Facebook and Twitter Go Live on Xbox 360!!

The popularity of Microsoft's gaming console XBOX 360 has been increasing by the day. Now Microsoft has decided to go a step further and integrate popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. So the users of Xbox 360 will not only enjoy the standard games for the console but can also log on to their favourite social networking sites and enjoy the games in it.

As of now Facebook has not been completely integrated and users will not be able to play any games on it. But the basic features of Facebook have been incorporated and users can view pictures, update their status etc on their 42" LCD at home. Additional features have also been added, like you can see all your facebook friends who are on Xbox Live and all your Xbox live friends who are on facebook.

For more details on this refer the following link

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/11/17/facebook-and-twitter-go-live-on-xbox-360/

Criminals, Programmers, or Criminal Programmers

One of the latest developments in the ongoing investigation of the Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernie Madoff is the filing of charges against two programmers. It is alleged that their work included the creation of phony documents to cover up the fraud of Mr. Madoff. At the end of this posting is a link to the Wall Street Journal article that provides more details on this story. I encourage you to also look at the comments readers have posted in response to the article.

Going a bit further into programmer behavior in general, programmers face decisions as to what professional decisions they make on an almost daily basis. I have been faced with minor decisions such as did I do a thorough job in coding and testing. Am I truly done in completing all of my programming tasks? I have actually been told by other programmers that their work was incomplete but it was easier to just not tell management the work was flawed.

In short, programmers and other professionals are faced with ethical decisions. Some professions have adopted professional standards and certifications to encourage better "behavior" (such as the CPA certification and AICPA organization for accountants).

I will end this post stating the human element & the need to do good deeds is a vital component for professionals in the IT world. You can have the best tools and expertise but we should have a personal ethic to do beneficial work for the company and ultimately the consumer. Not easily worded but I hope you can take a different perspective on the daily jobs we do & will do in the future. Good luck all! Bill Stephens

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703683804574533483600301134.html

Microsoft Azure live in January, for pay in February

Cloud computing was one of several topics that seemed to capture the class's attention this semester. Below is a link to an Internet article that just came out that goes into detail about Microsoft's rollout of its version of cloud computing - Azure.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/11/microsoft-azure-to-go-live-january-for-pay-february.ars

Introduction to Semantic web and usage of Semantic web and SOA to solve Integration issues

What is semantics?

Semantics is related to syntax. Syntax is how you say something and Semantics is what it means.

For example:

I hate grapes
or
I dislike grapes

In the above cases the syntax is different, but the semantics is the same. When we are talking about syntax and semantics we are talking about communication. People use their voice to communicate. So in the same manner the internet has created standards for us to communicate with each other. It gave computers the voice to communicate and share information. For example, Parrot can mimic human sound without understanding the meaning of the words.In the same way computers mimic human information to communicate with each other. So while the internet enables computers to talk to each other it was not designed to teach them what it means. The web can be seen as a document storage and retrieval system. The web created quick and easy way to retrieve and view information.So when you type the website address on the browser it sends the request to the website,the request basically states that you would like to download the document located at that address. The requested website retrieves the document and sends it to the web browser.This document is read in a language called HTML.The HTML language defines a syntax that computers understand. It tells the computer how to display the document for you. The internet lets computer talk to each other,the web allows us to store,retrieve and share documents and search engine lets us search information on any website. What is missing here is that today the computers just blindly retrieve and show us information because computers dont understand the meaning of the web pages they are displaying to us. Now if we can get a computer to recognize what is there in a web page they can learn what the user is interested in. This is what semantic web is all about. It helps computers understand the meaning behind the web page. The web of today is about documents whereas semantic web is all about things. Things could mean anything such as people, organizations, places, music. So the semantic web is not only about pointing these things to the computer but also letting the computers know how they are related to each other. There are several technologies that are in use today that can embed semantic and html documents. Two popular formats are 1) Microformat and 2) RDFA. Once the computer can understand people, places and event it can help you interact with these things. For example, music blogs usually list songs and album reviews on their front page. If the blog marked up the songs and artist using semantic technology, you could tell your browser to search all songs on the page or search the internet for other albums with the same artist. Search engines would also become more accurate than they are today. When you are searching you can say you are searching for a person, place or a particular song. Search engines would direct you to websites with far more accuracy because they would not depend on key words but the semantics of the web page. So semantic web holds a great deal of promise in making our life easier by helping computer help us to get what we want.

