I had to really lay into this movie in my Amazon.com review. I tend to write reviews for products that I'm impressed with and just keep quite on products that don't really impress. This movie, however, was the exception. It got such good reviews on Amazon that I felt compelled to give it a look. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) had some of the best information on this flick outside of Amazon. It didn't make the mainstream movie reviews sites like Rottentomatoes.com since it never made it to the box office. 2 starts was probably a bit harsh, 2.5 would have been more appropriate. I felt the genuine need to remove this movie from the 5 star plateau though as this is genuinely deceitful. My Amazon review follows:



I really live or die by Amazon reviews. 99% of the time, they are spot on. I felt like I was burned a bit by the reviews on this one.

I should have been a bit suspicious when a movie that never even made it to the box office (mainstream, independent, or otherwise) was holding down a 5 star rating on Amazon. Some of the sites that I normally rely on for movie ratings didn't even cover this movie since it didn't get a lot of press and didn't get any reviews by national or regional critics.

The majority of reviews that I read seemed held back on information so as not to give the "plot turns" away. Let me lay it out for you, there are no real plot turns so don't hold your breath waiting for any. Once you get past the opening scenes and understand the premise of the film, it quickly degrades into a typical Hollywood action / adventure type flick. That said, this is no worse than a lot of the trash that Hollywood releases to fill the theaters during the peak summer movie months. In some cases (pick most any action film on installment 3 or greater), it's actually better.

"Already Dead" is a 2-3 star movie that might be worth the low price you pay for the rental at Unboxed or your local retail outlet. Don't go in expecting too much though. There's a reason this didn't get picked up for mainstream distribution.

I've been contemplating the move towards a self-hosted Subversion repository for quite a while. My earlier attempts worked but left me with a lot of inconvenient and sometimes quirky side effects. These experiences always led me back to hosting Subversion on Linux, which is really where it works most naturally. Recently, however, I decided to retry my luck with Subversion hosting on Windows and I made the call to go with a "package" instead of doing the Apache / Subversion integration myself.



The tool that I went with, VisualSVN, is a Windows version of Subversion that targets primarily Microsoft developers using VisualStudio as their development platform. Matter of fact, the Subversion server package is freely distributed and the actual product that is sold is the Visual Studio plugin that allows you to tap into Subversion from Visual Studio. With a 30 day trial period and $49 price tag, I decided that it couldn't hurt to try it out. My findings are below:

• VisualSVN Server - The VisualSVN server, as mentioned earlier is a freely distributed product. You can get this piece of software whether or not you ultimately decide to buy and use the Subversion Visual Studio plugin. The server runs exclusively over HTTP / HTTPS (using OpenSSL) and does not support Subversion's binary protocol or running Subversion over SSH. Obviously, this means that Apache is in play. A version of Apache is included in the distribution. Initial configuration of the server is very easy, the setup instructions describe the extent of it. As I blogged about previously, this changes a bit if you try to get Apache and IIS to run side-by-side. In this case, you need to be very explicit and tell the very greedy IIS to stop listening on other IP addresses so that port 80 can be shared by IIS and Apache. I included links to the Microsoft article in my earlier post. In this case, you'll want to use httpcfg delete iplisten -i xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to stop IIS from listening on the port Apache is running on.      
  

• VisualSVN Visual Studio Plugin - As useful as the server is, the real product is the VisualStudio plugin. The most recent version of this plugin works on VisualStudio 2008 so I thought I'd install it and give it a whirl. Installation is fairly easy. Both TortoiseSVN and the VisualSVN plugin must be installed. I don't know exactly how VisualSVN communicates with Tortoise but it seems to make sense to leverage an existing Windows Subversion library rather than building everything from scratch. Using both the plugin and Tortoise gives you two ways to work with Subversion. In my experience with other Java IDE plugins (Netbeans and Elcipse), this is sometimes necessary to get around the shortcomings of the browser plugin.

This looks to be my keeper for Subversion hosting. Now I need to port over my existing repositories into the VisualSVN server.

I've been busy since returning from vacation on getting my new iMac up and running. Aside from the machine being a physical work of art, it's also been performing very well and runs so silent that I'm hearing all kinds of new noises in my house that I wasn't aware of before. This doesn't mean that I've completely forsaken Windows. In fact, the move to the Mac has allowed me to finally move to Vista on my home machine and install Visual Studio 2008, which is killing my work laptop. For those of you remotely familiar with the Mac, running Windows side-by-side with OS X has been possible since the release of the Intel-based Macs. This started with Boot Camp and gained serious traction with the release of Parallels. Most recently, VMware jumped into this space with their Fusion product for the Mac. I went with Fusion due to reviews on both Apple's site and Amazon.com that seemed to indicate that Fusion was more stable and that there were far more converts from Parallels to Fusion than in the opposite direction.

