Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

Interesting links for January 28th through March 13th:

• redirect – RT @indigo423: OpenNMS Group nominated for TM Forum Excellence Award http://shar.es/mbTAP (via @dhustace)
• Firebug Demystified | W3Avenue – Firebug is one of the most popular tool used by web developers – It is a Firefox add-on that allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. When you are not using Firefox you can use Firebug Lite – a JavaScript file that you can insert into your pages to simulate some Firebug features in IE, Opera, and Safari.
• RapidOSS and Netcool – What do you get out of the box? | iFountain.com – When you ask a vendor whether their product can do X, what are the chances for the answer to be no? Truth is, if there is any shape or form product can possible do X, regardless of how difficult and painful it may be to do so, the answer would be yes. Hence it is no surprise that people are highly skeptical of any statement made by the vendors.

Interesting links for December 30th through January 27th:

• RapidOSS and Netcool – What do you get out of the box? – A set of screencast on what RapidOSS provides out of the box when it is used with Netcool. Installation and configuration, overview of features, mobile interface, etc.
• AnandTech: The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD – Great review of SSD drives and performance considerations
• iPhone comes to Netcool | iFountain.com – iPhone optimized user interface for Netcool

Interesting links for July 29th through September 27th:

• Trademarkia (TM) Simplifies Trademark Search – Trademarkia let’s you search all U.S. trademarks filed since 1870, including dead marks. The company has scans of all the marks and returns results in a very appealing visual grid. You can search by company, theme, product category, or even filing attorney. Companies can also file a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office through the site.
• Google – Internet Stats – This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights. These have been collected from a number of third party sources covering a range of topics from macroscopic economic and media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time.
• GreenMail – Email Test Servers – GreenMail is an open source, intuitive and easy-to-use test suite of email servers for testing purposes.
  Supports SMTP, POP3, IMAP with SSL socket support.

  GreenMail is the fist and only library that offers a test framework for both receiving and retrieving emails from Java.

So Vmware is acquiring SpringSource. Like most people, my first reaction was say what? I didn’t get it; what’s VMWare got to do with SpringSource and Java ?
I read the blog posts by Steve Herrod and Rod Johnson. They were explaining their vision at a high level as expected, and it did not help much. I was still drawing a blank. I hit twitter, read some immediate reactions and subsequent blog posts, hoping they do the hard work and spell it out for me. No such luck. Comments were so diagonally opposed to one another that I’ve concluded it wasn’t just me who was confused. @daveofdoom thought Hyperic was a key tech, Reuven Cohen concluded that, Hyperic was unneeded by VMWare and would be shut down. Confused yet?

A sneaking suspicion has come over me: We don’t understand what these guys are really up to just yet, and they are up to something groundbreaking, that may shape the future.

No help from usually insightful sources, (amazing how easily I got used to readily available quality analysis for free!) I had to do some thinking and speculation myself. I reread the announcements and started thinking.

First, why am I interested? We use many of the technologies provided by these companies in some form. iFountain is a java shop, and use VMWare for development and testing. Our product RapidInsight is built on Grails and heavily uses Groovy, and has integration with Hyperic (one of the best server/application management solutions in the market, open source or otherwise.)

What does this acquisition mean to us?
1. VMWare Springsource Java stack combination.
As mentioned in Steve Herrod’s post, it no longer makes sense for the VMs to be ignorant of the applications running on them. VMs and the applications need to be introduced to each other. If they become good friends, and start talking and sharing, all kinds of cool things can happen.
In my experience, actual hardware and operating system has lost its importance a while ago. If you develop pure java applications, JVM becomes your environment. Why do we need another layer of abstraction, especially if it is virtual? To run a java application like RapidInsight in the cloud (EC2, etc.) or on VMWare hosted image, one has to create an OS image, configure it, make it secure, maintain/administer it, etc. just to host the JVM so that java app can run.
What if instead, VMWare could run JVMs natively just like it’s running linux or windows?