Tagging VS Semantic Web

Tagging is strongly associated with web 2.0.So why do we need semantic web?. Tagging is very good, useful and popular with social networking web sites.It is light version of semantic web. People think of semantic web as a logical layer on top of current web.They think everything needs to be explicit and clear.But there should be some ambiguity because else everything would require a forceful explanation. Tagging allows ambiguity and does not force everything to express or mean something. But to make things a little more clear it requires more than just tagging. For example, if somebody tags a picture on Facebook as a bird, and some else does not find the picture as been a bird but a reptile there is no way of removing tag or having a tag of tag. Semantic web gives you the language to express something and can be used in same way as tagging to express something without having any room for ambiguity.

Applying semantics to SOA

Business integration problems have represented a challenge for last two or three decades but complete solutions have not yet been found. But the latest developments in the area of semantic web and semantic web services as well as the emerging efforts towards Service Oriented Architecture(SOA) bring new opportunities and promise better, more dynamic and more suitable solutions for today's business environments.

By adopting SOA businesses split their overall functionality in discrete (yet meaningful) pieces, loosely coupled, accessible through well defined interfaces, and well suited for peer-to-peer interactions. Each piece of such functionality is offered and consumed as a Web Service. Further more, augmenting SOA approach with semantics guarantees unambiguous Web Service descriptions and explicit meaning associated with the interchanged data. As a consequence, complex collaboration scenarios can be easily built in a dynamic fashion, sustained by concrete solutions to solve heterogeneity issues at the data, process and protocol levels.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olDpQwR8Fhk&feature=related
http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:-F_lrSeSa2IJ:www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/16593/proposal.doc+semantic+web+integration+problems&cd=14&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

BCD Travel - Quick Peek under the Hood

My intention is to share some information you might find relevant for the Tuesday subject of BCD Travel. A very quick take is that BCD Travel is a major provider for booking of plane reservations. But you have to be careful and not think of BCD Travel as simply as a reservations systems provider. From www.bcdtravelinmotion.com web site, you can find where BCD Travel was named the “most admired travel management company” for 2009. Input for this award came from “travel executives from corporations, TMCs, airlines, hotels, global distribution systems, technology providers, car rental firms, payment systems, consultants, financial analysts and media”. Take note that the technology providers were a part of the mix!

One of the links provided by the class schedule included a link to a Wikipedia web page for “computer reservation system” and includes “global distribution systems”. A point made by this web page is that our business world has moved past the day of a computer reservation system run by a single airline to where business consolidations have resulted in multiple GDS’s (such as provided by BCD Travel). BCD Travel systems allow reservations to be booked for travel and lodging for multiple entities (including airlines) from a single site.

Going back to the first paragraph, the players in the travel industry are numerous and not just the airlines. At the end of this posting, you will find a link to a PDF from BCD Travel whose subject is consolidation of travel industry for potential BCD Travel clients. BCD Travel has the expertise and technology to assist clients with consolidation. Potential questions for Tuesday night could deal with topics such as outsourcing, application integration, mergers & acquisitions, technology trends…

From www.btnonline.com (Business Travel News): “BCD's European operations are in the process of standardizing technology platforms and processes. "One part is to look where you can invest in or acquire additional businesses, but another key part of the investment is just building up more infrastructure, whether it’s call centers or technology or sales forces. You can't do one without the other," Buckman said. "Rather than having to build some big call center to handle a multitude of clients, we should be able to network our people together so that we can flow transactions and calls from one location to another."