I'm running 3 operating systems now on this machine, 2 of them under Fusion 1.1. Mac OS X Leopard came pre-installed with the machine and Vista and Ubuntu Linux are running under Fusion. Despite the 64-bit Intel architecture on the new Macs, both the Vista and Ubuntu installs are 32-bit. I didn't hear enough good news about the 64 bit releases to convince me that they were worth pursuing. All of this is running on 4GB of memory. Only 1 GB was stock and you'd be crazy to pay Apple's prices for memory. Other World Computing (OWC) will get you to the 4GB maximum for less than $100. The memory install took all of about 10 minutes and OWC's service and delivery were nothing short of outstanding.

As far as the individual operating systems, they are all running fine. That said, everyone puts different kinds of stresses on their machines. Mine is software development and I require each of my operating systems to run at least oneIDE. That's actually the reason for the existence of these VMs in the first place. Although my initial research prepared me for the worst, I've had no issues with running IDEs concurrently on all 3 operating systems. I've encountered some small quirks, which I've documented below for anyone who might find this sort of thing useful:

• Mac OS X Leopard - I'm running NetBeans 6.0 with the Ruby-only configuration. Much to the chagrin of many Mac developers, Leopard did not ship with Java 6 even though it was included in some of thepre-releases. This proved to be a non-issue for the installation of the latest version of NetBeans. Obviously, running NetBeans in Ruby-only mode means that I'm not exercising the JDK and thus avoiding what could potentially be a lot of issues.
• Windows Vista - Although I've had issues getting used to the Vista operating system from the Windows 2003 Server / Windows XP I've become so familiar with, I've had few issues actually running Vista. I'm running Vista with the 1 GB RAM that Fusion recommended and have had no issues thus far. The only issue I encountered was trying to install Vista in Fusion Easy Install mode with multipleCDs , as opposed to a DVD. This is a documented issue with Fusion that I didn't become aware of until I ran into it head-on. Simply switching to a normal install solved all of my issues. On top of Vista, I'm running Visual Studio 2008. This runs pretty quick - even on 1 GB and builds of moderately sized solutions are pretty fast. TheIDE is really responsive and you really only notice that your running in a virtualized environment if you try to resize the entire Vista window to get more real estate for the IDE.
• Ubuntu 7.10 - Despite the size of the operating system, this installation took longer than Vista. I chose not to use one of VMware's canned virtual appliances and go with a fresh install.  I would probably re-examine this decision if I had the chance to do it all over again. Ubuntu is running NetBeans 6.0 with the full Java EE stack. The install of NetBeans downloaded directly from netbeans.com went really well once the proper Sun JDKs were installed. Both the Java 5 and Java 6 JDKs were available directly from Ubuntu's installation utility. I installed Java 5 first and, after realizing that it was a vanilla 1.5.0 release that didn't meet the requirements for NetBeans 6.0, I installed Java 6. Things have been just dandy since then.

I’ve posted about how impressed I was with NetBeans as a Java IDE and the incredible progress this product has made in the last couple of years. I knew for a while that Ruby on Rails and JRuby support was coming for the next major Netbeans release (v 6.0), but I hesitated moving from RadRails to NetBeans until the feature set had stabilized. Last week, the Netbeans 6.0 beta was released and, with RadRails stagnating somewhat under the Aptana brand, I caved in and made the switch.

 

George Cook does an excellent Job of running through the new features with lots of nice pretty screenshots. If you’re looking at moving to Netbeans as a Rails IDE, it’s the first place I suggest that you go. Some of my favorite features of Netbeans (with screens shamelessly stolen from George’s site) include code completion

 

 

 

…and debugging

 

 

There are several features from RadRails that I miss and that I hope the NetBeans team will consider integrating over time. These include the ability to import a project directly from Subversion and the test window that allows you to visually check the status of your tests and select particular tests to run. Those features aside, I don’t plan on going back to RadRails. NetBeans has made so much progress so quickly, I can only imagine that it’s going to put significant distance between itself and RadRails in the near future.

 

You can get Netbeans 6.0 here, available as a skinnied-down Ruby only version if you want. Finally, since Netbeans uses JRuby as the default interpreter and expects the Derby Java database, this article on wiring NetBeans for InstantRails should get you up and moving with the standard Ruby interpreter and MySQL database configuration, regardless of whether you’re using InstantRails or not.

 

Final note if you're brand new to Ruby on Rails and reading this post. Skip right to Rails 2.0, which is now in preview mode, to avoid dealing with Rails 1.2.x deprecations and to benefit from some of the new defaults. Enjoy!

