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Foolish to continue hoping for Chandler?

I’m looking forward to reading Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in code : two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software. I remain optimistic about Chandler, a next-generation Personal Information Manager (PIM) integrating calendar, e-mail, contact management, task management, notes, and instant messaging, though it’s hard to do so after reading Joel Spolsky’s The Big Picture, a quasi-review of Dreaming in code.

Web 2.0 in instruction; a book on digital humanities; UIUC folks

Two words from the second half of Spotlight on Web 2.0 12-8-06 1-5-07 FridayLive! TLT Group Online Institute resonated with me:

• self-service
• disaggregation

In the session, I also learned about the course ETEC 527: Technologies for Instructional Delivery.

To dig deeper into digital humanities, I will read A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. I will note that there are so many great faculty at great faculty at the UIUC Graduate School of Library and Information Science studying scholarly work.

Learning about “mass collaboration” from Wikinomics

I’ve been inspired by reading Wikinomics over the holidays to engage in a much broader range of collaboration. For a taste of the book, read the series of excerpts in the Globe and Mail (for example, globeandmail.com: Part 7: ‘Us’ power) or keep up with the weblog.

ERP

In doing some basic thinking about ERP at universities, I found the following references helpful:

• Enterprise resource planning – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia provides a good generic summary.
• Open source ERP InfoWorld Analysis 2005-08-08 By Oliver Rist: Does open source help out in the ERP space? I would think so in the long term. But right now?
• PeopleSoft – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is a good overview of PeopleSoft

university context

• Enterprise Systems UCB Goes ERP: Berkeley’s Infrastructure Includes New Business Rules and Policies is useful for the Berkeley context.

enterprise architecture and SOA: more reading

As I try to sort through the hype of SOA, I found the following articles useful reads over the holidays:

• CIO Blogs – Is SOA Another Fake Path to IT Agility? . Yes, designing reusable services is not an easy process. I think that people need to learn how be discriminating “consumers” of services before they can become savvy “producers” Often they are trying to skip that first stage of learning.
• CIO Blogs – The Starting Point for SOA . It seems to make sense that portals could be as a good starting point for SOA implementations. Portals are easy to understand. You can do SOA implementations in steps.

A very good overview piece on enterprise architecture is A New Blueprint For The Enterprise – Enterprise Architecture – CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005, an article on the connections among services and an event-driven model. I like the notion of an EA Zoning Board. The article is matched with a good piece on enterprise architects, who they are and do and what signs of good architects: WANTED: Enterprise Architects – - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005

It’s good to hear someone say that you can EA without an overarching business strategy: EA Without The Strategy – - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005.

EA On The Cheap – - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005 points out how to do things on the cheap — the most basic steps:

Doing enterprise architecture on the cheap means you have to forgo much of the planning and governance and focus instead on services and reusable integration. That may still mean investing in some developers who know Web services and buying some middleware to provide the integration glue that Web services lacks, but the CFO will be able to hold onto those old mainframes while watching IT become more responsive and quicker to deliver new capabilities from them.

what architects look for in other architects

Some quotes from: Master Builders – - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005, in response to the question “What to look for in an architect?”:

• “Businesspeople tend to be extroverts, whereas 75 percent of IT people are introverts. You have to be able to relate to both.”
• “They need to have a passion for tying things together; they should be constantly thinking about the big picture.”
• “I would look for excitement and passion. If I ask them about a project they’ve worked on, I want them to say, ‘Oh yeah, you should have seen what we did,’ and then talk for the next 20 minutes. He didn’t just do it; he lived it.”
• “You can’t just talk a good game; you have to deliver. I would ask someone to give an example of a strategic project they’ve led that brought together business and IT. Get them to focus on the key attributes that made that project work. Also, they need to be able to speak strategically and know the right level of detail needed.”

Notelets for 2007.01.05

CNI2006fall EDUCAUSE CONNECT has some good interviews to listen to get a feel for the national IT scene in higher education.

Mashups mix data into global service : Nature is a one-year old article on mashups in scientific computation:

Will 2006 be the year of the mashup? Originally used to describe the mixing together of musical tracks, the term now refers to websites that weave data from different sources into a new service. They are becoming increasingly popular, especially for plotting data on maps, covering anything from cafés offering wireless Internet access to traffic conditions. And advocates say they could fundamentally change many areas of science — if researchers can be persuaded to share their data.

I got to remember to check in on the webcasts in early March for this fascinating conference on the future of libraries: De Lange Conference VI Emerging Libraries De Lange Conference Rice University.

Oren Sreebny’s Weblog: (CSG 2007) Thursday workshop on collaboration tools:

….we have a tremendous proliferation of new species of software appearing almost on a daily basis and combining and evolving at a very rapid rate, making it very difficult to figure out which ones we should engage with at an enterprise level, or even how to construct a meaningful taxonomy of these applications.

Some recent observations:

• There is an increasing disconnect between the IT capabilities available to individuals, especially cutting-edge innovative individuals (as well as “ordinary people”) and what the institution is providing.
• UCB IT needs to respond to both end-users and purveyors of enterprise computing hardware and services.
• Many, many of the tools of Web 2.0 can be used to support/enhance teaching and research. Of course, it takes some learning, reflection, and experimentation to do so.
• I’d like to learn more about Information Technology Infrastructure Library – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (ITIL).