An aside: Travelport is a large competitor for BCD Travel and was a good case study for my CIS Outsourcing class. Those students who will be taking the Outsourcing class have additional reasons to listen up. I will add that I am not the GDS or BCD Travel expert. My primary reason for this blog posting was to share some initial insight and provoke you to “dig deeper” for your own enlightenment.

BCD Travel White Paper: “One size fits all?”

BCD Travel White Papers

Assignment No 2 JB Google Visualization API

Boston consulting firm BostonConsulting.com has forecasted U.S. job growth by industry and by geographic region. The graphic shows actual job growth through second-quarter 2009 and BostonConsulting.com forecasted job growth for third-quarter 2009 through second-quarter 2010. It covers every state in USA, the District of Columbia and 384 metro areas, broken down by fourteen industry sectors. The map can be used by graduating student and people who wish to seek employment in the United States. As US has been hit by recession, it has become very important for people to target specific states and industries offering job opportunities. The map is visually appealing and can be very informative for people to know the percentage increase in the number of jobs that would be available in the different states in USA.






The map is displayed using Google Visualization Geomap API. A geomap is a map of a country, continent, or region map, with colors and values assigned to specific regions. Values are displayed as a color scale, and you can specify optional hovertext for regions. The data in the map is also provided in tabular form for better understanding using the Google table API. A table that can be sorted and paged. Table cells can be formatted using format strings, or by directly inserting HTML as cell values. Numeric values are right-aligned; boolean values are displayed as check marks. Users can select single rows either with the keyboard or the mouse. Users can sort rows by clicking on column headers. The header row remains fixed as the user scrolls. The table fires a number of events corresponding to user interaction.

References:
http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-02-06-new-jobs-growth-graphic_N.htm

CIS 8020 Assignment 2 WS - Google Static Maps

A local real estate firm wants to reward its sales agents for the outstanding commercial estate sales effort for the latest 2009 quarterly sales. These agents are the backbone of the company; if they do poorly then the entire company will suffer. Each quarter, there is a different reward for these professionals. This time the CEO has decided that this coming Friday, October 30th, will be a day at Chateau Élan. The announcement will be posted on the company web pages since the agents do most of their work remotely.


Google Static Maps API is a good candidate solution for this situation. It easily generates maps which can be enhanced with colored markers while at the proper level of zoom to show all items of interests along with local road names. Street addresses and/or latitude & longitude will be part of the input. If required, maps can be made that are usable by mobile devices. Maps can be other than roadmaps; types include satellite and terrain maps. Marker W is for the Chateau Élan winery, I is for the inn, and G is for the golf course.

The primary providers of Internet maps are Google and Yahoo. To not use Google or Yahoo Maps would be inefficient and not the best use of resources. Maps provided by these Internet enterprises are easily created, modified and shared. Once again, our created object lives in the Clouds.

CIS 8020 Assignment 2 GV Google Maps

A person has come to Atlanta for the first time. He is trying to figure out the nearest UPS office. He tries to look up on the UPS website for the nearest store, however he runs into unresponsive maps and static addresses. This does not help him much as he is not familiar with the street names.

Below is a possible solution for the UPS website which they can implement for every city. I have implemented a solution for the city of Atlanta. All the UPS stores including drop boxes near downtown Atlanta have been plotted in the below map. The user can easily navigate around the map and zoom in to the required store to get the exact location.

I chose this web API for implementation because of the ease with which one can integrate the gadget. The visual interface that Google Maps provides is one characteristic that was required in this case. The simple yet detailed User Interface of Google Maps is essential so that this can be used by everyone. The user can easily navigate from one location to another. Thus enabling people who are new to any town/city to easily find UPS Stores.

This same map can also be implemented with many features such as flight tracking, weather monitoring etc. This is a basic demonstration of how the google maps api can be used to locate UPS stores within a city or worldwide. The applications of google maps are endless.

The source data for this prototype can be found on this link:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tJRTqZtwSJ1ZpShzoVj4gxA&single=true&gid=0&output=html

Are Portals and Mashups the same?