I’ve had some really good experiences with some of the iTunes Original collections, which include a mix of pre-existing songs, original versions of hits and artist narrations. I’ve especially enjoyed the iTunes Originals with Rob Thomas. This weekend, I picked up my first iTunes Exclusive Live Sessions mix. The Live Sessions series at 5 or 6 songs per collection offers only about half the music of your average Original collection but, as the title indicates, it’s all live music.

Since I’ve downloaded the Five for Fighting Live Session from iTunes, I have not been able to get the music off of my mind. I’ve been listening to Five for Fighting since their first CD, which accompanied my wife and I on a memorable trip down the US West Coast. Even if you can’t associate the Five for Fighting name with a particular song, it’s fairly likely that you’ve heard their music since it gets a good amount of radio play and has found favor with a number of TV commercial producers.

Granted, you are not going to get any original music here but what you do get is Five for Fighting’s best material done live in a pure acoustic (piano and guitar) format. The album is tight and the recording quality is superb. Artist narration, storytelling, and interludes are edited out except for one story about the writing of the song Two Lights which really accentuates that piece. At about $5 for the collection, you really can’t go wrong with this one whether you are an old fan or someone simply looking to pick up some great music to listen to.

Every IT generation has its seminal tome that transcends time and connects the dots in a way that no book had before it. For the object oriented generation in the 1980s, it was the Gang of Four (GoF) book. For the application architecture generation in the 1990s, it was Fowler’s book on patterns (PoEAA). “RESTful Web Services” will be, in my opinion, that book for the 2000s Web services generation.

There is something absolutely special about this book that readers of GoF or PoEAA will immediately recognize and appreciate. The book covers a breadth of technologies and ideas yet it helps the reader see how they all connect. It uses short code samples (in Ruby, the choice of this generation) to illustrate rather than obfuscate the ideas. Most importantly, it makes the complex comprehensible and delivers epiphany-like experiences throughout the book.

There are too many highlights in this book to enumerate in this review. However, some of the coverage that I appreciated most included:

• The chapters on resource-oriented design, since there was practically no written information available on this topic prior to this book
• The chapter on resource-oriented best practices
• An overview of the service building blocks, including the different representational formats and WADL, which I wasn’t aware of
• The chapter comparing and contrasting RESTful services with the “Big” (e.g. SOAP) service overhead that is common in most enterprise environments

I would have liked to see this book touch on simple POX versus true REST and handle the resource-oriented security concerns in a bit more detail but you can only ask so much of any one book. I’m fairly confident that “RESTful Web Services”, like the seminal tomes that have gone before it, will become assumed reading 

The innovation engine at Yahoo is heating up, looking to get Yahoo back in the race with the “Big Boys”, rivals Google and Microsoft. In an environment categorized by copycat service offerings and one-upmanship, Yahoo’s offerings are refreshingly unique. I cover three of the most recent services that I’ve been playing around with and that I think will prove entertaining to my readers as well – Pipes, OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, and TagMaps.

• Pipes – No less a luminary than Tim O’Reilly called Pipes “A milestone in the history of the Internet”.  Pipes is a browser-based visual editor that allows you to take input from one source and pipe it (in UNIX parlance) to another source. Along the way, you can apply a series of filters and transformations to manipulate the data. The data sources start and end as common feeds (RSS, RDF, etc). What you do with the data between its input and output is constrained mostly by your imagination.

Yahoo! was certainly not first on the scene with this idea. Dapper and others have preceded them in this regard. What Pipes brings to the party that no one else does is a really cool visual environment that allows you to trace the path of the data through the transformations and filers, interactively debugging along the way based upon the value of the successive outputs. It also has this cool reuse flavor to it, where you can experiment with, tweak, learn from, and potentially improve or fork off new versions of other peoples pipes or just reuse them in a black box sense.

After you’ve read Tim O’Reilly’s introduction, I encourage you to play around with Pipes. Although seeing is believing, you’ll learn best by actually doing.

• OmniFind Yahoo! Edition – Product of a nifty partnership with IBM, the OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is an enterprisey search solution that is the baby brother to IBM’s commercial OmniFind enterprise product. Built on top of the open source Apache Lucene search engine, OmniFind has the solid lineage necessary to be considered worthy of the task.

The product is a very easy install, whether on Windows or Linux, requiring very few steps to get the product up and running. OmniFind returns search results against locally indexed documents and the Internet, with the results being returned in the familiar Yahoo! look and feel. For those interested, the UI can be styled to match a particular site’s look and feel or you can go the direct route and work with the exposed REST APIs.

With the pricetag (free) and support for a couple hundred file types, there’s little not to like about OmniFind. Search performance has proven to be very fast with a few thousand documents. Indications are that the tool scales pretty well although the indexing process can be quite processor intensive and there are a couple of known issues with cleaning up very large temp files that could eat into your available disk space.

