lunes, 10 de diciembre de 2007

New article about Shoal

I've written another article: this time about project Shoal. Juan Pedro Danculovic helped me out with it. Thanks to him.

viernes, 7 de diciembre de 2007

Google Charts API

Another great toy from Mountain View, CA!. Google Charts API has born.
I like to call it Code As A Service (CAAS). Just a HTTP invocation with a few parameters are need to render beautiful charts.


http://chart.apis.google.com
/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Firefox|IE


Linux 2.6.24

New features of the kernel

IE8 announced, what a joke!

People are raging about the spectacular announce of IE8. I'm not an MS hater, but come on ! IE is the worst piece of software to come out of Redmond.

jueves, 6 de diciembre de 2007

PostgreSQL partitioned index tip

Did you know PostgreSQL can make use of a partitioned index? That is an index with a WHERE clause. For example:
CREATE INDEX bigidx1 ON TABLE bigtable1 WHERE bigfield1 < 10000

That effectively creates a better index than a whole column index. The planner can check the WHERE clause of the SELECT and choose a smaller index. Smaller means faster :)

Use with caution and ALWAYS benchmark the new indexes. This type of index is truly useful when you have a good part of the column data (say 70%) with a unique value and the rest with a very disperse value set. And the table is very big, obviously.

Hope it helps.

martes, 4 de diciembre de 2007

Great tips for bloggers

Thanks Jon Mountjoy for your great advice on blogging! This is a must read for every blogger.

lunes, 3 de diciembre de 2007

Who needs PhotoShop? Not me!

For those in need of a free replacement of PhotoShop, check out The Gimp. This is a free alternative, as powerful as PS and extremely flexible.

Tidy up your HTML pages

Usually you have to submit clean HTML for technical articles in sites such as java.net. Writing clean HTML is very difficult and error prone. Thanks God, HTMLTidy exists.
Just run it over your pages and look at the warnings. Perphaps you want something more automated? Run it with file override to create a complaint HTML.

The greatest book about writing style ever

William Strunk wrote the bset compilation of writing tips. As a foreign language author I can only say THANKS.
If you are writing in English, such as articles or documentation, be sure to read at least once a month!

Paypal para argentinos

Me agrada comentarles que el servicio de Paypal "Withdraw to you credit card" funciona perfectamente para tarjeta argentinas.
Paypal nos permite enviar dinero a nuestra tarjeta de credito, en la forma de un descuento. Es decir en el resumen de cuenta nos aparece -U$D 200,00 por ejemplo.
Paypal se lleva 5 dolares por cada envio, lo cual me parece justo.

domingo, 2 de diciembre de 2007

Esper:The power of events at your fingertip

Events are everywhere, in massive amounts , containing information you never imagined and in real time. But can you handle them all?
You are not alone, Esper allows you to process streams of events. A continous flow of events you can query and detect patterns.
The patterns are the real power of Esper, you can make use of sequencial and time patterns.

For example: If after the ocurrence of a Stock with more than 5 dollars, arrives a new Stock with less than 4 dollars, notify me!

Esper only notifies you, and leaves the rest to you.

Patrick Lightbody comments about my book

Thanks Patrick!

Javalobby interview

The guys at javalobby asked me a few questions.

A great article about consultancy

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/be-consultant.html

jueves, 29 de noviembre de 2007

New process scheduler for linux

There's a new "completely fair scheduler" for linux. I'm eager to see some benchmark or interactivity improvements over the old one.

miércoles, 28 de noviembre de 2007

IBM JDK tools

I'm not the only one with problem in the lack of profilers for the PPC64 IBM's Power platform.

Disable Explicit Garbage collection

You can disable explicit garbage collection (System.gc) by using the following switch:

-XX:+DisableExplicitGC

This week in various stress tests, many Stop the world collections are triggered by ServiceMix. This switch disables this behavior.

