• Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity - An experiment into connecting the Web with language.
• An Army of Solipsists » Blog Archive » High Performance Grails - A nice description of the steps to improve the performance of a Grails based web application using the techniques described in YSlow
• ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud: The Standardized Cloud - The need for a distributed and optimized virtual network is an important aspect in any multi-cloud deployment. One potential direction could be to explore the use of VPN or VDE technologies. My preference would be to use VDE, (Virtual Distributed Ethernet). A quick refresher, a VPN is a way to connect one or more remote computers to a protected network, generally tunnelling the traffic through another network. VDE implements a virtual ethernet in all its aspects, virtual switches, virtual cables. A VDE can also be used to create a VPN.

  VDE interconnects real computers running (through a tap interface), virtual machines as well as the other networking interfaces through a common open framework. VDE supports heterogeneous virtual machines running on different hosting computers and could be the ideal starting point. Network shaping and optimization may also play an important role in the ability to bridge two or cloud resources.

So far, the development is still done by iFountain employees. It should be no surprise to anyone, it wasn’t to us. Building a community is not easy, and takes time. Int he foreseeable future, we don’t expect a lot of external developer help (though it would be more than welcome) but we hope that we can establish a community that would guide where the project is heading. Most IT management folks (including this one) are not software developers, hence they may not be able to contribute code, but they are the subject matter experts, have first hand knowledge of what is needed in the field, hence can help the project immensely by guiding it with suggestions, feature requests, evangelizing etc.

The importance and value of the community for a project, even one supported by a commercial entity, is well explained and understood, so no need for me to repeat it here, needless to say, we will continue to build our community as the project takes shape. Sooner the better.

Netcoolusers is a lively mailing list based community and I started following it after I got my NCC back in 2000. There has been several discussions on the list about alternative web based interfaces that take advantage of web 2.0 technologies, etc. in the past. Several people had were interested in alternatives, stating that Webtop does not meet their requirements and some had to build in-house solutions themselves. I had not mentioned RapidInsight in the list at the time, even though it was such a solution since it was a commercial product.

Today, I’ve sent an email to netcoolusers mailing list announcing the RapidInsight open source project in the list, as it is directly relevant to the Netcool community.  Email had brief summary of the motivation for the project has come from, gave some highlights and included a link to the open source site, where interested parties can learn more about the project and take a look at the demo, download the software etc.

Next think I know, I was kicked out of the mailing list by the administrator (Jim Popovitch) for “unsolicited commercial solicitation”. You can take a look at the email and judge yourself. I certainly don’t see it as such. There is well established precedence where open source projects are mentioned freely including ones by the mailing list admins. I replied to Jim’s email explaining my point of view and left it at that. As much as Netcoolusers is a “community”, it is controlled by two people afaik, and there is no mechanism for due process. They make the rules and they are the judge and the jury.

Just sigh and move on… But it didn’t end there.

Others responded to my email, asking questions, naturally unaware that I can no longer respond to their emails, as there is no indication that I got kicked out.  Then came this email from another list admin, Jacob Steinberger.  Now hold on a minute! How about distorting the facts, and spreading misinformation. Is that not against the TOS of the mailing list? No? How about just plain decency?

Jacob writes: “While the email initially looks like a great thing to help the IBMuse Netcool GUI move in a direction that we have longed for the last half of his email and Blurry’s forwarding of his private email, shows that he (and iFountain) are out to make a buck.”

The last half of my email lists some of the RapidInsight features describing why it may be off interest to users, and asks for feedback and participation. That somehow suggests that I have evil intentions to “make a buck”? Oh no, iFountain will offer support for an open source project, run for the hills! bad, bad boy!

What I described to Blurry was that we plan to follow what’s referred as the JBoss model, as it is well established in the market. The product will be available with GPL v2 license and we will offer support and professional services. Having said that, bear in mind, I did NOT even mention any of this in my email to the list.

