elemental links

Assorted Links - October 24, 2008

You could say I was reading wide this morning, here an assortment of links that caught my attention:

6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

Esther Schindler "Since every programming language is a tool suited to solve a particular problem, it behooves each IT shop to use the best tool for the job. So in this article, I share a few up-and-coming scripting languages that really ought to be on your company's radar, with a few passionate arguments from developers who have adopted them." The 6: Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Lua, F# and Boo.

It's True: There's Fraud in the H1-B Visa Program - BusinessWeek

Is this fraud good for US tech workers? "The program for what are known as H-1B visas is designed to help U.S. companies bring workers with rare or specialized skills into the country. A Microsoft (MSFT) or IBM (IBM) can use the visas to hire someone from abroad if they can't find an American citizen with equivalent skills. But in a recent study, U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) found that 13% of the requests for H-1B visas were fraudulent and 7% contained technical violations. In one case, when a company requested a visa for a "business development analyst," USCIS found the person would be working in a laundromat, doing laundry and maintaining washing machines."

Stupid QA tricks: Colossal testing oversights | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-10-20 | By Andrew Brandt

J. Crew 'upgrade' "During the second quarter of fiscal 2008 we implemented certain direct channel systems upgrades which impacted our ability to capture, process, ship and service customer orders."...Among the problems reported by customers was this whopper: A man who ordered some polo shirts received, instead, three child-size shirts and a bill for $44.97 for the shirts, plus $9,208.50 for shipping. And before you ask, no, they weren't hand-delivered by a princess in an enchanted coach. As a result, the company temporarily shut down e-mail marketing campaigns designed to drive business to the Web site. It also had to offer discounts, refunds, and other concessions to customers who couldn't correct orders conducted online or who received partial or wrong orders.. In a conference call with investors in August, CFO James Scully said, "The direct system upgrades did impact our second-quarter results more than we had anticipated and will also impact our third-quarter & fiscal-year results"

Service Oriented Enterprise: 16 Corrections on Cloud Computing

Jeff Schneider and his "crack team of cloud computing consultants" offer 16 corrections to James Governor's "15 ways to Tell Its not Cloud Computing" post. James' origninal post is focused (IMO) on the cloud computing providers (and pretenders). Jeff's slideshow (IMO) is focused on enterprises/organizations who might purchase cloud computing services.

Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...: Enterprise Architecture Confusion regarding Buy vs Build...

James offers some IT investment common sense in uncommon times: "Let's start by acknowledging that an enterprise should only buy a product only when it decreases risk. If you don't understand how the product works, or if you don't believe claims about its capabilities, then don't buy it until those issues are settled...Likewise, buy the simplest, cheapest product that meets your needs. Don't buy expensive products with lots of features you don't need, even if you think those features might be useful someday...More importantly, you need to remix your thinking and acknowledge that open source belongs in the buy side mentality. While you can avoid the arduous mind numbing negotiations around seat-based licensing, you can focus on getting something deployed in production that meets the business need a lot faster. Of course, you should consider buying support not just from the vendor itself but also in terms of contributing back to the community..."

Why I think Web Oriented Architecture is phony « Judith Hurwitz’s Weblog

SOA is about the business: "When we talk about SOA we really aren’t talking about protocols. Sure there are lots of protocols and interfaces that are an important part of service orientation. But the power of SOA is in the fact that it enables businesses to focus on two key enables: 1. creating business services that are key business functions 2. enabling these services to be used flexibly to create a variety of business processes that can be changed quickly to enable change and innovation. Companies are getting pretty creative with this approach. Not only are they creating business services involving software components, but they are tying those business services into business elements such as monitoring electric meters...25 case studies that are part of the forthcoming second edition of SOA for Dummies. What did we learn? Simply put, customers are implementing SOA from a business perspective. They are leveraging back end and web based capabilities and gaining huge business value."

Links for September 12, 2008

The StreamBase Event Processing Blog: What the UAL Incident Teaches Us: Regulate News Market Data Sources

Mark Palmer on Regulation of information sources: "Here's where regulators should step in: automated trading based on unregulated sources of information should be prohibited. It's just not right, and the UAL debacle illustrates this perfectly. This "news" was 5 years old. Indeed, it was probably eliminated by most news processors as an outlier; but it only takes one to start a chain reaction. This "data" shouldn't have entered any trading system in the first place. Dow Jones wouldn't have put that story on the wire, nor would Reuters." Good discussion in the comments.