• TagMaps – I stumbled onto this product a couple of weeks ago while looking for some information about creating GeoRSS feeds. TagMaps is another way of visualizing data (tags in this case) on maps. I must confess that seeing tags on a map takes a bit of getting used to. I found that the best way to indoctrinate myself was by using Trip Explorer

Trip Explorer is a mashup of TagMaps and Yahoo! Travel users' public Trip Plans. What’s cool about Trip Explorer is that the clustering of tags reveals hidden tour gems that you might not otherwise find on a traditional map mashup. These gems become more evident (and detailed) as you progressively zoom in.

TagMaps is built upon Yahoo’s Flash maps, which are very interesting in their own right and need to be experienced if you haven’t yet had the chance. Aside from using Yahoo’s canned Explorer TagMaps, of which Trip Explorer is one, you can create your own TagMaps mashups. Simply create a GeoRSS feed or select an existing GeoRSS feed that returns a set of weighted tags for a given lat/lon bounded box. Easier said than done, I know. I’ll be writing more about how to do this in a coming blog entry. Until then, give this a look.

I don’t like to do book reviews back-to-back but Founders at Work has kept me pretty busy reading (and not writing) over the last couple of weeks. The book definitely deserves a five star rating and at $13 for the e-book version, it really is a great deal. My review follows…

This is an absolute must read if you’re job, your passion, or both (if you’re lucky) has anything to do with creating technical innovation. “Founders at Work” is a wonderfully meander through the stories of successful company founders – across several decades. Far from focusing on just those who made it big during the first dot-com boom or those who are profiting from Web 2.0, Jessica also includes some of the true pioneers in the field. She recognizes that, not only do these industry veterans have valuable stories to convey but, since many of them are helping to steer companies and venture capital funds to this day, their advice is quite topical and current.

From the great introduction right through the final interview, this book is packed with great anecdotes, advice, information and inspiration. Makes you wonder as to what the story is behind the story - how did Jessica get unfettered access to such a broad array of the founding fathers?

I’ve included some illustrative quotes from the book below. Give them a read and then go pick up this book. The printed copy is a bargain and the e-book version is a steal. It may turn out to be one of the best investments you ever make.

• “You guys are nuts. Throw out your business plan. Your customers—or potential customers - are telling you what your business should be. The business plan was only used to get you the money. Why don’t you rewrite a business plan that is focused just on providing what your customers want?” - Q.T. Wiles advice to Charles Geschke (Cofounder, Adobe) on the real purpose of a business plan
• “There were some warning signs. Consider McKinsey, which holds itself out as one of the world’s leading repositories of knowledge on how to manage a business. They say they’ll never grow their company by more than 25 percent per year, because otherwise it’s just too hard to transmit the corporate culture. So if you’re growing faster than 25 percent a year, you have to ask yourself, ‘What do I know about management that McKinsey doesn’t know?’” – Philip Greenspun (Cofounder, ArsDigita) on scaling corporate culture
• "That [not improving core product quality] was probably the biggest mistake we made. And that’s the advice I give everybody. All those little coupon schemes, this is what General Motors does. They figure out new rebate schemes because they forgot all about how to design cars people want to buy. But when you still remember how to make software people want, great, just improve it." – Joel Spolsky (Cofounder, Fog Creek Software)
• “I think some people slept; I know I didn’t sleep at all.” - Max Levchin (Cofounder, PayPal)
• “There were times when we were really broke before we had our angel investment, when only one guy who had children was getting paid.” – Caterina Fake (Cofounder, Flickr)

With nearly 21 of the 32 interviewees having the term “Cofounder” in their titles, Joel Spolsky’s advice seems perhaps to reflect best on what was critical to the success of these companies. “But because they never really take the leap and quit their job, they can give up their dream at any time. And 99.9 percent of them will actually give up their dream. If they take the leap, quit their job, go do it full-time—no matter how much it sucks—and convince one other person to do the same thing with them, they’re going to have a much, much higher chance of actually getting somewhere.”

Windows Power Tools is a collection of brief tutorials and overviews of freeware and open source .NET development tools. What kind of rating you might give this book depends largely upon what type of background that you’re coming from. If you’re the kind who has stuck religiously to the Microsoft Press series of books and acknowledge only the old testament, than this book will be either an epiphany (5 stars) or outright blasphemy (1 star). If continuous integration, test-driven development, and object relational mapping (new testament type stuff) are terms that you are fairly conversant with, then this book will probably land somewhere in the 2-4 star range.