Stay hungry, Stay foolish

Google's architecture

Following with the technical video sessions, I'm fascinated by the clear introduction to Google's architecture in this video.



GFS, MapReduce and a modified version of Linux are the base of the empire :)

JBoss stupid configuration errors

Why on earth the JBoss people doesn't warn about connection pooling? The stale connection are very common. What happens when the server has a smaller timeout time for the connection than the application server?
Answer: the connection becomes stale. It doesn't work anymore. Some drivers such as jTDS or DB2 jcc have this behavior.
The best thing you can do is add the following tag to your datasource XML:

<check-valid-connection-sql> SELECT 1</check-valid-connection-sql>

The SQL statement can be anything useful to you. Be sure not to do something crazy such as a join. The only requirement is that the SQL must execute OK, otherwise JBoss creates a fresh connection.

martes, 27 de noviembre de 2007

WS-Discovery

Today I researched WS-Discovery. This is a protocol of the WS-* family and is very similar to a p2p architecture. But instead of using a propietary or binary messages to discover peers or services it uses XML and SOAP.
I don't agree that the WS-* stack is bloated, the interoperability is great, when you have communicated two applications written in two completely different languages such as Java and ASP, then you know that Web Services are paradise.
If you complain about bandwidth just use compression, and if you don't understand the protocols, do your homework :)
Returning to the subject of my post, WS-Discovery identifies clients and services. The clients send multicast "probe" SOAP messages asking for services. Then the services answer in unicast to the client, using WS-Addressing to indicate the client the service address. Also services can say hello or goodbye to the whole network in a multicast way. All in all it is a very simple protocol and really useful in mobile enviroment where connectivity is limited.
A good way to dynamically obtain a SOA service catalog too.
AFAIK there is no Java implementation, but a .NET one in Windows Vista, but i haven't checked it out yet. Perhaps it's a good addition to Apache Muse.

lunes, 26 de noviembre de 2007

Open Source Code metrics

A few months ago, I found Ohloh. The Ohloh site checks out an open source project code and display several useful metrics like LOC count, the number and geographical location of developers, and an estimated project cost based on an average programmer salary. Check out the Ohloh page for one of my favorite project ServiceMix
You can also embed the metrics into your blog like this from the Shoal project:

Microsoft Surface

Es increible lo que se puede hacer con un touch screen, sin mouse y sin teclado. El Microsoft Surface no es solamente eso, sino que tambien es multi-touch como el iPhone y tiene 5 camaras para reconocer objetos.
Quiero uno!!!

Youtube architecture and scalability

I'm fascinated by the talk given by Cuong Do about the YouTube architecture, its issues and maturity phases. The trick for getting the mysql replication faster is an incredible example of lateral thinking.



It blows my mind!

Architect forum from Microsoft

I've been invited to join an architect forum organized by Microsoft. Fortunately is open minded and technology agnostic not Microsoft centric.
Kudos to Martin Salias and Ezequiel Glinsky for the great discussion topics. Highly recommended to attend if you are a software architect.

OSWorkflow book review

The book is selling well and getting positive reviews both from peers and reviewers like Geertjan

Java application clustering made easy

Ever wanted to share the state and emit signals between two applications? and how about a variable number of application instances? you know how hard it is to do it efficiently, in a multicast way, etc.
And how about recognizing an instance failure? All those features are hard to write and harder to test.
Shoal comes to the rescue. This framework derived from the GlassFish project, provides cluster communication, join and failure signals, messaging and data sharing.

jueves, 6 de septiembre de 2007

My latest technical article in java.net

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/09/06/instant-user-tracking-with-clickstream.html

sábado, 25 de agosto de 2007

Strategic business process management at IAE

After finishing the two day course at the beautiful Pilar IAE campus, i was disappointed by the little content and information the course gave me.
After a little theory and history on the business processes approach and business process management, we were onto studying four case studies. On the second day a rally of vendors crowded the course, attacking each other's product of not being "pure BPM". That course was a fiasco, it was the first time I paid someone to sell me.
A stain the IAE's curricula.

