33 Roundwood

The frustration of local government

2011-05-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

I think I want to just say a few things. This is not a dig at anyone - it is just me sharing some frustration that I suppose many people feel.

I just watched 'Bustin down the door' which is a surf documentary on the South Africans and Australians that went to Hawaii, didn't easily fit in, and managed to start the world of pro surfing. But the thing that got me was the sadness on Shaun Thomson's face at the end. And I grew up watching him carve a place in the world. And to see that movie now, 30 years later, just brought out something in me about what I am trying to do with open source in the UK.

I know that I know that I know that open source can make a difference in the UK. And particularly to local and central government. 40% savings across local government (which is almost a minimum of what can be achieved with open source) is equivalent to 95,000 front line jobs.

At the moment I am keeping 7 people employed and paid. I would love to do that for 7000 and to really make a difference.

So if you know someone that really wants to make a difference in local government (instead of just talking about it) let me know.

Here's to you Shaun - I appreciate what you did for us man.

Apache2 and PHP on Windows

2011-01-12T06:17:00.001-08:00

You would swear that we had this automated by now. PHP and Apache have got to be like an old married couple by now. Instead you have to go through hell to get the two to run together especially on Windows.

And I know lots of people will say 'Oh, no you just XYZ ...'

But check out the googling going on for how to get these two working and you will see what I mean.

Anyway the best step-by-step guide is here: http://www.thesitewizard.com/php/install-php-5-apache-windows.shtml

Well done whoever you are.

Amazon EC2

2011-01-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

I am enjoying Amazon's setup. The ability to create AMI images with a right click is certainly a lot easier than the old way.

ec2-user is the default and you typically log on using encrypted key authentication. Then just

sudo -s

to get a root prompt.

Automake notes to self

2011-01-03T05:19:00.001-08:00

From

http://www.openismus.com/documents/linux/automake/automake

The Whole Process

Assuming that you have written appropriate Makefile.am and configure.ac files (there are examples below), you should be able to build your project by entering the following commands:
'touch NEWS README AUTHORS ChangeLog'
'autoreconf --force --install' - runs aclocal, autoconf, autoheader and automake in the right order to create config.h.in, Makefile.in, configure and a number of auxiliary files
'./configure' - creates Makefile from Makefile.in and config.h from config.h.in
'make'

Notes to Self

2010-08-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

So much development going on. Really great. But I just know that I am going to come back and have to find the things that I have learnt all over again in the the future.

Well, I suppose that's what google is for.

But just in case I cannot find them again:

http://www.jasonlitka.com/yum-repository/

- best way to upgrade PHP on CentOS

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/recover-mysql-root-password.html

- recover MySQL root password

Good. Now I can chill.

coLinux

2010-06-03T22:03:00.000-07:00

Now this is a very cool alternative: "If Linux can run on anything, then why not on Windows?"

Start > Programs > coLinux

And up pops an Ubuntu console. 50 times faster and less painful than VMWare with no overhead. Very very nice

I added the following to the Wiki (my 2c)

http://colinux.wikia.com/wiki/CoLinux_networking_on_Windows_7

Big fan.

CentOS Repository for PHP 5.2

2010-03-21T16:34:00.001-07:00

http://www.webtatic.com/blog/2009/05/installing-php-526-on-centos-5/

Thank you.

IT with iA (informed Action)

2010-02-13T00:47:00.000-08:00

My stepfather had a thing about 'getting it right first time'. This made a lot of sense when you were building a wall and getting it wrong meant a lot of hard work to break it all down and start again.

But the information world in which we live today makes getting it right first time not only very difficult but, I would say, almost undesirable. The point is that we live in a rapidly shifting world of information that is nothing like the stable world of bricks and mortar. The whole definition of work needs rethinking (but that is a topic for another time).

So, unfortunately Dad, my approach is built much more around INFORMED ACTION and a belief that IT is much more successful if it is managed like a journey rather than a destination. Absolute cliche I know but I find too many IT projects, particularly BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS, that start with the belief that they need to get it right first time and when the project is finished they will not have to do it again.

Static delivery is a costly belief particularly with things like database design and BI. At OBA we have been doing IT for a long time and we know that it is far better to plan to keep doing.

For this reason we have good people with a lot of experience and we are always ready to learn (hence the INFORMED). However, we are not navel gazers! We also work quickly (a new data warehouse and BI reports in under 5 hours at JCDecaux for example) and iteratively (hence the ACTION).

The best approach we find is to plan from the beginning to do it again. The first time around you learn what not to do. Then you improve and keep on improving. Practice is mastery, mastery is practice as Bruce Lee used to say. :-)

Timo Elliott puts it very well in his Five Fatal Flaws of BI Projects when he says 'BI is a process not a project, there is no finish line.' I like the way Timo thinks.

Having said all that, here is the new imagery for Open Business Associates.

For anyone that does not know how to surf it looks like a frightening undertaking.

For someone like me that has been doing it all my life, there is nothing better than dropping into a six foot wall of water and sliding into the distance.

Open source is a fantastic wave to be riding and I love every minute of what I do. So the surfing imagery is perfect and my thanks to Paula and Richard at TheWayForward for the brand identity.

We intend to makes waves in the market and I challenge anyone to contact me (glen@openba.co.uk) if you want to cut at least 40% out of your IT cost of operations and still deliver solutions faster than you ever have before.

Good people

2010-01-24T13:13:00.000-08:00

If you have the right attitude (teachable, very hard-working, honest, presentable) and you want to extend your skills in open source and web technologies then I need to hear from you.

Glen
Founder
Open Business Associates
The Management Consultancy for Open Source
E-mail: glen@openba.co.uk

Right now we have projects involving Jaspersoft, Infobright and Talend for business intelligence, analysis and reporting solutions. We have several active AJAX web development projects as well as new XML, web application and workflow projects.

And we have not even started pushing sales on the thin client, document management, ERP, and data migration campaigns yet. So be prepared to work very very hard, to play even harder and to be in at the start of a sector of the IT industry that is expanding rapidly.

Ajax Cross Domain

2009-12-22T05:07:00.000-08:00

Cross domain ajax requests are important when building the new generation of web applications especially in a REST architecture.

Apache httpd supports .htaccess files but the information for Tomcat is a lot more sparse. Here is the solution to getting cross-domain ajax requests to work in a tomcat http environment:

http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/crossdomainajaxflt.htm

You need to dowload the jar and put it in webapps/{your app}/WEB-INF/lib.

Then edit web.xml in your webapps/{your app}/WEB-INF and add in the following under the web-app element:

<filter> <filter-name>CrossDomainAjaxFilter</filter-name> <filter-class>com.cj.access.CrossDomainAjaxFilter</filter-class> </filter>  <filter-mapping> <filter-name>CrossDomainAjaxFilter</filter-name> <url-pattern>*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping>

This is the simplest approach. The link has some additional options for more fine grained filtering. But it works out the box and is not difficult to implement - just difficult to find !

Happy Christmas all.

