LIVE from Boston!

After 26 hours of travelling, I arrived here in Boston late last night. It has been rather exciting since this is my first visit to the United States of America. It looks pretty much like Vancouver but that is hardly surprising. The conference has officially started and today, I attended two workshop session on Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN) and Clinical Research Information Exchange (CRIX). I was rather disappointed that the topic on Semantic Webs was changed to ELN, let's hope the schedule remains unchanged for the rest of the conference.

Anyway, I missed writing up on my attendance at the Community LOVE launch organised by the folks at SGDOTNET.

I came back late on Friday night after a shoot at Suntec City. So not surprisingly, I woke up late on Saturday morning and rushed down to NTUC building to attend the LOVE launch. I missed the opening keynote, and went straight to attend the session on developing Microsoft Gadgets.

Ever since landing myself with a copy of VISTA, I've been so hooked on using gadgets on my desktop. So much so, I had to install Google Sidebar just to get the same feature on my older XP boxes. The latter is sluggish and resource intensive... but no choice la, no gadget support for XP yet. I did hope that the session would include more samples on how to create more complex gadgets, e.g. those that interface with web services, rather than a simple "Helloworld" or "GoodbyeWorld" application. Perhaps next time?

The next session on CAML was greek to me. I've not been properly introduced to Microsoft's Sharepoint product offerings. But it has caught my eye. I will have to find some time to find out more and see what it offers.

Lunch was simple, but deeply appreciated. I was fortunate to find a seat near the window to savour my bee hoon and the magnificent view.

After lunch, it was workflows, yeah! It was a very informative session by Maung Maung, with much take home information to keep. Through his demos, he demonstrated the ease in creating both sequential workflows and state machines. Can't wait for him to post his sample codes online. At the end of the session, I had two burning questions: (1) Was there any support for WS-BPEL; and (2) Does Microsoft again only provides out-of-the-box support for transaction and persistence services using SQL server. The answer was yes to both questions. Microsoft will be posting a BPEL translator soon. For (2), you'll need to write your own implementation to work with other database software. Disappointing, but hey, I got a free t-shirt for my questions!

The last session I attended was on Office Business Applications (OBA). The speaker demonstrated the ability to extend, customise and integrate Office applications with external software components such as web services. But I liked what he said about the shrinking time-to-market phenomenon. With OBA, you can quickly create usable software that is familiar to users, and faster to build. He also stressed the shortage and need for OBA developers. Hmm...

The finale was exciting. And I have to raise my glass to the team and Microsoft for providing lucky draw gifts for everyone. I was however, disappointed at my luck with LUCKY draws. haha. I only got one gift, a book on ADO.NET. But I think this book may prove invaluable to me. After all, not too long ago, I was searching on topics regarding ADO.NET for implementation in my projects.

The team did a great job. Thanks!

Oracle Developer Day

After a long absence, Oracle finally came back to Singapore to meet her developers and fans with an event yesterday. Unfortunately, I only had time to attend two session in the morning. Nevertheless, I still drew some benefits from my attendance. I learnt that:

• Oracle's Linux distribution is free for production and development if you do not wish to get support.
• Oracle XE was more than a database. It contained Oracle Application Express that allows you to quickly create small applications or share Microsoft Excel spreadsheets securely (kinda reminds me of Zoho's product offerings). But I'll definitely be looking at this product in the coming weeks.
  
• Oracle Business Process Architect (BPA) is a new tool for business process owners to manage workflows. I wonder how much differences are there between this and the BPEL managment tool that integrates with JDeveloper or Eclipse.
  

New buzzwords I have learnt:

• SDO, which stands for Service Data Objects. It's going to be an additional application interface layer over and on-top of Web Services, COM objects etc. for accessing data. Did I get it right?
• SCA, which means Service Component Architecture. Hmm... SOA 2.0?
  
• Fusion Middleware - a family of middleware products including application servers, development tools, business intelligence, user interaction, business process etc. Repackaging?
• BAM, which means Business Activity Monitor. I'm not too interested in this one, since there's no real need for such information in Bioinformatics, or is there? Maybe I'll look at it, but not in the near future.
  

There is no end name-calling. ;)

On to SL... the virtual expo made Wired's headlines. The article focuses mainly on the poor performance of the SL engine, which I think many SL residents would agree. It was interesting that the system was only able to cope with 100 slersons (pronounced as slur-sens, a new term I coined for SL residents). So according to the article, 60 vendors would mean only 40 participants. Now that's bad. But I believe Linden Labs are trying to work on the lag issues and I'm looking forward to the new version due tonight.

