29 Monday Aug 2011
I’ve been looking after the Basingstoke Tapper’s web site for some was now. I ave to admit that the site was starting to get a bit stale. But now I’ve handed on the domain to new blood. I’m kind of sad to be passing it on, but time for new blood and probably a relaunch.
29 Monday Aug 2011
Posted in Music
Tags
I’ve finally finishers reading the weighty volume on Jac Holzman’s and Elektra records. Elektra as you probably know was probably one of the most influential indie labels thought brought us the likes of The Doors. But as a label it had more humble beginnings with a lot of Folk and dare I say world music (long before we called it that).
Reading of the book is a little slow to start with – probably because I’m not so familiar with early New York folk (pre Dylan) and trying to place things into the context of what I do know. But as things move on the book becomes more and more engrossing. It is amazing to see what Elektra and Jac achieved putting the artist and music before all else (rather the than manufactured X Factor world).
having finished one substantial music book, I’ve jumped straight in with another – The Man Who Recorded The World, A Biography of Alan Lomax. Unlike Elektra, I only know the smallest amount about Lomax, namely his contribution to music history for recording original African American music. I’ve not read all the book yet, but it’s a very engaging start. If you want to know more about the author and the book then go to http://www.johnszwed.com/about-the-book
Mixed in with this is the reading technical books such as parts of Thomas Erl’s SOA Book series, and some light reading with the like of Iain M Bank’s Surface Detail.
21 Sunday Aug 2011
Posted in Music
Tags
11 Saturday Jun 2011
Posted in General
A couple of pics from Peter Kay at the O2
10 Tuesday May 2011
Posted in General
29 Friday Apr 2011
Posted in Books, Technology
OSGi In Depth
When I first came across OSGI In Depth (was originally called Enterprise OSGi In Action during its Manning draft stages) I had to ask myself whether the same publishing house could justify another book on OSGi when they had already published OSGi In Action a year or so before.
Having now read both I have to say that there is a case for both, yes there is a degree of overlap – but that is necessary to set background. The In Depth book is very much geared up for architects and looks at the technology from a architecture and design consideration with some very honest insights and good practices. The In Action is better suited to developers that need to know about all the different interfaces. The two books are very complimentary, where to start obviously depends upon where you’re approaching OSGi from.
In Depth can at times feel feel a little be discouraging read, but upon reflection what you’re reading is actually very honest worts and all set of insights. Lets be honest how many J2EE books go into the challenges, and headaches of getting entity EJBs to be highly performant, not to mention the deployment challenges that could be faced with versioning of the underlying database if your selling production solutions that should be easy to upgrade.
When you get past this, there are some seriously valuable insights into possible dead ends that you could go down or catch you out later on if you don’t do that up front thinking about how you want to package, deploy and upgrade during the earlier phases of a development programme.
The book illustrates the way to address a number of these, and provides a number of design patterns. The book does miss a trick of providing these patterns as an appendix where they can be easily referred to for reference only.
Over all this is a valuable read, particularly you’re looking at OSGi from an architectural perspective (as I am). Rather than try and review each chapter I have developed a mind map to help show content of each part of the book (of course this means I have a memory jog if I need to come back to specific issues). The mind map of this can be found at http://www.mp3monster.org/new/techie/MindMaps/OSGi-In-Depth.shtml
28 Monday Feb 2011
Posted in Books, mindmap, Technology
I’ve been reading Beyond Software Architecture – although there is nothing particularly new here, it was useful in helping me distill all the different things that as an Architect I try to take into account. Given the process of distilling thoughts I ended up choosing to mind map my thoughts. The masp can be found here.
27 Sunday Feb 2011
Posted in General
25 Friday Feb 2011
08 Saturday Jan 2011
Another playlist from Phill Jupitus’ Good Morning Nantwich
Chapter 12 – Pleased to Meet You (RB Shot JR)
check back I’ll post more of the playlists
