This is MP3Monster's blog. The blog covers music, technology, photography and anything else Monster considers worthy of blogging about.Sans Institute Paper - great title, great read?
Posted by monster in Work
The Sans Institute isn’t a place I would look for entertaining reading. I have to admit to tracking the site as my job requires that I have a handle on best practice for development including code security considerations and issues of PCI. But a new paper in the Institute’s reading room certainly got my attention - "Beer - The Key Ingredient to Team Development". As much as my team and I’m sure many others would love to use this as an excuse to head for the pub everyday on the company’s tab; it is actually an article about team development and the different stages a team goes through (Forming, Storming, Performing etc).
I have to admit I’ve not read the paper any further than to discern its key theme, but I’ll try to blog about it once I’ve read and digested it.
Chance to influeence music industry leaders
Posted by monster in Music, Work
According to the NME (here) Fergal Sharkey the former lead singer of The Undertones who now heads an industry representative body has setup a website which will give people the opportunity to feedback to the ‘powers that be’ about their music buying habits. The only problem in my mind is that they’re not interested if you’re over 24 years old. Which I have to say I find a little insulting - I am well outside that age bracket, but still very much clued up about ways to acquire and listen to music; and spend as much or more now than I did when I was 24.
I think that the age banding also assumes you have an understanding of your demographic, but the point of site I thought was to try and understand your consumers. So why not let all contribute and then look at the patterns in the responses.
Junior Development staff in a distributed development team
Posted by monster in Work
An interesting problem was highlighted the other day in conversation with colleagues in the IT industry. How do you take on a graduate or junior developer within a highly distributed development team, and how do you make Agile work well in a distributed team.
Often the argument is that distribution doesn’t matter, we have lots of technologies to overcome that. But, when we deal with new people, particularly those who haven’t had much or any experience there is a lot of contact needed - communicating large amounts of detail - not the clearly expressible things that we can read in a document, but all the nuances, the policy compared to the actual practices; seeing and feeling the tensions and people politics within a team and how they should be negotiated. It is this very reason that video conference is better than a phone call, and traveling to meet someone is better than a video conference.
With my new roll which involves running a team of individuals, it is easier for them and me that we now located in the office as group. I obviously will get to feel how they interact with external demands, and what the demands are - which in our case are many. But the team have a better sense that they can call on me to help easily. This cant translate to a distributed team.
This is not to say that there a good things for distributed teams. The staff will be content as they located in situations they should be happy with. The disruptions of a large office dont exist, so the chances of longer periods for clear thinking are there - which are important to developers.
Quiet on the blogging front - wave bye bye, say hello
Posted by monster in Work
I’ve been a little on the quiet side on the blogging front, as I’ve been busy with work related activities.
Firstly getting SeeWhy’s first SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM customer up and running on a platform combination we’ve not really dealt with much before namely JBoss 4.2.2 on Red Hat Linux. Taking into account the fact that the installation included setting up the environment and a jBPM source machine the install went very quickly and smoothly.
Secondly, I shall be parting company with SeeWhy in the New Year for pastures new, and green (literally) as I’ll be going to work for Specsavers as an Integration Architect. The Specsavers interview process has been an interesting experience which included, psychometrics tests, stand up presentations, and technical exams, along with the traditional face to face conversation.
So in January I’d imagine that my blogging activities will be a bit on the slow side as I’ll be pretty busy getting my feet under the desk as they say with the new job.
SeeWhy for jBPM video demo
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
SeeWhy for jBPM now has three videos that have been put together that illustrate SeeWhy what it is, and what can be done. Although the videos are aimed at jBPM they’re just as applicable to any BPM solution, not just jBPM. The videos also give some sense as to what SeeWhy has the potential to be able to do.
The videos are freely available from Google, and higher res versions that can be downloaded from the SeeWhy website. With the higher resolution versions you can see in detail what is being done.
Part 1 - Introduction to SeeWhy for jBPM
Part 2 - Business Activity Monitoring
Part 3 - Event Driven Business Intelligence
How portable is Java?