“Trying to sell something, whether it’s a product, consulting services or support, is strictly against the TOS of INUG. Any violators of this  policy will be removed from the list.”
There is nothing about a sale of product or services or support in my email to the list. Just the announcement of availability of RapidInsight as an open source project, that’s it. Announcement of an open source project is not a sales offer. The information on our intend to offer support was in a private email to Blurry as he asked about it directly. He chose to forward the information to the list when he found out I got banned from the list.

If that’s not bad enough, he did not stop there:
“Additionally, when a potential vendor’s website (iFoutain’s) states …

Thou shall have unrestricted access to the software. The software products will be available for download from the website without barriers. The community will be able to download and start using the software right away.
… yet requires you to create an account to download software, you have to sit back and go “humm”.”

My email to the list included one link to the ifountain.org site. From there, there is a link to download the mentioned software directly, no user accounts needed. And as I mentioned above, not only that, the source code and all its revisions (subversion) are also available directly from the site without any user restrictions, as it should be for any open source project. Why all the haste to judge?

Banning someone from the list based on rules and interpretation of those rules you’ve defined yourself is bad enough. Bad mouthing someone with false information when they can no longer respond is simply wrong. I’ve emailed Jacob before I posted this to give him a chance to correct himself but have not heard back from him.

• Modest Maps - Modest Maps is a BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Flash (ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0) and Python.

  Our intent is to provide a minimal, extensible, customizable, and free display library for discriminating designers and developers who want to use interactive maps in their own projects. Modest Maps provides a core set of features in a tight, clean package, with plenty of hooks for additional functionality.

• RapidInsight for Netcool - Confluence - RapidInsight is an integration and automation solution for operations management, and typically used to integrate data from disparate management systems and present to users through a simple, unified, consistent web based user interface.
  In today's organizations, managing the IT infrastructure is a complex undertaking. Most organizations use number of tools for different management disciplines and for different technologies, yet the need to manage the infrastructure holistically is apparent. RapidInsight provides capabilities to consolidate data from disparate systems and make it available to users through simple, consistent easy to use web based interface to faciliate management processes.

25 years ago, this town was not connected to the phone network. It was possible to call someone by “registering a call” with the operator.  One would have had towait in front of the phone for hours for the operator to connect the two parties. It all changed with Ozal, starting 1983, opening up the country and the economy to the world. And now, I’m sitting here with a broadband connection, integrated with the rest of the world, as I would be back home in Switzerland or anywhere else in the developed world.

I sit in the terrace and looked around to the sea, to mountains, yet people insight often capture my attention. A remarkable transformation is happening and one does not have to look very hard to see it.  Couple of women are carrying down tea leaves down the hillside with huge baskets on their back. Tea farming is hard work.  Three harvests a year and the terrain here is mountainous. One of the women has a mobile phone in her hand, clearly texting (and quite fast), mobile penetration is very high. Houses here have all the amenities, from dishwasher to satellite TV. Tea factories still the biggest employers.

The coast is much better connected to the rest of the world. 40 years ago, taking the ferry was the best option  to travel to far away cities.  Once could have arrived to Istanbul in about a week!, IF there were no weather problems. Now there are numerous flights, and coastal highway connect the towns to each other.

There has been significant migration from these towns on the coast to large cities as my parent have done a long time ago. Migrating to larger cities has been the only viable option for many to move out of the agricultural lifestyle and join the industrial era. Now, people here are not only better connected physically but also technologically.

I’m curious to see how the information wave will alter this society once again. One thing is sure, people here are accustomed to change and adapt to new things with ease, and this is their strongest suit.

It’s been 4 years since my last visit here. This year, I’m able to stay over three weeks, because I can continue working here!

They’ve just removed the drainage but the cast needs to stay for another 10 days apparently. After that they’ll check whether the bourse is infected and close the knee for good if all is well.