Since I put myself in the 2-4 star group, I’ll start by mentioning that there are great online tomes of knowledge that contain most of the tools listed in this book and a bunch others not listed here. One of the most respected and well linked lists belongs to the author of this book’s forward, Scott Hanselman. His Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows has been dutifully updated on an annual basis. Despite the fact that there are free, decent resources out there that fill some of the same purposes as this book, I enjoyed thumbing through the book and picking out tools I hadn’t heard of to fill in some knowledge gaps.

The main reason that I landed on a 3 star rating instead of a 4 star rating is that the brief tutorial format that worked so well for James when describing Visual Studio functionality is his previous book, Visual Studio Hacks, just doesn’t do justice to tools that represent significant pieces of an application or support infrastructure. I would have preferred to see less tools and deeper coverage in certain areas. Understandably, since not everyone would want to see the same tools as me; a broader, shallower approach trades off depth and detail for marketability. I’ve included my complete list of pros and cons below so that you can see how I came to my rating:

Pros

• Great reference book with enough of an introduction to get you started with a broad array of tools
• If you’re an O’Reilly Safari subscriber, this book is included in your subscription
• The authors aspire to keep materials current on the book’s companion Web site. At the time of this review, the site is little more than a list of tools in the book

Cons

• Lots of this material is available for free on the Web, if you have the time and inclination to find it
• Introductions to tools are not sufficiently in depth to communicate any more than the most rudimentary of use cases

Over the holidays, I had the chance to catch up with some back reading and Podcasts and there was one, in particular, that caught my attention. The book / Podcast combo on transforming state governments by Deloitte & Touche provided some really interesting, innovative, no-holds-barred analysis of the problems that state governments are facing in the early 21^st century. Recorded the day after the 2006 elections, Deloitte’s Bob Campbell and Bill Eggers collaborate with Deloitte advisor, former governor of Pennsylvania and first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge to produce an excellent Podcast. The Podcast serves as a solid introduction to the more extensive analysis in their book, States of Transition: Tackling government’s toughest policy and management challenges.

 

 

 

The Podcast is available via iTunes or as a download on Deloitte’s Web site. You can also download a decent sized book excerpt here. I have also mirrored the book excerpt as well for the sake of speed and continuity. I’ve highlighted some of the interesting points of the Podcast and book below. I encourage you to listen to the Podcast and pick up the book. My experience with state government leads me to believe that Deloitte’s analysis is spot on. Many of the truths analyzed in the book / Podcast are the veritable elephants in the room of state government. As important as these insights are for public policy and administrative specialists; they are equally important to technologists. As I have told several clients, the business architecture issues of state government such as workforce, political, and organizational constraints must be offset by tradeoffs that will ultimately affect the application and technical architecture solutions that we as technologists are asked to provide. If you are a technologist providing solutions to state governments, it behooves you to understand these business architecture constraints.

 

Before I go into the highlights of the book / Podcast, I’ll start with a bit of ethically obligatory disclosure. I am a Deloitte employee. That said, I am not writing this blog entry to tout or profit from my employer’s intellectual capital in any way. The materials I am blogging about are, obviously, all publicly available. Furthermore, I am writing about them because I feel that they would be of interest to the majority of this blog’s readers. Enough of the fine print; highlights as well as a matrix excerpted from the book can be found below:

 

• Bob Campbell hits the nail on the head but citing federal entitlement programs as the drivers of siloed state government operations. Makes you wonder if things like the Federal Funding Accounting and Transparency Act are eventually going to have trickle down effects on the states.
• Focus on states as the “laboratories of democracy” and drivers of innovation. This is especially important since states have the potential to be much more agile than the federal government in addressing policy issues and providing innovative solutions.
• Coverage of the tough choices needed to fix an ailing Medicaid system. Innovations such as the Vermont Medicaid waiver system are included in the discussion. One fact that I found both interesting and scary (though not surprising) is that, were state Medicaid budgets the basis of independent operating entities, nearly half of the states’ Medicaid programs would be Fortune 500 companies.
• Detailed analysis of state government workforce issues. There is a lot of information about unfunded liabilities on state retirement and healthcare plans. Governor Ridge went as far as to compare state government with the steel and automotive industries; a comparison I contemplated a lot on my recent trip to Detroit.
• Critical look at an infrastructure deficits and discussion of the need to increase focus on this area. There are some interesting examples of the public-private partnership model at work. One in particular that came up during the Podcast was the purchase and execution of warranties on roads by New Mexico. For those with further interest in this area, I’d encourage you to listen to the IT Conversations Podcast about transportation networks.

