Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

Interesting links for February 11th through February 16th:

• Bruce Perens: How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need? – 1. Gift license: The Apache License 2.0

  This is similar to the MIT and BSD licenses, but provides a little more protection from software patent lawsuits to the Open Source developer.
  2. Sharing-with-rules license: GPL 3
  Descended from the GPL, the most popular Open Source license, this license is updated to deal with the vastly larger amount of copyright and case law that exists today.
  3. In-between license: LGPL 3
  4. Affero GPL
  So, my set includes two base licenses: Apache 2.0 and GPL3, and two derivatives of GPL3: LGPL3 and Affero GPL3. To use them, you'll have to learn two licenses, and two sets of variations on one of those licenses. All of them are compatible with each other.

• 5 Online Political Resources Everyone Should Know About – ReadWriteWeb –
• Designing Web Interfaces: Supporting Screencasts – For many of the figures it is helpful to see the actual interface in action. This collection contains screencast movies for some of the figures in the book. Additional screencasts that serve as examples for the chapter are also included.

Interesting links for February 8th through February 11th:

• The Definitive Guide to Bash Command Line History – good coders code, great reuse – In case you are a first time reader, this is the 3rd part of the article series on working efficiently in bourne again shell. Previously I have written on how to work efficiently in vi and emacs command editing modes by using predefined keyboard shortcuts (both articles come with cheat sheets of predefined shortcuts).
• Raible Designs | How To Setup Your Own Software Development Company – For payroll, I use PayCycle and have nothing but good things to say about them. Having a good Accountant and Financial Advisor (for your retirement plan) will likely be an essential part of your business.. LinkedIn's Service Providers is a good way to find recommended professionals in your area. Finally, you'll need insurance. The Hartford has a good Small Business package that costs around $500/year. It's liability limits have worked for all of my clients and I'm covered if my laptop ever gets stolen. For Health Insurance, I recommend using eHealthInsurance.com to find a good provider for you.
• What Does IBM Mean By Dynamic Infrastructure? | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog) – As technology becomes cheaper more and more devices will have embedded processors and sensors, and they’ll self regulate – so they’ll be a little better at what they do or even a lot better. Devices will “phone it in” when any component fails and they’ll also know where they are, so stealing such devices is going to be a challenge. Most of that is easy to see.

  What is not so clear is what the benefits will be when you aggregate all of this together. So hats off to IBM Tivoli for providing a good analysis of what it may mean. The picture that Tivoli paints is of a grand convergence between 5 distinct worlds:

Interesting links for February 3rd through February 6th:

• Getting Groovy and Grails in an SOA – This research is aimed at the programming language Groovy, a dynamic language that works on top of the Java Virtual
  Machine. Groovy, developed in 2003 by James Strachan and Bob McWhirter [ 28 ], is a language that is very similar to
  languages like Ruby, Smalltalk, Python and Perl.
  One of the aspects that this research is aimed at, is the usage of Groovy in an SOA. In this context, the position of
  Groovy is investigated as a service provider and consumer.
  Other aspects that will be covered, are the characteristics of Groovy; the dynamic nature of the language and remarkable
  syntax that makes Groovy unique.
  Finally, the Grails-framework will be covered. This framework helps developers build web applications based on
  Groovy's variant of the Java Server Pages.
• Polymorph: Hacking Business Models – Purpose

  * Create a sustainable business model that can be adopted and adapted by others.
  * Create a fair and democratic company that is owned by the workers.
  * Have long-term, trustworthy and meaningful relationships with our staff and customers.

• Virtual Geek: So… What's the BIG picture stuff going on under the covers? – Point 1: It presumes a 100% virtualized datacenter (at least as far as x86 workloads go). What can we do to make any x86 workload a candidate for a VM, and how do we help customers accelerate that transformation.

  Point 2: Every Layer of the physical infrastructure (CPU, Memory, Network, Storage) need to be transparent. Transparency means "invisible". This implies a lot, and implies that the glue in the middle, like a general purpose OS, needs to provide the "API models" for those hardware elements to be transparent.

  Point 3: Every Layer of the physical infrastructure needs to be able to think/understand/respond to "VM objects" (or more accurately, groups of VMs that define applications and application SLAs). These groups of VMs that define the application become central, both as a way to get fast value (Virtual Appliances), and also for the infrastructure to support. Long and short – the Network and Storage need to be "VM-aware".

