Some form of closure?

Some of you may know that in the 9/11 attacks, I lost a friend, Ed Felt, on United 93. Ed had been traveling to San Francisco on business. I obviouslty feel bad enough about the attacks, but to also lose a friend drives it home much more. Plus, and this is something I've never really shouted about (for obvious reasons), I was meant to be on that flight! The only reason I canceled was because I'd just got married and had promised my wife I'd not travel out of the country for 6 months after the wedding.

So you can probably understand why it was with some trepidation that I finally watched the United 93 movie. I deliberately took a while to buy it on DVD and I've never watched it on TV. But last night I decided to bite the bullet and sit down to watch it alone. I've read reports and seen documentaries over the years about the whole event, but this movie was good in showing the utter chaos and confusion that was going on at the time. The scenes on the plane itself were the hardest: I fly a lot and could empathise with the passengers just from that perspective, but when I considered that I could have been there ...

I'm not sure if I'll ever watch the film again. I don't think I have to in order to understand what Ed's family and those of the other victims, are still going through today. I'm one of the lucky ones, but this is something that will always stay with me.

Woo Hoo!!

Some good news. I don't think I have to do an acceptance speech, but I'm really glad to be on the team. SCA is definitely an important industry standard in the making.

Wonderland and JavaOne

Probably the best presentation I saw at JavaOne was left to last. James Gosling previewed Wonderland. At first I thought this was just yet another Second Life, avatar-based demonstration. However, when they started showing the avatars working within the virtual world with the same programs (Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) as you'd use in the real world, it took on a completely new importance. This was very cool. Being able to create rooms where you could display your code dynamically and updateable (on "glass" walls, no les ;-) as though you were in a physical equivalent, show presentations, have true meetings where (almost) everything you'd want to do if you were face-to-face could be done, is a significant step forwards. Nice.

JavaOne 2007

I'm at JavaOne once again, to give a couple of BOFS (one on transaction bridging with the other members of the JBossTS team and one on JBI 2.0. Over all I haven't been as impressed with the conference this year as in previous years, but maybe I've just chosen to go to the wrong presentations and BOFs. Plus, why why why why why can't Sun manage to set up a decent wireless network for the conference? For a company who used to talk about The Network is the Computer, they do a pretty bad job of it year on year!

Red Hat and MetaMatrix

I first came across MetaMatrix at JavaOne in 2002/2003 when at Arjuna and we did some work with them over the next year or so. This should be interesting.

New post on JBossTS blog

I just posted this on the JBossTS blog site.

Anyone know Chinese?

Apparently this is one of my articles in Chinese. Not knowing the language, I have to believe it, although I do wonder if this is a case of The Hungarian Phrasebook again.

TDM

It's been a while since I've really been able to blog and that's all down to lack of time. Towards the end of last year, as part of the reorganisation of JBoss under Red Hat I was made Technical Development Manager of our SOA platform. What that basically means is that I'm in charge of the technical direction, development and productisation of everything SOA within the company. I went from managing 2 groups to 7 over night, with all that entails. Pretty interesting, I have to say, but definitely a time sink!

Arjuna and the history of middleware

Wolfgang has written a great paper on the impact of research on middleware. Arjuna gets several references, although there are a few inaccuracies (e.g., Arjuna Technologies wasn't sold to JBoss). Well worth a read.

John Backus dies

Some sad news. It's been a long time since I programmed in Fortran but I was always impressed with it.

Red Hat and Exadel

This is interesting news in a number of ways. I think it's great news for our products and projects.

Nooooooooooo!!!!!

This just got pointed out to me through the minutes of the first day at the W3C workshop onWeb of Services. I must have missed this stirling move on the part of the TAG. I've mentioned before about sessions and Web Services and how WS-Addressing is not the right way of doing this, but WS-Context is better. Of course it's no surprise to see that contributions to this TAG effort are from heavy WS-Addressing users, but us WS-Context supporters need to be more pro-active.

Vinoski leaves IONA

I meant to post this last week but work got in the way. I first met Steve back in the early 1990's at a Usenix conference where we were both presenting. He'd recently joined IONA from HP and I knew of him because of his great work on ORB Plus, still one of the best implementations. We had several Guinness drinking sessions and he could easily drink most people under the table! We kept in touch over the years though I don't think I've drunk as much since! I wish him the best in his new job.

Red Hat and interoperability

I'm not sure if this got much publicity, but it's worth checking out. Interoperability with different vendors is very important. Web Services are a way of achieving some interoperability, but they're not the entire solution.

Memories

Ah, this brought back memories. I remember using Spring around 1991 and reading many of the Sun papers on the subject. It was very cutting edge for the time (and still today in many respects).

Update on Jim

I hope this is wrong and he turns up! It's good to see the community coming together to help the search.

Jim Gray lost at sea!

Just saw this (thanks Stuart). Fingers crossed that Jim's safe and sound!

Nice

I want one. This sounds interesting too.

Submit a paper

I forgot to mention, but Eric asked me to be on the program committee for the W3C workshop on Web Services for Enterprise Computing. The deadline is fast approaching, so if you've got a paper or a position on the topic, please submit it.

WS-Context progressing to standard

This dropped through the cracks, but I'm pleased to say that WS-Context has passed the TC vote to proceed towards a standard.