Wondering what how to keep UC Berkeley competitive in an increasingly “flat world“, I found the essay Berkeley and braving the new flat world by Richard Newton (who just passed away at the much too young age of 55) heartening:

I believe we at Berkeley must simply double-down on our efforts to identify and bring the best and brightest here to Berkeley, as undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, visiting scholars and faculty, in a strategy I call “intellectual insourcing.” We must work harder than we ever have before to build upon and extend our regional lead as the most important cradle of discovery and innovation in the world by assembling a critical mass of talent right here in the Bay Area. Ultimately, I believe such a strategy is the most important way Berkeley Engineering can help create a sizeable “bump”—ideally a mountain—on this new flat world.

Notelets for 2006.12.02

I’m rather sympathetic to the view that IT Architects Must Write Code — or at least should be capable of writing prototyping code.

I find A Conversation with Werner Vogels quite an inspiring picture of what we might be able to build at UC.

Rice University News & Media:

Rice University and IBM will collaborate on the development of an open-standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will help higher education institutions tie together their increasingly diverse academic software applications. The collaboration is supported in part by IBM’s Shared University Research award program, created to exemplify the deep partnership between academia and the industry to explore research in areas essential to innovation. Through the award and software from the IBM Academic Initiative, IBM has donated IBM BladeCenter hardware technology, software for an SOA platform and related services valued at $700,000.

Bubble redux? Perspectives CNET News.com:

You won’t find the big ideas that ignited breakthrough developments during this phase. With all due respect to their inventors, mashups don’t represent the apex of Silicon Valley’s creative genius. The truly exciting stuff still waits over the horizon. That’s where things are going to get more interesting.

MIT to try Python for introductory CS course (AMK’s Journal):

Philosophically, the material tries to follow a “practice-theory-practice” model: First, a task is presented and students work on it. Then, students learn the theory that underlies the problem presented, and finally the students tackle the problem again, given these better techniques, Kaelbling said.

» Interested in learning how to develop mashups? Welcome to Mashup U. Online Between the Lines ZDNet.com:

My personal belief is that mashup style software development, as ecosytems go, will easily overtake most other software development ecosystems in number of developers and applications. To help acclerate that process, ZDNet, in conjunction with Mashup University (the event) now brings Mashup U directly to you, on your desktop at no cost to you.

The “circle of life” — NonCartoonist’s comment on “Interested in learning how to develop mashups? Welcome to Mashup U. Online” TalkBack on ZDNet:

So, should we not use mash ups because they are easy to design and then hard to work with? No. They are part of the normal development process. “Pieces parts” or “Frankenstein” systems (now called “mash ups”) typically break ground in a new area. Once the paradigm is established the “vertical solutions” that are easier to maintain move in and take over. Mash ups (or what ever their next “nom de querre” will be) move on to break new ground in a new area. It’s all part of the cirle of life…

Possible alternatives to jython:

• Jepp – Java Embedded Python
• JPype – Java to Python integration

Nelson’s Weblog: tech / bad / whySoapSucks:

As someone who bears some past responsibility for well used SOAP services (Google’s APIs for search and AdWords) let me say now I’d never choose to use SOAP and WSDL again. I was wrong.

Cyberinfrastructure and learning

I’m looking forward to seeing how Christopher Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University, plans to relate cyberinfrastructure to learning technologies at his talk Teaching and Learning via Cyberinfrastructure on Nov 7, 2006. Much of the cyberinfrastructure discussion I’ve seen has focused on the research implications of this new tech-infrastructure. Will Dede help us think about the learning implications? The abstract for the talk is:

The National Science Foundation is evolving an ambitious vision of cyberinfrastructure–the integration of computing, data, networks, digitally enabled sensors, observatories, and experimental facilities. As the nation begins to actualize this vision, novel, powerful capabilities are emerging for educational simulation, visualization, and real-time data collection. Through cyberinfrastructure, students in any location could conduct sophisticated inquiry activities across barriers of distance and time, customizing their learning portals and participating in virtual communities. Instructors could use sophisticated methods of assessment based on real-time collection of information about individual student performance. What are the implications of this initiative for practice and policy today?

SOA at UCSD

This morning, several of my colleagues and I listened to Planning and Delivering Service-Oriented Architecture, presented by Marty Backer and Christopher De Rosa, both of UCSD. (See the accompanying Powerpoint slides. Audio is also available from the presentation page.) I will recommend this talk to my colleagues and managers — there is a lot there.

Here I want to record the questions I asked during the session and my summary of the answers given:

• Have you used SOA in the context of academic/scholarly applications or only for administrative apps? Answer: There is a new app for academic personnel, which will include scholarly works.
• Have you consciously applied what we learn from mashups and other Web 2.0 approaches to SOA? That is, more lightweight service invocations (REST instead of SOAP, for instance.) Answer: Yes, they have followed mashups fairly closely. Their system does support multiple protocols. They build an internal service component and then wrap them. SOAP/WSDL…very interested in REST….lots of scripting language usage on campus.
• What type of education/traiing efforts are you putting into place for UCSD developers AND managers? Answer: The slides gives some answers.