Portals and Mashups provide the same functionality of integrating content from different sources into one place.However I found this interesting article on Portal versus Mashup.

Mashups and portals are both content aggregation technologies. Portals are an older technology designed as an extension to traditional dynamic Web applications, in which the process of converting data content into marked-up Web pages is split into two phases: generation of markup "fragments" and aggregation of the fragments into pages. Each markup fragment is generated by a "portlet", and the portal combines them into a single Web page. Portlets may be hosted locally on the portal server or remotely on another server.

Portal technology defines a complete event model covering reads and updates. A request for an aggregate page on a portal is translated into individual read operations on all the portlets that form the page ("render" operations on local, JSR 168 portlets or "getMarkup" operations on remote, WSRP portlets). If a submit button is pressed on any portlet on a portal page, it is translated into an update operation on that portlet alone ("processAction" on a local portlet or "performBlockingInteraction" on a remote, WSRP portlet). The update is then immediately followed by a read on all portlets on the page.

Portal technology is about server-side, presentation-tier aggregation. It cannot be used to drive more robust forms of application integration such as two-phase commit.
Mashups differ from portals in the following respects:

















The portal model has been around longer and has had greater investment and product research. Portal technology is therefore more standardised and mature. Over time, increasing maturity and standardization of mashup technology may make it more popular than portal technology. New versions of portal products are expected to eventually add mashup support while still supporting legacy portlet applications. Mashup technologies, in contrast, are not expected to provide support for portal standards.

The questions to be answered are

Will Portals remain or will be replaced by Mashups?
Portals only serve the lowest denominator of end users and hence confined to limited information broadcasting. The major problem with portal is that the user cannot decide which content can be personalized or how it can be manipulated. With the rise of social networking sites and availability of free open APIs users quickly learned to build their own personal portals. With the current trend users won’t be content to operate within the confines of a single, stoic portal that restricts how they consume and manipulate information.

Implementing Mashup’s for SOA
Most vendors are now using the terms “SOA” and “Web services” interchangeably, it has become obvious that for most corporations, implementing a successful SOA will require the service-enablement of their existing applications. Mashups are a completely valid method of accomplishing this.

Mashup’s for Cloud computing.
Mashups are a natural complement to SaaS. With SaaS and mashups, you may be able to maintain the bulk of your confidential data internally and send the hosted application only small subsets of data for processing. If the network link to the SaaS vendor fails, at least you still have local access to your data.

Also good read discussing Mashups to be the future of Portals is available on http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20080114/technology01.shtml

References:
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29
http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=1861

Oracle in the news

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has offered to pay $10 million to IBM if IBM can proved that its systems run database software is even as half as fast as those from Oracle (Wall Street Journal October 15, 2009 “Oracle Targets a New Rival: Former Ally IBM”). This posturing on the part of Ellison and Oracle can be attributed to the April acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

For those not familiar with databases, Oracle has been a leader in the field of databases for years.
I would attribute their growth to two reasons: 1) having the best product / database and 2) growth through acquisitions. Its acquisitions beginning in December of 2004 include:
PeopleSoft ($10.3 billion)
Global Logistics Technologies
Siebel Systems ($5.8 billion)
Portal Software ($220 million)
Stellent, Inc ($440 million)
MetaSolv Software
Hyperion Solutions Corporation ($3.3 billion)
BEA Systems ($7.2 billion)
Sun Microsystems ($7.4 billion)

The acquisition of Sun (which is still under review by the EU) has given Oracle an in-house provider of servers. IBM which has worked with Oracle is no longer as important to Oracle. In the past, Oracle and IBM have worked together. The WSJ article made the point that a group of IBM engineers are on-site at the Oracle campus to illustrate this cooperation.

Looking at the table of RDBMS market share below, Oracle is seen to have twice the market share that IBM has. Oracle is without question the market leader. This table for 2006 was the most recent table that I could find.

