Red Herring Ceases Publication

One of my favorite magazines, Red Herring is shutting down. During the last three years of reading the magazine, I learnt a lot about different businesses, mostly upcoming ones as the magazine focussed most on the venture capital scene and technology companies during the dot-com boom. March will be the last issue of the magazine. I wonder what will happen of other new economy magazines.

Update: I received an email from Tony Perkins (co-founder of Red Herring and AlwaysOn) about his personal views on the closing of Red Herring and its potential revival that he has posted on AlwaysOn. I am sure Tony will keep alive the passion of Red Herring in the form of AlwaysOn.

Ten things to know about XDocs (Infopath)

Jon Udell writes about ten things you must know about Infopath (previously caled XDocs). From the Microsoft InfoPath preview site:

Microsoft InfoPath™ (previously code-named "XDocs"), is a new product in the Microsoft Office family and streamlines the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms. The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because InfoPath supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, InfoPath helps to connect information workers directly to organizational information and gives them the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact.

Jon further discusses InfoPath in his blog. Also check out this article on XML capabilities in Office 11.

Here's what I feel of Mike Tyson

Open this Photo Gallery and goto the last photograph (# 8). This is exactly what I feel about Iron Mike. Shut up now.

Perspective on Web Services

Another article on Web Services, this time by a credible source as Eric Newcomer (CTO at IONA). Eric discusses the evolution of Web Services and the roadblocks to a standardized world of Web Services. He writes:

..today we sit at a fork in the road of Web services evolution. There are two paths that the industry can take, with each path leading to a distinct and different future. One road leads to a truly standardized world where corporations fully reap the benefits of Web services by untangling the "spaghetti mess" of IT systems. The second road leads back to yesteryear, where proprietary systems ruled the day, maximizing vendor service and maintenance revenue, and killing end-user flexibility and return on investment.

Accepting that we have the core standards (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) in place, standardized and accepted by almost everyone, he says that the fight has reached the next level and this is where Security, transactions, reliable messaging and orchestration comes.

True, This is what is hampering the adoption and deployment of web services. Security is the primary concern but we've got a good start with WS-Security specification (and other related specs) but Orchestration and Messaging involves lots of players (few unheard of before) and quite diverse ones two. It would be interesting to see the tug of war between the Vendors and the standards bodies and hopefully we will have universally accepted standards for these also.

Microsoft goes after Spammers, Finally

Some days back I reported the reduction in spam that I noticed on my hotmail account. Well, That didn't last very long. Spam is back again to its glory days but looks like not for long. Microsoft has finally decided to go after the Spammers and has filed a so-called John Doe suit in the federal court for the northern district of California in San Jose. The suit doesn’t name defendants, but allows the plaintiff the power to issue subpoenas as part of the investigative phase of the trial.

Consolidate Database Servers

Last week's InformationWeek had a story on how many companies have database software that uses only 10% to 15% of capacity and how a startup Savantis Systems comes to the rescue for such companies.

The Savantis solution, dbSwitch™, maximizes database availability while minimizing the costs of hardware and software. The patent-pending dbSwitch technology allows data centers to pool database servers in order to leverage resources across multiple applications. The result is a Database Area Network (DAN), a unique network-based approach to the provisioning and management of database services. Servers and databases may be added to the DAN without requiring any changes to the DBMS or to database applications.

Over the years I have seen so many database servers getting wasted with just 40-50 GB data and I have also seen the opposite, where database rationing was the utmost priority. This product when released can certainly reduce the hardware costs and what more would you want in today's world. Keep an eye.

Ink-based form designer [ via Shawn A. Van Ness's Blog]

This is so cool, a pen-based forms design tool for Visual Studio.Net. This was demo'ed in VSLive! and Shawn writes that they wowed a late-evening tired crowd. I say who won't get wowed by such a tool, the dead ones are already turning up in their graves....:)

[Also posted at My .Net Weblog]

Google buys Pyra Labs (the makers of Blogger)

This is huge news with even huge implications. Read all about it in Dan Gillmor's blog. More to follow.

