available.

Keystone Technology Plan Issued

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Pennsylvania’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) issued the Keystone Technology Plan to serve as the information technology blueprint through the year 2009. The plan’s phased approach is quite interesting, with the following phases taking center stage:

Yesterday: Enterprise Planning and Governance
Today :Shared Infrastructure Services
Tomorrow: Business Centric Services

BSCoE plays a prominent role in OIT’s vision and is mentioned as a driver of infrastructure today and key player in the creation of business-centric services in the future.

User-Generated Content

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

For some time I’ve been giving thought to user-generated content on the Internet. In particular, I’ve been interested in audio and video content. A recent post by Dion Hinchcliffe drove me to put a bit more structure around my ideas and put pen to paper, figuratively speaking.

I’ve been following Dion’s blog for nearly a year now and his writing helped shape my thinking about Web 2.0. Although I strongly agree with his statement that user-generated content is one of the pillars of Web 2.0, it appears that we disagree somewhat with respect to the limits of its potential. I can honestly say that user-generated content on sites such as Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and del.icio.us has added tangible value to my online experience. In many ways, there is no way to even emulate these services in the world outside of the Web. I don’t think, however, that I will ever be able to make a similar assertion about video and YouTube, in its current incarnation.

GeoGlue Available

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The first, albeit very rudimentary, version of GeoGlue is now available online. As described in previous posts, this release is really nothing more than a soundseeing mashup with Google maps. The functionality is very basic, allowing the user to browse for soundseeing tours graphically using maps and a menu system or to search for tours using a combination of keywords. All tours are provided via MP3 streaming audio, either from the site that created the tour or from GeoGlue.com directly.

e-Government Mashups

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Phil Windley’s recent post on e-Government mashups is a great introduction to the topic of citizen-facing Web services. As refreshing as it is to see that progressives in Rhode Island and the District of Columbia are exposing government data to their citizens and opening themselves to the law of unintended consequences, this only scratches the surface of what is possible. As I’m sure Phil knows as a former state CIO, fully open citizen self-service is likely to only go so far. As cool as it is to mashup public highway, crime, and public entity data on a map for the world to see, enabling truly effective government is going to be, to a greater extent, dependent upon empowering government knowledge workers. Imagine if, as an example, a knowledge worker was able to pull together information from their state’s welfare, criminal justice, and revenue (i.e. tax) systems and mash these up in a way that enabled them to uncover hidden relationships between this data and serve the state’s citizens more effectively.

Soundseeing

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to describe what GeoGlue was. Although, we have a far-reaching strategic vision for GeoGlue, I can describe the functionality in the initial release using two words – “Soundseeing Mashup”. Now both of these words are fairly new additions to the English language. The mashup concept has gained a good deal of traction through all of the Web 2.0 writeups. Soundseeing, on the other hand, was a term that even I had not heard until just a couple of weeks ago.

Open Source Enterprise Applications - Lacking the Critical Mass

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I was revisiting an article I penned very optimistically several years ago about open source software collaboratives. Most notably, I mentioned the Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative and the Government Open Code Collaborative (GOCC). These were (I stress the “were”) seemingly ill-fated initiatives to share the source code to business applications in the commercial and public sectors, respectively.

Open Source Enterprise Applications.pdf (550.16 KB)

Checking on these initiatives two years hence, I discovered that there has been scarce an update to either one of these sites since I wrote the article. Looking back and reflecting on my thoughts and experiences over the past couple of years, I realize that these two initiatives were destined to fail and that the open source community is unlikely to produce quality, open source enterprise applications. Allow me to compare.

Getting Real - The Book

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I stumbled onto the book Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application while canceling my Backpack service with 37signals. True to the advice they give in the book, 37signals made canceling their service very easy – one of many valuable nuggets of advice offered in the book.

Getting Real describes the practices, both software development and beyond, used by 37signals, a small company that despite their excellent, easy-to-use applications is perhaps still best known as the innovators and driving force behind the Rails framework. Given the tie to the Rails creators, it is not surprising to learn that this book espouses an Agile approach to software development. What differentiates this book from other Agile texts is that it blends both Agile software development practices with, dare I say it, pragmatic guidance from 37signals and other industry notables on the business of creating, releasing and managing Web applications in the Web 2.0 world. This includes advice on staffing and the organization (borrowing from Peopleware), application design (using a user story / UI approach as opposed to a user story / domain object approach), pricing and signup, promotion strategy, support and post-implementation activities.

BSCoE4J Java Framework

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The BSCoE4J Java application development framework was released today to the Commonwealth and is now available for download. The framework contains both abstract and concrete components that support the creation, manipulation, and persistence of domain objects. It interfaces well with, and is meant by no means to supplant, well-understood open source frameworks that address presentation layer, persistence layer, or domain object creation and discovery challenges.

The addition of the BSCoE4J Framework as the third core BSCoE assets rounds off the BSCoE offering for custom enterprise application development. BSCoE4J joins the BSCoE.NET Framework and the BSCoE Software Engineering Process (SEP), forming a comprehensive set of tools for Commonwealth applications looking to do development in either Java or .NET.

Microsoft .NET Google Map Component

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Jacob Reimers’ Google Maps Control has been a genuine blessing for me over the last couple of days. After a lot of prototyping with Google and Yahoo maps, I decided to go with Google maps for GeoGlue and keep Yahoo maps open as an option based upon the development of the APIs as well as any potential licensing or usage constraints. After dealing with the Google APIs directly, and feeling the pain of issues such as the well-known Internet Explorer “Operation Aborted” maps loading issue, I was yearning for an intermediary API that had already thoughtfully addressed some of these issues.