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
The title is a bit of a trick question - if the JVM meets all the tests to qualify being called Java then it is portable. However the website JavaSpecialists has a series of brilliant articles about some of the depths of Java, with a rather interesting article called ‘Law of Cretan Driving’ which looks at the way 64 bit value are handled (such as long) within the JVM. The article points out that it is not mandatory for the JVM to ensure that the bytes that are used to represent a long can not be manipulated by separate threads at anyone time. That is to say that any 64bit primitive such as a long is not guaranteed to be thread safe. However problem is that primitive data types are generally considered by developers to be atomically safe - which isn’t necessarily the case. So we can find that a java application which is theoretically portable may actually not port.
Java Standard - http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/Concepts.doc.html#17876
SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM
Posted by monster in Work
SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM is the latest evolution in the integration between jBPM which forms a crucial element in the orchestration of JBoss’ SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) stack. We’ve produced some video clips complete with commentary together that show the core parts of the SeWhy for JBoss jBPM along with looking at SeeWhy in the broader context of BI (Business Intelligence) and BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). The SeeWhy page here has both low res streaming versions of the videos and downloadable high res versions.
If you’re interested in work flow and how you can monitor and measure its activity both in terms of IT operational performance and in the business context then the three clips will be ten minutes well spent.
Useful links …
SeeWhy release announcements
Posted by monster in Work
It would appear that the SeeWhy press announcements about the latest publicly available version of SeeWhy are filtering out (e.g. webitpr | SeeWhy Announces Version 3.4 to Drive Online 1-to-1 Marketing )onto the Net. The announcements also reflect the current push into the Customer Experience Management (CEM) application of our real-time event processing platform.
As SeeWhy is an event engine with configured and configurable metrics it provides a very powerful offering that will allow simple measurement such as user experience (such as how well are page requests being serviced - in general and for key customers) all the way through to some significant business orientated metrics - website performance against hit to sale conversions trended over a time. Particularly when you add to this a highly customisable closed loop capabilities.
real-life jBPM proof of concept using SeeWhy
Posted by monster in Work
Jorrem Barrez’s blog has a brilliant demo (video and slides) of a proof of concept that presents JBoss jBPM (JBoss’ Business Process Management tool) and SeeWhy being used to provide a BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) capability for jBPM (Small steps with big feet » Blog Archive » Some real-life jBPM action: PoC jBPM Orchestration). Jorrem appears to have worked version 3.2 of SeeWhy and taken advantage of the jBPM Integration Guide. Its pleasing to see that they thought it was well documented, the good news is that his proof of concept will come together even more easily with some of the forthcoming features.
del.icio.us tags: SeeWhy, jBPM, JBOss World, BI, BAM, PoC, demo
Event Processing (CEP) - overview from EBizQ
Posted by monster in Work
The Enterprise Business IT blog/online journal have posted a number of articles and webinars looking at Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event Driven Architecture and related areas, the links are :
- What is Event Processing?:Blogs and Resources
- What is Event Processing?: Event-Driven Architecture
- What is Event Processing?: Related Technologies
- What is Event Processing?: Trends and Commentary
The EBizQ pages link to material by influential thinkers/analysts in the area such as Roy Schultze (Gartner) and one of IBM’s Lead Architect’s Opher Etzion. If you’re looking for a basic handle on Event Processing particularly within the context of more mainstream business i.e. SOA (Service Orientated Architecture), BPM (Business Process Management), BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) issues then these links make a good starting point although although the this certainly doesn’t tell the whole story as it doesn’t address the super high volume players such as Streambase and the likes of my employer SeeWhy where we provide Event Driven BI (Business Intelligence) which has a natural affinity to BAM. However EBizQ does touch upon Event Driven BI here.
NB - I’m expressing my personal views rather than those of SeeWhy here.
