Gerd’s Blog

Today was the last conference day for JAOO 2007 and I will visit the Scrum Master Class for the next to days. No Keynote today so even Track Host Frank Buschmann was a little bit confused and came to late to open his Track. Never the less the first speaker was Wayne Fenton the Director of Architecture form eBay. As I posted I met him already the first day at the Conference Party. He spoke about Operational Scalability and how scalability is on of the big requirements for his company. His talk was quit interested because he gave an overview how eBay reached the goal that their system scales very well. He explained a little bit about their production line and how they are doing deployment which I will post about soon.
The second Talk was given by Robert S. Hanmer about Fault Tolerance once again in the Architecture Quality Panel. Robert is working for Alcatel-Lucent where he developed Software that helps to achieve 99.999% of availability by designing fault tolerant systems. The systems need a possibility to detect faults. If they have detected one they are using different strategies form simple reinitialization up to whole reboots to bring the system as fast as possible back to a working state.
After lunch, which is a little bit to South African like for me this year, Kevlin Henney talked about Performance Art. The main message was that Performance matters in every system but as one person said at the end - It does not matter what Kevlin is speaking about, his talks are just great.
The last Talk I visited this day was by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock about Lessens Learned in architecture. She is an consultant and had the chance to see several different architectures. It was interesting that she spoke not that much about the architectures it self further more how she is dealing with the challenges in projects as consultant.
At the end there was an Panel Discussion. What I take from it is normally the design or architecture of a product is not bad at the beginning. I mean nobody want to build a system he cant extend and maintain in the future. Further more there is a leak in communication so that developers do not understand the architecture and therefore the the code gets to a big ball of mud. There was one quite interesting comment form a guy of the audience. He admitted that they are doing architecture documentation on small movies. Several on the panel and I like the idea. I have to try it out.
The finishing panel was held as Podiums Discussion by Martin Fowler, Diana Larsen, Erik Dörnenburg, Erik Meijer and Eric Evans. They did some retrospective on the conference and what they fascinated them.

At the end I have to say the three conference days of JAOO 2007 where grate. I had a lot of fun and learned several new things. I am just wondering why we got no Conference T-Shirt this year but at leas everyone got a bag. So, now I will go out with Rupert for some beer to discuss the last two days a little bit. I am really thinking if I will come to this conference next year again. Definitely it is the best i have ever been to, but lets see maybe we will be able to do something like the JAOO in Vienna for the next Year.

Yesterday there was day to at the JAOO 2007. The Keynote was held by Eric Maier who presented his vision of programming in the future. The presentation was about bringing all the bloody code away from the Programmer. With bloody code he means code that has nothing to do for solving the current project.
The first talk of this day was by  Jean Bezivin who talked about model transformation At the beginning he started explaining Models Meta-Models and al the theoretical stuff that in my opinion most of us already know. This part was a little bit boring. In the second Part he was switching to the Eclipse Model Discovery project they are doing the transformation with. The presented stuff was quit interested, the presentation technique was like a professor at the university (see one of my last postings).
After lunch we went to  Eric Evans talk about  strategic design. His conclusion was that you have to find your main model and build your business around it. I was thinking about the main model of the system we are currently developing - maybe I should spend a little bit more effort on this in the future.
Next talk was once again by Klaus Marquardt, this time more technical then the last one. He was talking about Complexity Management in projects. His conclusion was that you have to be very careful with KPI’s Management are requesting.
Joseph Yoder spoke about The Adaptive Object-Model which was quite interesting because we use this technique for our Event Processing Engine too. Our Event Object Types are definitions of the Event Objects that are the runtime container for Events - the objects send through the system.
The last Talk at this day was a more practical one held by Jimmy Nilsson & Kim Harding Christensen about LINQ for Domain Driven Design. I know LINQ for some time now it was just nice to see how other people solve problems with it. At the end one of the Developers of LINQ had a small discussion with the two speakers why some stuff was build in the way it is now and which trade offs they had to agree to.
After all tat there was a so called “Sun-Keynote” which was more or less an marketing event form Matt Thompson and one Sun developer I even don’t remember his name. They showed some examples with JAVA Me and Sun SPOTS. I didn’t like tat kind of marketing events titled as Keynote.
In the Evening there was an other new Event called Jam Session. There where some pizza, beer and wine and several speaker and visitors played music. We met some smart people including Jimmy Nilsson. We were speaking about the situation in Software Development in Austria and that there is no conference like the JAOO in Central Europe. He asked if we are planing to do something against this. I am really thinking about this since last year I have been to JAOO. Lets see if we can do this.