Integrated Thunderbird Email, Lightning Calendar and Google

2009-12-09T11:41:00.000-08:00

Wow ! Mozilla has definitely come on. I have been using Thunderbird for over a year now.

I just installed Thunderbird 3 then added the latest nightly build of Lightning (Calendar) and then added the Google Calendar Add-on.

All in about 15 mins. All integrated and all working. Definitely a project to donate to.

Morning all

2009-12-09T00:47:00.000-08:00

Christmas. and we are so busy at OBA. It puts a huge smile on my face to think back over the past year. I am even having a little partner - customer - vendor three way tensions just like a real supplier !! :-) But we will sort that out for the customer - letting them down is not an option.

Yesterday I shook hands on our first technical employee. Very excited about that.

Jaspersoft business continues to move. And Infobright business is starting to happen in the UK after Europa ran 4 days of calling into 110 leads for us.

Column databases certainly do change the mindset. I see so many customers taking ages to build relational data warehouses with 20 or 30 joins into a fact table or long snowflake chains and then thinking about bringing all that into a column database. If we have the choice, with Infobright we just put all the data (time dimensions included) into one table unless there is a good reason to do otherwise! It makes batch loading or adding new dimensions insanely easy. That keeps the ongoing costs of maintaining the data warehouse down and avoids complicated load scripts altogether.

On the other hand with Infobright we can quite happily also take on an existing snowflake schema. So we have a POC next week and I am expecting to have their queries running against the new warehouse in a day. We'll see - never can tell with a POC.

Infobright goes up to 30TB on a single server (it also does cold standby). After that we look at Greenplum for the moment.

2009-12-03T14:00:00.000-08:00

Needing to load a new file into eXist DB from a web application.

So had to work out how to get it to work first with curl. After an hour of trying:

url -u admin:password -X PUT -d @dump.txt http://localhost:8080/exist/rest/db/kg2/employees2.xml

Oh yes !

2009-11-28T11:10:00.001-08:00

The SAAB Grifen JetFighter design is done in part on open source thin client technology specifically because of its ability to handle high performance graphics in a thin client.

Things like this get me excited about open source all over again. Very very cool. Well done ThinLinc.

ThinLinc competes in the same space as Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Server. The product was designed by the same guys that came up with VNC, the graphical remote access solution for linux.

I have been working with Cendio supporting their Thin Client product 'ThinLinc' in the UK and this success is great news. This story shows how much open source has moved into the mainstream of business and that more and more companies trust open source to run their mission critical applications and still save money !

REST

2009-11-25T17:01:00.000-08:00

1 am - I should be sleeping (or surfing).

The articles written on Authentication and Authorisation in a REST application seem to all point to the use of standard HTML authorisation i.e passing a username and password in the URL as the best solution. Or some variation e.g. using a hashed and salted keycode instead of a password. And then adding https to keep things hidden on the network.

All fine but it occurs to me (as things do at 1am) that if REST is about data (resources) rather than methods then the right place to protect that data is at the data level.

So I think that is what I will do. Set user, group and role security in the database and then just return an access denied error if someone requests something they cannot have.

Then the requesting client application can decide what to do with that. The reason this has been troubling me I think is that I am wanting to use AJAX to do all the front end stuff. In which case the screens are rendered generally before the data is loaded - although not necessarily (just that is normal practice at the moment).

The MVC controllers in things like Zend have been confusing me on this. I am not sure you need a controller with a REST application. The client is just calling URLs. Screen renderings are not secret and can be customised very quickly for the most part. The data is what I think I need to protect. So people will see the same screen but only the data that they are authorised to see on that screen. I think that might do nicely as a best practice.

If the screen itself needs to be secured then I suppose the screen becomes a REST resource and we secure that. But I don't have that problem right now.

Then, databases. I really want to use eXist. I think that an XML database is a very useful tool for handling the presentation of data for REST applications. And Adam Retter has written a very cool XML-SQL xquery plugin. So I can store data in XML or I can store it in a MySQL database and then let eXist query that database and return the results in well-formatted XML which it does by default. All very slick.

Hmm.

1&1 Dedicated Server Hosting

2009-11-14T01:35:00.001-08:00

1&1 is good. £30 a month - ish and really intelligent support. I used a server on the EC2 cloud recently and ended up with a horrible bill. It mounts up quickly.

The test of a service is always when something goes wrong. At 1&1 I ran a script that deleted openssl which meant I could not get into the box remotely. But they have a serial console setup that means you ssh into a fixed server. Then log in with an id that is set up to connect you via serial port directly to your box. Perfect (especially when you do something stupid).

Another of my servers failed with a hard disk. Calling the help desk early on a Saturday morning was no problem at all. No long process - straight to the person who could reboot the box, check the hardware, knew what to do, and arranged for a new RAID disk to be installed.

Getting a new server is dead easy too.

Very very good.

The problem with SOA

2009-11-12T12:59:00.000-08:00

For a long time (probably since 1996 when I was working on migrating and merging mainframe technologies) I have believed that service-oriented (network-based) applications could be implemented more simply using standard web technologies. SOA always tended to hide the application in remote procedure call. And then each time I wanted to get access to some new business data I first had to spend ages understanding the API.

There were a few other bug bears for me over the past 10 years. Things that I have maintained must be possible and which clever senior architects and developers said was not possible. The first was session maintenance over TCP/IP. Being a connectionless protocol ( in contrast to mainframe SNA ) people said it was not possible to maintain a secure connection. And then came AJAX and now Open Business Associates has the first telnet/ssh appliance for web browser based on the stunning work of Dr Phil Endecott in Cambridge. I had been looking for someone to help me put this together and Phil had already done all the hard work. Cracking stuff. Now you can connect securely into anything telnet or ssh based from a web browser with nothing more than javascript support in a browser. No ActiveX controls and no messy java applets.

The second thing for me was drag and drop in a web browser. Again, clever bods, some within IBM Tivoli said it couldn't be done. Well that certainly was not true.

Anyway, back to SOA. A couple of things have come to maturity in the past two years which has changed all of that for me. The first was AJAX and the second is a combination of ideas that have converged into what is now called REST. Leonard Richardson and Sam Rubyhave written the first book that tries to formalise the architecture and I am sure it will be revised a little. Because it really is dead simple. And hence massively flexible and easy to work with.

The beauty of REST is that the application is focussed on what DATA the user needs access to and making that available as resources that can be accessed using a simple URL. The results come back as XML and the client application can then present that how it likes. Using something like ExtJS makes that part very easy. So all in all you end up with an application development approach that is standardsbased, flexible, cheap and a whole lot of fun to work with.

If you are thinking of writing a new application I would strongly suggest that you start to think about moving away from client-side java, RPC and SOA and take a look at REST.

Turn a column into a list

2009-10-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

While doing a SQL reporting job I needed to take a resultset that was returned as a column and turn it into a comma separated list.

After an hour of trying to get 'coalesce' to work on MySQL I found 'group concat'.

Check this out :

SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(column_name) FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_name = 'provider'

Gives you a list of the column names in a table.

Then I can add another short list of the one or two columns that I want to exclude and by doing an AND statement I can automatically create a table using a ' create table as ' without having to manually type in 99 column names.

