[digital:meditation]

Soundtrack: Coax – “Aura Reading” (off the pretty good “Blue Enigma” album released on Kahvi Collective).

I have to admit I haven’t been dealing with the “machine meditation” idea I used to play with rather often back then, on Flickr, before it eventually became a place not that much fun to be anymore. At the moment, one or the other ’round here (?) might have noticed, the frequency of picture posts on this page has somewhat decreased, as well… which is to a certain degree due to the fact that my day-job projects these days are (fortunately…) pretty challenging, leaving little time for much else… and, to some degree, it’s also due to the fact that I am sort of unhappy with the tools at hand… I do not really want to completely move to a platform like Flickr again, for obvious reasons. Same way, however, I do not mainly and only want to post images as Manu (@calacirya.de) does, so I stopped using / maintaining my PixelPost installation a while ago, same as I didn’t want to run two different installations / tools anymore… just to end up learning that wordpress, though generally capable of doing so, still has a bunch of disadvantages being (ab?)used as a photoblog engine. Oh well… whatever. I’d better stop ranting and enjoy the music…

Once in a while you tend to stumble across music accidentially, music which seems way out of the genres you usually deal with… and yet, it works. Something like this happened to me when discovering Botany Bay on jamendo.com, a platform I have been frequently using the last couple of years for various reasons. Reading tags like “pop”, “triphop”, “postrock” or “folk” weren’t really what I was looking for, but I decided to listen to it nevertheless, and, after listening to “inhale” and “moon child”, I knew I wouldn’t be likely to get this music out of my player anytime soon. Ordered both albums (as I didn’t want them to be in my collection “just” as mp3 files burned to disc), enjoyed the cover artwork, enjoyed the music, even though, as my musical tastes tend to differ, I can’t listen to the same stuff all the time…

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Ever wondered how to get your computer to do more than just clicking on an icon, leaving you to enter some data into some application window (browser, mail client, …) and be more or less pleased at its overall outcome? Ever wondered how on earth to get your computer actually processing your data, solving your problems in a way more suitable for your every-day work? Maybe even tried to, careful as could be, get closer to the idea of “writing programs” for your machine but so far hesitated, scared by the overall complexity and skills set required to get this done?

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Whoever is reading this weblog more or less regularly will have noticed that I am an enthusiastic user of NetBeans for most of my development needs, and this holds true even now that, given a current project of ours, I have to switch IDE at least once daily, as we do a project based on Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform and NetBeans, as comes as no surprise, is not too good a tool for building applications which are more or less built atop the Eclipse RCP core (well, getting deeper into things and especially talking about RAP application deployment, you’ll figure out that Eclipse itself also leaves a lot to be desired here, but that eventually is another story).

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… trying to capture light again, found in peculiar places… :)

Soundtrack: Kalte – “Mariana Arc”. A moment of quietness in a place where light seems to be percieved in a completely other way than, say, on a bright sunny day, under a sky wide open.

Simply put: “Programming Collective Intelligence” is one of the most outstanding publications related to IT and software development I’ve been reading in a while. Given some of our business use case, at the moment I am a little deeper into dealing with analyzing (and, subsequently) making decisions and suggestions out of data somehow linked to users in our environment (for the obvious reason of both making our work a little easier and making our users overall experience a little better), and browsing the table of content of this book made it seem worth a closer look. And, overally, after having a closer look, I was about to find out that this book indeed offers profound information on the issue I am dealing with – and way more beyond this scope…

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Sometimes you just end up frustrated beyond belief: Being into software development / architecture, reading and keeping yourself up-to-date is an essential part of your work. Likewise, you generally tend to be (maybe a little too) enthusiastic about new technologies, as in most cases, while stumbling across new technology, new approaches and concepts, you might see new solutions that might provide an elegant, powerful, or maybe simply more sane way for you to help your customers, users, … getting their work done. This is a good and healthy process… if it works out. Because on the other side, it also can be a source of extreme frustration, if your given infrastructure and IT environment is not up for that. That’s when you get to work highly motivated in the morning, and the outcome is all the same virtually every day:

• System integration using open standards, web services and SOAP? Oh please, we don’t even support generation of valid XML (based upon some schema or DTD) right now.
• Quick scripting integration of backend services using JSON and REST? Not out of the box, you have to do that manually, and you can’t do it bidirectionally as our current HTTP client implementation doesn’t support anything else but GET.
• Usable, AJAX enriched web client? No. Our web client architecture relies upon a whole block of code containing hundreds of lines of inline HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and we don’t intend to change that.
• CORBA integration as a technology at least somewhat open? Oh no. We do have rudimentary CORBA support, but just for our very own internal purposes, unsupported, untested and unmaintained outside our own use cases.
• Asynchronous communication, ESB or business orchestration even? Well no, by now you should have learned that our system doesn’t need an outside world to exist.
• Mashups, Web 2.0, portal integration, widgets, all these technologies which aren’t really useful in itself but maybe a good thing to provide end users with some eye candy? No. Not now, not tomorrow, probably never.

Being in kind of a rant mode, I could continue this list forever, but it is of no real help. What’s the bottom line? Well, despite my personal (political) attitudes, I have become a little more pragmatic the last couple of years as far as it concerns the use of “open source” software or even “software libre” in a business context, as I have figured out that, though I think it’s generally an important matter from a long term point of view, there are more important short term aspects to deal with: Open standards. Open connectivity. The ability to integrate applications, to make them seamlessly go together without too much ado. Ask your vendors to support open, industry-adopted interfaces and agreed-upon communication standards, and don’t accept “data” or “logic silos” to lock up part of your business data / functionality. Show your vendors that this matters to you, and support those who make a change here, no matter whether open source or not. It’ll make things more difficult during project startup, especially as it will be more expensive and provide value you can’t immediately “see”, but as soon as you will need it, you know why you did it initially… or, maybe worse: You know why you should have cared, initially.