The Dropkick Slurpies

The cousins came for Thanksgiving and we had a band all of a sudden.

What sports I am going to try and watch this long weekend

Wednesday November 25th:

Nothing?! Well, some college ball will be on and I'll watch it. Maybe this is the night for the Charlie Brown special. Maybe catch the Dookies being beat.

Thursday November 26th:

Yes, I'll catch the NFL, but there is not much to cheer for. Green Bay at 12:30 root for them for tradition's sake.

At 4: root against the Cowboys or Raiders? This shall be when dinner is! Or college basketball.

At 8: Go Broncos! Actually, I'll be watching Texas A&M and rooting for them tilting at windmills.

At 4 I should catch Clemson in basketball. And flipping later to the top 20 matchup of Minnesota and Baylor.

Friday November 27th:

Oh yes, the buffet commences. After going out to cut down our Christmas tree (yes, we are doing this Friday!!) I am going with a wood fire and...

at 2:30 College football, WAR EAGLE! No. 2 Alabama at Auburn
I'll want to catch some Nebraska (our great opponent) at 330
at 7:30 Pitt (booo) at West Virginia (triple boooooooo)

but, most important, we have VT vs. Temple in hoops at 8!! The stove will have the room at 90 by then so Nelson and I can jump around in our VT bball shorts.

Saturday November 28th:

VT has a 6:15 basketball game against Deleware that I'll watch if televised and assuming the UVA matchup is a blow out. But Saturday is built for football, college football:

Noon- I have to watch Clemson beat old man Spurrier.
3:30 The Hokies march toward yet another 10 win season
I'll have to flip to see F$U pull the upset on the annointed ones.
8:00 - rooting for Georgia Tech (grumble) to beat them dogs.
10:30 if I am still alive- NAVY!

Sunday is rehab and dancing and ignoring my fantasy football team.

Jamming with Aran and Nelson

I promise to have more like this soon. Grandpa Nelson came by on the way from seeing his very ill father and we got to have an impromptu jam session.

A Note about my Name

Well I just don't do blog posts anymore do I? I'm also hopelessly behind on my video editing and producing.

So, the nickname DougHed? From Quake in the clan days. I was DougHed in the No Pants clan. We were killers and I still have flashbacks. Sometimes my kids find me whispering "BFG 9000".

- Don't bring a shotgun to a rocket launcher fight.

I love this picture

Phyllis doesn't, but I do.

From

She loves this one, which I do too:

From Paris 2008

Sometimes love

Sometimes love
Can be as simple
as finding your daughter’s mouse dead in its cage
And burying it
While she’s out of town

Sometimes love can be as simple as a dog
Touching his cheeks as he turns his
Large white head to your hand

Sometimes love can be easy as making your son’s bed
Or smelling his washed head or holding
His hermit crab while giving it water

(For my sake, realize the mouse was old
And she knew
And had picked a place out to bury
Her, dear Silver)

Sometimes love is crying over those you’ve lost
In war, and in tragedy

And in nothing but peace, like flurries by the tarmac
Sometimes love can be not killing a man
You know deserves to die
Or hunting
For food for a family
Hungry in an Appalachian winter
And making a quick and merciful kill

And sometimes love is sitting
On the memorial benches
Among the dead outside
The Pentagon with pictures
Of your friends
With pictures of them smiling
With pictures before
They were a bench

And sometimes love can be the last story
Before bed
Or describing constellations
To your children
you hope will live so far into the future
And live such good lives into that dim
Horizon

Cloud Computing: Show me the money panel

Well ok then, this sounds just a tad bit more like marketing or how you actually make money doing this stuff? Goodness knows I need lessons in that.

A knowledgeable friend tells me that SOA is fast dying.. great, we are just getting into SOA for a client, but.. anyway.. he says the near future is all about the Cloud. So, here I am.

Rags, the speaker (really) is saying- Cloud computing is replacing SOA and web services. “Cloud computing- everyone says they are doing it, but are not sure what it is and they are in fact lying.”