Talend, Infobright and Jaspersoft

2009-09-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

Having built up some very successful business with Jaspersoft it has been great to start to work with Infobright and Talend at a couple of our customers. And both those products really seem to do what they say on the tin.

The Talend UK sales guy did a demo for myself and one of our customers the other day and I was very impressed. A very comprehensive set of features and over 13,000 rows per second on his laptop. I particularly like the fact that you can lay out a business diagram and that Talend automatically produces good looking documentation. Customer loved it.

Infobright is another very professional outfit. Paul, the bus dev guy from Canada is working really hard and it sounds like some of the big SI's are finally waking up to what can be done with open source. Well, I can only say 'I told you so' and try to keep getting some of the business. I think I wrote earlier about Infobright performance - something like a million rows queried in under 300 ms.

Pentaho is also looking good and particularly if you are wanting a pure analysis tool. That is their sweet spot.

All in all that makes for a complete open source business intelligence solution. If you are in EMEA and need help on anything in this space drop us a line - we really do love doing this stuff. Did I tell you we did a job for Skype in Estonia over the summer? I suppose I can't say much but we were very chuffed and they were delighted with the results. We used Greenplum there - first time on that product. But we know PostgreSQL well and Greenplum provides a spectacular cluster solution for PostgreSQL. DR and failover all sorted and fantastic performance on mega datasets.

The application development side is coming along very nicely as well. Check out the oba workflow tool that I have been hacking together over the past month or so. A few people are interested in that. With a little effort we could turn that into a very neat BPMN and BPEL and/or xProc generator.

The key for me though is connecting that front-end into eXist, the XML database. eXist is a great project and the mailing list is constantly buzzing. What we can do with eXist is to create a workflow and then also execute it in eXist. People access the workflow using simple REST (HTTP) calls i.e just point a browser at a URL. eXist returns everything in XML or JSON making the integration perfectly standardised. Adam Retter has also knocked up an SQL plugin which means you can get SQL results in a browser. Very cool. Check it out.

What else? I cycled 40 miles this weekend. Good fun. And built a new shower in the house which my daughter has been nagging me for for ages. Knocking down walls is always good stress relief !

The house in France is looking good and they have redone the roads which has made it all look very good. Less of a surf 'shack' now which it was when we first bought it. But it is 100m from the one of the best surf beaches in Europe and only an hour flight from the UK.

On a more existential note, my thinking on the seen and unseen realms has been coming together very nicely. Reading John Kehoe's book he made a comment about Einstein's conclusion on the wave-particle nature of light. The study of light and the wave-particle experiments we did at school have always stayed with me and now they are making a lot more sense and helping me understand a lot of things that always seemed irreconcilable. But I need time to write that all down sensibly so perhaps it will have to come out slowly.

Night all.

Work equals Energy in a given Direction

2009-09-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

I had lunch today with one of the most interesting and impressive people - David Stroll. At over 60, he and his colleague who is 74, are making inroads into the world of work and productivity improvement that are, in my very humble opinion, as important as the changes made by Henry Ford to work at the beginning of the industrial age.

David and Steven are empiricists and they have taken the time to really understand the nature of work in the information age. It was an honour actually and I hope to be able to bring some of their skills to bear on some the public sector departments that I am working with.

The discussion raised some challenging questions particularly challenging to a lot of the pop work motivation and social psychology stuff that is bandied about as science. I think I might even raise a few of the questions on our forums.

IE

2009-09-16T06:10:00.000-07:00

IE browser detection for javascript:

<!-- IE Detection:  IE=0 or IE=1 -->

<script type="text/javascript">IE = 0;</script>
<!--[if IE]>
<script type="text/javascript">IE = 1;</script>
<![endif]-->

<!-- End of IE detection -->

Works a treat in the page header.

Then in the script you just have to test for IE equal to 1 or 0.

Acknowledgements to someone who I cannot find in my history anymore. If it's you please let me know.

A large percentage of the browser code in the world is written to work around Microsoft Internet Explorer issues. So this is a very useful piece of html.

And the other browsers are taking the war forward, particularly Google. Their little svgweb project for example is just another way of taking the strength out of IE. In my opinion the ONLY way for Microsoft to regain control of the browser (and associated user interface) is to open source IE completely. That's of course if the browser market is something that Microsoft thinks is worth owning.

Raphael

2009-09-15T02:44:00.000-07:00

Graphics inside an ExtJS Panel courtesy of Raphael. Not much to look at I know.

But, on page load the graphic is animated. You can drag the panel around and minimise it without losing the image. On click the circle changes colour.

And it works in IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Perfect

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<title>Raphael</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/Ext3.0/adapter/ext/ext-base.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/Ext3.0/ext-all.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/Ext3.0/resources/css/ext-all.css" />
<script src="raphael-min.js"></script>
<script>
Ext.onReady(function () {

var draw = new Ext.Panel({
   id: 'drawPanel'
 , title: 'Panel'
 , collapsible: true
 , draggable: true
 , width: 800
 , height: 600
 , renderTo: Ext.getBody()
});

var paper = Raphael(draw.body.id, draw.width, draw.height);
paper.clear();
paper.rect((draw.width-640)/2, (draw.height-480-30)/2, 640, 480, 10).attr({fill: "gray", stroke: "none"});
var c = paper.circle(draw.width/2, draw.height/2, 60).animate({fill: "#223fa3", stroke: "#000", "stroke-width": 80, "stroke-opacity": 0.5}, 2000);
c.node.onclick = function () { c.attr("fill", "red"); };

});
</script>
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

Infobright rocking along nicely

2009-08-14T12:56:00.000-07:00

"<" Level type="Numeric" "/>" is the way to make Mondrian not put an 'UPPER' in the SQL statement that it generates. Took me hours. Followed suggestions from Julian Hyde amongst others on various forums. Tried setting olap.case.sensitivity=true or false etc etc etc... Eventually found the right thing to change in the OLAP schema XML. And it makes sense but finding the right place and the right syntax....

Anyway. Sorted. Now I have some serious response times from JasperServer Pro and Infobright IEE 3.1.

12 million rows

select
`id` from `dwTable` where `id` = 27
group by
`id`
order by
`id` ASC

15:56:28,411 DEBUG sql,http-8080-Processor17:144 - 0: ,
exec 693 ms

Nice. No need for aggregate tables at that sort of rate.

Software Manageability

2009-06-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

The total cost of ownership is more about the operational management of change control, patching etc as well as the annual maintenance and support costs.

Yet I find that almost no-one writes software with manageability built in from the start. See my last post for comments on good debugging.

I started working with a chap - whose name completely escapes me for now and I do not have the energy to dig through my emails to find right now - who built something in Python that I really should follow up on. It would provide a mechanism that could be easily added into any open source application providing automated updates. A lot of new open source application do this now - SugarCRM for example - but it would be nice to have an easy to use library that was not java based. That and a Python based server agent that I came across the other day would make a very good software management and bug fixing basis.

Note to self.

