The new router/Access Point from Asus, the WL-500g Premium is packing a load of interesting features, like :

• Two USB ports to connect web cams, or hard drives
• apparently, based on Linux
• with a download manager which uses the hard drive to take care of your FTP, HTTP or BitTorrent downloads without the help of a computer.
• Class of services for HTTP, FTP, and BitTorrent

Along with the regular features, it seems a very cool gadget.

You may not know, but all MacBook Pro have a motion sensor that is used to save your hard drive in case of a fall. It seems that it can be used also :

• To switch screens in a virtual Desktop (watch the video, it looks almost like playing a pinball)
• A carpenter's Level.
• A security device (motion sensor).

Very cool. Any other usage I might have missed ?

The EJB 3.0 specification really simplifies the development of entity persistence. Rahul and Ed are detailing the differences in this article. Annotations are really simplifying the developer's job, while still allowing customization. The same holds true for JAX-WS 2.0. And all of that, open sourced in Glassfish, with performance improvements above the previous Application Server benchmarks ... look at the results posted by Scott Oak. Excellent ... 167% improvement above previously posted results ...

It seems that the trend of IT offshoring policies is starting to impact the availability of US trained IT professionals. It's no surprise. Not only students are not willing to face the fate of having their job moved to a low cost location, but now, engineers are starting to move out of the job, mainly into Marketing, it seems (I would be interested to know how many seasoned developers are attending MBA schools these days ...). Robert Mitchell seems to disagree that students contemplating an IT job should be put off by offshoring. In an article, he says :

globalization is an opportunity ... placing key human resources closer to customers in each market.

I don't really think that this is the reason why jobs are offshored in the first place ...

Computer world has a nice article on how to be a better blogger ... and still keep your day job ... David Strom says :

• Tell the truth
• find your voice, and stick to it
• be professional at all times
• craft your own blogging policy now
• understand the mechanic, and know your tools

For me, blogging is not about promoting my employer's technology. Even though I think that our technology is really cool. It's one of the reasons why my blog is not on the corporate site. I would like to make sure that I'm perceived as objective, and provide a forum that is transcending a specific employer, and will evolve with me, not attached to a specific job.

Often, during performance evaluation periods, career development assessment, one has to define long term goals, how to get there, and more importantly, how to track progress.

While I don't like too much self help type of books or articles, and not that Tom Peters is in that business, but I found in one of his articles a very interesting paragraph:

No matter what you're doing today, there are four things you've got to measure yourself against. First, you've got to be a great teammate and a supportive colleague. Second, you've got to be an exceptional expert at something that has real value. Third, you've got to be a broad-gauged visionary -- a leader, a teacher, a farsighted "imagineer." Fourth, you've got to be a businessperson -- you've got to be obsessed with pragmatic outcomes.

I think that this is a very good start.

The next step after playing with the openESB platform in a previous blog entry, more as a user, and look at what it takes to develop a service engine. I found on the web a tutorial on writing a service engine for ObjectWeb's Petals. They give a pre-packaged Hello World service engine. I tried to install it on top of the openESB starter kit. It's quite simple :

• in the Runtime panel, expand the Sun Java System Application Server node, then the JBI node.
• right click on the Service Engines node, select Install "New Service Engine"
• point to the .zip file, and you are done.

Here is the result :

Next step is to understand how to activate the Service Engine, and extend it.

This entry tries to explain how to put together a simple BPEL process invoking a web service created using the JAX-WS 2.0. This uses the Java EE 5 Tools Bundle Beta It's quite simple in fact ...

Read more...

The file provided on the Exim web site seems a bit too simplistic.
An alternative version (under CDDL 1.0) can be downloaded here

Read more...

The internet is a strange place ... or maybe it's the world... here is what happens when you google few words :

  De Anza pow wow -> Geronimo stolen skull -> the skull and bone society

Read more...

I just saw a cool video of all the effects that the Logitech Quickcam Orbit can do. It's very cool. Notice the computer fan starting to pickup during the demo ? I'm sure that this require some serious CPU to achieve.

You might have seen ads for the Ambient Orbs . They are basically a pager on the FLEX protocol with a bunch of leds attached, changing colours with the weather forecast, the phase of the moon, the traffic or the NASDAQ.

The interesting thing is that on the company's web site, there is a page on how to build your own. This is where I found that there are some data only FLEX pager, certainly with a serial port.

On the same web site, there is a mention of the Ambient Energy Orb developed for DemandResponse (this one is not wireless though....) Potentially interesting combination ...

Seen on Business 2.0 blog

But now the tables have turned. An unusual convergence of economic factors has made this moment the best time to look for a job since the most dizzying days of the boom. A recent survey of more than 14,000 employees and human resources managers by compensation consultancy Salary.com found that fully 65 percent of workers planned to be hunting for a new job in early 2006.

That's an interesting information ...

This book by David A. Chappell seems very interesting. I have to add it to my to read list.

Seems to be very relevant to efforts like Open ESB and how ESBs can be applied in Service Oriented Architectures.

I recently saw a blog entry mentioning an article relating SOA with the portal technology. It's not clear to me that this is really related. Yes, there are services, which can expose portlets, but are we saying that the composition of portlets inside a portal is identical to the composition of services by a composite application platform like Sun's CAPS ? Here is the pointer to the document: A Service Oriented Architecture for Portals Using Portlets

In his blog entry Capacity Challenges Charles Betz ponders on the difference between the capacity management of mainframes and (the lack of ?) capacity management of distributed applications. I agree with all the points made in this entry, and would like to add some thoughts.

Read more...