Yesterday was Day one of the conference and was really interesting. Everything started as last year we got a nice little bag with all the stuff you need at an conference. Just one thing was much better this year, I had no problems getting my batch.
The morning keynote was held by Robert C. Martin and he is a really good speaker. At the beginning he was rising the question if software engineering is already a profession and appealed to every developer to write better and cleaner code. He is wearing a green band on his left arm for about 3 years now because it reminds him to do so.
The second talk we where attending was by Charles Simonyi about “Democratizing Software Creation” which was really fascinating. His company is developing an language to describe other languages which you can imagine is not that easy. The talk was given in combination with one person form Capgemini who showed an demonstration of an DSL generated within their language. I am still a little bit sceptical if this is really working the way they showed it and wanted us to believe it does.
Organically Agile was the Talk by Klaus Marquardt who is working for Dräger Medical. The purpose of his talk was that even life critical systems can be developed within agile methods.
Lex Spoon did an talk on Scala an language that is very interesting. The language combines Functional and Object oriented concepts and I would like to take a closer look on it in the near future.
Gilad Bracha is working on a language called Strongtalk which is used to build an Executable grammar. The exciting part here is that Lexer and Parser can be easily extended because of flexible concepts like mixins that Smaltak provieds.
The last talk before the Party Keynote was by Andreas Zeller and titled Beautiful Debugging. He presented his Ideas written in the Book Beautiful Code. The book as the talk I can only recommend you.

Party Keynote was given by Robert C. Martin again . He was speaking about the Space flight he did this year. The Pictures he showed where just amazing special the ones taken at the ISS. Take a look at www.charlesinspace.com to get some of the expressions we where able to see.
After the Keynote there was the Conference Party as last year. We met some people there e.g Joe Hummel, Wayne Fenton and Roy Osherove, all three are speakers at the Jaoo. We had some nice conversation special Wayne Fenton spoke a little bit about who Ebay does roll-out. I will make an other posting about that later.

Today I have arrived at the JAOO conference in Aarhus. I am visiting the conference with a good friend of my Rupert. On the bus form the airport to the town we met with Rajeev Dayal one of the Google GWT Developers. He will held a Talk about “Building Large Applications with GWT 1.4″ on Thursday. After we arrived at the hotel we went to lunch together and spoke about working for Google developing the GWT, Rich client applications for the Browser and several other things very interesting things. He gave us some information how development is done by Google and I have to say I now understand much better why things like the blog search issue I mentioned in one of my last postings can happen there.

Right now I am sitting in my hotel room and looking at the schedule for tomorrow. The opening Keynote will be held by Robert C. Martin and the Party Keynote by  Charles Simonyi. In the evening there is the Conference Party so hopefully I will find time to post about the talks before the it starts.

I am still on vacation so i used Thursday to move my blog as described in my last post. As already mentioned i preferred WordPress so i gave it try on www.wordpress.com one of the free hosted site. Already the first impressions where grate i played around a little bit and felt very comfortable with the interface and the functionality that was provided. So I started to search how i can transfer the old posting and comments. At http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpres i found an article how this can be done easily. WordPress supports an importer for several sources and Blogger is one of them. So i tried it an after a few minutes the content was transfered. I was very impressed how easy this part worked.

