Software application development

So there I was just about to take a flight to the US. Leafing through my as yet unread Bill Bryson books that I have left, I was about to dive headfirst into A Short History of Nearly Everything, when “thud” went my door mat and a complimentary copy of O'Reilly Publishing's The Twitter Book leapfrogged to the front of my reading list.

I'm not a professional book reviewer although I have done one or two in my time such as Google Apps – also from O'Reilly. In fact the last tome I did review was a cookbook, so take my comments as you find them.

Anyway, a book on Twitter then - why on earth would we need that? It's an intuitive micro-blogging service that has taken the world by storm and is a seriously good networking tool for a freelance technical journalist such as myself. So wouldn't this just be 234 pages (I counted) of teaching your grandmother to suck eggs?

Well, Twitter is just about to get its own FA cup commentator this weekend in the form of Setanta Sport’s Jon Champion. Surely when a medium is used for broadcast football commentary then it has matured?

Well yes, there is some of grandmother to suck eggs element. There are the painful “This is how you sign up and search people – and this is what a #hashtag is” sections. But get past that and there are quite a few useful items to read. Make no mistake, this book is actually written by Mr Tim O'Reilly (they named the publishing company after him), or @timoreilly as he likes to be known these days. O'Reilly wrote the book with co-author Sarah Milstein (@SarahM) a freelance writer who boasts the claim of being the 21st user of Twitter itself.

As well as the stats to show the “thousands” of per cent growth Twitter has seen at various stages of its still blossoming popularity, there are some good “oh really, I didn't know that” pages to pick up on. I'll try and pick a few for you:

** There's a version of Twitter that works with assistive technologies called Accessible Twitter – you can find it at http://accessibletwitter.com

** There's some good help pages with useful web sites listed such as http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter which is a forum where people discuss Twitter issues.

** We all block those crazy “SEO specialists and web entrepreneurs” (well, I do these days) and I also block Tatiana46832 from Kiev who wants to know me. But did you also know that you can send a message to @spam or follow http://twitter.com/spam (which auto follows you back) for extra help in fighting the good fight?

** Trending has come to the fore recently and I worked out what Wossybookclub was after a few clicks, but I wish I’d known that I could go to http://whatthetrend.com and actually get an explanation for what each topic (or trend in this case) was supposed to be about.

** There’s some good info on advanced search in here that did give me a few extra pointers.

But Doh! Here are some of my Homer Simpson “doh!” moments. I’m sorry, but advice on using third party Twitter clients like Tweetdeck is preceded by the comment, “If you Twitter more than once a week”. Um, yes, like I do – really I do. Perhaps this is useful for beginners, but I fear the authors have gone one step too far back in their back to basics approach. Also, they mention Tweetdeck and Twhirl – but there’s no mention of Tweetie and many of the other worthy client interfaces. Poor show chaps. As for the “What to RETWEET” pages, I won’t go there as I’m sure you know what makes interesting follow on reading and what doesn’t.

** A final positive comment from me on the pages within – did you know that you should post on the right days to be amidst the most traffic? Guess which days are the most popular? It’s spread over Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. For myself I do notice that hardcore Twitterfolk (if I may place myself in that category) who Tweet on Saturday and Sunday do tend to leave the professional approach to one side slightly and chill out a little.

If I have one criticism to make it is probably that a lot of this kind of advice is exactly the reason many of us are on Twitter in the first place. What I mean is, this is the sort of help that frequent Twitterers share all the time. Like I said in the title of this blog - the Twitter Book: worth a look if you're hooked.

But when do you sit and read a hard copy book about online experiences? Well, like I say, I did it on board Virgin Atlantic VS0021 to Dulles. So as I'm blogging in the sky I think I can safely say: Virgin Atlantic, your planes are as lovely as your cabin crew, but your online booking system sucks big time as it spewed me out and wouldn't let me check in online. Richard, if you're Tweeting – sort it out will you please sir?

Finally, what would a Twitter bog post be without a bit of self-promotion? You can find me at http://twitter.com/ABridgwater and I’m generally a pretty congenial sort of guy.

I've just finished up editing a feature for a DBA community portal that examines the current wastage elements in typical technology deployments - a scenario the author described as 'toxic technology'. So what I hear you say right? Another droning account of xyz per cent of software and/or other technology projects that fail to deliver on their original specifications. Well, there's a bit of that - and the odd smattering of stats to crunch on, but this one is different.

