Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.