Links for February 8th through February 11th

A little something extra…

Stephen and I spoke with “NoSQL vendor” today (for lack of a better categorization). More so than myself, Stephen has really made a study out of these merging, non-relational data-stores. At the moment, the space is exciting and confusing for developers and evaluators. There’s so many different options, each taking a different technological crack at new ways to do be a database.

I was reminded by my old friend Charles that I (and he) tend to loath (relational) databases: from a developer’s perspective, there’s a weird thing you’re forced to strap on your otherwise elegant architecture. One of my personal hopes then, is that we’ll start to see databases that aren’t so, well, weird to deal with.

Stephen raised an excellent point as well: high performance, speed, or however you want to put it is increasingly an expected feature. Just as higher processor speeds and GPUs made responsive and nice looking UIs expected, “high performance” is increasingly an expected feature. For example, I used a desktop email application for a long time – Apple’s Mail.app – until it just stopped performing well. I never delete emails and over the years, I get a lot of ’em. The high performance that GMail gives me is what I expect.

There are better examples than my email needs – analytics is one – but the points still stand: when it comes to databases we need more elegant, developer-friendly data stores and high performance that end-users expect.

The Links

• Should every major incident produce a problem record?
  "To reach our levels of awareness you must learn by teaching theory, gaining many certifications, traveling, wearing a suit, using wireless in airports, and attending many conferences. Until you have your own blog and people pay you to recommend things you cannot possibly begin to understand."
• OpsCamp Through an Internet-scale Lens
  "So how will cloud technologies have a meaningful impact? By reducing friction and improving agility throughout their IT lifecycle. Reducing the barriers and “instantaneously” getting the developers and testers whatever resources they need. Allowing development projects to ramp up with little to no lead time. Being as responsive as possible to business decisions or changing demands of the marketplace. Add up the value of those benefits and it dwarfs any infrastructure savings."
• Google: Buzz off!
  Fantastic: "Despite the claim to help me: ‘to start conversations about the things you find interesting,’ it does nothing of the sort. Instead, it adds in any ’stuff’ that people it has decided I am following put into their Buzz (a bit like Twitter) along with any other accounts that Google has linked via their profiles such as Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader, assorted blogs….the list goes on. In other words it is aggregating a pile of stuff and lobbing it over the wall into my GMail."
• 'innovation via association'
  "Many of these larger vendors have been trying 'innovation via acquisition' the last few years. Now they are into 'innovation via association' – with the really smart technology the world needs."
• FamilyLink.com + Kynetx: How websites could be better with your family | Richard K Miller
  "It's like Greasemonkey in the cloud." A sort of "glass bus" as I used to call it.
• Carlson Chooses Zenoss Enterprise for Network Monitoring – Commercial Open Source Application, Systems, and Network Monitoring – Zenoss
  They got TGI Friday's!
• MindTouch and Fujitsu Discover the Missing Link in Enterprise Collaboration – Open Source Collaborative Networking for Intranets and Extranets
• SAP Announces Subsequent Changes to Executive Board and Management in Support of New Co-CEO Structure – Yahoo! Finance
• Open-source Silverlight project drops early third code
  "Moonlight 2.0 implemented Silverlight 3.0 APIs that let media content run outside the browser, provide expanded support for Silverlight's DeepZoom feature and enable you to write codecs in managed code. Moonlight 2.0 also adjusted to the quality of a user's connection to reduce breakages and delays."
• ITSM Weekly The Podcast (Week 1) – Blog – ServiceSphere
  "What happens when a CIO, a Service Desk Manager and an Industry Junkie Chat Weekly?!"
• InfoQ: Second Generation Lean Product Development: From Cargo Cult to Science
• Flickr: The Taken by the waiter Pool
  This is kind of funny.
• Bill Gates on iTunes in 2003: “Jobs Has Us Flat-footed Again” | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD
  "Steve Jobs ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right and market things as revolutionary are amazing things. This time somehow he has applied his talents in getting a better Licensing deal than anyone else has gotten for music."
• Pitchfork: Echo Chamber: RZA
  "I didn't know George Washington wore tights so tight. I actually couldn't put the tights on how I was supposed to because they were so tight. I was embarrassed with the tights on because they really hug your nuts. So instead of the tights they bought from the prop house, I had a pair of [thermals] also. I'm from New York. So I put on my own tights. More baggy, more space for my nuts."
• Business Model Jujutsu
• Social circle and content – Google
  Check out your social graph as Google knows it. Nifty!
• robertbrook's Profile – GitHub
• Zoho Launches New Version Of Invoicing Application