Good debugging = good software

2009-06-15T19:51:00.001-07:00

Exactly what it says on the tin.

The Cathedral and The Bazaar makes this point very well. Good software never just comes out coded perfectly first time. For software to become excellent over time requires an iterative process. Coding, checking, fixing, etc in an endless loop.

So it follows then that software which a) allows you to pick up bugs quickly and b) register and fix those bugs quickly will get better quicker.

Hmm, maybe Microsoft are on to something with their exceptionally irritating automatic software bug logging thingy.

For the open source vendors I certainly think there is work to be done on forums to make it easier to 1) turn on debugging in an application 2) make the problem happen (not always possible) and 3) upload what you have found to the forums and track progress.

Necessary but not sufficient

2009-06-15T19:43:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure if I have said this before.

The first question I get asked by corporates is most commonly: 'How do the developers make money out of open source?' The first instinct of any business person is correct - if it is free then how can it be sustainable?

The answer: 'You pay for it.'

The key is that you will pay an order of magnitude less for the software than you would if you were paying a proprietary software vendor. Either you pay the developer or vendor company for annual support; or you pay an integrator such as ourselves to support it for you and to act on your behalf into the forums etc, ; or you pay someone internally to run it and to spend their time on forums finding bug fixes.

I probably shouldn't just toss it this comment out here because there is a lot more to total cost of ownership. Check out our upcoming Technology Evaluation Matrix. But it is important and it needs to be said - so I will say it.

Getting things done

2009-06-15T19:40:00.001-07:00

We have been using the Amazon Cloud extensively. Our open source integration lab makes good use of this and allows us to quickly show customers what their solution could look like and how various open source systems can be integrated very quickly.

We actually did one for UBS recently - 24 hours to integrate 3 open source applications. Done by the people that actually build those products and who had never, and have still never met each other. Stunning. And the result : the start of a graphical operational workflow tool based on an XML database and Web 2.0 drag and drop. Very cool. Now we just have to get them to buy it !

Open Source in Government

2009-06-15T19:17:00.000-07:00

The role of open source in a heavily outsourced environment. Sounds like a topic for an MBA paper. Maybe I should suggest that one of the MBA's at Kingston has a look at this.

Certainly, talking to government recently there are challenges in this arena. Particularly in regard to the wallets of the system integrators I should imagine. But I cannot see actually how this should really present a problem. Unless of course they have actually been making large amounts of profits from software rather than from services up to now. But if they truly are integrators and their money comes from services then open source technology should be nothing but a good thing for them.

And it certainly is a good thing for taxpayers. If only to provide a serious alternative to traditional ways of getting things done. And somehow the transparency associated with open source just seems right for government.

For starters Open Business Associates provides a way to find the technology alternatives (check out http://openba.co.uk/opensearch ). Nothing mind blowing really but for people that have no idea where to start looking for open source solution it is a start.

Then I am working on our Technology Evaluation Matrix. This is a system to score open source products across a 24-point spectrum from licensing (the use of 's' and 'c' in that word has really become confusing - question for Mr Fry perhaps on the evolution of language). Sorry, ... from licensing through to features and ease of installation and configuration.

And then of course the Risk, Readiness and Benefit assessments that we provide for helping organisations understand and work through Strategic Change. That capability based on the work of Kobus and the Proxime team who started out doing the transformation of the failed Sabena airlines.

Not to mention the Amazon Cloud open source integration lab. 'Nuf. I will put that in another post.

I am looking forward to working in this space. I think there could be a lot of very positive movement here.

http://www.cio.gov.uk/transformational_government/open_source/

RESULT !

2009-05-17T04:48:00.001-07:00

Open Business Associates is all about finding the right associates for technology and delivery. I have been working with Calum Miller on several business analysis projects recently. He certainly knows his stuff although I am pretty sure that expertise didn't come overnight.

Last week I needed to build an analysis view for a Financial Director at an online retail customer of ours so I decided to do it myself.

It took 3 days to understand and extract the data, build the schema and get the first report up. With no training. Not too shabby. Read the frustrations along the way in the blogs below.

But the result was worth it. Real business numbers in an easily accessible format and a sense of doing something that can really help business people. A good place to be right now.

So we have interest from several retailers and marketing companies already in business intelligence - especially against the costs of the other vendors. And I can see no reason why Jaspersoft should not be top of the consideration list.

I did get Talend working by the way. But even when it runs, the extract of data is painfully slow - about 1 sec per record. In the end I just wrote a SQL query myself. So I am yet to see a real use case at a customer. Some discussions on the go in that regard with a few people so we will see.

Shong

2009-05-14T01:05:00.000-07:00

Thank you Shong. First hurdle answered.

Talend can only guess the schema for an absolutley basic sql request. so I have to define the returned result manually and then map it to my other table.

Okee dokee

Write software for ease of debugging

2009-05-14T00:30:00.000-07:00

Today's challenge: Talend

Business Goal: Give the FD at an online retailer a business intelligence view of his invoices.

No problem: Talend. Extract invoices and invoice items from one postgres db and dump them in a big old table in another postgres db. Was expecting to get this done in one day.

Ha !

So far 6 hours on this one. I would copy and paste the latest error message from Talend but the bloody pop-up window won't allow me to copy it. And there is nothing in the log file. And I can't be arsed to rewrite the whole error.

Ease of debugging really is the most important feature in software. Followed closely by operational manageability.

Then which forum to stick this problem on. So put it on all of the them last night. This morning - nothing.

Frustration (actually another 'F..' word) !

I will get this sorted but it takes forever when developers, especially open source ones, make it so hard to find, report, and debug software problems.

Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar - it even comes up there as the key issue.

So I have started the timer and we will see how many days it takes to get this done. There really are more important things to do guys.

openSearch - all the open source directories in one place

2009-05-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

Try it! Your next business solution is probably in the world of open source.

The button will take you to the live search page - my business agreement with Google needs the search to come from my domain.

openSearch indexes sourceforge, freshmeat, osalt, ohloh and EOS.
If you think an open source site should be added to this list please drop us an email: search[@]openba.co.uk

openSearch is available from today thanks to Google custom search and Jim McHale of Memoori who told me about it. A one-off payment but something that I think has to be done. Jim has his own very powerful search cluster on the Amazon cloud (check it out at www.memoori.com) and I also looked at Yacy (very cool peer search technology with good front-end management) but Google worked best for me right now. Sorry Jim !

Signs of the times

2009-04-29T06:18:00.000-07:00

Spent the last four days arranging to let my house in France. We bought it two years ago and have steadfastly resisted letting it. But I am so busy in the UK that I cannot see us spending the whole of August there again this year.

I have had a fair amount of interest already from surfer friends and families that are looking for a less expensive holiday this year. Signs of the times I suppose.

Check it out - http://surf-break.co.uk

Russian SOAP

2009-04-16T02:45:00.001-07:00

This post is about Accessing Jaspersoft Web Services with PHP and Zend_SOAP

I hunted for a good few days on the web trying to get the very scant Jaspersoft examples to work with the equally scant Zend examples of a working SOAP call.