The author I worked with is a chap called John Thorp and he's president of The Thorp Network and chair of Val IT Steering Committee for ITGI. (Note to self, must remember to register “The Bridgwater Group”.) Anyway, Thorp kicks off with a quote from Jack Welch, the former chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001.

“The failed promises of the Information Age add up to the longest-running disappointment in business history. On the other hand, information technology has produced an enormous transition, something that companies should be grappling with and studying every day,” said Welch.

I read a lot of IT-focused management comment and, to be honest, most of it washes over me like misty PR puff. But there was something in some of Thorp's comments which just seemed to be well written and thought provoking. IBM's favourite developer message is empowering IT to drive the business and getting the two functions to work in concert. Ask Thorp for his take on that and you'd get, “The challenge facing enterprises today is not implementing technology, although this is certainly not becoming any easier, but implementing IT-enabled organisational change.”

IT managers working with development teams with supporting RDBMS functions must get bombarded with opinions from their upper management on just exactly how they should manage their IT portfolio management practices.

Thorp's best comment was on leadership values in typical IT shops where he says that in many, if not most cases, while support from the top is ultimately essential - it has not always started at the top. A former colleague of his, Don Tapscott, once said, “Leadership can come from anywhere.”

I think that's a nice message for the average Joe. The developer on the block who thinks his or her team leader wouldn't know a robust platform structure from a hole in the ground. Anyway, what was I doing reading IT management pieces? I have a transatlantic plane trip this afternoon - that must have been it. Time to get my head firmly in the clouds.

It was 8am on a bank holiday Monday morning that I was watching the IT news feeds and started seeing mentions of Stream Computing coming to the fore. Being a bank holiday, I though yes very good – cloud computing, waterfall methods, scrum practices (they all sound like creative labels) so let’s present “stream” as the next paradigm and make sure we milk it and talk about the Motorway Computing multi-lane collaborative approach as soon as possible right?

But of course it’s no joke or silly label. In fact, ZDNet.co.uk reported on this topic as recently as this time last month and it is very real. The technology proposition here is that spiraling amounts of unstructured data such as emails, blogs, video, voice and other web generated content requires a huge amount of processing. Breaking off chunks of this data to process in batches (in the traditional way) produces a sort of staccato set of results that do not lend themselves well to real time processing scenarios such as financial market analysis, healthcare systems or weather monitoring.

This development is actually IBM’s baby and has, according to the New York Times, apparently been over half a decade in the making. Big Blue’s product based on this approach is called System S and it will no doubt go down a storm with particle physicists everywhere. Just a few days away from the company’s Rational Software Development Conference (which I will sadly miss this year due to travel restrictions) you might have thought they would have saved this news up for June – but it does in fact tie nicely in with IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign, so I guess they couldn’t wait.

Streaming in processing terms is not a new concept and even stream computing itself is a term that IBM has been using since June 2007. Added to that fact, ATI Technologies (before it became the AMD Graphics Product Group) has also been working in the high-performance, low-latency CPUs space on similar projects for some time now. That said, this may be the point at which the previously somewhat familiar term gets a little more commercially branded and driven by the corporate IBM publicity machine. There’s an IBM white paper here in PDF form if you need some bedtime reading on this topic. Beware the cheesy corporate spin though, the first sub head in this paper reads, “Harvesting pearls from the torrents” – you get my drift right? No pun intended.

Anyway, back to my Motorway Computing concept. This model sees software application development teams take a three or four lane approach to module construction. While the core foundational structure is kept in the leftmost “slow” lane, certain agile performance streams may “overtake” and accelerate in faster moving lanes. Reverse to right lane format for USA and our European continental cousins. Bug tracking is sidelined to the “hard shoulder” breakdown zone and periodic rest stops, or “service areas”, are intermittently placed for version control management. Project goal destination tracking is constantly monitored using a navigation box, which “speaks” instructions to team members in their podules throughout release iterations. Finally, nightly builds are completed with the team safely offline in the “motel zone”, where they can bond, recuperate and refuel for another days coding. It’s sure to work, just avoid the roadworks delays – that would be the customers of course.

IBM put out a study datelined one minute past midnight this Thursday morning commenting on the fact that outside of netbooks, the recession has largely put the kibosh on PC growth. There is according to IBM, however, an area of PC investment that actually saves money for a company: the Linux desktop.