As some friend of mine who are in the business of selling network hardware would say, it appears that Oracle has the “secret sauce” (much like the secret sauce that McDonalds has). I expect that Oracle will be in a better position for its sales with a capability to now include servers as a part of its offerings. Also, Oracle should continue to grow its percentage of market share. This pattern of acquisitions probably will contribute to the slow decline of IBM as the premier leader of software and hardware.

I am less sure that Oracle truly has the speed advantage over IBM OR that this speed advantage is that relevant to most of the Oracle and IBM clients. For those who think that numbers alone are the final argument, I would offer up this saying popularized by Mark Twain - "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Why Email No Longer Rules…

Wall Street Journal for this Monday (Oct 12th) in its Technology section hit on several topics our class has discussed and some related topics. Cloud computing had it own article; another article about a large firm with 135 data centers had its CIO saying cloud computing was not a current direction for his firm. The lead article about email somewhat missed with too much focus on Twitter and Facebook as alternatives to email. Comments from the readers were more on target with thoughts such as the use of IM (instant messenger) and why corporate needs versus social needs were pertinent considerations for a discussion about email.

Other articles included a collection of blog reviews, fake corporate profiles, and the use of online reviews from customers of company products. The lead article on the decline of email is posted on WSJ for public consumption and will be found at the end of this posting.

Class had prepared me for some of the ten questions that were a part of the "How Well Do You Know... the Cloud?" quiz. Here are four of the questions from the Wall Street Journal; I will withhold the easier questions. Answers will be provided "soon".

3) Which of these techniques is vital for creating cloud-computing centers?
A. Virtualization
B. Transubstantiation
C. Cannibalization
D. Insubordination

5) Match the provider with the cloud-based service.
A. Amazon
B. IBM
C. EMC
D. Microsoft

1. Azure
2. Elastic Compute Cloud
3. Decho
4. Cloudburst

7) IBM, EMC and Boeing Co. were among the companies signing what document whose title is reminiscent of a famous political statement?
A. Declaration of Cloud Computing
B. The Rights of Cloud
C. Mein Cloud
D. Open Cloud Manifesto

10) What August event was widely seen as an example of the risky nature of cloud computing?
A. Spread of Conficker virus
B. Gmail outage for more than an hour
C. Theft of identities over the Internet
D. Power outages in the Midwest

WSJ article "Why Email No Longer Rules..." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203803904574431151489408372.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

Regards,

Bill Stephens

Isn’t it all about an interface?

In layman’s terms I would describe an Interface as a final product or service available to the end user. The user is not concerned with what goes in the background but definitely looks for an easy to use friendly frontend which allows him to get a task done. Imagine about your favorite Facebook site - You want to add a friend to your friend list and to do so Facebook gives you a link to a huge database and you need to search and sort to just add a single friend to your friend list. Would you still be willing to use Facebook where each function requires you to perform several steps before you achieve a goal. For example: upload a photo, join a community or add a friend.

To gain a competitive edge companies need to provide interfaces to the outside world, create awareness so that customers know what the company is about and what it deals in and what is the best that customers can achieve in terms of cost and quality by using the company’s interface. What have various companies like Apple and Blackberry provided you so that you can receive Facebook, Twitter or email alerts on your phone - they have just provided you an interface. With an Iphone in your pocket you need not roam around with a laptop because you can check email, pay your bills, and make a reservation while you are on the run.

The following link is of a video where Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group talk about sixthsense technology…it is an amazing product

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27Jd5uwBvQU

I have also embedded the same video on our blog.
The web is opening doors to more and more interfaces. With web 3.0 on the horizon businesses have already started taking advantage of the available interfaces. For example – Linden labs creation “Second Life” where people can almost live their life’s. People can shop, travel, buy, sell, do business and basically experiment stuff that they would want to do in real life.

Web 3.0 is moving the web world towards open data, structured data, smarter ways of filtering content, real time and highly personalized data where a single interface would give you all you need to know.