Even the SOAP example that you will find whenever you try to Google for a solution (i.e. accessing xmethods.net with a SOAP call) is broken. Seems like xmethods got tired of people hitting them for testing beginner code.

Zend have a SOAP component which simplifies SOAP access quite nicely. It works by first querying the SOAP server for the WSDL (Web Services Description Language). That way the Zend SOAP component knows what methods etc are available from the SOAP server. Obvious downside is a call to the SOAP server. But Zend do caching if you want.

The piece that is missing from the Jaspersoft documentation (as always with them) is a full working example. So they give you a snippet of XML that has to be sent to the JasperServer web service but no PHP that wraps it all up. And certainly no PHP to handle the formatting of the response.

So here is some PHP that actually works with Jasperserver 3.5. All you have to do is stick it in a PHP file under the Zend server htdocs directory. Mine is in htdocs/test/index.php.

Oh, and the other very cool bit of PHP that really helped was the trace option in Zend. Provided by Dmitry who wrote the SOAP extension for Zend. (Hope it's not too cold in Russia, Dmitry!)

And thanks to Greg Houston http://formatmysourcecode.blogspot.com/ for the code formatter.

__________________________________

<?php
require_once "Zend/Soap/Client.php";

   $trace = 1;

   $req = '<request><resourceDescriptor name="" wsType="folder" uriString="/ContentFiles" isNew="false"><label>null</label></resourceDescriptor></request>';

 $client = new SoapClient("http://localhost:8080/jasperserver/services/repository?wsdl",array(
   "login" => "jasperadmin",
   "password" => "jasperadmin",
   "trace"      => $trace,
   "exceptions" => 0));
  
 print($client->list($req));

 if($trace) {
 print "<pre>\n";
 print "Request :\n".htmlspecialchars($client->__getLastRequest()) ."\n";
 print "Response:\n".htmlspecialchars($client->__getLastResponse())."\n";
 print "</pre>";
 }

?>

And now we grow

2009-04-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

Hope you all had a good Easter. I did some rock-climbing with my kids. It's been a while so my hands are a little sore. But it was good to see them pushing and good for me to hang on a rope - my daughter only let me slide once !

Early morning and doing lots of thinking. It has been eight months since I started Open Business Associates. And it has been great. A couple of early contracts that set things going. Simplexo has decided to focus on integrating with Microsoft Outlook so I am not doing any work for them. They still have an open source version on Sourceforge. As a SQL to XML gateway it is still useful.

But I Want One Of Those has been really good. Calum has produced some stellar business views from three data cubes. Cubes ? Well, yes, that is the right word. A few tables in the database (no need for foreign keys) and then some XML to define the cube shcema. Some Mondrian magic in the JasperServer and we had marketing managers drooling within two weeks. Nice.

Now to grow. Steve Standring and I did a first investor meeting last week. Semi-formal i.e. no powerpoints or spreadsheets (although we had prepared all those and never got to show them off - bastards !) but set for a follow up. It has really just made us realise that we have something here that investors are interested in - so that has got the wind up Steve's skirt.

So the first step in expanding sales has been to take on a telesales company, Europa Communications. I had a very good meeting with them and it is going to be very interesting to watch how that grows.

And so here I sit at 5:30 a.m. going through the business model again. And it looks okay actually. It works with just me and it works better as I add sales people. Sounds like a plan.

This week a couple of meetings with City banks who are very interested in looking at cost savings with open source.

Oh, and I redid the website in Joomla. Took a couple of weekends but hopefully that will be a lot more scaleable and allow others to contribute.

Busy days.

Frantic

2009-03-27T07:23:00.001-07:00

So much on the go - apologies for no posts. The crunch is definitely driving interest in open source.

Latest buzz of activity is around open source reporting - Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Spago and Talend at the top of the list.

And MDX !!$%^*!

I wrote this little MDX primer (with swearing be warned) as I launched into BI analysis with a customer. But I had the expert help of Calum Miller in Edinburgh - good man and will certainly work with him again as an associate of Open Business Associates. He really knows that analysis space well.

I need to add something on the advanced JasperServer stuff I am doing - but no time for that right now.

Open Business

2009-01-26T05:03:00.001-08:00

Had a fascinating lunch with Chris Potts on Friday. Well actually lunch was fish but the discussion was fascinating. Being a Strategist and CIO Futurist Chris has a way of making you think. And he loves venturing off into unchartered mindscapes. "I don't know where this is going but it will be fun," he says.

So in this case we met to talk about OPEN BUSINESS ie. applying the principles and practices of open source technology to pure business. For example, what if we open sourced (publicised?) our month end business process? Why would we do that? Well, all companies have a month end process and we all pay the consultants loads of money to help us do it right because 'they have the knowledge'. What if we shared our experience and found out it was not such a black art?

Chris has written a series of articles commissioned by CIO.com on his ideas. They have now been bundled together and can be downloaded as 'The FruITion Papers' in pdf format.

Definitely thought provoking.

So Chris and I are doing two things for starters:
1. We have set up a discussion forum for business people to explore these ideas. Feel free to join in and contribute at The Open Business Forum.

2. We intend arranging an Open Business discussion event in London. The agenda will be decided through open discussion on the forum. The FruITion Papers will probably be useful reading for anyone interested in joining the discussion.

So there we go - something new and exciting. Should be a fun ride !

Open Source UK

2009-01-10T23:32:00.001-08:00

What is Open Source:
Open Source is a practice. It involves collaboration and the freedom to extend, copy and reproduce without restriction. It is managed through peer review. The practice leads to better quality and reliability and typically also allows greater flexibility than traditional management practices.

The above summary after reading Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' for the third time while having a wonderful break in South Africa - the land where you can buy a 5 bedroom detached house on a marina in Cape Town for £100,000 (yes, a hundred thousand). Gotta love it !

And it seems that Open Source did not die over the Chistmas period. As I landed the first text arrived for a meeting from Simplexo who have just secured funding after fantastic analyst and press response to their Enterprise Search Solution. I am very excited to be associated with them providing technical sales services and letting people in the City know what they can do. Simon Bain, the founder/designer/XML guru has built a solution here that makes enterprise search stupidly simple.

Actually, Open Source in the UK is only just getting started. The UK is massively behind the rest of the world in it's rate of adoption of open source (too much credit to spend unwisely up to now) although some of the best embedded and commercial open source software is built here. But this year there is going to a massive increase in the visibility of Open Source in the UK. And not just from me, although I will be putting all my energies behind that effort. Countries in Europe like the Netherlands mandate Open Source as the first choice in government projects. Can someone please get Gordon Brown to give me a call !

The business divisions of Open Business Associates are all moving forward:
Anyterm Enterprise continues to receive downloads every day from the VMWare Marketplace.

The Web 2.0 development division has several projects to quote for. I also initiated discussions this week with Wavemaker who have some awesome development tools for WYSIWYG AJAX development to help speed up delivery times for us. AJAX frameworks certainly seems to be one of the most rapidly evolving areas at the moment. My approach has been to start with one but be prepared to switch until things settle down. But I am not waiting because the applications that you can produce are just too cool not to get started. Check out desk-in-space for example.