Change management

My team's getting a reorganization, so my interest in change management increased. This is a very interesting subject and every leader has to master the basic principles. Check out this great article on change management.

lunes, 13 de agosto de 2007

36 Jaiio

Vamos a estar hablando en las JAIIO. Es a fin de agosto en mar del plata.

IAE

A fin de Agosto voy a estar cursando en el IAE un programa focalizado llamado "Gestion Estrategica de los procesos de negocio". La idea es salir con un mindset de procesos y la mejora de la compañia a traves de la mejora de sus procesos.
En el mes de Julio estuve en el IAE cursando el programa "Dirigiendo Personas". Altamente recomendado por las actividades outdoors, ejercicio de autoconocimiento y los casos de Harvard.

Gartner BPM Summit

I'll be attending the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando next September.

Opensymphony's ClickStream article

I'm writing a new article for java.net about OpenSymphony's ClickStream. ClickStream's is a traffic path logger to embed inside your web applications. This traffic paths information is useful for analyzing user trends, and web site usage statistics. We'll keep you posted when it's on production.

domingo, 12 de agosto de 2007

Argentina: A hacerse conocidos!

Estoy contento porque mucha gente me está preguntado el como y el porque de la autoría de libros de Open Source.

Desde mi optica, es muy importante darse a conocer al mundo como técnicos de gran calidad; no solo técnicos baratos.

Un paso importante es que se comiencen a escribir mas papers, articulos y libros sobre cualquier rama de IT. Es muy forma muy eficiente y con gran llegada en los mercados importantes.

Cualquier que esté interesado en escribir temas técnicos en castellano o en ingles (preferentemente) no dude en contactarme a través del blog o en privado.

Muy util para los que estan negociando sueldos!

http://www.cuantocobro.com/

MBA en el CEMA

Estoy cursando un MBA en la universidad del CEMA. Estoy realmente muy contento con la calidad de los profesores y el nivel de los compañeros de estudio. La atención administrativa en la universidad es la mejor que tuve, sencillamente trabajan para cada uno de los alumnos con muchisimo esmero.

sábado, 11 de agosto de 2007

miércoles, 8 de agosto de 2007

OSWorkflow book front cover

ServiceMix book

I've started to write a ServiceMix book for Apress with a teammate. I'll keep you posted on the content shortly.

OSWorkflow professional support

I've decided to put my skills to the services of others who are initiating in the open source arena. My first offering is professional support services for OSWorkflow, a product I know very well.
International clients are welcome!

sábado, 9 de junio de 2007

OSWorkflow book!!!

I'm so happy! Only one step left to publishing!
OSWorkflow book

lunes, 21 de mayo de 2007

viernes, 11 de mayo de 2007

OSWorkflow book - first draft finished

Finally, I've completed the first draft of all the chapters! My upcoming OSWorkflow book will show you how to create a completely open source BPM suite.
It will be published by Packt Publishing www.packtpub.com

martes, 8 de mayo de 2007

JavaOne 2007 - Day 1

Dia 1 : Martes 8-5-2007

Como el año anterior; JavaOne? comienza oficialmente el segundo dia; (el primero se dedican a evangelizar y capacitar a la gente en el Java University); con toda la fanfarria y parafernalia puesta en escena comienza la General Session. La charla de apertura del evento y la que más sorpresas trae; este año empieza muy cool; con una DJ en escena.

Mientras más de 14.000 personas se acomodan en sus asientos, hay grupos de brasileros que gritan a sus compañeros y agitan sus banderas: son cientos; todos de los distintos JavaUserGroups de Brasil.

Se apaga la música y entra en escena John Gage, saludos a los brasileros y nos muestra los límites de Java y de la energia: Dispositivos móviles más baratos que las PCs y paneles solares de mano.