JVM running natively without an OS would presumably have a lot smaller footprint, and save resources. However, more substantial savings would probably come from eliminating administrative overhead of managing the OS.
From an ISV standpoint, this combination may enable ISVs to deploy applications in VMWare JVM ready format, to be installed and running within minutes.

2. Instrumentation of the applications and VMware
Hyperic is different than other solutions in the market it’s competing. It has an agent that is installed on the host and can gather in depth information that is essential for the “conversation” between the applications and VMware.
Using Hyperic, applications can be instrumented, giving in-depth information on how the application is performing, etc. Imagine VMWare assigning another CPU and more memory to the JVM on the fly automatically based on various performance parameters! (afaik neither is currently possible without a restart of the JVM). Now that would be something!

3. Development tools – cloud integration
We use various VMWare images for development. Having an IDE that is integrated with the cloud (VMWare) resources and enable running apps directly on the cloud by push of a button from IDE sounds good to me. If VMWare/Springsource continues to invest in having great support for Groovy and Grails in Eclipse, and integrate it with the cloud, it will be a great combination.

In short, I can see VMWare becoming THE platform for us to develop our products. All of a sudden, this is not such a crazy acquisition. Hats off to everyone involved, there is some great potential here!

From traditional IT management perspective, things are a bit blurry. Springsource acquisition of Hyperic hinted that Hyperic may become more of a specialized management vendor, focusing on java application management. With the acquisition of Springsource by VMWare, this has become a stronger possibility.

With this acquisition, Hyperic (product line) is moving into dominating the future of IT management with a vertically integrated solution. Does VMWare intend to compete in the traditional IT management market with the likes of Zenoss, Groundworks, Tivoli, HP, BMC, etc. as well, or will they gradually abandon this market? What is the future of Hyperic product line, if any, apart from being a key enabling technology for VMWare’s cloud platform?

Interesting links for June 29th through July 17th:

• Why is Performance Monitoring so hard? – brettdargan.com – To keep it simple lets categorize them like this:

  * Current State – Instantaneous State based
  * Alerting
  * Historical Stats
  * Trace (System > Component > Request) ~ Vertical Profiling through technologies
  * Profiling – usually technology focused, like Java Profiling
  * Vital Signs

  These have varying levels of intrusiveness; stickiness and probability of working when needed. They also have varying stakeholders, users, requirements, permissions that = red tape that slows you down when you most need the information.

• What do I do for a Living? – Step 4: Correlation & Enrichment | A Monitoring Odyssey… –
• Efficient Services: RapidInsight: Open source Netcool Alternative? – RI is an alternative and a complimenting product to Netcool. Visit below link in case planning/scoping/analysing the roadmap from Netcool

Interesting links for June 22nd through June 25th:

• Theocracy and Its Discontents | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com – RT @GreatDismal: Theocracy and its Discontents, Fareed Zakaria http://tinyurl.com/nu9rxy [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2332184076]
• JavaScript Toolkit for Rich Web Mapping Applications — GeoExt v0.5 – GeoExt brings together the geospatial know how of OpenLayers with ExtJS to build powerful GIS apps on the web with js http://www.geoext.org/ [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2296416778]
• DataflowConcurrency – gparallelizer – Dataflow concurrency offers an alternative concurrency model, which is inherently safe and robust. – Google Code – RT @glaforge: Nice: Dataflow concurrency with #groovy's GParallelizer: http://code.google.com/p/gparallelizer/wiki/DataflowConcurrency [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2277260266]

Interesting links for June 16th through June 21st:

• Flex on Grails ‎(flexongrails)‎ – Flex on Grails Book to be released with Creative commons license http://sites.google.com/site/flexongrails/ http://ff.im/-4fDpj [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2265957275]
• Flex on Grails Book to be released with Creative… – berkay – FriendFeed – Flex on Grails Book to be released with Creative commons license http://sites.google.com/site/flexongrails/ http://ff.im/-4fDpj [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2265957275]
• FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Iran Does Have Some Fishy Numbers – RT @monkchips: RT @timbray If Nate Silver says the election was bogus, that's good enough for me: http://is.gd/12Ace #iranelection [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2190534964]
• Atlassian Developer Blog – Agile Context Switching with "The Disturbed" – Agile Context Switching with "The Disturbed" http://bit.ly/7G6Uu [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2189830715]

Interesting links for June 15th from 22:48 to 23:14:

• Berkay Mollamustafaoglu – Switzerland | Facebook – just for the record, I got my facebook username as well http://www.facebook.com/berkay [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2155146631]
• wingsuit base jumping on Vimeo – birds got nothing on these guys! http://vimeo.com/1778399 [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2130112688]
• Freeriding, participation and another modest proposal | carlodaffara.conecta.it – Good analysis "Freeriding, participation in open source and another modest proposal" http://bit.ly/1uCCkr via @jgehlbach @cdaffara [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2103349091]
• PROJECT DOES NOT EXIST – iFountain Tracking System – @robinharwani Can you open an issue with the error msg http://www.ifountain.org/jira/browse/SUP. Also, in RI, you can see hist. events [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/2084405066]

Interesting links for June 15th from 01:54 to 06:05:

• Escaping quotes in Groovy strings – Messages from mrhaki – simple pain relief, why Groovy just rocks: "Escaping quotes in groovy strings" http://bitly.com/HnPaf [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1637893675]
• Atlassian Developer Blog – Setting up JIRA and Confluence in minutes – Atlassian is on a roll! Good blog post on how a software company can make it easy for customer to use Amazon EC2 http://bitly.com/yvUzj [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1567621129]
• Putting the Toothpaste Back into the Tube… – berkay – FriendFeed – Putting the Toothpaste Back into the Tube… http://ff.im/-2f0d3 [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1566931072]
• Judith Hurwitz’s Weblog – RT @jhurwitz: Just published new blog on Oracle acquisition of Sun __ http://tiny.cc/BdzIp [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1565816390]
• Atlassian Stimulus Package – 5 user lic for Confluence/JIRA for $5 for charity! sure I can use it for smthing! – http://www.atlassian.com/starter/ via @mcannonbrookes [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1563981404]
• Brain Myths—Busted – MSN Health & Fitness – Health Topics – Brain Myths—Busted http://tinyurl.com/d6ocqs http://ff.im/-2cc1t [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1549161826]

Interesting links for June 15th from 00:48 to 00:49:

• Brain Myths—Busted… – berkay – FriendFeed – Brain Myths—Busted http://tinyurl.com/d6ocqs http://ff.im/-2cc1t [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1549161826]
• iFountain.com – Stop the presses! RapidInsight wins EMC Smarts 2008 Offering of the Year Award http://bitly.com/msHda http://ff.im/-2b9pL [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1541907118]
• Stop the presses! RapidInsight wins EMC Smarts… – berkay – FriendFeed – Stop the presses! RapidInsight wins EMC Smarts 2008 Offering of the Year Award http://bitly.com/msHda http://ff.im/-2b9pL [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1541907118]
• The Civil Heretic – Freeman Dyson – Profile – NYTimes.com – The Civil Heretic: Freeman Dyson http://tr.im/iY52 http://ff.im/-29PF6 [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1534441221]
• The Civil Heretic: Freeman Dyson http://tr.im/iY52 – berkay – FriendFeed – The Civil Heretic: Freeman Dyson http://tr.im/iY52 http://ff.im/-29PF6 [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1534441221]
• Mashup, Not Smashups! – IT Management 2.0 – RT @SuzySpaatz: RT @EMCITManagement: Mashup, Not Smashups! http://twurl.nl/mkuzfr — if you are interested in Service Management, read this [from http://twitter.com/berkay/statuses/1532940564]