More tools (for Group Presentations)

Before I provide some limited information on these tools, I need to tell you that I have no direct experience with either of these tools. In searching the Internet for PowerPoint alternatives, I came across them. Their names are SlideRocket and Prezi.

SlideRocket has a 30 day trial version for free. You can consider this tool to be a part of Cloud Computing, your file is stored on the Internet. The animation effects are comparable to that of Adobe Flash. W/o naming names, I was told that this tool was not stable. When I have time, I need to get some hands on time with SlideRocket for myself. The one presentation I viewed was superior to PowerPoint.

Prezi has a public version that is free with 100MB of storage. Downside is that it treats your file as public property open for viewing by others! There is an offline viewer available for downloading. It is not comparable to PowerPoint. Their description is that of a large poster board where you can zoom in, zoom out, and navigate about the poster board. One of the earlier presentations was done via Prezi or a similar tool (which could have been Adobe Flash). So Prezi like SlideRocket is more Cloud Computing with your file stored on the Internet. The Prezi web site has a page detailing some of the ongoing bugs with Prezi. Having shared that Prezi does have some bugs, I still want to take Prezi out for a "test drive". I suggest you find your way to Prezi to see some of their demos.

There is one serious downside to Prezi in that how does one print off handouts from a Prezi poster board? Every student I know expects to be able to print handouts from each presentation.

Here are some of the links for these tools:

www.sliderocket.com/product/
www.sliderocket.com/product/pricing.html

http://prezi.com/
http://prezi.com/profile/signup/

Regards,
Bill Stephens
Mercury Group

Week 7 Abstract and Reading (SOA Web Services)

Class,

Our presentation has three major parts/goals:

A) brief review of SOA and SOA Web Services

B) discussion of the relevant points for the three case studies identified in the reading for this week (see below for the reading material)

C) interactive discussion of several business scenarios where we discuss whether SOA is a proper alternative

Note that the other presentation this Tuesday will be on the same topic of SOA Web Services. Our intention is to minimize any overlap between the two presentations.

Class interaction will add to the presentation & is encouraged.

The reading below is relatively light and is on one website => http://www.cioinsight.com/c/b/Case-Studies/

1) British Telecom Case Study - a very short case detailing how British Telecom pursued SOA as its strategy as it standardized its world-wide IT operations.

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Case-Studies/British-Telecoms-Tech-Transformation/

2) Valero Case Study - this case provides the background of why Valero pursued SOA along with its experiences with building services.

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Case-Studies/Valero-Pumped-On-SOA/

3) Amazon Case study - this case study is a second look for the class at the several services provided by Amazon from another perspective.

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Case-Studies/Amazon-at-Your-Service/

Regards,

Bill Stephens

Mercury Group

Grid Computing Vs Cloud Computing

After a very informative presentation by the Nucleus group, I researched more on cloud computing and related topics. I came across Grid Computing which infact has been around for quite some time. If you compare Grid computing with Cloud computing, you notice that both are geographically distributed computing methods. I have tried to differentiate Grid and Cloud computing in this post.

What is Grid Computing: "Grid computing (or the use of computational grids) is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains applied to a common task, usually to a scientific, technical or business problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or the need to process large amounts of data." - www.wikipedia.org

What is Cloud Computing: "Cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them." - www.wikipedia.org

Grid has been around for more than a decade and cloud has been around for only the last couple of years.
Grid shares local resources and geographically available resources whereas cloud is more about making large data centres available.
Grid mainly comprises of hetereogenous resources whereas cloud is more inclined towards homogenous resources.
Grid is always locally owned and managed whereas clouds are centrally owned and managed.
Grids are interoperable which infact is a very important characteristic of it, whereas cloud is generally not that interoperable.

If anyone has had any practical experience with Grid or Cloud computing and can shed some light on this, please do share your thoughts with us.

