This is MP3Monster's blog. The blog covers music, technology, photography and anything else Monster considers worthy of blogging about.Mindmaps
Posted by monster in Work & Technology
Mindmaps section has been updated with more detail in the SOA mindmaps and a new Performance MySQL map. All of these will get more updates over the coming weeks.
Security Design Patterns
Posted by monster in Work & Technology
Security is a challenging area within software design and development. The fact that Microsoft have been pushing hard for a couple of years now with the high emphasis on security in their applications and still notable vulnerabilities show up is simple testament the the challenges.
So it is good to see that the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University have made a booklet/paper freely available that describes some Security Design Patterns (can be found here). I’ve not yet read all of it – but the content I have reviewed is good solid guidance.
SOAPatterns Mind map
Posted by monster in Work & Technology
http://www.mp3monster.org/new/techie/MindMaps/SOAPatterns.shtml
SOA Patterns
Mindmaps
Posted by monster in Work & Technology
I use Freemind as mind mapping tool, and when reading technical books I sometimes make mindmaps as I go. My mind maps can be found here. As it happens I’m not the only one to have done this, and over at the Freemind wiki you can find lots of links to other people’s efforts including a brilliant set on Fred Brook’s Mythical Man Month and another on design patterns here.
My current on going effort is for OSGi and can be seen here. this isn’t complete yet, but well on its way.
Note there is a small gremlin with viewing these with Firefox which I will fix in the next day or so.
AJAX Resources
Posted by monster in General, Work & Technology
With WebUI’s getting more like thick applications as a result of the increasing adoption and sophistication of AJAX use I came across a website that does a good job of pulling together AJAX lessons, examples and tips tricks called www.ajaxlessons.com. Its a link’d recommedn adding to any web developers list of dev resources.
Social Networking sites as part of a business intranet
Posted by monster in Work & Technology
I’ve never entirely be convinced by the suggestion that using social networking technologies to form a business intranet. That is, until today when I heard a podcast presented by the Chief Technologist of Ektron as part of the SWSX conference. To date I’ve viewed the intranet as needing to be able provide static content (e.g. standard documents such as benefits etc) and a dynamic area for knowledge sharing.
What Bill Cava highlighted is that a large percentage (50%) of people found site searching for information can be ineffective. But by exploiting people’s innate understanding of human relationships and roles. So by leveraging that, you improve the chance of finding what you need. For example configuration information for a VPN, well talk to a system admin as they’ll know where the documentation is, and may well even have links from their profile to the information. This really plays dividends on distributed or larger organisations.
Secondly, social networking sites also have forum style areas where a written exchanges can be posted. But unlike the forum, the participation in the discussion can be more easily configured and dynamically controlled (self organising). But there is also context to the conversation as the social network provides detail about the participants.
Lastly the intranet only delivers value if its used, and to get use it must provide the engage-ability that social networking functionality can offer. As Bill points out we perform web analytics on company business sites, and should we not also do that for the intranet to understand that its value and contribution to the business operation.
I’d recommend listening to the podcast if you’re looking how to improve your business’ internal IT resources, although it is slow slow going to get the nuggets from the ‘cast.
Event Processing - Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so
Posted by monster in Technology, Work & Technology
When it comes to event based processing such as CEP, time becomes an important (and complicated) issue. To your average Data Analyst timelines may seem relatively simple issue - data is in the timer period of interest or not. However when you’re dealing with events from different systems as they occur time becomes all important - the first issue that needs to be considered is, are all the systems feeding us events reporting against the same time clock. Imagine events that happen at the same time in from two different systems but a reported against different clock times would look they your event system receives them. Then how do you handle things if systems switch in and out of summer time ? Marco Seiriö in his blog Marco on CEP provides an good explanation to some of the issues and strategies for dealing with them in his blog entry Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
It is interesting comparing the approaches that RuleCore takes compared to those here at SeeWhy and it seems that here at SeeWhy we’ve taken the possibilities a step further by allowing the user to have policies on handling timing uses associated to each event stream.
BgInfo - Helping manage your servers
Posted by monster in Work & Technology
In my work roll I’m having to manage more and more machines, particularly with the increasing adoption of Virtualisation. A friend of mine introduced me to a rather helpful little tool which used to be provided freely by SysInternals and now Microsoft (they acquired sysInternals) called BgInfo. BigInfo create a simple wallpaper that provides clear visibility of a machine’s configuration. Below is an example in Vista:
The only shame is that it doesn’t capture the information for Linux based machines as well.