Trying to remain fair and unbiased, there are also several things for which I would have liked to have seen analysis and opinions. It’s understandable these issues didn’t make the cut for a text that is already tackling a lot of huge issues. However, I’d be interested to know where folks stand on these issues:

 

• Detailed analysis of the real cost of a state worker (per hour). When you factor in the number of hours worked and the liberal pension and healthcare benefits, what is the actual cost of your hypothetical state worker? I’d be interested to know.
• Focus on the citizen-centric viewpoint of government. That is, with my cable company, whether I go online, call on the phone, or walk into one of their storefronts, they can ask me a question or two to establish my identity and then pull up all of the information they need to help me without asking me to provide it again. Government, on the other hand, comes across as having a serious case of amnesia when trying to pull off the same act. “Need to file taxes? Tell me your name, your address, your dependants…”, “Need Welfare? Your name, your address, your dependants…”, “Need a license...”
• Discussion about digital and energy infrastructure as well as physical infrastructure. Not to diminish the value of physical infrastructure, but last time I checked, we didn’t rank too well globally in terms of the pervasiveness of high-speed network connectivity. We also have a serious addiction to dead dinosaur juice. While energy policy tends to be largely a federal thing, states like California are well versed trend setters in this area. If states really are to be the drivers of innovation, what could they do in this area? Check out my post on the Destiny USA project. Seems like New York has mixed emotions about being too much of a trend setter.
• Realistic view of drawing the best and the brightest to state government work. I’d be interested to know how many states offer tuition reimbursement as part of their employment package. Anyone, anyone?? Also, with the private sector increasing chunking work into projects and matrixing staff across projects, I’d be interested to hear ideas about if and how a hierarchical organization such as state government can be contorted to follow this precedence.

Following up on my This Digital Life post last month, a couple of folks have sent me emails asking if I had some recommendations around other Web 2.0 tools. In the sprit of a recent podcast that defined Web 2.0 as “really anything that’s cool online nowadays”, I decided to post some Web 2.0’ish tools that I highly recommend. Some of these tools I’ve been using for a year or more (a mighty long time in the Web 2.0 world) and some I’ve been using for just a couple of weeks. Most are, with the exception of Central Desktop, free services. Enjoy and let me know if you find these useful.

• scanR – Snap digital pictures of whiteboards or paper documents and upload them for processing to scanR. The images are cleaned up, PDFed, and sent back to you in an email. You can also upload images of business cards, which are then converted into vCards that can be imported into your favorite contact management program.

• Vyew – I’m a recent convert to Vyew and have been nothing but impressed with its features and ease of use. Think WebEx; but it’s better and it’s free.

• Zamzar – File conversion online. Format… you name it. Upload a file, identify the type of conversion you’re looking for and Zamzar quickly converts the file; returning the finished product to you via email. Zamzar supports over 200 conversion types. Some of my favorites are doc-to-pdf, ac3-to-mp3, and avi-to-flv.

• Mediamax – So now that you have all of this digital media, what do you do with it? Enter Mediamax. You get a whopping 25GB of storage for free and the pricing plans for more space are very reasonable. This includes sharing and hosting of digital audio and video and a Windows-based tool for file synchronization and automated backup.

• Google Calendar / Remember the Milk – With some recent integration efforts, this is a tool match made in heaven. The best calendaring tool combined with the best to-do list manager, all in one very intuitive UI. Although not combined, these tools both have great browser-based PDA versions as well.

• Central Desktop – The Cadillac of the tools listed here and, as mentioned earlier, the only one that does not have a perma-free option. This tool is simply so awesome that it warrants mention. Central Desktop is software as a service at its finest. Portal based functionality, project management, full text indexing and search of uploaded documents, Web meeting and audio conferencing capabilities, IM and Skype integration, version control, and the list goes on. It’s not as lightweight as Basecamp but it has all the features you wish for in Basecamp and is even more intuitive.

Over the last several months, I’ve really been trying to get my arms around SOA and develop a meaningful opinion and knowledge base on this so often used, even more often abused, and ever-more-frequently maligned three letter acronym (TLA). Along the way, I’ve discovered a couple of great resources that have helped shape my thinking and hone my implementation skills on the topic:

• Prentice Hall’s Service-Oriented Computing Series - Right now this series consists of just two books by Thomas Erl, “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design” and “Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services”. These two books, however, are tantamount to the old and new testament; literally comprising the SOA bible. The series is also slated to be expanded into a more complete collection, along the lines of Addison-Wesley’s Martin Fowler and Kent Beck signature series.

Thomas’s books have helped me to understand how my traditional proxy and wrapper-based viewpoints fit into service design and how I might be able to improve the robustness of SOA interfaces built using these patterns. These books also reinforced my positive experiences with contract-driven design and have rekindled my interest in XML schema definitions, which I haven’t used extensively for years.