• fault-tolerance.png (PNG Image, 784×393 pixels)
  Yup.
• Conformity Names Tom Bishop as Chief Technology Officer
  Tom Bishop now over at Conformity.
• Google Buzz: A Missing Piece to Fill Google's Social Gaps
  With Google Buzz, Google sends a Dear John letter to Facebook – "The good news for Google is that they seem to have done an excellent job of targeting all of the things that they needed to do to get into the status-oriented social media game and have launched an actual product platform for Google Buzz, as opposed to a raw technology such as Google Wave that was far from resembling a product at its preview launch. While the launch team made it clear that Google Wave will undoubtedly play a key role in Google's evolving strategy to accelerate its content collaboration capabilities, Google Buzz is about getting people integrated into Google services more effectively as soon as possible – and to give both Twitter and Facebook some competition for statusing attention."
• bitquabit – The fighting's been fun and all, but it's time to shut up and get along
  Why are mommy and daddy fighting? "So why is there so much hating? I think what’s going on is that people are coming to these tools from Subversion or CVS, have their massive epiphany on how totally awesome DVCSes are, and then assume that only their tool can have this level of awesome, so they begin evangelizing. The problem, of course, is that the other guy feels the same way, and is also evangelizing, so the Git and the Mercurial guy end up in a locker-room-style temper-tantrum over whose tool has the best performance or whatnot, instead of how much more awesome their tools are than the competition."
• Forrester misunderstands its 'intellectual property' | The Open Road – CNET News
  "If I were going to engage an analyst today, it would either be anyone from Redmonk, The 451 Group's Matt Aslett, Forrester's Jeffrey Hammond, or Gartner's Brian Prentice. Why? Because each of these actively blogs or, in Hammond's case, speaks regularly at industry events. And each of them gives more, not less, content/thinking away."
• Early Warning Signs
  Nice list of early warning signs that Agile development teams are doing it wrong.
• The WELL: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
• Analysis: Google Buzz And The One Ring To Rule Them All… – SVW
• Microsoft's SVG talk a prelude to IE support?
• Google Buzz – Gmail mod for the Tweetbook set
  Sergey Brin: "Other social services focus on entertainment," he said. "I find them useful for productivity."
• Microsoft Azure is available, but does anyone care?
  "I'm not sure if anybody noticed, but the long-awaited Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform went into [beta but] billable production last week after a pretty short beta period by Microsoft standards. (I plan on digging a bit deeper into Azure this year.) However, I was taken slightly aback by the lack of fanfare."
• Azure, Amazon Cloud Noise Grows Louder
• Open source management software delivers football fans 6 million slices
  "Papa John’s uses OpenNMS to monitor 816 notes, which corresponds to 1,412 interfaces and 5,747 services. This year the company plans to add OpenNMS monitoring to its more than 3,400 restaurant locations as well, which could increase the number of managed nodes to 30,000."
• Open Source, Social Contracts and Running a Business
• OpenNMS Users Conference Registration Now Open
  Get your OpenNMS user grouping on, in Frankfurt.
• Tech Horizons: OpTier, A Step Toward Business Service Management (BSM) 2.0 – Forrester Research
• Doug McClure's Business Service Management (BSM) Review 2009
  Doug looks over how BSM (Business Service Management) has evolved (or not) in the IT Management space over the past year.
• Amazon.com: Canon VIXIA HF S10 HD Dual Flash Memory with 32 GB Internal Memory and 10x Optical Zoom: Camera & Photo
  I hear this camera is pretty good. Love the Canon brand too, none of the weird Sony crap.
• The OpenNMS Group and Inveneo Partner to Build and Monitor Wireless Network for Haiti | Business Wire
  "'We had to roll out a multi-node network in a disaster environment in a matter of days,” said Andris Bjornson, Inveneo project engineer. 'The support of the open source community has been fantastic. OpenNMS’s speed to deployment, stability and flexibility, as well as the responsiveness of its support team and the community has been critical to our success. We compared OpenNMS to many other solutions, and every day I’m here in Haiti I’m glad we are using OpenNMS.'"
• Simplicity in the Cloud: Announcing Cloudcat
  MuleSoft makes an AMI for their bundling of Tomcat, sells support for it. Pricing: EC2 is 30 cents an hour (includes EC2 fees), GoGrid starts at $29/month.
• InfoWorld Enterprise Architecture Award – InfoWorld
• Adobe to Jobs: 'What the Flash do you know?'
• Giz Explains: Why HTML5 Isn't Going to Save the Internet – HTML5 – Gizmodo
• Videos: Michael Coté, Travis Campbell, Erica Brescia, Andrew Shafer at OpsCamp Austin 2010
  Whole passels of videos from OpsCamp Austin 2010. Nice format!
• Potomac Framework
  Stackless stack for the Flex world.
• Makara's do-it-yourself platform cloud
  Run your own PaaS. Kinda feels like an early 3Tera, but PaaS rather than IaaS.
• The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps
• The iPhone obsession
  The iPhone is like IE 6.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.