Seewhy for JBoss jBPM
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
With the big push at SeeWhy to get Version 3.4 out of the door coming to an end, I’m expecting to get time to finalise SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM - a BAM solution for JBoss jBPM (JBoss’ Business Process Management tool which is also used to provide orchestration of the JBoss SOA platform) using the SeeWhy realtime BI product. The core of this has been largely finished for some time, as we demo’d it in Orlando for JBoss World but the production quality finishing and the final piece of functionality - providing the closed loop capabilities such that SeeWhy can start new jBPM processes or get existing processes to resume had been held up. Unfortunately trying to get a good grip on this and the threading implications hasn’t been so straight forward giving the limited amount and quality of documentation (for example javadoc for jBPM is very sparse) and example code available. Although I am very pleased with the quality of documentation that the next generation of jBPM is likely to have having seen the PVM (Process Virtual Machine) source code for its first release.
LinkedIn recommendations
Posted by monster in Work
A former colleague of mine added a Recommendation to my LinkedIn profile today that is very pleasing to read. It is always pleasing to read that a former member a team you’ve run thinks you’ve done a good job.
Tom Baeyens - jBPM
Posted by monster in Work
I had the chance to have a chat with Tom Baeyens, the lead for JBoss’ jBPM development programme who has a blog at Process Developments. He has recently blogged, giving SeeWhy a little mention as a result of our conversation.
The Killer App for CEP
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
The online journal ebizQ are providing a webinar on ‘BAM:The Killer App for CEP’. Although SeeWhy would suggest that this is not exclusively the domain of Complex Event Processing, but any tool around Event Processing with a real-time capacity. It would seem that SeeWhy is not the only organisation that sees how BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) is a natural partner for Event Processing as SeeWhy has produced an extension to its real-time Business Intelligence platform called ‘SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM’.
The webinar is sponsored by SL who provide a real-time style dashboard so will give some basic visibility of business activity, but doesn’t have the richness of SeeWhy’s intelligence or ability to feedback into the source system such as jBPM or event a third party.
JBoss World Orlando 2008
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
We’re back from JBoss World in Orlando now - and a few pictures of the trip can be found at Flickr: JBoss World Orlando. A very busy trip indeed with only an hour in the sunshine at the end of the conference before heading back to the airport. For SeeWhy initial impressions are that the conference was a success, but it is still early days to really tell. Thankyou to all who came to see our stand and talk about Event Driven BI and the new jBPM BAM solution. Plus a special thanks to David Barnes at Packt publishing and Matt Cumberlidge the brilliant author of the book Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM.
Links to articles mentioning SeeWhy from JBoss World:
- http://java.sys-con.com/read/502052.htm#
- http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2209946/jboss-extends-relationship
- http://adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=22086
- http://reddevnews.com/news/article.aspx?editorialsid=9561
- http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid26_gci1301878,00.html
Amusing quote …
Posted by monster in General, Work
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
Robert Frost
JBoss jBPM
Posted by monster in Work
Well I got my copy of Matt’s book today, and had a look through - and I can say that it looks very good - if you want to get an idea of what BPM can offer without any licensing costs then this book with a download of jBPM is perfect.
I can’t resist taking two quotes though. The first is from About the author
I’d like to thank Phil Wilkins from SeeWhy for going way beyond the call of duty in helping me.
and from the closing section about using SeeWhy with jBPM:
There is a great deal to discover and put to use in the SeeWhy business intelligence platform, and have merely scratched the surface of what’s possible:we could write a whole book about it.
Any, congratulations to Matt for a great book. The book can be found at Amazon here.
JBoss jBPM Book
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
I’ve previously posted on the involvement I’ve had with supporting Matt Cumberlidge’s book on jBPM, well I’ve found the book on Amazon now (go here).
SeeWhy Releases Business Process Management Integration Kit
Posted by monster in Work
To press releases to day for SeeWhy, one about the ‘BPM Integration Kit’ with a nice quote from Matt Cumberlidge (SeeWhy Releases Business Process Management Integration Kit). The second is finally announcing Version 3.2 of the product (SeeWhy Adds Advanced Profiling to SeeWhy Community Edition 3.2 ) with a good quote from IDC analyst Alys Woodward.
More press for SeeWhy
Posted by monster in Work
A couple more articles about SeeWhy have appeared in the major press:
