Nov 29
London calling
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 11 29th, 2007| icon31 Comment »

Looks like QCon London this March has been announced. Quite a few of the tracks look similar to the much hyped QCon San Fransisco a few weeks back.

Since almost the entire company is going to the conference, I hoping for the best possible content. From the track summaries, you’ll be likely to find me in the tracks covering Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, The Cloud as the New Middleware Platform (finally getting to see one of my favorites, Gregory Hohpe) and SOA, REST and the Web (will be interesting to see if Stefan can top the SF line-up).

So far, the list of speakers is quite short, but I guess most of the usual suspects will be coming.

Expect me to blog as much as I can from the conference. See you there!

Oct 20
Isn’t that work email?
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 10 20th, 2007| icon3No Comments »

I’m using GMail for both my personal and my work email. That means I have to remember to choose the correct From address for different recipients. I usually don’t.

Greasemonkey to the rescue. I searched userscripts without finding anything that matched my needs, so I wrote one. It quite simply asks you for your work email and a set of patterns to match for. For every email you then compose, it will search the To field for the patterns. And if one match, and your From address doesn’t, it will warn you. Works for me. For the patterns, I keep a list of the domain names for the clients and partners I work with.

Now, this is my first Greasemonkey script so please be kind, but report back any troubles or improvements. Also, I’ve found that other scripts I’ve used for GMail as frequently broken due to Google updating the site, if this happens to this script I’ll be happy to keep it in shape if you remind me.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Jan 28
Wow… that is wow
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 01 28th, 2007| icon3No Comments »

Nick Gall, a Gartner VP spills it:

“Unfortunately, Web Services, at least the WS-* style, are “Web” in name only. While WS-* enables tunneling over HTTP (used merely as an XML message transport), in almost every important aspect, WS-* violates (or at best ignores) the architectural principles of the Web”

and

“It is my position that the W3C should extricate itself from further direct work on SOAP, WDSL, or any other WS-* specifications and redirect its resources into evangelizing and standardizing identifiers, formats, and protocols that exemplify Web architectural principles. This includes educating enterprise application architects how to design “applications” that are “native” web applications.”

While I certainly could not agree more, it is interesting to see that even the big-shots bow agree, in public. That W3C workshop might turn out to be a defining moment in how the web and web services are regarded among the broad base of developers and architects. I sure did not think so when the talk about it started.

Sep 17
Bockstensturen 2006
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 09 17th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

Last Sunday was the culmination of this summers mountain bike training, Bockstensturen. BST is a 100 km race starting in the center of Varberg on the swedish west coast, with the majority of the race in the hills in Åkulla just outside of the city and with the finishing kilometers on the dunes by the sea. This year it was fairly dry, but still quite sticky for most of the distance. My goal was to beat 6 hours, which I just barely did, coming in at 5:57:02. Below is the GPS plotted map from Google Maps (sadly with pretty poor resolution) and the elevation graph. The total elevation gain ended up at 1304 meters.

The day after, well actually for three days after the race, my legs were in pretty bad shape. Should I actually do this again I should probably train more regulary for a longer time.

So, will I be back next year? I’m afraid I’m too stupid not to.

GPS plotted map

Elevation

May 28
My del.icio.us conventions
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 05 28th, 2006| icon31 Comment »

I spent some time this weekend cleaning up my del.icio.us bookmarks. I have a decent, but not huge collection (616 links) and I find that every few months it’s a good thing to clean up duplicate tags (relax_ng vs relaxng), improve bundles and fix some misspelled tags. This time I also rearranged some of my tagging conventions. As most users, I add as many tags as makes sense for a certain link. I find the suggestions made by del.icio.us to be quite good and frequently choose among them.

Articles or blog posts I now tag with the author with the “by:” tag prefix, e.g. by:elliotte_rusty_harold. I find this a good way of keeping track of writing by my favorite authors.

I use the natively supported “for:” prefix to send links to friends who also use del.icio.us. I still got to gather some more experience on this but so far it looks good. I like to minimal approach del.icio.us takes to this type of functionality.

Links which are not HTML pages, especially PDFs, gets tagged with a “format:” prefix, e.g. format:pdf. This serves mostly as a hint/warning for myself while browsing my links. As linking to special formats like SVG might increase, this might be a good way of locating all of these at the same time.

Links which require some attention from me, gets a “to:” prefix. Currently, there are two of these, to:read and to:wish, but I expect further types in the future, e.g. to:blog for stuff I want to comment in my blog.

Since I spend a lot of time with different open source tools, lots of my links are for different OSS projects. As licenses are of great importance in this world, I’ve created a “license:” prefix, e.g. license:gpl. I haven’t really started using this yet (only one link) but I hope it will be useful.

As seen above, I use different prefixes for special types of tags. So far I find it a very good practice and I expect to define further prefixes as I go along. A de facto convention for these types of tags would be great. For example, if everyone would be using the by: prefix, finding all articles by an author, spread over different sites, would be very simple. Does anyone know of such a conventions that people use (it seems like some of the prefixes I use also get’s used by others, e.g. license:gpl)? I would certainly be happy to switch to whatever is the majority choice. If not, how would one establish such a convention in the best way?

Apr 8
Now, how simple was that…
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 04 8th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

We had an old printer stuffed away on the store. It connects via the parallell port and Evas laptop doesn’t have one. So, we’ve been printing through my laptop which only happens to be available when I’m home. So, I wanted to hook the printer up to the Ubuntu box we have for storing files and serving up some other stuff (like subversion). I started reading through some articles on how to configure Samba to do this. But it required a fair amount of hackery. Then, I found this wonderful howto describing how to set it up using only CUPS. Took something like 3 minutes and works like a charm. Dead simple.

Mar 28
It’s enterprisey!
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 03 28th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

The new favorite word makes it to wikipedia. [via Mark]

Mar 27
It’s enterprisey!
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 03 27th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

The new favorite word makes it to wikipedia. [via Mark]

Mar 23
SOA == WS?
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 03 23rd, 2006| icon31 Comment »

My colleague Mårten just replied to Jimmy Nilssons question regarding whether SOA == WS. As Mårten, I think that equation is not necessarily true, possibly not even desirable.

I view services as a well designed (from both a business and technical standpoint) interface to perform a function. This is not bound to a particular technology (such as WS-*).  In fact, I think the whole WS-* mess in many cases is holding back the possibilities of building a working SOA due to its complexity. I’m certainly a part of the Loyal WS-Opposition and prefer to use the strengths of each protocol rather than adding a leaky layer on top. In my world, using HTTP (preferably REST like) and a MOM (like ActiveMQ or WebSphere MQ) will suffice for building a very strong and flexible backbone to enable SOA.

But, the hard part of building a SOA is not the technical details (that’s been solved for years), it’s finding a appropriate services based on the business requirements. The experience in this area is far less advanced.

Jan 30
Open SVG Test Suite launched
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 01 30th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

Two week ago, Cameron McCormack launch the Open SVG Test Suite initiative. It aims at providing a open environment for providing SVG test cases using a liberal license. The current SVG test suite, published by the W3C working group, is fairly limited. The XML Query Test Suite has 9700 tests covering 94% of XML query (a 164 page specification, SVG has 181. SVG, being a very complex (719 pages specification) and on many places ambigous specification, is hard stuff to implement (I’ve did my best). And, as you would guess, these two facts has lead to the current implementations being incompatible in many places. And web developers, hardened from the broker wars, are feed up having to hack their documents to work with the viewers.

So, I truely hope that Camerons project will be a great success. It is required for SVG to finally getting going.

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