17 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in General
The RecordStore have been using some marvellous old photos as part of their newsletters. I went looking for them so I could share them …
As it happens a lot of these photos show up at http://aziomedia.wordpress.com
If only my collection looked as good as this.
15 Saturday Jun 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology
Continuing to look at the Introduction to Oracle Event Processing book, by chapter 6 the books has covered the key principles and ideas for building a CEP solution, and we’re now need to consider deployment. But refreshingly the book also takes on a number of non functional requirement (NFR) areas such as the issue of monitoring, a subject area that many technical books tend to ignore. The attention to monitoring is admittedly driven by the fact that Event Processing is inherently sensitive to timing and system loading etc and will obviously have a direct impact on what outcomes are produced.
As the book takes you through aspects of building a simple solution – the CEP equivalent to writing ‘Hello World’ it would be great if the authors could make the implementation available for download, so you could go straight into deployment.
Chapter 7, then takes us into other performance improving aspects such as how to get event enrichment data, and importantly exploit caching to drive the performance. If you’re familiar with Coherence then this aspect should be pretty easy to get to grips with, and the book actually focuses on the OEP aspects of the setup. If you don’t know Coherence, you’d do well to look at additional sources of information.
Chapter 9 is a natural evolution of 8 as further develops performance thinking with clustering and with it High Availability dimensions.
Before looking at High Availability (HA) and scaling the book drives back into more advanced scenarios with CQL by introducing Java into the syntax.
09 Sunday Jun 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology
Continuing with the review of the Packt book Introduction to Oracle Event Processing (OEP) we find chapters 3,4 and 5 take a far more indepth dive into the product, what it can do and how to implement the features with examples of why you might want to use different features and capabilities. Chapter 5 focuses specifically on the Complex Query Language (CQL) syntax which is a SQL based expression language for querying events and describing expressions with an obvious emphasis on time series data.
As the book isn’t a blow by blow, screen shoot by screen guide through creating an example application using OEP you are going to need to apply a bit of effort now in utilising the ideas and capabilities being explained here.
A very well executed set of chapters.
02 Sunday Jun 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology
Chapter 2 of the Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing book is really two smaller chapters introducing the platform in terms of its history, building blocks and the challenges that have had to be solved in the creation of an event processing platform (such as managing the potential impact of the garbage collector when handling very high event rates).
Not many books go into the underlying details of how a product is created, but in doing so the authors have provided a lot insight into the art of the possible and avenues for developing further understanding.
The second half of the chapter walks through the use of a demo scenario. Rather than providing details from standard Oracle manuals in a click by click type of guide, the book uses the example to show a flavour of breadth and depth of the tool.
This chapter doesn’t try to describe the installation process, but points you to the Oracle documentation and explains what it should guide you through.
Even if you don’t intend to exercise the demo, it is well worth reading the chapter to understand the construction and breadth of the tool. Based on what has been shown here, I believe some of the Oracle products such as AIA tooling could learn from it.
01 Saturday Jun 2013
Posted in General
It’s great having a little blogging and tweeting apps on a phone as it gives a great opportunities to exploit those odd moments to capture and idea and post them.
The tools can use predictive text and correct your keying and spelling errors. Bit why can’t they help by suggesting/predicting links for you???? Trying to jump in and out of editing on an iPhone to grab links is just a pain!
I inevitably end up fixing blog entries from a desktop sooner or later to add appropriate links etc.
Over to you app authors time to impress.
01 Saturday Jun 2013
Posted in Books, General, Technology
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In the process of reading Susan Cain’s book Quiet I got to wondering about common traits of developers and the idea of pair programming.
Pair programming advocates the idea of 2 developers working on a single piece of code will produce better quality code with a lower big count on the basis that both developers catch each others mistakes and both will gravitate to the best ideas. To achieve this does need the subjection of egos.
Now, if the stereotype of developers being typically introverted individuals which I think holds water (certainly from my experience) then drawing from what Susan Cain has written about this development approach is going to be fatiguing and not sit easily with the personality of your average developer.
This would mean for pair programming to be effective then those involved must. Be able to bring Free Traits to bare (more in a moment). But those best able to bring such practices to effect must be truly motivated developers. Ironically I believe that those highly motivated and focused developers are the best out there. So how does this pact the value of such an. Approach?
As for Free Trait Theory this takes the view that when pursuing core values individuals can project (if not manifest) traits such as extroverted behaviour, albeit find it fatiguing.
All of this says to me is, don’t expect developers to live and breath the idea of pairing; and even expect reluctance (on the basis that not all developers see. Coding or the value of coding as a personal goal in life). But bursts of this approach may deliver value when working on a more challenging area of code or algorithm.
29 Wednesday May 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Oracle, Packt, Technology
Although the book’s introduction says that its target audience is developers and architects the first chapter is a very good introduction to the ideas and goals of Complex Event Processing (CEP) for anyone in the IT industry. The chapter explains the ideas and goals of CEP illustrating them with easy to grasp real examples.
Possibly one if the best starts to a Packt book I’ve seen.
If your going to get stuck in with the more practical pieces then I’d start downloading the tools from Oracle as early as possible as there is several GBs of software. You might also consider cheating by downloading a prebuilt VirtualBox with the majority of the software already installed and configured.
28 Tuesday May 2013
Posted in Books, Oracle, Technology
I shall be reviewing the new Packt book on Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing (details at http://bit.ly/ZTpzCh). The full review will be posted here, but will probably tweet as I go (www.twitter.com/mp3monster). Given one of the authors is Alexandre Alves I have high hopes for the book given what I found when reviewing of his OSGi In Depth book he wrote for Manning.
22 Wednesday May 2013
Posted in Music
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Over the last few years it has become a common thing for artists (or more precisely record labels on behalf of artists) to offer the advance purchase of CDs with the offer of download of the album in an electronic format (MP3 or FLAC typically).
I have to admit I’ve plumped for the additional cost of this option a couple of time recently, falling for e impatient view that the CD will take time in the post and the download on release date will allow me to hear the album at the 1st opportunity.
But present purchases have just shown me to be a bit of a mug, as the CD has arrived a day or two before the official release date, allowing me to rip the album for myself and loading it onto a USB stick so I can hear it in the car 1st thing Monday morning on my way to work.
So, what is the point of the additional premium? The CD arrives early, it is faster for me to rip the CD myself (in fact modern Blu Ray drives can spin the CD so fast that it takes longer to login to a website for the download than the rip process).
So why not allow advance order purchases to download the MP3 version immediately? The risk of leak – well better to allow the MP3 to be downloaded rather than ripped as it means you can trace the leak by ‘water marking’ the download to a transaction. It can’t be the chat scoring because you can count e physical media (unless the real value is for the record company to count such purchases as 2 copies of the album in the sales stats).
I think going forward I’m going to stick to just physical plus personal ripping.
13 Monday May 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, General, Technology
I recently completed a review for Packt Publishing of some course videos on Netbeans 7 with JavaEE, which concentrated particularly at JSF and related technologies such as JPQL. The videos are a natural follow on from the author’s book Java EE 6 Development With NetBeans 7
I have to say that David Heffelfinger’s videos did a good job of walking through the basics of the technologies and would suggest that they’re worth checking out if you want to quickly get your head around this area of Java.
For more on this kind of thing checkout David’s blog – http://www.ensode.net/roller/dheffelfinger/
Only catch – I don’t know when the videos will get published officially at the moment.
Update:videos likely to be published mid June
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 