Architecture

Enterprise and Solution Architect Certification & Resources

OSI 7 Layer Model

Wikipedia Note


Internetworking Basics

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia

LInked Data

Linked Data Home

Web of Data

Linked Data Blog


Linking Open Data

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

Ontologies Repositories

DAML Ontology Library

Information Interpretation and Integration Conference

SHOE by University of Maryland. Project has shifted to http://www.mindswap.org/

METEOR - S

METEOR-S: Semantic Web Services and Processes

GeoNames Ontology

Geospatial semantic information from GeoNames

XML Mapping Tools

Additional tools for XML:

Altova MapForce

StylusStudio


Liquid XML


XML Exchanger

Mapping SQL Databases to XML

sqlxml

Schema Mapping

Starting a research into Schema Mapping (XML-based)

Clio by IBM Almaden Research Centre

ToMAS

There is also one on Semantic Mappings between different data model.
MapOnto

Also see Knowledge Management Lab, University of Toronto.

Other references:
Mavericks8020 Blog

Schema Mapping Discovery from Data Instances

JPA ORM

Towards a Theory of Schema-Mapping Optimization

Using Schema Mapping to Facilitate Data Integration

Solutions for caBIG Interoperability using Semantic Annotations for WSDL (Healthcare)

Business Rules Management - ILOG

How to sell BRM to your Management?

Disruptive Technology - CTOVision.com

Disruptive IT

Disruptive Technologies List Updated

Ready for Dual Screen Laptop?

http://www.gscreencorp.com/

http://gizmodo.com/5346996/gscreens-dual+screen-spacebook-coming-soonish

Webtop OS

G.ho.st

Glide OS

icloud

Business and Web 2.0

McKinsey spent 3 years to survey on how Web 2.0 impacts the business world.

Here is the result, in an interactive format : )

Business and Web 2.0: An Interactive Feature

Rulebook Management

(Extracted from
Ronald G. Ross, "What You Need to Know About Rulebook Management," Business Rules Journal, Vol. 10, No. 9 (Sep. 2009),
)
Table 3–1. FAQs a General Rulebook System (GRBS) Should Support.

* To which areas of the business does a business rule apply?

* What work or decision-making tasks does a business rule guide?

* Where is a business rule implemented?

* In what jurisdictions is a business rule enforced?

* What purpose does a business rule serve?

* When was a business rule created?

* When did a business rule become effective?

* Where and when has the business rule been published?

* Are there previous versions of a business rule?

* Is a business rule currently in effect?

* Has a business rule been retired or replaced, and if so, when and why?

* Who is responsible for a business rule?

* What influenced the creation or modification of a business rule?

* Who can answer particular kinds of questions about a business rule?

* Who has been involved with a business rule over time, and in what way?

* Has the business rule been adopted by, or from, some outside community of practice?

* Where can more information about a business rule be found?

Introduction to Ontology

Terry Halpin, "Ontological Modeling (Part 1)," Business Rules Journal, Vol. 10, No. 9 (Sep. 2009)

Complex Event Processing

Complex Event Processing blog

Programming Algorithms

My first encounter with this topic.

So I have collated a list of references:

Computer Programming Algorithms Directory

Nist Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

Object Oriented Programming Web

Berkeley Programming + Algorithms

Revision Control Systems again

Unlike CVS which operates on a centralized, client-server model, Git and Mercurial operates in a distributed manner.

bnet" Teamwork Don'ts

Semantic For Business Process

Finally! Semantic Utilised for Process Management within and between Enterprises (SUPER) is one of the first implementations.

On Regular Expressions ...

8 Regular Expressions You Should Know

On Marketing

By Seith Godin



Emotional Hooks for B2B Selling

Web Squared [World after Web 2.0]

Secured Socket Layer (SSL)

Intro to SSL by Sun


Introduction to PKI by Sun

Programming with Java XML Digital Signature API by Sun

Generating and Verifying Digital Signatures by Sun

SSL/TLS Strong Encryption: An Introduction by Apache HTTP Server

Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE) by Sun

Introducing SSL and Certificates using SSLeay by Frederick J. Hirsch from The Open Group Research Institute

SSL is also known as Transport Layer Security (TLS).