Este es el JavaOne número 12 y quiere felicitar a la gente de la vieja guardia, que asistieron a todos los JavaOne - de las miles de personas quedan expuestas 4 o 5 que son aplaudidas con fervor. Mi único pensamiento fue: 12 x 3k = 36k les dejo las conclusiones a Uds.

Entra Rich Green, que el año pasado tomó la conducción del grupo de software de Sun; como primera acción felicita al equipo y a la comunidad por la apertura del códifo de Java el año pasado y nos convoca a unirnos a la comunidad OpenJDK?.

Rich trae a muchos invitados en escena: VPs de Yahoo, Nasdaq, Sony, Ericsson.

La parte más interesante técnicamente es la charla de la CIO de Nasdaq, una gordita muy simpática pero con poca onda para hablar en frente de una troupe de 14.000 bestias en busca de formas femeninas.

Nos cuenta que Java le permite procesar miles de transacciones por segundo (obviamente en hardware de Sun) y que pudo soportar el pico de 150.000 transacciones por segundo en el ápice del efecto Shangai o como quiera que se llame. No puedo dejar de preguntarme que tipo de transacciones, pero el numero me resulta increible.

La gente de Sony nos quiere inyectar una dosis de BluRay?, la cual la audiencia no toma con mucha ganas (tal vez recordando VHS vs BetaMax?), minutos mas tarde, la gente de Ericsson nos cuenta que van a abrir su software para switches telefonicos, tal vez con la intención de que algún programador del este europeo, encuentre un bug smile

Yahoo, es ahora Yahoo y Flickr, y nos dan las herramientas para buscar desde nuestro telefono movil de una manera mejorada (es decir mejor que google mobile) y de subir fotos a Flickr desde nuestro celular (quien no se tentó en sacar una foto con el celular a alguna parte interesante de alguna desconocida y compartirla).

Terminando la ya hora y media de bla bla; sube el mítico James Goslin y un peladito que me hizo acordar a Edward Norton en American X (rapado y toda la pinta de skinhead) a mostrarnos JavaFX y JavaFX scripting. Tembló Flash y Silverlight: JavaFX Script es ActionScript para todos los Javeros.

JavaFX Mobile me pareció un sistema operativo en Java para mobiles, lo interesante es que Sun propone detachar el hardware del software; de los celulares. Una movida parecida a la de IBM en el 81, habrá que esperar para ver los resultados.

Por último, sube Jonathan Schwartz, que se alegra de no tener que dar la keynote este año. Jonathan es un tipo que me simpatiza y luego de leer su biografía me parece increible como un matematico y economista puede encontrar lugar en la presidencia y gerencia general de Sun: un lider brillante. Nos cuenta de las ganancias de Sun en billones de dolares y trae a un directivo de las naciones unidas. Vamos a jugar con los estereotipos: Como se imaginan a un directivo de las naciones unidas? ... ... Bueno, este directivo es un africano de aproximadamente 50 años, muy mandelesco, que trae una túnica verde hasta el piso, flaco, de 1,90 de alto, sudor en la frente y con un íngles peor que el mio. Acartonado, parece el sintetizador de la vieja Sound Blaster. Esto no es todo, nos comienza a hablar de su programa de educación global, con la ayuda de Sun; pero el tono no es amigable y parece reprocharnos tener los 3.000 dolares para la entrada a JavaOne?; y que hayan chicos que se mueren de hambre en el mundo. Pero más allá de las palabras, es el tono de voz: exaltado, con una cadencia propia de los políticos y sindicalistas. Este fue el punto debil de la charla.

Otra vez John Gage en escena para cerrar. Me voy corriendo porque me espera la primera technical session , Domain Specific Languages.

Habrá mas noticias del Frente.

Naya = en ei wai ei

domingo, 6 de mayo de 2007

Information Integration at work

There's an incredible IBM TV commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy7MCu-FhKk

How do you integrate all the information in your company to literally "connect the dots".