After i had finished the first import i tried to set up the http://blog.gerd-saurer.com domain to my hosted WordPress log. Unfortunately i could not register a CNAME entry so i decided to install my own WordPress instance on the server. After an hour everything was working and I searched and installed the most important Plugins (FeedBurner, Google Analyticator, …). Then began the most complicated part - finding an template that fits your needs. I found one but as so much of them it was optimized for 800×600 screens. I do not believe anyone is surfing with this solution any more so I changed it to an 1024×768. I hope you like the Theme.

No it was time to change all important tracking tools from the old to the new instance. First i changed my domain settings for blog.gerd-saurer.com at my provider. I created an new FeedBurner feed to track the old Blogger instance feed and changed the URL of the original post and comment feeds to the new WorPress instance. When this was finished i activated the Analytic settings and finally posted on my old blog my last message with an information that this will be the last message that is published on this blog and that everyone that receives this message via an RSS reader should update the feed URL.

Finally I tried to set up a mechanism to redirect people accessing my blog directly to the new one. You can find a nice HowTo at http://laffers.net/howtos/howto-redirect-blogger-to-wordpress.

It took me nearly one day to switch my whole blog. If it would have been possible to use the WordPress service hosted I think half a day would have bean enough. Everything was easy and straight forward. I hope the decision to move to WordPress was right.

Once again I apologies for the troubles the the moving had cause you but finally as you read this post you have switched successfully. I am looking forward for interesting posting and comments in the future.

I was using blogger since 2 months now and i have to admit that it is far no that usable as i thought. Today i decided to move my blog including the content to an other tool. I think i will shift to WordPress but i have not made the final decision. The domain http://blog.gerd-saurer.com and the RSS Fees for the Blog and the Comments will stay as they are.
I apologies for the troubles this will cause you. Until now i really was very satisfied with the Google Products but Bloggers is far not that i expected.

If you are interested what was the crucial factor for my decision:
A few hours ago i posted my Post Titled “Google Reader Feeds” which was original an older draft version about a month old. As i posted it i did not recognize that the publish date was set to the original date the draft was created. This is not what i expected because it was published today and not about a month ago. I tried to change the date but the only thing i go was an error that i should publish something at the bloggers google group. I searched there and found several entries already more than a year old - no comment when it will be solved.

I was playing around with OpenID for some time now and until now I am very satisfied with it. For this reason i also activated it on my blog as authentication mechanism but more on this later.

First of all for all of you who don’t know OpenId - what does it mean? OpenId is an decentralized Single sign on system for the web. In reality the user just have to know an URL. Instead of entering and User name and Password on every site the user just the URL into the filed that is provided. If you are interested how OpenId works exactly just visit the wikipedia article or openid.net.

At the moment there are not that much websites that provide an log in with OpenId but the protocol is becoming more and more accepted until the last time. Even Blogger is trying it out in their beta version (see my experiences with blogger in Finally I moved from blogger to wordpress).

So if you are interested in your own OpenId there are several ways to get one. If you are an WordPress user you can already use the url of your blog as your id. On the other hand there are several providers out there that offer free OpenId Services or you can set up an server on your own. I decided to use MyOpenId. On the other hand i wanted to be in control of my id’s and not to addicted to one provider. The good thing here is the designer already took this situation into account. You can simply link your own domain to an other OpenId provierd. I for example use www.gerd-saurer.com as my OpenId. I entered the following configuration to my default website which indicates every OpenId request for authentication to use my MyOpenId service. The nice thing here is if I want to change the service I just have to change the meta tags to my new Provider.

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server”/> <!– For delegating OpenID v1.x–>
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://gerd.saurer.myopenid.com”/> <!– For delegating OpenID v1.x–>
<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://gerd.saurer.myopenid.com/xrds”/> <!– For delegating OpenID v2.x–>

After using my new OpenId on several sits now i wanted to inform you that you can use your own Id now on my blog to post Comments. I hope you enjoy the smooth way of loging into sits and don’t have to press the reset password button every two months because you forgot the user pass word again.

If you like to see some videos on OpenId, how it works and what you can do with it just check out the following presentations:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2288395847791059857
http://www.slideshare.net/daveman692/openid-bootcamp-tutorial