First up: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Ok, this wasn’t actually a demo of Amazon, but actually the amazon guy’s little traffic map application and I had no idea that going to one site, grabbing images (maps in this case) taking a snapshot and storing them locally and maybe doing a little manipulation. So, everything I do is now categorized as CLOUD Computing. I declare JPI experts on cloud computing and we will be talking at future conferences.

Sales Force guy is reinforcing this impression- grabbing sales data, crunching it, producing a map. That’s cloud computing.

FACT: I do not think they are right. But they are interesting.

The Enterprise Integration Patterns guy is talking: he’s doing a servlet for us. Oh, he writes the little app and puts it INTO the cloud. The cloud part is the ASP where you can put your app out there. Well, that’s pretty cool.

The Intuit presentation was much better- a little applet on the cloud that goes out and grabs client data from various sources to build them a billing record. That’s very useful and made much more sense. Reach out, grab a few fields here, a few fields there, and some other fields over here, pop into a nice AJAX front end and voila, a great little app.

The Microsoft guy is up next and his prime number checker app just died a horrible death. He blamed JSP and we moved on. Poor MS guy.

Wrapping up the day

Tired!

SOA at Enterprise Scale: Solving Real Challenges with GlassFish ESB

Whoah, this was a snoozer. Off to air hockey.


Coding REST and SOAP Together

Two guys from Prague. I think REST stands for Milan Kundera Potato Farmer. I could be wrong. I’m just surprised they threw one vowel in there.

What’s new in Groovy 1.6?

This should be fun- it’s all new because I have no idea what Groovy is.

I assume it is this: http://groovy.codehaus.org/

This is one of the talks I signed up to get outside of my box.. literally I have been mainly staying in a box here.

Well, it’s got BigDecimal arithmetic. Don’t underestimate the importance of things like this!

Fascinating- three examples of “Hello World” in Groovy. I’m lost. I’m not sure how many of my clients want something that says “Hello World!” and responds “Hello Groovy”.

Wait- I am sure. 0.

http://Groovyconsole.appspot.com

AJAX Performance Tuning

Ahh... this was a good talk...

Here’s some meat and potatoes for me.

Optimization Strategies: scale down your development environment- both your client and your server, because users invariably have lower quality than developers; browser incompatibilities should be researched early; do performance testing as well as usability- start with single users, then go to multi users; use tools to test; QA last, then ship.

FUN FACT: These strategies mostly go back well into the 1970s, but don't tell anyone I know that.

Good AJAX design separates content (HTML, XML, XHTML) from CSS from script. That’s each goes in its own file folks.


De-reference unused objects:
Var foo = ‘blah’: // then do something
Delete foo;


Setup vars for your declensions. This goes WAY back in coding history:

This is bad
divs[i].style.color = white
divs[i].style.alignment = right
divs[i].style.blah = blah

This is good:
Ds = divs[i].style
Ds.color = white
Ds.alignment = right

And so on. Simple.


To do with pages: Put style sheets at top. Put script calls at bottom. We’re going to try this.

Rethinking ESB

Oh boy, this speaker is not what I’d call engaging. Not good for first class of the day.
I mainly care about ESB for grabbing a single “thing” off the shelf and plugging it into much larger/broader applications we build.

This talk- focus on the API being simple, easy to learn, snap in, snap out. All great ideas, until you really need the bean to do something complex, e.g. plot a complex set of S-Curves for value management of a capital construction project, then a whole set of them. Sorry, I’m being snotty, but that’s the sort of real world stuff we run into and that API cannot be simple.

Here’s a nice point: when doing complex graphical output, give an option to view the data. I may have to run that by the line of business for their graphs. We sort of do this already! Yay.


Don’t wrap your business logic in code. Well, duh. Actually, I need to be careful here, having done that. But no longer! So, lesson to you- don’t wrap your business logic in code.

FACT: There will always be bugs (they said it, not me). So, be careful with your patch management.

FUN FACT (from Doug): Bugs are what happens when life is what happens when you are waiting around for something great to happen.

AJAX vs. Java

This seemed like a pretty useful discussion, but the presentation and content was fairly tortured. They tried to make it all entertaining, but I wanted to see some of the functional work done to deliver useful data to users.

So, here’s the take away- Java is much faster these days. Well, we knew that- remember 1.0? 2.0? Complete pigs and made up the popular phrase “Java- write once, run slow everywhere” or “debug everywhere”.