• Enterprise Service Orientation Maturity Model (ESOMM) – “Maturity model… uh oh, here comes the heavy handed approach to SOA”, you might be thinking. In my opinion, however, this is the most dense (that is, succinct and knowledge rich) piece of material about SOA that has been published to date and a must read for anyone looking to role out SOA to their enterprise. The ESOMM defines 4 layers, 3 perspectives, and 27 capabilities required to support a SOA (see diagram below). The maturity levels are based upon SEI’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM), but the similarities pretty much end there. As with the core CMM, think of this as a roadmap towards evaluating and improving your organization’s SOA capabilities – not as a report card.

   
esommgif.gif (32.31 KB)   

• Service-Oriented Analysis and Design (SOAD) – This is a nifty article which seeks to bridge the gaps between the object oriented and business process oriented design and modeling and the requirements of modeling for an SOA. The article does a great job of walking through traditional approaches that most people are familiar with and then adding SOAD-specific elements to the design. The article concludes with a short case study that includes traditional models such as a business process workflow, class diagram, and state diagram and then augmenting this with a service breakdown model and a rather interesting business interaction model (see diagram below) that integrates SOA specific concerns into a more traditional UML sequence diagram.

SOAD_LG.gif (29.3 KB)

• Java and .NET Specific Implementation Materials – Jeffrey Hasan’s book Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C# is by far the best text in the .NET realm. Jeffrey starts with a very solid approach of WSDL and XSD contract driven design and then gradually introduces the new WS-* standards, integrating them one-by-one. The original book covers WSE 2.0 with his newest text covering WSE 3.0. SOA Integration Using Java EE 5 Web Services is the best text that I’ve found from a Java vantage point.  I like the fact that this book starts out with REST (Representational State Transfer) type services to show how things look before all of the standards-compliant overhead is added. Good coverage is provided for JAX-WS 2.0, JAXB, and JSR-compliant packaging. The book is not yet available on the open market but the work in progress is available as a “Rough Cut” book through O’Reilly’s Safari.

      

• BPEL-Specific Materials – BPEL specific implementation details haven’t seemed to make it into any published books yet. The vendors offer a good deal of online materials in this area. To learn it this way though, you’re going to have to commit yourself to a particular implementation. Good materials can be found in the following places:

o     JBoss - JBoss jBPM

  o     Sun - NetBeans Enterprise Pack

o     Oracle - BPEL Process Manager

o       .NET - Windows Workflow Foundation

In a previous posting, I reviewed the 37signals book Getting Real and encouraged folks to pick up a copy. The good news is that the full text for this book has recently been released online. You can find the HTML version of the book here. You no longer have any excuse not to read it.

I’m often asked about tools and technologies that I use on a daily basis. Like everyone else out there, I lead a pretty busy life and I’m always trying to find ways to be more efficient or to use tools that better support the way I work and live. Below you can find a list of the tools and technologies that make my life easier in some way or the other. I’ve cataloged these tools using some general categories to help delineate functionality. As much as possible, I tried to avoid the mundane things and concentrate on smaller niche tools or new technologies that you might not have heard of or actively use and which might enable you to tweak a bit more efficiency or productivity out of your day. Enjoy and please feel free to add comments citing tools that you believe might be of interest to others.

Digital Media

• Wall Street Journal on Audible.com – The Journal is the way that I get my news every day. No commercial interruptions, no funding drives, no annoyances. The MP3 version shows up at around 6:00 am every morning and is ready for download to my iPod. The daily read is about an hour long and includes selected articles unabridged and read in their entirety.

• IT Conversations - Some really great Podcasts by leading edge thinkers in the IT industry. The material is first rate strategic thinking and helps keep me centered on larger issues even when my day-to-day concerns are often much more pragmatic.

• TiVo, TiVo Central, and TiVoToGo – Yeah, almost everyone offers DVRs these days but TiVo was not only the original, it has remained the most fully featured. With TiVo Central, you can schedule your recordings from a Web browser so that you can make sure to record that show you forgot to schedule last night. With TiVoToGo, you can transfer TiVo recordings to your PC, laptop, or most recently to a number of mobile video devices, such as the video iPod. There’s nothing like watching Lost or 24 on the walk into work in the morning.

• Video iPod and the Transpod – The video iPod is truly an amazing thing. All that storage, all those songs, and a phenomenal little viewing screen. The Transpod lets me take my music on the road with me and will continue to get good use until I get my next car, which will definitely have some type of interface for the iPod.

• Handy Backup – I’ve never had a hard drive with critical personal files crash on me. Statistically speaking, though, it’s only a matter of time before this happens. I therefore use the Handy Backup tool to do incremental and occasional full backups to an offsite FTP server. The disk space, you ask – MediaMax Streamload - $4.99/month for 100GB storage.

• Turbine Video Encoder – Used for taking my AVI videos and converting them to the industry standard Flash format for video distribution. This is the same process that YouTube does except that it’s not them doing it, it’s me.