Worldwide PC shipments fell seven per cent in the first three months of 2009 from a year earlier according to IDC. But interest in the open source desktop is confirmed, says IBM, by a new independent study by Freeform Dynamics which indicates that more than 70% of Linux desktop deployments are spurred by cost savings and that IT staff say Linux desktops are easier to deploy than expected.

Struggling with the “ultra-lite” nature of Linpus Linus Lite on my Acer Aspire One and the fact that the device drivers for the power supply seem to have AWOL since installing open source PDF viewer Evince – I’m NOT totally convinced that every Linux desktop deployment is a thing of joy. But let’s keep going.

The trick, says Freeform Dynamics, is to avoid getting distracted by those users who are emotionally or practically wedded to Windows, the report says, and focus on the ones for whom the PC on their desk is simply a tool to get their job done and therefore exhibit “moderate and predictable” use of e-mail and office tools.

Now this may be a new argument that IBM decides to put some weight behind, but basically the company is saying that non-technical users such as transaction workers and general professional workers are more than twice as likely to be primary targets for desktop Linux adoption than mobile and creative staff.

Not that it’s a bad thing, but that almost goes against the general perception that one garners from working with the development and DBA community as I do. It’s the techies who adopt Linux first and then, in many cases, hang on to their adopted flavour for dear life. But perhaps that’s not what IBM meant by “mobile and creative staff”, perhaps that means salespeople, managers and those who want what they think is a spoon feeder GUI that they perceive to be robust.

In fact, to clarify this point I spoke to Dale Vile, research director at Freeform Dynamics who told me, "If you take a look inside the report, you’ll see that technical staff (development and ops) are indeed the most prominent initial targets, but as that’s pretty well accepted, we didn’t pull it out as a key finding. The views of targeting within the end user community were the most interesting, and the most useful for those looking to exploit Linux beyond the technical domain."

You can get a summary of the findings on the Freeform Dynamics web site if you wish.

In related news, IBM is also talking about its connection with Canonical (which was announced in December of last year) as it teams up with a company called Virtual Bridges to provide Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technology as part of a Microsoft-alternative desktop offering.

Virtual Bridges partner sign-ups have, guess what, seen a dramatic surge recently. VERDE is Virtual Bridge’s punt at the VDI space working with Ubuntu and and IBM’s collaboration and productivity software, Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS).

Most interestingly here, with the latest VERDE 2.0 release, Virtual Bridges claims to offer the ability to use the virtual desktop software when users are offline. Users can be disconnected from the Internet and still be able to use applications locally. The company says that this expands VERDE from being VDI-only to being a complete desktop management infrastructure offering.

How the product achieves this in terms of perhaps balancing local client processing power to capture application status if a web connection drops – I don’t know if that’s what they do, I’m trying to make an educated guess – they do not say. But it does appear to be the current must have in cloud based virtual desktop application delivery.

Today sees a new free public WiFi network launched in the UK. Targeting underserved and ‘digitally remote’ areas of the UK, free to use access points in both public and commercial venues will be largely funded by the venue and its partners.

This has got to be good news, I tend to get in and out of Las Vegas at least two or three times a year and McCarran International Airport is the only place I know that offers truly free access. There was, apparently, quite a buzz about free WiFi hotspots for the UK springing up back in 2002, but it all seems very locked down now doesn’t it?

Now obviously I don’t really cover telecoms as I typically focus on software application development, but the Freerunner network caught my eye because it is based on open source technology with a distributed network architecture – hence, no data centres and, one would have to concede, no single point of failure.

The company says that traditional WiFi operators have based their networks on a centralised design as this was a sensible thing to do back in 2000 when you needed lots of control over your service, because distributed technology just was not available.

Freerunner says that the most critical component in its network is its access points, “We put most of the processing capability and hard work at the edge. By taking inexpensive access points and putting open source software on them we give them the power of a Linux machine. This means we run the firewall locally on the access point. We define the network rules and carry out QoS at the edge. Freerunner is able to modify what happens at the edge, across the entire network, from a simple web interface in seconds.”

As I say, this caught my eye as the terms telecoms and open source are not often used together unless you are talking about open source telecom billing systems, CRM solutions or teleconferencing software perhaps. This development seems to be at a more infrastructural level that does impact software architectures. Here’s the web site if you want to check out this news further.