Event Processing Thinking: On Occurrence time: a footnote to the UAL fiasco

Opher on Event Occurrence Time: "The works in the temporal area are talking about several time dimensions - the bi-temporal model talks about: transaction time -- the time that a fact is recorded, and valid time -- the time interval in which the fact is valid. In event processing we also look at a bi-temporal time similar to this: detection time -- the time that the message that represents the event was detected by the processing system, and occurence time -- the time which the event happened in reality (occurrence time can be considered as the starting point of a valid time that ends when the event becomes irrelevant, but let's get it out of the scope and concentrate in occurrence time)."..."Thinking about standard structures for events -- I would think that having "standard header" with some mandatory properties for each event...the occurrence time should be a mandatory. Occurrence time has some inherent issues associated with it - but I'll discuss it another time."

Microsoft joins OMG | InfoWorld | News | 2008-09-10 | By Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Microsoft joins OMG, (finally) supports UML, will bring BPMN to Visio: "As part of its strategy for model-driven software development, Microsoft on Wednesday announced it has joined the Object Management Group (OMG)."..."Microsoft views model-driven technologies as a main pillar of its "Dynamic IT" vision for aligning business and IT. Other pillars include service enablement, virtualization, and the user experience."

The 10 Laws of Cloudonomics - GigaOM

Intro: "Public utility cloud services differ from traditional data center environments — and private enterprise clouds — in three fundamental ways. First, they provide true on-demand services, by multiplexing demand from numerous enterprises into a common pool of dynamically allocated resources. Second, large cloud providers operate at a scale much greater than even the largest private enterprises. Third, while enterprise data centers are naturally driven to reduce cost via consolidation and concentration, clouds — whether content, application or infrastructure — benefit from dispersion." Followed by 10 laws of (groan) 'Cloudonomics' -- bad name, good read.

Is the Cloud Right for You? Ask Yourself These 5 Questions - GigaOM

5 questions for enterprises on using the/a cloud: is demand constant? is growth predictable? can demand be shaped? where are the users? is the application interactive?

CFOs more optimistic about U.S. economy: survey: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

"Chief financial officers are more optimistic about the direction of the U.S. economy, but remain concerned about consumer demand and weak credit markets, according to a quarterly survey." " Compared with the previous quarter, 28.5 percent said they were more optimistic about the U.S. economy, up more than 7 percentage points from June, according to the Duke University/CFO Magazine survey of about 1,300 CFOs, including 524 from the United States. Those saying they are less optimistic fell to 41.5 percent, from more than half in the previous survey and more than 72 percent in March. About half expect the U.S. economy to begin recovering by the middle of 2009." "Still, many finance chiefs say they are cutting plans for capital spending and employment and 43 percent say the credit crunch is directly hurting their company. CFOs named weak consumer demand as their most pressing concern, followed by credit markets and the cost of fuel, the survey found."

User Experience: Learning from the Pros - ReadWriteWeb

Compelling User Experience shouldn't be limited to the web & consumer tech, enterprise users deserve good UX as well. ReadWriteWeb notes some UX resources to check out: "The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line. What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience."

links for 2008-08-20 (more or less)

Had the delicious blog posting job worked, I would have already recommended the below links.  But it didn't (shocking) so here I am, impersonating a batch job.  We've all been there before, eh?

Fighting the Superstitions of Software Development: Questioning the Assumptions | Advice and Opinion 

"At the Schindler bitranch, we call these "superstitions:" information accepted on faith, without personal knowledge or examination. People pass along "everyone knows" data without questioning it, and others repeat the superstition as though it's undeniably true. Confidence isn't knowledge; in fact, confidence can prevent knowledge and innovation from happening, because an unquestioned belief means you never measure, never test, never look at alternatives." 

Jitterbit Reveals Open-Source Data Integration Tool - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

need to check these out, Jitterbit + "Other open-source data integration vendors include Talend, XAware and SnapLogic, which also has a community site and is building a library of completed connectors and pipelines."

Todd Biske: Outside the Box » Blog Archive » Governance does not imply Command and Control

Last week, Todd & I were chatting about the (wrongly) implied command & control nature of SOA Governance, and how that inhibits success. In that conversation, I passed along the link to an article on inspiration & leadership, previously sent thru my links here. Todd, being Todd, expanded/augmented that quick conversation into this great post. Think of it as a preview for his upcoming book on SOA Governance.