More on VirtualBox, Sun's Virtualization Machine

64-Bits Guests even though you are using a 32-Bit host

RunMyProcess: One of Gartner's Cool Vendor 2009 for BPM

RunMyProcess

Java Software License Management

There aren't many open source tools when it comes to managing licenses for the Java Application you have developed. Here are the ancient few:

TrueLicense

JLicense

A popular UI for license management is the use of Wizard class in Java Swing package.

One would also have to understand the basic about generating paired keys and certificates and signatures.

One of the key things I found for such a tool is the use of Java Preferences API to keep the state of the license ... however, it also comes with certain loopholes.

In comparison, there are aplenty commercial ones such as Agilis's.

Transforming Software Architecture with Web as Platform

A presentation by Dion Hinchcliffe on Transforming Software Architecture with Web as Platform during QCon.

Free Vector Maps for download (and they are editable)

This author has a good starting list of available vector maps (free and commercial).

Google Wave: Developer Preview

Google's New Browser Frontier: 3D

O3D API

Google's Web Element

Cool tool from Google. Google Web Element

Microsoft's new search engine: From Kumo to Bing

Microsoft Bing

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Blog

Schwartz's Blog

U.S Governement Initiative to share Data

Data.gov

Learning Java

JavaBlackBelt - Tour from John Rizzo on Vimeo.

Open Government Data Initiative by Microsoft

To promote sharing of public data among government agencies and consumable by methods such as REST and Web Services.

Open Government Data Initiative




Powered by Microsoft's cloud services, Azure

Software Testing

Sad to say, this is often the neglected portion of software development.

Here are some resources:

TestingReflections

SearchSoftwareQuality

Yahoo Agile-Testing

ThoughtsOnQAEngineering

OpenOffice Base

Native database for OpenOffice suite, OpenOffice Base

It is developed based on an open-source java, SQL database system, HSQLDB

One of the cool feature is user can create form, extracting data from various databases based on queries onto a single form

ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight

ArcGIS is one of the few who have jumped onto the Silverlight bandwagon

ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight
Still in beta though

Microsoft Virtual Earth for Silverlight

The long awaited integration of Virtual Earth and Silverlight is finally here

Virtual Earth home

Here are some early preview of what it can do from blogs:
Synergist
Virtual Earth, An Evangelist Blog

Microsoft Research

In the world of microsoft ... here are some sites to stay in touch:

Microsoft Research

And in the area of search, here are Microsoft's 2 new research:

GeoLife
Location based social networking service based on Virtual Earth

RenLiFang
Mine online data to track human relationships

HealthCare

IT has its tentacles all over in various industries. HealthCare is one of them

OpenHealth Natural Lanaguage Processing

Microsoft Amalga

OpenOffice.org (aka OOo) Java Libraries

Here are some of the available java libraries for those who are developing their applications on top of OpenOffice:

ODF Toolkit: De-facto by OASIS

jOpenDocument: Promising one ...

The official site (by OASIS) for OpenDocumentFormat is @OpenDocument.

Chrome Experiments

Something interesting from Google's Chrome browser.

Non-relational Databases

Came across this term though. I have heard of XML-databases. These are really different.

Mongo DB - Schema-free, document-oriented data store. Written in C++

Apache CouchDB - document-oriented data store.

Drizzle DB - Optimized for cloud and NET application

Map Technology

The world of map technologies is really dazzling ...

One of the leaders (if not the leader) is Refractions Research. Their open-source products are incredible -
Geoserver - a map server that dishes out maps in various projects, style and overlapping layers. It supports open standards for map delivery such as Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS). WFS provides more functionality for querying the features of the map such as features within an area and changing the styling. Styling is defined in an open standard, Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD).
uDig - A eclipse desktop client for map development. Loads most map file formats and provide styling capability.
PostGIS - A spatial database

Another comparable open source product to uDig is OpenJUMP.

On the client side, there is DeepEarth, a silverlight-based user interface for map navigation. Supports tiling, panning, zoom, search, pins, geometry and various map sources (e.g. Virtual Earth, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, WMS)

Typically, the client side uses at least 4 coordinate systems:

• Tiling (position of tiles, number of tiles)
• Geographical positions (most commonly used is latitude and longitude)
• Logical positions (from 0 to 1)
• Pixel positions (X and Y from a reference point which is usually the top left corner of a tile)

Map projections are extremely important. Earth is round, but on the screen, it is flat. Here is a list of spatial references.