Impressive even for IBM.

sábado, 5 de mayo de 2007

At last! San francisco...

After almost 20 hours of flying and waiting i've finally arrived to SF again..twice in a year, i feel as i've never left.. this city is beatiful.
Flyers from the ezeiza airport: Beware! The aircraft to Dallas waited 3 hours to depart, as the radar is BROKEN!!! Our only international airport and the radar is broken!!
Well' i'll keep you posted on Monday when the training day begins in JavaOne.

martes, 1 de mayo de 2007

Personality test result - not surprising....




You Have A Type A Personality


You are hyper, energetic, and always on the mood

You tend to succeed at everything you attempt

And if you don't succeed at first, you quickly climb your way to the top!



You could be called a workaholic, but you also make time for fun

As long as it's high energy and competitive, you're interested

You have the perfect personality for business and atheltic success

martes, 17 de abril de 2007

JavaOne 2007

Great news! I'm going to JavaOne this year too. Thanks to the CIO for the support!

sábado, 24 de marzo de 2007

SF

Finally I'm here in San Francisco with my wife. After 15 hours of travelling throught the United States, i-m resting on the couch in the cartwith hotel. Not much of a big hotel, but a low cost one. We greatly miss our child, that stayed in Buenos Aires, he's too little to travel such big distances. Next Monday beings SF Summit 2007 at the Moscone Center, along the VS Live conference.
As usual, all my money goes to new books about architecture: The IT Architecture toolbox and Data Strategy. $100 bucks in two books, that's a lot for an Argentinian!
Will report next monday!

viernes, 16 de marzo de 2007

Hellish day

Today was a difficult day. Two crashes from our biggest Java application, made our team work at full speed. The IBM JVM crashed with a SIGSEGV and then core dumped. I've learned that different linux distributions and kernel make the java thread implementation variable. If you use LinuxThreads or NPTL, every thread is a process. So check your process limit!.

jueves, 15 de marzo de 2007

OSWorkflow developer

I'm glad to announce that i've become one of the main developers of OSWorkflow. Hani Suleiman, the project leader, invited me after submitting many patches. This is an honour and great responsability to keep to great quality and features of OSWorkflow.

lunes, 12 de marzo de 2007

Enterprise architecture mapping tool

Enterprise architecture needs tools! No commercial vendor tools convinced me. Instead I'm using Protege, the open source knowledge management tool that's a defacto standard. It allows me to build an enterprise architecture metamodel, to create an inventory of our current architecture situation and to model the ideal architecture.

martes, 6 de marzo de 2007

Enterprise architecture team

My architecture team is made up by the following profiles:

- Enterprise architect
- Data Architect
- Software Architect
- Integration Architect
- Infrastructure Architect
- Usability
- Project Architects pool
- Architecture demand manager

The department is about 25 people, including the architects and programmers. All the department's demand from the projects is managed by the architecture demand manager. He assigns the project architects to one or more projects.
Each of the architects, data, soft, etc. manages several others architects. Only one enterprise architect program is defined, covering improvements in the architecture for several areas.
I only need a business architect, for better aligning the Enterprise architecture to the business strategy and processes.

domingo, 18 de febrero de 2007

I'm back

After 2 months of inactivity i'm back. A lot of water under the river, a new position in the company is consolidating, about two thirds of my OSWorkflow books are finished and my baby is almost 5 months old.
I've taken over the Chief Architect position in the company. My ex-boss moved to a new department called Quality of Service. Kudos to him for teaching me a lot about architecture, politics and patience.
With the new position, comes new responsabilities and more people to manage. More than twenty people in the enterprise architecture department....what a mess...
I'll post soon with the details of the team i've assembled.
I wanted to tell you my goals for the 2007: TOGAF architecture certification, PMP and the most desired of all: IT Architect certification from the Open Group!!! I would be the only one in Argentina to posses such skills, my boss should be very happy and proud :)