Last night, I made L$8 and met with a colleague. Oh, I built my first structure in SL. It was a sign post that you can put in your garden. I put this in one of the "Singapore" lands, and hopefully it'll stay. Here's a picture of it:


In two Singapore SL lands I visited, there's a sandbox area that you too can get your hands dirty creating stuff in SL.


Some symbols of the Lion City. It always start with a "C"!

Fast and furious

What a rush! In a blink of an eye, my weekend's over.

I was too tired to write yesterday, but I really wanted to share on my experience at the International Technology Expo 2007, held in Second Life! I arrived at the conference a little early but managed to pick up some freebies at the registration booth (checkout my ITE t-shirt and hat). From the registration booth, we had to travel down elevators and ride on special trains to bring us to the exhibition area. The rails for these trains are seen on the top right of this first snapshot.


Conference was well attended by some of the major vendors including Dell, Sun Microsystems and SAP. And me being me, I couldn't resist grabbing my self a Sun t-shirt. Some of the vendors offer information and downloads, and by "touching" these demo items, you will be forwarded to the information/download websites using your favourite web browser. Each booth will also be staffed by a sales/marketeer. You can ask and have your questions answered in real-time! I was particularly interested by the World Stock Exchange. Yes, you can trade SL company shares and hope to make Linden bucks.




The beautiful lady on the right, was describing details about WSE and she told me about how sometimes the market can be rather chaotic as traders generally do not put much effort into deciding their buys and sells. The I asked about Reuters and their SL activities, and whether any of these do help affect the market dynamics. She said that it might. But I think as this technology matures, this might just be another "real" market to speculate on. But hey, do that on your own risk ya? ;)

There are endless possibilities with SL. Some enterprising start-ups have been looking at bridging our RL communication with those of SL. And one such company is developing tools to send SMS via SL...


Well, you'll never know what you're going get next!

TGIF

Yup, it's Friday again. And I haven't heard this phrase for a long time.

It's probably a good time to recollect the week that passed. I haven't been doing that. So let's backtrack on my learning journey this week.

I haven't had the chance to spend time to concentrate on my reading and self-learning. I have been so busy and caught up developing a proteomics tool for one of our collaborators, which thankfully, I could complete a working demo before our next meeting.

So since Monday, I have been taking time to develop new capabilities, and I have mentioned them before. I started with a few chapters on GIS this week and it has been insightful. So far, I've just been a user of location services. Only recently, I had the opportunity to spend my precious office hours understanding this art... or do you call this science?

I have been reading the book Geographic Information System and Science. It is an extremely palatable book, and I've learnt lots from it. If you're keen on GIS, and if you can get yourself a copy, I do encourage you to read this book. I'm midway through it, but I believe I would have had a broad overview of the field. Enough for me to begin my development work in this area of study.

Meanwhile, I've been busy reading it alongside my new favourite Google tool - Notebook. If you do not already know what it is, do check it out. Google Notebook allows you to clip text/information on web pages you visit. For me, I took it one step further, and used it as a learning companion. You can even export notes to Google Docs and later as Word, PDF or other formats. Cool ya?

For now, I need to retire to prepare for my early morning drive, 300+ km up north.

Getting MS SQL Server 2005 to work with JBoss

I spend a good amount of time last night trying to get JBoss to connect with MS SQL Server 2005 as a datasource.

The first thing you should do is to download the required software. Assuming you already have JBoss and MS SQL Server 2005 (MSSQL2005) already installed, what you will need to download is the JDBC driver for MSSQL2005. After you have downloaded the JDBC driver package, extract the files within and look for the jar file that contains the JDBC implementation classes that you require. The filename is sqljdbc.jar and you should place this file in %JBOSS_HOME%\server\deploy\%SERVER_CONFIG%\lib.

Next, create a datasource configuration file for MSSQL2005. I used the sample file from %JBOSS_HOME%\doc\examples\jca\mssql-ds.xml as a base. This configuration file was originally written for MSSQL2000, so you may require some tweaking for this to work. This is what my mssql-ds.xml contains:

<datasources>
  <local-tx-datasource>
    <jndi-name>MSSQLDS</jndi-name>
    <connection-url>
     jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:4570;DatabaseName=testdb
   </connection-url>
    <driver-class>
     com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver
    </driver-class>
    <user-name>sa</user-name>
    <password>***</password>
        <metadata>
            <type-mapping>MS SQLSERVER2000</type-mapping>
        </metadata>
    </local-tx-datasource>
</datasources>

Take note of the regions marked blue. (1) The protocol should be "jdbc:sqlserver" and not "jdbc:microsoft:sqlserver" used in the example file. (2) Be very careful about which port number you use. It is not necessarily true that the MSSQL2005 would use the default number 1433. For security, it appears that MSSQL2005 would use a dynamic port. You can of course disable dynamic ports and set a static port number to listen to. Please check the MSSQL2005 documentation for more information how to do this. (3) The driver class is wrong. The original configuration file sets the driver class to com.microsoft.jdbc.sqlserver.SQLServerDriver.