In the commercial world, there is TatukGIS.

Other map providers include PTV AG.

A popular file format for maps are ShapeFiles (*.shp)

For more information on tiling system, here is an article from Microsoft for Bing Map

All this in a span of 2 months.

Speed Test for your Broadband

Ever wonder what is your broadband speed (upload, download)?

Find out from here:

SpeedTest

Towards true SOA: Cloud Computing

What is Cloud Computing?

How to make a good presentation

Here is a presentation by Guy Kawasaki on how to make a good presentation (10-20-30 rule)

Here is another good advice on how to make a good presentation

Microsoft Technologies

And when you think Sun's Java is cool, there is also Microsoft's range of products.

Windows Presentation Framework

And also this site: WPF MSDN site

Windows Communication Framework

A framework to manage Web Services. For those that was born in my era where we have to go through numerous procedures to create a Web Service, would definitely agree with me that the process to create Web Services these days are over-simplified (which is a good thing).

I also have the opportunity to explore the ASP .NET 2.0 Membership and Roles Management technologies for access control. Here is another link on Roles Management and a How-to guide on membership. This also leads me to Windows Authentication.   

Unlike Java, which is true object-oriented, Microsoft's C# is more towards procedural although it claims to be object-oriented.

One of the strategy I adopt for Microsoft' technologies is to understand the concepts (through their MSDN sites and basic tutorial) first. This is crucial. Microsoft's technology tends to bombard you with lots of similarly different technologies.

Rich Client Application War

3 big companies, 3 fantastic technologies:

JavaFX
From Sun Microsystem

Silverlight
From Microsoft

Adobe RIA
From Adobe

SQL Databases

MySQL
Bought over by Sun Microsystem

PostgreSQL

Oracle SQL Database

HSQLDB

JDBC connectors can be used to connect to all these databases

Reports Generation Tools

These software enable users to pull data from various data sources, from flat files to databases, to generate reports for almost all purposes. However, in my humble opinion, usability is the key. Do you want a developer to create a report? Or do you want your business analyst to churn out the report? Or with a more ambitious goal, the Management?

Jasper Reports
Open-source: GNU Public License
Designer: iReports

OpenReports
Open-source: GNU Public License

DataVision
Open-source: Apache Version 2.0 License

Eclipse Business Reporting and Intelligent Tool (BIRT)
Open-source: Eclipse License

jFreeReport
Now known as Pentaho Reporting

jXLS

Crystal Report
Proprietary (SAP)

Java Reflection, Java Beans and Serialization

Java Technologies are really fascinating.

Java Reflection API
Used to modify or examine runtime behaviour of applications running in JVM.

Java Beans
JavaBeans™ is:
portable
platform-independent component model.

Serialization
To quote from JavaBeans tutorial, "object serialization means converting an object into a data stream and writing it to storage. Any applet, application, or tool that uses that bean can then "reconstitute" it by deserialization. The object is then restored to its original state."

XML DB

As XML is gaining traction in the software industry, using an XML repository to support XML transactions and queries seems logical to improve performance and scalability.

eXist is an open source XML database management system. By storing XML data as XML data model, it uses XQuery and XPath technologies for indexing and querying.

There are two modes of running this eXist: remote and embedded. In embedded mode, the application runs in the same Java Virtual Machine as the client application. Besides using XML:DB APIs, I found out that several other technologies are used to enabled one to embed applications onto another:

jGroups
JGroups is a toolkit for reliable multicast communication.

jLine
JLine is a Java library for handling console input.

XACML
An access control policy evaluation engine written entirely in the Java(tm) programming language.

Quartz
A fully-featured, open-source job scheduling system that can be integrated with or used together with any J2EE or J2SE application virtually.

XML-RPC
It's a specification and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the WWW using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding.

Commons Pool
Enables pooing of objects

ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition)
A language tool that provides a framework to construct recognizers, interpreters, compilers and translators from grammatical descriptions specified in various target languages.

About minskytecharena

In my journey to realise my dream to be a CTO/CIO of my own global conglomerate, I would like to note down the various technologies that I have come across and highlight those that I find them notable.

It also serves as my own repository of technologies at my disposal.