FUN FACT: Ajax and graphic rendering, even in 3D is still faster than Java, once you have the images to the user- especially in chrome (in IE, not so much).

The biggest wins for client side java these days seems to be its thread less nature (a very important, but singular issue) and it’s use in smaller devices (which is a much bigger issue as this is where the world is going). And by smaller devices, I should throw in giant TVs that are now including MIPS chips like LGs new LCDs. Why? Movies, games, anything on demand.

REALLY FUN FACT: Blackberry is head to toe java. You can’t do that with AJAX (duh) and it is the largest user base hands down. Blackberry doesn’t do anything crazy like working with only one carrier (ahem, iPhone) but with 400 of them. Dayum.

So, yeah, Java is great, but doing rich UIs like google wave, inotes R8.5 and other things with AJAX is still the best choice. Marry it up with a push method, like comet, and then you have everything you need.

Thoughts on fund raising

I volunteer for a local charity and, not surprisingly, donations are in the tank this year. They've asked for social events ideas and I have always thought a casino night(s) would be great for raising money and getting a younger crowd into the charity. I've also thought about regular Texas Hold'em tournaments.

I'm wondering if anyone has any experiences, suggestions, etc. for this sort of thing. I have never put together a casino night and I am daunted by how much work might go into it. Poker tourneys, however, I've done and they are very easy to organize.

AJAX and JSON

Ok, I can tell already this one is a little too basic for me. The basic idea is that AJAX is DHTML with XML. We’ve been doing the latter for ten years and the former since it first came out. Though I can use the brush up on current JSON.

Very useful things, that are new to me:

• Jsoneditor.net -- As the name says, an easy and rich editor.
• Jsoneditor.appspot.com -- same as above with neat features
• JS Loader - http://www.jsloader.com/ -- load libs independent of platform and in order and with great confidence.

Sun Opening General Session

Well, this was refreshing. Compared to the whacky motivational speakers Lotus and IBM seem to prefer for their general sessions, Sun does it up with people doing the work and what they are working on and why it's cool.


FUN FACT: Last IBM conf. was Neil Armstrong- neat, but, um, he's not a programmer.


FACT: I already have Armstrong's autograph on my wall.


Down to some Java business. JavaFX will kill your DVR with a blunt object. DVRs will be around in ten years, but not for folks who like to order up their own content- much of it for free with commercials. TVs will just be another net appliance on your home Wifi, running whatever comes after N. Game consoles- you have 5 more years, maybe 7.


FUN FACT: Everyone in the AJAX talk has a laptop on and they just told us to turn off all electronics. Everyone just laughed.

FACT: Chicago Options market runs java applets on hand helds and the whole system logs 300,000 transactions per second peak. 300,000 transactions. Per. Second. Mind blowing.

Packed Community One sessions

And I post nothing. Oops!

Ok, other than some tips on AJAX, the best thing I saw was this:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

And, yes, of course you can plop it into any Eclipse project you are working on:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/wa-dw-wa-pz-opensocial.html

FACT: linkedin uses open social, so does the GOOGLE.

What is ESB?

First off, I'm going to get an overview of Enterprise Service Bus:

Ok, introducing your talk with how much GlassFish is being googled and downloaded for 10 minutes- not so great.

GlassFish portfolio: Enterprise server, Web space server, web stack, OpenESB.

sun.com/glassfish

Well, this whole talk is much more sales than I expected and almost no OpenESB- which is what I wanted to hear. Maybe tomorrow's ROA talks will have more of the ESB stuff.

FUN FACT: If you are wondering, IBM Websphere does integrate with OpenESB- apparently quite well. Though I should not be typing that at a GlassFish talk.

FUN FACT: IBM has a robust federated ESB architecture. Not banging their drum, but it really is old hat for them:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/websphere/products/appintegration/esb/?ca=campaign=agus_itebffesb-20090428&me=psearch&met=google&re=ibm_esb&s_tact=usitk011&cm_mmc=campaign=agus_itebffesb-20090428-usitk011-_-k-_-google-_-ibm_esb


Background:

Sun GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus builds on top of the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Platform and OpenESB to provide an enterprise-quality enterprise service bus (ESB).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus

"There is some disagreement on whether an enterprise service bus is an architectural style, a software product, or a group of software products. While use of an ESB certainly implies adherence to a particular architecture, the term "enterprise service bus" is almost always used to denote the software infrastructure that enables such an architecture.