As far as the Swiss hospital experience goes, it was quite nice indeed. I was quite puzzled to put it mildly watching them get ready for what seemed to be a surgery and using words like anesthesia where I was just expecting them to clean the wound and put some stiches. We’ve started talking in French where I tried to figure out what on earth was going on and was told about risk of bourse infection. After a while, noticing that my french is not exactly fluent and I did not understand what bourse is, the doc asked what language I spoke and switched to English with ease. Turns out bourse is bourse in English as well but he described what it is and I got the general idea, and resigned to watch him work on my knee with some disbelief, slowly realizing that my injury may be a tad more serious than I thought initially.  Little later I glanced at his name tag and saw that he had a Turkish name! Not sure what the odds are to running into a Turkish speaking doctor in an ER in Switzerland, but I’d imagine not that high. It turns out he was born in Germany, quite impressive individual to say the least.

Now, I’ll have to figure out how/whether  I can make it to London next week for a project. Are you allowed in a plane if you have a full leg cast and can’t bend your knee? wonder what I have to do ..

The “gap” between the web 2.0 world created by the digerati and real world is analogous to the one between university and the industry, or to put it differently the gap between pure and applied science. There has always been criticism of Universities and scientists for working on stuff that does not matter, has no applications or use in the real world. Critics argue that universities and scientist should work on applicable issues. Significant portion of science has shifted to this type of more “real” areas rather than pure science since that’s where there is more funding available.

Yet I think it’s mostly accepted that history shows science that had no apparent use yesterday, may enable incredible progress the next day. It is simply not possible to know which research today will become the revolutionary technology of tomorrow, hence pure science still plays a vital role. Pure and applied science has a symbiotic relationship. Applied science uses the ideas and technologies provided pure science to solve practical problems in the real world, hence also has a vital role.

Web 2.0 community and the digerati are the pure scientists and the labs of the social technologies. Just like the pure scientists that work on seemingly obscure fields, web 2.0 community is experimenting with new technologies and approaches that may enable betterment of humanity. Ideas are tested, good ones bubble up.

It may not be possible to see directly how web 2.0 helps solving real world problems, but web 2.0 may very well be a catalyzer, enabling the right people to come up with the solutions by providing the tools. To be able to see the impact of these technologies and learn from it, the ideas and the technologies created by web 2.0 community must spread to the people in the real world.

I’d suggest therefore that the inspiration that we’re looking for lies with the people who are outsiders to web 2.0 community. People who have first hand knowledge of real world problems yet may not be able to envision how web 2.0 technologies they can leverage these tools even if they are using some of them in their personal lives.

Unfortunately most of these people don’t blog. Even if they do, their posts would never get on Techmeme, so to connect with them you have to do the hard way, and meet them.

I suspect this may be partly what Fred Wilson has in mind, in his European trip. If I were Fred, I would want to talk to people who has not even heard his name before. People who work on making a difference in the field. I’d listen to what they do, how they work, what they see the problems are to see whether anything rings a bell, whether web 2.0 ideas can be applied to. I’d tell them all about web 2.0 experiments, new ideas and their promises. A multidisciplinary collaboration, meeting of ideas of people from completely different walks of life is what’s needed to spark inspiration.

Football is dominating the agenda in Turkey these days, which would be fine, if only really important issues were not overshadowed. Never mind judicial coup attempt that threatens the country’s future, never mind military abandoning its principle to meddle into politics and risk damaging its credibility irreversibly.

I hope we win tonight, but there are other areas where we should compete.

(refers to the deaths in Tuzla dockyards)

I do think that I loose significant amount of time context switching as I often work on different things in parallel. A tool that would keep the information organized around the different tasks I work on simply makes sense.  Then I heard of Tasktop and realized that now the idea that I liked so much in mylyn was available outside development environment and got excited.

Tasktop uses the tasks you work on as the context. When you browse the web or open the documents while you work on a task, web pages and docs are automatically associated with the task you work on. If you close the task, they get closed and if you reopen the tasks, they get reopened. Simple idea and effective.

So having loved the idea, I downloaded an evaluation copy of the software and started using it to see whether I would stick with it.  I started using it exclusively and after some getting used to what is what, I was comfortable using it. We use Jira for issue management in the company and I use gmail as my email client; tasktop is integrated with both which made is easy to get going. Working with Jira this way is really nice and a lot of my tasks originate from email so gmail integration is very useful.  I got my tasks in and started using the tool happily.

Tasktop uses an embedded safari based browser. You can launch external browsers but it is meant to be used with the internal browser. Determined to like the tool I gave it a go. I didn’t last very long with it. I found myself going back to Firefox repeatedly and having to do some manual work with Tasktop which is not the idea.  It looks like Tasktop bets the product on the assumption that people will not mind switching their browsers and will use the embedded browser. They may be right. I’m guessing that they target the corporate world which overwhelmingly uses IE and don’t think IE users have a particular loyalty to their browser and may welcome the embedded tasktop browser. This is not the case for me. The browser is the most important application I use, and no way I’ll switch to something else that easily.  I think Tasktop folks may be underestimating the resistance people may have to switching browsers a bit.

There were couple of other minor issues, but they were not show stoppers that would likely to get fixed as the product matures. At the end, the experiment was a failure in my case due to the browser issue. I find myself forgetting to switch back to tasktop etc. which defeated the purpose of tasktop. I still think this is a great idea that has a very good chance of succeeding in the corporate world. It may have harder time with the usual early adaptor crowd however. I’ll keep an eye on tasktop to see where it goes.

With this acquisition, HP becomes an IT services behemoth, second largest only after IBM, and going forward, competition between IBM and HP is expected to be fierce, especially for large outsourcing deals. Obvious enough.

Yet this deal will likely to have massive impact on IT industry in general, not just outsourcing sector. Following IBM closely, as a strategy, HP has just created the second vertically integrated one stop IT shop for customers, providing everything from hardware to software to services. To appreciate the importance of this acquisition, I believe we need to consider this deal along with other acquisitions HP made recently (Mercury Interactive, Opsware, Peregrine,Trustgenix,Tower Software, SPI Dynamics, Bristol, etc.)

With these acquisitions along with already substantial Openview family, HP has a large portfolio of IT management software and now a large services organization that can deliver solutions using these tools. Naturally, HP services organization will still have to collaborate (when it has to) with 3rd parties to meet the requirements of their customers and not just push HP software, just as IBM professional services do, at least in theory.

In practice, experience suggest that it’ll become increasingly harder for other vendors to compete with internal HP products. Projects will have to justify why they need to use 3rd party products instead of internal ones and often the path of least resistance will be to use internal ones unless the customer explicitly dictates otherwise.

I think this is a major problem for any player that is not a one stop shop IT services provider. Software companies without substantial IT services organizations as well as independent IT services companies and systems integrators may find themselves cut off from significant portion of the market.

HP has a large and effective ecosystem. The mutually beneficial relationships HP has with its channel and integration partners has long played a significant role in HP’s success in the IT management market. With this move HP is no doubt jeopardizing its relationship with its ecosystem. It is not surprising however that HP thinks the risk is worth it, and the gains that will come from becoming a one stop shop will more than compensate for the loss of business it generates through the ecosystem.

Enterprises have long been working on reducing the number of suppliers and work with handful of preferred ones and the allure of one supplier that is responsible for everything seems to be too hard to resist for many.

The impact of loosing the channel may be greater than anticipated. Independent services organizations that partner with software companies acquired by IBM in the recent years have been finding themselves competing with their old partners and some of them have been making moves to alternatives. With HP adding a large services organizations, it also becomes a competitor for any services organization that may previously be a partner that sells and implements software products from HP’s or IBM’s portfolio of products.

BMC CEO was quick to move in to take advantage of the coming conflict and characterizes EDS acquisition as “declaration of war” by HP to its ecosystem. BMC also has been in an acquisition binge lately, acquiring BladeLogic, Emprisa Networks, RealOps and Proactivenet within the last year but BMC does not have a large professional services organization so it makes to position itself as the supplier of choice for professional services companies that will be alienated by the HP EDS acquisition. CA may also make a similar move having assembled a solid set of tools through acquisitions (Concord, Aprisma, etc.).

However, if HP’s strategy works out and HP software products starts to gain marketshare, it will not be surprising to see further consolidation in the market in the form or pairing between services organizations like Accenture and software companies like EMC, CA and BMC.

IT market is more and more looking like a Highlander movie. There can be only one a few.