I have also kicked off an embedded software initiative which I realised was missing from the portfolio.

The partnership with Jaspersoft is going very well and I have several leads to follow up as UK customers look to Open Source for business reporting and analysis. I have also agreed a UK partnership with ThinLinc - the equivalent of Citrix and Terminal Server. Somebody know the CIO at Barclays ?

A lot going on. And so it should be considering that Open Business Associates represents the largest software company in the world (well over 44,000 Open Source projects and growing). And we take that representation very seriously because those developers are some of the brightest on the planet.

At IBM I was architecting solutions based on about 360 products in their Business Automation division at Tivoli. And I know how impossible it was to find out where things were going because of internal technical rivalry and corporate non-disclosures that are part of a listed company. And it was even more difficult to be heard if things were not going the way that customers needed them to go.

That just does not happen in Open Source. The direction is clearly discussed in open forums for customers and developers to read. And the quality and reliability of the software that comes out of Open Source projects is unheard of in corporate development shops.

In the world of software, "code reflects the business structure in which it is built". So, if you have a structure like IBM then you are going to get massively layered, convoluted code that actually never really does what it was planned to do. Crazy. In the world of Open Source, on the other hand, you are working more like a team of artists than a manufacturing production line.

As an aside I think that IBM's Open Source strategy is to be very supportive of the projects and then to buy the ones that they need. Using them as an outsourced development shop essentially. ILog for instance. Not a bad strategy really. Personally I think they should come clean on the strategy and outsource the whole damn development shop.

Stay in touch - www.open-source-uk.net

Driving throughput in the world's biggest software company

2008-12-31T23:07:00.000-08:00

Sourceforge currently has over 44,000 projects with more than 80% activity. Even with only one developer per project that is a lot of motivated software developers.

And I know that harnessing that capacity for UK enterprises will make a huge difference to costs, time to market and productivity especially in the current downturn, which as I said previously, I expect to run to the end of 2010.

So that's what I do through my company Open Business Associates. We communicate effectively between this world of developers and the business world. So that's great. But now I have been looking at how to ensure that we don't just take the bad habits of corporate software development and bring them into the Open Source world.

Theory of Constraints is one of the things that grabbed me over the festive season - that is very sad I know. Anyway, I was absolutely fascinated to discover Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Critical Chain is the first book of his that I read, given to me by a family member that runs production plants in Nigeria - talk about a challenge!

The whole focus of Critical Chain is on improving throughput in projects and applies perfectly to traditional software development processes. I think it will work just as well in an Open Source model especially as the book spends a fair amount of time discussing how to get subcontractors and vendors to buy into the process.

If anyone has tried Constraint Analysis on Open Source projects I would love to hear from you.

Are we having fun yet ?

2008-12-16T03:39:00.000-08:00

'Intriguing' is the word that has been used twice in the last week to describe Open Source and my company, Open Business Associates.

The first was by a friend of mine who is the senior partner at a consulting firm, Proxime, in London. He has been looking for a way to provide cost effective ERP with project management and HR components for a prospective client. And what do you know: Adempiere - does just that. And they incorporate Jaspersoft who are another of my key partners, providing more business reporting solutions than anyone else. And Jaspersoft just received funding from Redhat. Nice to know that I am picking them right so far.

The second was from Chris Potts of Dominic Barrow. Chris is a 'strategic futurist' and one of the best. I first met Chris at a Meta conference about four years ago. I think I was the only one in the audience who understood why he was talking about MONEY at an IT conference!

He has just released his first book - Fruition. Chris is also very good at finding images to encapsulate a thought. So, if you want to repaint the picture of how you do investments - in anything (although IT is a great place to start) - then read it and make investment thinking the backdrop of everything you do.

Hmm, I wonder if Gordon Brown would like a copy ?

SEO - a Web Service with ExtJS

2008-11-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

This post presents a new SEO web service and a Web 2.0 form to produce some SEO statistics.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not a one-off exercise but David Viney (esteemed, of the UK) has written one of the best books on the subject - detailed, technical and clear.

I have spent some time looking at websites for a couple of my customers and working through David's seven-step approach with them.

One of the first things to be done is to go to the Google SEO Toolkit and get a list of keywords and how many times per month those specific phrases get searched for. Otherwise you will be focussing on keywords that no-one is looking for. Seems sensible enough and you can even download it as a csv file.

The next step though is the time-consuming one, particularly if you have to do this for several customers - you have to go back and find out how many competing sites return each of those search phrases. And that involves manually checking through at least two results pages for each phrase. And then you start on the calculations - to work out which phrase has the best probability of success. For a list of 500 phrases per customer that can take some doing.

So, I made a web service. You call it with the search phrase and the count of how many times that phrase is searched for that you got from the google toolkit. The web service sends you back an XML page of the other numbers that you need. Here's how to call it (just change monkey and the number for your stuff).

http://openbusinessassociates.co.uk/extjs/examples/grid/SEO.php?phrase=monkey&count=1200014

In parallel I have been playing with ExtJS. So I decided to put the two together. If you go to http://openbusinessassociates.co.uk/extjs/examples/grid/xml-grid.html you will find an input box that you can simply cut and paste the contents of your google .csv file into and press the button. A couple of seconds later you have a list of all the figures in a nice looking ExtJS grid. Click on the column headings to sort and choose the phrases that will work best for you.

To implement the phrases in your website so you get to the top of Google ... well you'll have to read David's book for that.

4-Year Cycles

2008-11-17T13:21:00.001-08:00

Certainly "interesting times" to be living in. For the record, I am betting that the FTSE will turn in about October 2010. This is based on the 4-year cycle identified by Larry Williams.

Take a look for yourself. The red circles occur every four years – not a bad time to buy it would seem.

I have no idea how far down it will be by then (probably well below 3000) but that is not what I am watching. From June 2010 I am going to do whatever I can to have cash on hand.

Bookmark this page and let's come back and see in Nov 2010 – perhaps South Africa will have actually managed to host a successful World Cup as well !

Absolute Radio

2008-11-14T06:30:00.000-08:00

Absolute Radio - I love that station. I even made this widget for them the other day just for fun.

Nearly as appealing as the value of Open Source in the current economic crisis.

But, as Microsoft and others have been so keen to point out, it is the ongoing cost of operations of Open Source that is the achilles heel of the proposition. Having worked in corporate IT environments for nearly 20 years, I have to agree with them.

One large bank that I worked with in London moved to a Redhat Linux platform with 10's of thousands of servers. The numbers that ended up hurting them were certainly not the license costs of Redhat but it was the hidden costs of 'upgrade often' which is the mantra of many Open Source software houses. In a corporate environment the cost of change control is massive.

So, my view of the most important software that the Open Source community needs to produce as soon as possible is centralised maintenance and distribution of software patches and configurations - not sure if I can turn that into an acronym.

I have done a hunt around and cannot find anything Open Source that does the job across Linux, Unix, Windows and Apple platforms.