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) brings flow-related concepts such as transformation and routing to a Service-Oriented Architecture. An ESB can also provide an abstraction for endpoints. This promotes flexibility in the transport layer and enables loose coupling and easy connection between services."

Blogging from Javaone

I'll try to post regular updates here.

FUN FACT Hadoop on apache- yahoo uses it to build 4,000 node clusters. Actually, they have 25,000 nodes in their cloud, but 4,000 is their operational cluster. All open source.

REALLY FUN FACT: they have AMD sponsored "Hang Zones" with video games, movies, bean bags, comfy chairs and even air hockey. Don't tell anyone I work with.

August 2, 2008 Part VIII

All things end, good or otherwise, and we wrap up our last day shopping in Paris and having lunch on Rue Cler. We had read about the Bon Marche, so we headed there. It is interesting, impressive, but ultimately uninteresting and crowded. On the top floor, however, Phyllis finds some wonderful needlepoint and all the presents we need to bring back to Gayle (Nana) and Aunt Sharon for taking the kids to camp for a week. If you must go, head up quickly away from the crowds, perfume and ridiculous fashion (ok, there were a few cool things we saw for bajillions of dollars). There are other smaller bookstores and shops nearby and we head to them before going off for lunch. Again, if you want a quieter place to stay in Paris, Rue Cler is the place to settle in. St. Germain de Pres is larger and also nice, but nothing compares to the Rue.

From Paris 2008

Our travel out I’m almost hesitant to mention. I saved a few dollars by routing us from Paris to Dusseldorf then to Atlanta and on to Roanoke. Don’t do this. Don’t go from one European country to another to connect then to fly back. Yes, yes, they have a “union”. That’s great, but that is not the United States. They dump you out on the tarmac and have you go back through security, if you can find it, check in to your next connection, go back through security and, running now, make your connection if you are lucky. We were not happy.

From Paris 2008

But we did make it home, harried and long suffering, but so glad to see everyone.
Some things I learned, knew, found useful:

• Paris can be very hot in the summer- maybe not quite as bad as Washington, DC or New York.
  
• People get concerned about wearing shorts to tourist sites in Paris. Pah, no issue. Wear them.
  
• As mom says, always take a slow boat down the river.
  
• The end of the Tour de France is a great show.
  
• Steak Frites, baby.
  
• Do it. Wait in the line. Go to the top of the tower.
  
• The Louvre is excellent, but there are many other fantastic art collections in Paris- Orsay, Chantilly and many we missed.
  
• For lunch- museum cafes; for dinner- the Marais; for sleep- Rue Cler.

August 1, 2008 Part VII

As with excitement about vacations, my notes start to run down and run thin as we near the end. We’ve gotten to the point where we are talking about the kids more than what we are going to do in the city, so it’s time to escape someplace away from the crowds and noise. We head for Gare du Norde then off to Chantilly. This 16th century castle is much smaller, much quieter and much more relaxing than Versaille. The castle was burnt down during the French revolution, but rebuilt in 1875–1881 by Henri d'Orléans, duc d'Aumale (1822–1897) to the designs of Honore Daumet. The duke clearly loved his hounds and his house and it shows in his statues and private art collection.

From Paris 2008

From Paris 2008

The Duke's dogs were a huge highlight for us.

From Paris 2008

The Duke's art collection was impressive and worth the trip.

From Paris 2008

From Paris 2008

The Chateau is a long 2 km walk from the train station, but through a lovely park and quite nice with good weather. There is a hippodrome you can walk along behind rather than taking the long way down the road.


After returning to Paris, we head for Le Marais, the Jewish Quarter, for dinner. It turns out, five days later, we’ve found an area just down the way from where we are staying that is the best area for finding small, inexpensive and fun restaurants. And for our last two nights we wandered back to this fun neighborhood.