DataWebTect

Yesterday, I was in the AZRUG where they had a presentation for IBM Rational Build Forge software. First off, I have to thank the organizers for the pizza and the location. It was very convenient to be there and spend two hours. Just a disclaimer, this is not a sales pitch for the Rational buildforge tool but was really impressed and wanted to highlight the features and believe me, the only thing they did was to give a soda and pizza and that is not enough to bribe me for the sales pitch. The product speaks for itself.
How many times did you wonder if only they had a tool that can simulate your code in a production situation and you will not have any surprises when it is released to production? Well there seems to be solution or close to it in the Rational Build forge software. This software is a tool that sits on top of your development, test and release management system and you can simulate the situation and there will not be any problems during the release. I had nightmares in this regard because you would have completed your sandbox testing and there are no problems but when the release engineer releases to the test environment, you would see that some setup information was missed, and the application is not working and you would know about it from your boss after two days and he is angry. Then you verify the code and see that one of the release setup information was not setup properly and you go and fix it. You may not have such problems going forward if you implement the Build forge which eliminates such issues by having common platform across various environments.
The presentation started with features of the product. This was the first time I have seen a software that spans all aspects of the SDLC and yet acts as a thin client on top of the various enterprise environments. It seems to be a neat tool that can solve multitude of problems in one stroke. The developers can simulate the build in their own boxes and then release for the deployment and the release engineer’s job is very simple and it wont take hours or days and it also sends out the email notifications to the appropriate group based on the setup of steps. It has the capability for compiling the build suitable for multiple os platforms. It has api and adapters that come which can integrate with Clearquest/Clearcase. I asked about the release management with Remedy and they said that it is possible to call an api to trigger the release based on the Remedy change ticket. I was impressed. Although I did not get to do the hands on, the presentation was able to convince that it could add efficiencies to any type of software development cycle followed by the enterprises. They presented that some companies had 100% efficiency after implementing their suite of Build Forge, I am still skeptical to accept it but it may be true. The user interface is clunky but I would take it for ease of life. Overall it would be something that is a must for the enterprises with unpredictable release processes.

Stevey of google talks about the Good and Bad agile in his “Good Agile, Bad Agile” post. He has clearly depicted his perception of Agile programming. He talks about the incentives to the engineers based on their performance in a particular project and that they do not have any deadlines in meeting the projects except the quarter end when they want to be on the big screen to get their fat bonuses and other perks. No wonder google is growing in leaps and bounds because of the way they treat their engineers. Not every company does that and it is not uncommon for the engineers to be treated as just resources to meet the end. Very interesting post and it could take an hour to read and digest it.

On the first print edition of Ajax Magazine Dion discusses the seven things every user of Ajax should know. I agree with him on all the seven points and I need to comment on:

3. Ajax Is More Involved Than Traditional Web Design and Development.  The loss of HTML user interface conventions, the almost limitless potential for hidden or latent functionality, the programmatic creation of page elements instead of declarative, and other intrinsic aspects of the Ajax approach throw out much of what we know about Web design and development.  Web designers must much more deeply understand the capabilities of the DOM, Javascript, CSS, and how the browser renders graphics, layouts, and elements.  Developers find testing both difficult and tedious.  Though tooling is continuing to improve across the board, it will take years for the industry to develop best practices, lore, patterns, and shared knowledge to make Web application development straightforward.  Huge kudos to folks like Yahoo!’s Bill Scott for trying to fix many of these problems — particularly the loss of GUI standards — by actually moving the state of the art considerably forward with things like the Yahoo! UI Design Patterns library.  The bottom line: Ajax development, at least for now, usually takes quite a bit longer than traditional Web development and requires a higher level of skill.

Even though Ajax development is not faster, the responsiveness to the users compensate for the sacrifice.

Very often in Oracle we use the packages to write jobs that load the data or read the data and do some manipulation and insert the data into the database. In order to debug the same we normally use the “DBMS_OUTPUT” which could sometimes becomes too unbearble and may throw out the “Buffer overflow” and will not provide the clear indication of where exactly the program is executing and what is the status etc.,

Andy Campbell gives this great tip, wherein he demonstrates the use of DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO to make the life of the DBA’s easier as well as keeping track of the long running application. In this he shows an example where he embeds the application info at various points and queries through V$SESSION and V$SESSION_LONGSOPS to nail out the execution points. Great stuff!

David St. Lawrence talks about the comfort zone in his post. It is very true but we do not realize it. In his words the following stand apart.

Ask almost any successful artist or businessman about their rise to success and you will discover that they started making their breakthroughs when they finally discovered how to move out from their “comfort zone” to a higher level of public exposure

In all walks of life making that transition is very difficult and we tend to live with what we have without even thinking to get out of that “Comfort zone” thereby wasting our precious skills and capabilities by suffering and not taking that next step to move out of it. If only Edison was in his comfort zone there would not have been an electric bulb. And there are lot of examples in the history to show how people came out of their comfort zones and created some feats which are not humanely possible. What is yours and will you come out of it?

Guy Kawasaki has this interesting post on distribution, wherein he discusses ten important characteristics of the art of distribution. A thought provoking and interesting post which clarifies the doubts of Viral and distribution. The following example will stick in your mind

A viral product could have no distribution, and a distributed product might not be viral. To use a medical example, a person with hepatitis in the middle of the ocean won’t spread the virus, and someone with a non-contagious disease won’t spread it even if she were in the middle of Mumbai during the morning commute.

Wired has compiled the winners and losers of Web 2.0. Flickr, Odeo, writely and del.icio.us make up the winners and these are no surprises but in the losers space MySpace, squidoo and browzer.

I could not understand the logic behind the differentiation. Is this about the usability success or failure then I can agree that MySpace is a failure but if it is about the revenue and the market share myspace could be a winner.

About sqidoo, it is really good but I kind of agree with the author’s opinion about the money making thing. But again here our measurement is about how much money the lensmasters get which cannot be a measure of how successful a venture is. Does anybody know the site which depicts the winners and losers in the web 2.0 space based on the number of users and the reveneue generated from the site.

Joel has reviewed the Sprint’s latest LG Fusic phone in his interesting post.

The thing I could not understand is if the phone has such useless UI did anybody in Sprint try out the phone before sending it off to the bloggers for review. If only they did that they could have corrected at least some of the issues.

Regarding the movies, they all do the ripoff. Joel missed about the games that came with the phone and I was wondering how that looks like. Anybody?

An interesting top on Decker Marketing, the gorilla marketing guru. He discusses about the way our brain perceives(which is called the first brain) the information and suggests that the products should be marketed in such a way that the information they see is not ads or marketing materials but through word of mouth. And blogs are the one such vehicles and more and more companies are looking forward to the blogs for their promotion. Some bloggers even get paid for writing the content and such kind of marketing is growing and it is not far away that everybody will be doing such marketing in the near future.

Scobel found her in this post and looks like she is traveling across america and he muses this could be big video project she has been working on. There is nice video here.