I am not advocating some committee agreed standards effort either - please no - JFDI I think.

So keep your ear to the ground. I will get the basic spec drawn up and then I will be advertising for contributions on the various rent-a-coder forums

Perhaps I will even advertise it on ABSOLUTE RADIO. Did I say I love that station?

And if you know of a good Open Source product that already does "CMDSPC" then please post a comment - I do not want to re-invent the wheel.

Rgds

Glen

Go make a difference.

Forever Friends

2008-11-09T00:54:00.000-08:00

I was digging through some old photos the other day and remembered that I've done some stuff that not everyone has done. And now, when I am stepping into the unknown, I find those memories make for good encouragement.

Climbing Forever Friends with Dalton Gibb is one I always go back to. To the limit that was - not a particularly hard climb, 16 if I recall. But huge exposure on a 100m sheer cliff wall in a hidden valley outside Robertson, South Africa. A decent walk in, hot, rocky and no-one else around.

A hectic overhang in the beginning - I got the belay into a knot and Dalton was just reaching for the critical hold to pull around the overhang. He ended up holding on with one finger saying, in typical calm Dalton voice, "Now would be good Glen".

And I will never forget clipping off at the top - dehydrated - no topping out, just two bolts in the middle of a sheer face with 100's of meters stretched out below us. And as we swung around and looked out, the moment just stood still. Very very cool.

> been shot at in the army - three months on the Angolan border living off stale water
> fought off 3 guys with a gun trying to hold up my pregnant wife and I in Durban
> spent two years working in the Durban Dolphinarium, swimming with dolphins every day - including Gambit, the biggest dolphin in captivity. And getting bitten regularly by bloody penguins!
> surfed with a whale twice - Kommetjie (out alone in huge surf) and Vic Bay. The whole world goes quiet as the biggest animal in the world slowly glides up out of the water - awesome. Take a look at the size of that bloody shark in Fish Hoek. No more surfing there for me. Damn tourists doing shark diving.

And a whole bunch of other professional and personal high points. They all took courage to step out into and I should not forget them. It is too easy to just lie down and not live.

If anyone sees Richard Branson

2008-11-06T06:47:00.000-08:00

Heard today that Steve Gadd died of cancer. He couldn't have been more than 40 which is too close for comfort. I worked with Steve at BP and he was one of the best pre-sales guys in the industry.

It just made me sit and think again - life's too short to do the things you don't really want to. Bruce Lee used to say that progress was about stripping away not adding things. And now I have some serious opportunities to consider and keeping those sorts of things in mind helps.

People tell me that I am very brave to be starting a business when the economy is crashing the way it is. I think what they mean to say is 'stupid' and 'take the permanent job offer with lots of zero's on the paycheck'.

But I personally cannot think of a better time to be starting (and helping to start) Open Source businesses. I am loving it and I can only see upside.

So, if anyone see Richard Branson, please tell him that I am looking for him. He is missing a trick here. If he wants to be part of the Oracle of Open Source and make a bigger impact on the IT industry than Bill Gates - tell him to call me 08452 93 93 63

(leave a message if I'm out).

Glen

Dr Dale Hacking

2008-10-20T12:53:00.001-07:00

If ever there was someone I wanted to thank it must be Dr Dale Hacking.

My mother gave up treatment for her cancer because her doctors were just not communicating with her in way that made her trust them. Dale was my mother's oncologist in South Africa and moved to Ireland where he now works at the Whitfield Clinic. I managed to track him down on Google and gave them a call. I called him on his mobile and the next minute I got a call back - while he was busy at a conference. I explained that my mother had given up on treatment and he offered to give her a call.

My Mom called me a little later in tears. She could not believe that he had remembered her.

One call from a man prepared to take a moment was all it took to boost Mom.

I found another recommendation on the web for Dale: "First, he tells no lies. Second, you are a person learning new facts not a patient being told what to do and when, just the why’s. Third, he is such a positive personality that you can only benefit from being around him even when he has something to say that you don’t want to hear."

Like I said - thank you. It made the difference.

Open Business Associates

2008-10-20T12:15:00.001-07:00

Well the company is official. The bank account should be opened this week. Abbey was the only bank that could/would open a bank account for a business on the phone immediately. Very very cool. And no bank charges - 100 free deposits a month etc. Perfect. Bye bye Barclays.

And I already have one very happy customer in Seer Green CE School. So I am exceptionally happy. Or maybe I just don't understand how dire the situation is. I have enough money at the moment to last three months. But I am enjoying life more than I have in 10 years - so that makes it very worthwhile. Getting up and having a head full of ideas is fantastic.

I know there are loads of people who have started companies and lots of millionaires that do it all the time but, hey, everyone has to have a first.

So my advice to all those middle-aged has-beens and dreamers out there - get up and do it! Find one thing you can do that can really help someone and that you really enjoy doing and JFDI.

2008-08-03T11:50:00.000-07:00

May you live in interesting times.

Trying times to say the least. Mom's cancer continues and she is having a hard time of it.

At the same time I have heard that we are going to be going through a round of redundancies at work. Not pleasant and certainly makes the economic situation hit home.

So losts of good reasons to reconsider the meaning of life and what I really want to do. Moved the furniture around at home a lot ! I enjoy being at home - which is saying a lot considering what I went through a year ago with a midlife crisis. Now home really is the best place to be (thanks Ikea!).

I built a very impressive powerpoint demo - did I mention that. It works as though you are logging into a real web portal. You can enter text into form fields and have that info presented in reports in other parts of the demo app. Very cool. Enjoyed that. Two tiny lines of VB code was all it needed for that bit.

I have also written an SNMP agent for Ingres databases. Popped it on sourceforge and the Ingres community website. Based on NET-SNMP and accesses the Ingres IMADB as well as script output. I wrote the MIB as well (using SimpleMIBEditor). Then I got bored with adding MIB variable code so I wrote a poller and an AJAX web interface to view database performance graphs. I used the prototype javascript framework and Open Flash Charts with some php and C to handle the interfaces to databases and NET-SNMP. Prototype has a very good UI framework although I think it lacks support and the user base around it is either small or relatively quiet. Relative that is to YUI (Yahoo). So I am about to start porting the SNMP app to YUI which also uses Flash charting. Should be a good environment to know something about if nothing else. One very cool thing in the Prototype-UI is the ability to save a layout by default. YUI does not have that yet. So may have to write it. Hopefully not.

So software is still what I enjoy - creative.

And then gardening (well is was very overdue) and some time on the farm with Jess and the sheep. That is always good for me. And she is working so well. She really does stop and listen to what I need her to do. Makes for a good working team. I did put some signs up at a farm supplier to let people know that I am available to help with stock work.

Then the family are off to France for August. And I should know in the next week whether I am still working at the same place or not.

Happiness is a positive cash flow !

2008-07-11T01:35:00.000-07:00

One phone call.

Mom has really battled with the effects of the radiation for her cancer which has now moved into her bones. The doctors wanted her to go for chymo and she has refused up to now. I really felt like I was losing her because her head was giving up and she did not trust her doctors.