Interesting links for January 30th from 01:47 to 05:58:

• jChat – YUI, Jaxer, & ActiveRecord – jChat is fully functional chatroom application that demonstrates integration of the following web related technologies; HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, YUI, Jaxer, and Activerecord.js.
• » IT Management 2.0: Blame virtualization | Feeds | ZDNet.com – Finally, we need a way to tie this all together – to have a common view or model of IT that maps both physical and virtual worlds together. If you’re not taking advantage of application dependency and discovery technologies that map across both P & V — you’re definitely managing the 2.0 data center with a 1.0 toolset. And with those discovery and dependency mapping tools, you’re on your way to a real CMDB (configuration management database) able to track virtual and physical configuration items (CI’s) and virtual dependencies, too. Tie that into your service desk and service catalog – now you’re talking IT Management 2.0!
• Headius: My Favorite Hotspot JVM Flags – Great tips for JVM use!

Interesting links for January 22nd through January 28th:

• Academic Earth – About – Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.
  We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.
• Inaguration in Fullscreen Gigapan Viewer – amazing high resolution photo of the crowd in inauguration. The amount of detail is incredible.
• Setting up an Amazon AMI with Java and MySQL on EBS using the AWS Management Console –

Interesting links for January 20th through January 21st:

• Cheap Server Backup with Amazon S3 –
• Grailsflow : Open Source Workflow and Process Engine – GrailsFLow is an open source Workflow and Process Engine. It is written using Groovy and Grails and can easily integrate with other Java, Groovy or Grails applications. GrailsFlow provides:

  # a complete out of the box workflow and process management system
  # a very simple structure and is easy to understand
  # a Groovy based DSL to define the process, not XML
  # a complete user interface for process definition, worklist management and process monitoring

• Web Design Resources I Use – The following list contains the content, tools and resources I use to create websites. Content is updated regularly… and I have a large backlog of more free resources to add. Also I may break this page down into tabs or pages at some point.

Interesting links for January 9th through January 19th:

• Twellow :: Twitter Search Directory, Twitter Search Engine –
• Marshall Kirkpatrick » Three Useful Research Tactics I Learned Last Week –
• JTA – Telnet/SSH for the JAVA(tm) platform :: SSH – open source java telnet/ssh library
• “Help! I Need Somebody” – Not to knock developers, but writing code is much less stressful than handling support. There are pressures to be sure, but the number of unknown variables to be managed in a coding project is less than those in the average support issue.

Interesting links for January 6th through January 7th:

• Data Visualization: Modern Approaches | Graphics | Smashing Magazine – Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.
  Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization
• louisgray.com: Disqus2FF Mashes Up Fractured Conversations – As the Disqus blog points out, an enterprising Disqus community member, Carter Rabasa, put together a quick application on Google's App Engine, called FF2Disqus. By entering your API key for both Disqus and FriendFeed, assuming you use both services, the tool will check your blog posts on FriendFeed and pull in FriendFeed comments to your site, or send Disqus comments to FriendFeed.
• Closure make File Access so Easy in Groovy « Aldry’s share about Java, Groovy and Grails – Closure is a class that only contain a pieces of code. If you came from C/C++ Closure will be identical to function pointer, but Closure has more capability and better safety mechanism. In this article, I will show you how Closure support in groovy can make file access whether it is read or write operation so easy.
  //Create new file and write to it using withWriter method and with closure argument
  file2 = new File(’c:/mylovepoet2.txt’)
  file2.withWriter{
  writer ->
  writer << ‘oh my sweety\n’
  writer << ‘please come to me’
  }

Interesting links for December 19th through January 5th:

• Law & Life: Silicon Valley » Top Ten Open Source Legal Developments: 2008 –
• Running a microISV « Successful Software –
• The Cisco-centric Open Source Exchange Community –

Interesting links for December 14th through December 17th:

• The Enterprise Cloud – substantial analysis of clouds in the enterprise. Unlike most babbling about cloud computing these days, this is an in-depth analysis of the subject matter. Long and well worth it.
• Mastering Grails: Grails in the enterprise – In this article, you'll explore some enterprise-grade tools for monitoring and configuration. You'll learn how to instrument your Grails application with JMX. You'll get a brief introduction to Spring configuration in Grails. You'll also see how the log4j settings are initially specified in Config.groovy, and you'll learn how to adjust them dynamically with JMX.
  MBeans are like the various gauges, dials, and switches on the dashboard of your car. Sometimes the instruments are read-only, like your speedometer. Other times, like the accelerator, they are writable as well. But this dashboard metaphor breaks down a bit when you consider the fact that MBeans are meant to be managed remotely. Imagine flipping on the turn signal or changing the radio station in your car — remotely.
• organic thoughts: JmxBuilder (Groovy DSL for JMX) Released – JmxBuilder is a Groovy-based domain specific language for the Java Management Extension (JMX) API. It uses the builder pattern to create an internal DSL that facilitates the exposure of Java and Groovy beans for runtime control and management via the MBean server.The Groovy JMX Builder DSL hides the complexity of creating and exporting management beans via the JMX API and provides a set of natural constructs to interact with the JMX infrastructure.