I finally got to open Ming’s Summer Day CD and gave a listen. The first impression was: Wow! Is that Ming? He sounded so different, at least when comparing when he was speaking vs. singing. 
I am impressed that he even composed the lyrics him self. I did noticed he attempted to inject some vocal varieties. Kudos! This certainly sounds like a good solid 6 mo of hard work for him. If you want to check it out, see this myspace page.
Archive for February, 2007
First impression about Ming’s Summer Day
Thoughts about Radar Networks and Semantic Web
After reading this blog entry about Radar Networks and Semantic Web, here are some of my thoughts and follow-up questions:
- How will you cater to different type of users with different level of technical skills? (I guess you will provide different type of interfaces.)
- Are you seriously planning to stay in beta for 3 years? (Google is doing it. I guess you can find some ways to justify that.)
- How will you create enough incentives for end-users to spend the extra energy to “tag” or encode contents using your platform? (I am looking forward to see the beta.)
- Who will be in the position to define the ontology? Isn’t that usually done by a standard body? What if that standard body takes years to define such ontology? How do you regulate “the central ontology”? Will rest of the world agree with the ontology definition? What if a community of users wants to “fork” the definition? Will your platform offer interoperability across different silos of definitions?
- Although you are positioning Radar Networks as a non-competitor of Google by pointing out the differences of technical approach and focus, the actual end-user attraction factors might still related. Google is in the attention economy business. They focus on products and services that attracts attention from user’s eye balls, leverage that attention and convert it to ad revenue. One trick to attract eye balls is to present good enough search results to most users, effectively filter out a lot of noise on the Internet and present relevant information that users will most likely want to see. Semantic web is another creative approach to enable filtering massive amount of information and present relevant information to users. Although the technical approaches between Google and Radar Networks are different, the end effect that will attract users can be similar. Therefore, overlap of interest may still possible.
Notes on running NCSA HDFView
The HDFView “is a visual tool for browsing and editing NCSA HDF4 and HDF5 files.”
The Linux version appears to be 32-bit and not having all the necessary 32-bit libraries caused my system unable to run it. So, I tried to run Solaris version. I had to tweak HDFVIEW_HOME and JAVAPATH variables in <HDFVIEW_HOME>/bin/hdfview.sh to get the application to run.
Where is Sun Fire X4200 Server Documentation?
If you are looking for Sun Fire X4200 Server Documentation, here is the link. I already went through the trouble navigate through several links to save you some time.
Resolution Zoom in XOrg
I noticed that the Control-Alt-”+” or Control-Alt-”-” key sequence for resolution zoom in XOrg no longer work. A search on the net helped me to find an alternative: xvidtune -next or xvidtune -prev
Special thanks to Xanday for the tip.
Belenix DVD — initial impression
Belenix “is an OpenSolaris Distribution with a Live CD (runs directly off the CD).” Just a couple days ago, Belenix DVD just released, which has NetBeans 5.5 and Glassfish. After downloaded the image off the net and burned onto a DVD, here are my initial observations on one system:
+ It recognizes ATI video chip and works with wide screen. This is pretty cool.
+ ACPI works out-of-box. I am impressed. Ubuntu 6.06 doesn’t work with this box. At least not yet.
- No sound. I can live with that on a development box.
- It can’t recognize the Ethernet out-of-box. That just kills my dream to play with Belenix on this box. Maybe I’ll try it on a slower/older machine.
+ NetBeans runs as advertised. No installation necessary. This is very cool.
I know that most of negative (-) points I made are addressable in OpenSolaris rather than in Belenix. So, I am still impressed at what folks at Belenix did. Keep up the good work.
Thoughts about “The deployment production line”
“The deployment production line” is an article with a few agile tips on deployment. The abstract suggests that the article will show user how to deploy software quickly with the ability to fall back to a previous version. The article certainly recognizes the technical challenges of deployment, which are usually manual processes, error prone, and hard to automate. Realizing such challenge, the article recommends automation as an agile practice without providing much strategy insights on how one may overcome such challenge. Given that this is only a six-page article and the authors specifically only outline the principles, the article offers little value for practitioners, at least for the type of deployment work that are not exactly similar to author’s experience.
The way that the authors described their best practices suggested that they were working with projects with Java/J2EE source code, using Ant, Subversion, CruiseControl, and WebLogic. In another words, authors presented their case from a developer’s point-of-view rather than from a deployer’s point-of-view. The article focued on tips and best practices on reaching production quality software. It focused less on how to take production quality software and deploy it to different customer production environments that may integrate with other applications. Such stage of software life cycle could require manual processes, error prone, and hard to automate.
A deployer may not have access to source code and mostly work with binary, configuration interfaces, and configuration files. The deployer may benefit from better quality of software as a result of applying tips/best practices in this article, he/she probably does not have a direct influence on how the development organization practices development. So, the target audiences for this article really are for developers and release engineers in the development department of an organization, not system engineers or consultants working on customer production site.
Having said that, the article attempts to address deployment issues by focusing on development improvements. This is a good and a highly recommended approach to address the root cause of software quality issues. However, such paper does not help deployment engineers on the field working on customer deployments with released software that may not have all desirable qualities. Given my understanding of the abstract, the article does not offer as much insights on the last stage of “the deployment production line” as I liked. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good or bad article. Just don’t expect it to solve all of your deployment issues. 