I got hold of her previous doctor, Dale Hacking, in Ireland. He is an absolutely amazing man. One phone call. I asked if he could just call her in South Africa.

Well Mom phoned me back with her hope restored and willing to go for the chymo. Calm, clear and confident - knowing the facts without giving false hope.

Bless him. Much recommended at the Whitfield Clinic in Ireland.

2008-06-17T10:04:00.000-07:00

I said goodbye to my Mom on the phone this evening. And she said 'Goodnight' in a way that made me realise that one day I am going to say 'Goodnight, Mom' for the last time.

And that made me cry. After four years of cancer she has already outlived expectations. Now it's in her bones and the pain is hard. But she has great support from friends in SA and has found the strength to fight again. Very hard to have to fight again when you thought you were through it.

Life.

2008-06-16T02:04:00.000-07:00

300 acres of space -

Spent Sunday afternoon working on a sheep farm outside of Milton Keynes. What a pleasure ! 300 acres with two flocks of 200 sheep to be moved and inoculated.

There is something very honest about working in the dirt with animals. And it certainly gives one a view on a different set of values that people live by - compared with the world of London IT and Finance. A 300 year old house and a hard-working couple with no evidence of any focus on money spent on frivolities.

We moved the one flock of 200 into another field. Three dogs and ourselves driving them. One poor little lamb must have lost its mother and was on its last legs. But we picked her up and hoepfully she will recover in a field closer to the house.

Then moved a second flock from the back end of a very large field (set in a massive country estate) into the holding pen. And then push them through the race with the farmer doing the injecting for BlueTongue and myself doing the deworming of the lambs.

Great fun - good dirty work. I came home tired, covered in sheep shit and happy with my year old border collie. Jess, having worked like a star.

Got another farmer to help later in the week and I also want to pop into a farm near the Chalfonts that has a good sized flock and see if I can help out there.

2008-06-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

I do like Opera - the browser I mean. Well, I enjoy a little opera on occassion as well. But thin, fast and light is really appealing and Opera seem to have managed to retain that so far. Firefox irritates and IE is just too heavy and Safari - well, I don't really like it at all - small print etc.

I had an acid test that I used when I was investigating software as the architect for McCarthy's in South Africa: if a vendor came in with some software and it did not work the way I did straight out of the box then it was not built by people who really understand my business. I don't mean it had to have all the features but software must fundamentally be moulded to the shape of the job it is meant to do. Otherwise it is going to be a force-fit forever.

And the other litmus test for me was speed. If someone can do something NOW, then they probably know how to do it.

I recall another comment from when I was selling large scale software management systems at Micromuse: some clever scientist apparently said that if a company had managed to solve the scalability problem in a particular area then they had probably solved the problem in that space.

Scalability, Speed, and Style.

Sounds like surfing :-)

2008-06-03T23:06:00.000-07:00

open thinking

I am thoroughly enjoying working in the open source market. And I am also very interested in the move that Google itself is making into the Enterprise market. If they can find a way to integrate the web and desktop world's smoothly (and I have no reason to think that they won't) then they have a very useable solution for enterprises.

Cancer - is the other thing that is top of my mind at the moment. I lost two fathers last year (mine and my wife's) and now my mother's cancer has appeared again - after being dormant for almost five years. So I have been hunting around and came across Dr Clark. So now I have to go through the process of working out whether she is a quack or whether natural remedies are the solution to AIDS and cancer. Well, we will carry on with the normal radiation and chemotherapy treatments, as horrible as they are, and I will get going on the alternatives at the same time.

Now my step-father, when he was older spent a huge amount of time reading about health remedies and diets. He had also been a heavy drinker and smoker and I was fascinated that he should suddenly think that there was something in all this health sutff. So you have to notice when a man who has lived strong for 80+ years thinks something is worth looking into.

As always, lots to do and all of life's challenges and puzzles make it worth living.

Have good one.

2008-05-27T12:57:00.000-07:00

Bream with capers and fennel seeds ...

Travelling up to visit a customer in Cheshire I decided to spend the night at a little 3-star lodge called The Cottage outside Holmes Chapel. And it was the food that captivated me. The bream would rival anything in London and then some.

Wonderful !

Reading 'The Inner Game of Golf', Galwey says "Driving is my favourite part of the game - not because I allow myself to swing fully but because I allow myself to enjoy it fully. I've found that almost everything I let myself enjoy fully I soon am doing well, because enjoyment and learning go hand in hand."

Perceptive man that Mr Galwey.

2008-05-15T06:29:00.000-07:00

Start -> Run > diskmgmt.msc

After downloading and paying for Paragon and another who's name I forget I finally found diskmgmt.msc which is all you need when adding new disk space to a Windows vm.

So extend the virtual disk using vmware (there is a command line to run that can increase the disk space allocated to a fixed VM disk image)

Then start up the VM and run this little baby.

Nice and easy.

Why use fixed disk size - faster.

2008-05-11T02:17:00.000-07:00

I hate programmes that install in Windows and then do not give you an option to control their auto-start behaviour. They are almost as irritating (bad?) as programmes with timeouts that are not configurable - like most network management tools especially Intel Pro-Set Wireless. For a company like Intel that really is an absolutely crap piece of software. They should open source it and let the community show them how to write user interfaces.

But, anyway, auto-start irritation:

Quick google and "hey presto" all you have to do is Start -> Run -> msconfig

to turn off programmes that automatically start in Windows XP.

http://www.webterrace.com/tweak/msconfig.htm

Noise cancelling headphones:

I had the pleasure of travelling up and down to Newcastle on her majesty's secret service, national rail, this past week. 9 hours on the train. The week before I had to fly 10 hours to the Caribbean and back - tough life.

So I did a quick google and some research on noise-cancelling headphones. Tired of crying babies and listening to other people's conversations and music. I didn't even know how noise-cancelling headphones worked. I am still no expert but I can tell you this: GET SOME. What a pleasure.

I took "google's" advice and bought the JVC HA-NC250. Absolutely bloody brilliant ! Flick of a switch and whole trip suddenly feels smooth and relaxed - they cut out all the train or plane roar. Seriously cool !

2008-05-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

Sheep shearing this last week. The man arrived, set up and sheared 70 sheep in an hour and a half. They regard sheep as meat on legs not like us townies that try to talk to the sheep. Interesting, a good lesson in perpectives.

2008-05-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

So, let's see if google docs works as it says on the can.

Word wrap would be nice - the default editor in blogger seems to just keep going but hoepfully this is a little more intelligent.

We live in hope.

But ... if this works, then I have to say I like it. Very cool way to get thoughts out there that otherwise just sit in my head (and I assume in everyone else's just the same).

Just got started

2008-05-05T10:29:00.000-07:00

... but this looks like a very good place to store things that
I have learnt while desperately trying to get software to work.

find . -name '*.py' -exec grep --color 'xrange' {} +

- a very good way to link find and grep to search for something
in a specific set of files.
- all accolades to http://iwiwdsmi.blogspot.com/2007/12/
how-to-use-grep-and-find-to-search.html