Please note: You may also need to run the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration utility to enable MSSQL2005 to listen over TCP/IP.

Once the configuration file is completed, copy the file to %JBOSS_HOME%\server\deploy\%SERVER_CONFIG%\deploy, which would automatically register this datasource in the JNDI registry. Thereafter, you can obtain the datasource and connection, example:

    Context ctx = new InitialContext();
    DataSource ds = (DataSource) ctx.lookup ("java:MSSQLDS");
    Connection conn = ds.getConnection();

I hope this information will be useful for those trying to get MSSQL2005 to work JBoss. Happy Coding!

Fruitful weekend

... or at least I'd like to think so.

I have been toying with the Linkedin services, and have found them extremely useful. I have managed to get in touch with some of my old friends whom I met during my active days in the Singapore Java Users Group. It is wonderful to know that some of them have progressed quite a bit since we last met. Hmm... but a little depressing that I am still very much a nobody. In any case, if you are looking to do some serious networking, Linkedin is a good start. My profile is now located on the right. If you are from Google, please feel free to add me to your connections. ;)

Over the weekend, I have managed to give limetree the required additions to the SC website. One of the features was to pull blog feeds and list them on the SC website. Initially, I wrote a ATOM parser for this purpose, but later found a ready library to parse both RSS and ATOM. This is useful because we have not identified specific blog providers and a decision of which standards to support (both of course!). Magpierss decides on the appropriate parser depending on the type of feed received. Now that's so cool. Made development work a lot shorter.

I got myself a backup drive yesterday. It's a Western Digital My Book Premium 500GB. I'll put a picture up later tonight. But this is a really cool-looking black box that is helping me to sort my gigabytes of data/photos/mp3s and later for backup. What I especially like about it is the auto-start and auto-shutdown features. The drive turns on and off whenever it is used and not used respectively. It connects to the PC using either USB 2.0 or Firewire 400. I would prefer the latter, but I will first need to move my Firewire card from my old PC to the current one. I walked around Sim Lim Square quite a bit (up and down, round and round) before finding stock at Videopro on level 4. I think it might be the last piece. I could not find it at Fuwell and Bell as they had no stocks. Btw, these are the only three shops I found selling this model at S$299.

Culture 2.0

First special thanks to Ajay (IBM) for giving us a comprehensive sharing on what Web 2.0 is and what it offers. He reiterated the key components of Web 2.0:

1. Web as a platform; and
2. Enabling technologies.

So was anyone so impressed with Google that they wanted drop everything and join their team? I want. *lol*

But after more thought on the presentation today. I asked myself whether Web 2.0 could be classified as a culture? At least for our workplace, can we take down cold walls and inhibitions that prevent us from being a dynamic organisation, ready to innovate and do magic? Seriously, after seeing what comes out from America and other technology-driven countries, it challenges me to examine whether or not our environment is stifling for greater creativity? Where is the disruptive technology from Singapore?

So, for me, I will put in a third issue in Web 2.0: it is about culture. At the human level, we need to change the way we think, work and interact. Not the hows (technologies) but the whys (culture).

We need to:

• Willingly share information and resources without any form of fear.
  
• Instill a collaborative spirit, to excel both as an individual and as a team/organisation.
  
• Be open and embrace cutting edge technology.
  
• Foster enterprising spirit.
  
• Be creative.
  
• A warm working environment; and lastly
• Enjoy our work.
  

How do we then foster this culture in those we teach? How do we create a platform/environment for students to learn, share and innovate freely, collaboratively and enjoyably?

Last words.... will IBM buy OpenLaszlo? *dang*

Fuzziebrain speaks...

Quote of the day

This statement really blows my mind...

"The cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government... your asset values will disappear, your apartments will be worth a fraction of what it is, your jobs will be in peril, your security will be at risk and our women will become maids in other persons' countries - foreign workers."

Anyway, this has been a rather technological day for me. I've gotten around checking out some real cool Web 2.0 stuff, notably ZOHO. It has a full suite of office productivity applications and a cool API to work with it.

And I finally installed Google Desktops! Can't resist after being impressed by my month old Vista sidebar. Now if I can only get my feet wet and start writing some cool gadgets of my own. But I can't help being apprehensive about indexing my entire file and email systems.

I'm also getting started on GIS and spatial analysis. If anyone has any pointers, leads, tutorials etc. on this topic, please feel free to share with me ya? ;)