For more information please go through http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-cloudgrid/

-Gautam Velayuthan

Team Tools for Colloboration (Internet-based)

Greetings,

Some interesting topics were presented during our past class. Some were "old" such ODBC while others were "leading edge" such as Cloud Computing. These new technologies do lend themselves to improved tools such as for communication & colloboration. Last year I used two very productive tools that made use of the Internet while enabling our team work on an intense school project. Both tools were new to me but easy to learn.

Skype and Dimdim are the Internet-based tools. Price is well... free! So your money back if you are not satisfied. Here are some links: http://skype.com/ and http://www.dimdim.com/products/dimdim_integrations.html

The primary use of Skype (for us) was to have group conversations while we as individuals were using computers and/or planning our work. Now this can be done differently depending upon personal perference but I prefer to use a headset with a microphone. So I did incur a cost in buying a nice headset. I do recommend buying a premium headset so that you are comfortable and can use the headset for the long haul. Back to Skype - the primary benefit is that your team can work together but not have to be in the same location such as the endearing GSU library.

The other tool is Dimdim. Dimdim has multiple uses but our primary use was to have one person displaying his or her computer session over the Internet to the group. This simplifies the ongoing conversation by allowing everyone to have a simultaneous experience with a single computer session.

Dimdim does offer a wealth of other group possibilities; much more than sharing a single computer session among a group. Both voice and video can be streamed to many places. Dimdim's focus is more of web conferencing, webinars, Internet classrooms and such. I may be taking the wrong path but Skype seems to be superior with its streaming of audio.

While we are on the topic of Dimdim, you should know that it is a good example of various topics discussed during the API & Cloud Computing presentation. Topics such as API, Open Source, Mashups... From the Dimdim web page: Dimdim is the world’s only open source web conference with a completely open & free API. This means you can integrate or mashup Dimdim with your own stuff, web application, directory, email system, even Facebook or your website.

Good luck with these tools. One circumstance that provoked this discussion was the use of the Google Presentation Tool by Mega Hot Pot. Perhaps this seminar thing is working. Cheers!

Bill Stephens
Mercury Group

I am thinking my next posting will be about some additional Internet tools but with other uses for your group. Maybe the same price => free.

Week 4 Abstract (not Week 3)

Our goals for the Messaging Patterns Presentation:

• Relate Messaging Patterns to both SOA and computer applications
• Tell what is a Messaging Pattern
• Move from a discussion of Messaging Pattern theory to specific examples of Messaging Patterns

See you in class Tuesday night!
Thanks

Bill Stephens
Mercury Group

Week 4 Reading (not Week 3)

Recommend Reading for the Week 3 Messaging Patterns Presentation by Mercury Group

Hohpe, Gregor “Chapter 1 - Solving Integration Problems using Patterns”
http://www.eaipatterns.com/Chapter1.html

Chatterjee,Soumen “Messaging Patterns in Service-Oriented Architecture, Part 1”
MSDN Library - Servers and Enterprise Development / Architecture Journal April 2004
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480027.aspx

Nichull, Duane et al
“Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Specialized Messaging Patterns”
http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/pdfs/Services_Oriented_Architecture_from_Adobe.pdf
Adobe Systems

Cited Sources
(See above)

Brown, Paul C “Implementing SOA: Using Services”
www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1190115
May 14, 2008

James, Stan “Messaging Patterns”
http://www.surfscranton.com/architecture/MessagingPatterns.htm

“Service-oriented architecture”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture

“InfoClipz: Service-oriented architecture (SOA)” InfoWorld Home / Architecture / Videos
A capsule explanation of the most influential trend in enterprise software.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/architecture/infoclipz-service-oriented-architecture-soa-899

Finalized list of sources to be provided no later than Sunday, August 6th.

Mercury Group of CIS8020

August 22

Initial posting of the Mercury Group.
Our group of three is:
Bill (me)
Juhi
Gautam

I am new to blogging so this experience can only get better with time!
Our first group presentation is set for Week 3 so to date our group has been exchanging emails on our topic. Initial research is not turning up much material but we continue to dig.

Expect more from all of the Mercury group as the semester takes off!
Thanks.

-Bill