Bose SoundDock

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I received the Bose SoundDock as a gift for Father’s Day (thank you girls!) and felt compelled to tell everyone about it. For a couple of days, I mulled over trading in the white model I received for a black model to match my IPod. After reading all the glowing reviews on Amazon.com, I just couldn’t bear waiting another week to try the SoundDock out. I was not disappointed…

The sound on the unit is incredible given its small size. What’s most amazing is that you can crank up the volume and get little or no sound degradation. Given the rather limited controls on the speaker unit, fine tuning is more a matter of tweaking the IPod’s equalizer settings. It gets around pretty well within the house, having made the rounds from the bedroom to the study and ultimately to the basement to accompany me for workouts. From the reviews I read, it would seem that caution (and adequate packing) is advised for transporting the SoundDock over longer distances. I believe that a separate case is available for the SoundDock. If nothing else, you can box it up again and move it around that way.

Java Developers Journal Article - Active Authentication

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Since I originally published my article on active authentication in the Java Developer’s Journal a couple of years back, I’ve been receiving a trickle of requests for the source code. It looks like the article is still available online although the accompanying source code seemed to have disappeared. I rummaged through my archives and dug up the WAR file containing the source code in case you’re interested. I can’t vouch for its absolute correctness. I seem to recall recreating the source code for a guy in Switzerland a couple of years back to run on Tomcat 5. I’m not sure if this is the version I’ve posted.

GeoGlue Progress

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

With Suzanne and the kids away for a week, I’ve been holding up my end of the bargain and working to make some significant progress with GeoGlue. After getting hung up quite a while on the nuances of Google and Yahoo maps – not to mention Flash encoding – I chose to take a more lightweight approach to getting a first-cut working product out to production. I’ve revamped the user interface pretty significantly but still many of the tried and true styles still manage to show through.

BSCoE Awarded 2006 Computerworld Laureate

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The BSCoE project recently received a Computerworld Honors Program laureate honoring the project for its use of information technology to benefit society. It looks like the official case studies and pictures of the award ceremonies have been posted online. You can find the BSCoE case study here. I’ve also included a couple of interesting photos from the Computerworld ceremonies including the snapshot of our client receiving the award.

Video on the Web

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with Web-based video for GeoGlue as of late. I knew very little about the medium out of the gate but with a bunch of reading and prototyping over the past couple of weeks, I’ve learned quite a bit. The first revelation to me was that the majority of professional-grade video sites such as YouTube and Google video encode their video as Flash. A bit of further research found claims of 98% pervasiveness of the Flash plugin, as opposed to much lower rates for Real, Quicktime, and Windows Media. Scott Persinger’s post on the video format wars proved to be quite interesting reading in this respect.

Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I got through the entire book Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion over the weekend. You can read my Amazon.com review on the book’s page. Overall, the book follows in the footsteps of the other guides in the Pragmatic Programmers series in that it is written to be easily understandable and provides to be a relatively light read

Although the first several chapters are relatively elementary, the material gets a bit better as the book progresses. Towards the back of the book, there is coverage on organizing Subversion projects and directory structures, handling common libraries, and dealing with vendor libraries and source code. To me, it was this material that justified the cost of the book. If you’re interested, I’d personally recommend getting the book directly from the Pragmatic Programmers website (no offence, Amazon). These guys are very good about providing updated versions of their books as they become available. They are usually free of charge or at reduced rates. A great bargain as long as you don’t mind reading PDFs.

Nursemaid's Elbow

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

We had quite a harrowing experience this weekend with what was previously to us an unknown ailment – nursemaid’s elbow. This partial dislocation of the elbow is caused by lifting the child (Anna, in this case) by her arms. Anna screamed like we’ve never heard her scream before and was inconsolable. This resulted in our first child-related ER visit, putting an early damper on what promised to be a very busy christening weekend (Mia’s, in this case).

BSCoE to use Logidex

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The official press release just came out announcing that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will be using LogicLibrary’s Logidex product as its asset metadata repository. This is quite an exciting development since it will afford BSCoE the opportunity to automate many of the asset cataloging, management, and approval functions that would have otherwise been manual processes.

As a card holding member of the tool skeptics club, I admit to being plesantly surprised and impressed by all of the product demos that I’ve seen and the technical expertise displayed by LogicLibrary’s product technicians. Logidex has a number of extremely interesting features that I have seen in no other product, let alone product suite, including:

DasBlog Installation

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

After a while searching for blogging hosts or blogging software for .NET, I finally settled on Scott Hanselman’s DasBlog. The installation of DasBlog proved to be extremely easy; involving the simple extraction of a Web project into a folder (virtual or otherwise) under which one intends to host. Furthermore, storage is all file-based so that no database interaction is required whatsoever. All of the expected amenities such as rich HTML editing (see below), a variety of skins, and a plethora of configuration options are offered through Das Blog as well.

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a no technology zone. I have enough of that in my blog. It also won’t be a boring diatribe about my life or what I do. Instead, a couple of fun facts and pictures:

Spent nearly 8 years of his life in Germany. Went to university there, worked there, drove very, very fast there. The image is of his German drivers license - scary, eh?

[Full Size Image]

Posts Archive

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Search

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000