• Audacity – An open source sound recorder and editor that’s great for recording, editing, and publishing audio in MP3 format. I’ve use this for all of my GeoGlue recordings.

• Afterdark CD Series – With different techno flavors representing a variety of US and international cities, the Afterdark collection contains enough funky grooves to get you through days of work without ever hearing the same song twice.

Web-Based

• Firefox – Once you go to Firefox, you won’t go back to Internet Explorer. Firefox is benefiting from fresh ideas in a market where others had long since capitulated to Microsoft’s dominance and meaningless updates. Microsoft’s newest version of Internet Explorer, with tabbed browsing, integrated search, and customization is a blatant rip off of Firefox. Thanks but no thanks.

• Netvibes, RSS, and Delicious – Earlier this year, I switched from my home page of over 3 years – Google and moved to Netvibes, a Web 2.0 home page. While Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft struggled to catch up with their home grown portal offerings. Netvibes and its brethren (such as Pageflakes) have created vibrant ecosystems with all of the portal services that you might need and open APIs to create your own services should you see fit. Two of the most useful services are the RSS and del.icio.us modules. Having access to all of your blogs and favorite links from one well organized home page will contribute a lot to your efficiency.

• Safari and Books 24x7 – As an addict to technical books, these two sites were godsends in so many ways. With enterprise subscriptions, the entire array of Apress, O’Reilly, Addison Wesley Professional, and Wrox technical books amongst others are at your fingertips. If you buy and read a lot of technical books and can handle the digital media, this is definitely something for you. If the subscriptions seem a bit too pricey, a Professional membership to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) will get you entry grade access to both of these collections.

Software Engineering

• Visual Studio Professional and NetBeans - On a day-to-day basis there’s really no other way to do professional .NET and Java development than with a professional IDE. For .NET Visual Studio professional has all of the tools that you need and avoids the overbearing Team System overhead that you might not. With Java, I’m doing my work right now in NetBeans although I’m working with a bunch of different IDEs to determine which I like best. Oracle JDeveloper and MyEclipse are a close second and third, respectively.

• Enterprise Architect – UML modeling, team-based modeling, round trip code-model synchronization and design tool extraordinaire. Enterprise Architect does it all and does it all well. All of this for $200 per license. EA is arguably one of the best buys in the industry and one tool that you’ll never catch me without.

• TestDriven.NET – A must have for any .NET developer, in my mind. TestDriven allows you to run a variety of unit test suites (NUnit, MbUnit, and Team System) directly from the Visual Studio IDE. One of the killer features is the ability to run the tests with the debugger. Recent features include the addition of menu items leveraging NCover for code coverage and Lutz Roeder’s Reflector for disassembly and dependency analysis amongst libraries.

• WebHost4Life and eApps – I host a variety of content online and have found these two hosts to be the best over time. WebHost4Life provides reliable .NET hosting using .NET 1.1/2.0, full SQL Server 2000/2005 functionality (with full Enterprise Manager access), registering of COM/COM+ components, and set up of SharePoint sites. eApps provides Java and Ruby on Rails hosting. Java hosting includes JBoss/Hibernate, OpenLDAP, and Subversion repository creation.

Knowledge and Document Management

• OpenOffice – Although I’m still locked into Office at work, OpenOffice provides a free alternative from my home computers. With support of the new Oasis standard OpenDoc format, reading from and saving to Microsoft compatible (e.g. Word, Excel, Powerpoint) files, built in PDF creation, and conversion of Powerpoints to Flash, OpenOffice meets all of my home document management needs.

• Subversion and TortoiseSVN – A great example of truly open source software beating out best of breed commercial competitors. Subversion is an open source revision control system that is replacing CVS as the repository of choice for managing open source and commercial code alike. Running on top of Apache, Subversion communicates very efficiently via http and is thus a great choice for distributed development. With widespread plugin support, including the Windows Explorer-based Tortoise SVN, Subversion is a great choice not only for managing source code but for managing changes to any documents that might be accessed by a variety of users.

• The Brain – Although there is a lot of mind mapping software out there, the Brain is by far my favorite. It’s a great way to organize disparate thoughts; allowing me to capture hundreds of thoughts, focus on the ones at hand and drill down through the whirling nodes of radial visualization with a few clicks to get to any of those hundreds of thoughts or ideas. Check this one out online.

• Win2PDF Pro – I distribute almost all my Web-based documents as PDF. Win2PDF Pro is much cheaper than a full version of Acrobat and it let’s me create PDF from most common programs. The pro package includes password protection, encryption, PDF hyperlinks and other niceties.

• Camtasia – Useful for illustrating the use of particular software or techniques. On-screen activities are captured an