HTML Tree Graph

Found an implementation of HTML tree graph on an unknown weblog to me. I really liked it. Basically it uses XSLT to convert a XML file to pure HTML. But then this guy had used Java to convert the XML to HTML. Well, apparently one line does this in ASP.Net. This line:

<asp:Xml id="myXml" DocumentSource="tree.xml" TransformSource="tree.xslt" runat="server" />

Here's the output:


[Also posted at My .Net Weblog]

The J2EE v .NET 'split' is nothing to do with Web services [via WebServices.org]

Tom Welsh tries to clear confusing and misunderstood view that industry is "split" because some organizations are basing their Web services on J2EE, while others prefer .Net. In an article on The Register he writes:

If everyone was ever going to settle for using nothing but Windows, they could all interoperate using COM+ or .Net Remoting. Or if we all agreed to standardise on J2EE, all we would need would be RMI and JMS. Actually, CORBA would have done the trick across all platforms, but it was "politically" unacceptable - meaning that Microsoft (among others) was so committed to talking it down that a U-turn would have involved too much loss of face. The Web services initiative could turn out to be IT's Project Apollo, in that it aims to open up a whole new application space that has hitherto been largely inaccessible. That space comprises fast, smooth, reliable automated interoperation between disparate computer systems, even those that belong to different corporate networks. Like Apollo, it will be a long job, because a set of wholly new technical problems needs to be solved - and before they can be solved, they have to be identified. But success is likely in the long term, simply because everyone has joined forces in the common cause.

Good read.

Microsoft muscles into business reporting

CNet News.com reports:

Microsoft plans to embed a business-reporting feature into its SQL Server database software, a move that will likely cause jitters among specialized business-reporting software companies.

I love companies throwing such surprises. This will be very interesting to see how Crystal Decisions and other vendors react to this development. Crystal Decisions already ships Crystal Reports with Visual Studio.Net.

[Also posted at My .Net Weblog]

Web Service-Oriented Architecture [Via CapeBlog]

Good article on Web services oriented architecture by the Cape Science CEO, Annraí O'Toole.

This article discusses some historic approaches to building service-oriented architectures and outlines the key failures of previous technologies. In particular, this article shows how Web Services technologies, through the provision of ubiquitous, Internet-based, and document-oriented technologies, provide the compelling foundation for implementing Web Service-oriented architectures, and consequently, that Web Services represent the best solution to business integration.

Stop the Press: Software Delivered to Schedule!

One of my favourite sites, Software Reality has an article comparing software development to publishing a newspaper.

Your average programmer has many fine qualities. Timeliness, however, is not normally considered one of them. If software were delivered along the same lines as your daily newspaper - with all the features you expect and according to a predictable schedule - our customers would be a lot happier.

Jakob Nielsen: Homepage Real Estate Allocation

Jakob Nilesen in his latest alertbox article:

On average, sample sites evenly distributed valuable screen space between content, navigation, fluff, blank areas, and system overhead. Areas of user interest should occupy more than the current 39%.

Creating a Culture of Ideas

Nicholas Negroponte says expertise is overrated. To build a nation of innovators, we should focus on youth, diversity, and collaboration.

India on the Security Council

Thomas Friedman writes in this article (registration required) on New York Times:

Sometimes I wish that the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council could be chosen like the starting five for the N.B.A. All-Star team — with a vote by the fans. If so, I would certainly vote France off the Council and replace it with India. Then the perm-five would be Russia, China, India, Britain and the United States. That's more like it.

Why replace France with India? Because India is the world's biggest democracy, the world's largest Hindu nation and the world's second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it's become silly. India has grown out of that game. India may be ambivalent about war in Iraq, but it comes to its ambivalence honestly. Also, France can't see how the world has changed since the end of the cold war. India can.

Which Indian won't agree, I do. But then again, Is this sudden and unseen favoritism for India, just because of France's position on Iraq. On a related note, France backs India over Security Council seat. Interesting. I don't get politics and I never will.
Update: Times of India relates this story to the benefits India can reap because of US-Iraq conflict.

Checkout my .Net blog

Checkout my new .Net blog at http://dotnetweblogs.com/DSharma/ and the corresponding RSS feed. While there you can also check the other .Net Weblogs. If you are one of those who use News Aggregators, here is the OPML file and dotnetweblogs RSS feed.

Web services Adoption:Hype Ratio

We all know that there is too much hype surrounding Web Services. Personally I think hype for a new technology is good but this hype should be retained under the walls of reality. XML-Journal has an article discussing the Adoption:Hype Ratio of web services.

Even today, I'm frequently faced with those who are disappointed at the progress of XML and Web services. My stock answer to skeptical questions about XML adoption is to talk instead about the "Adoption:Hype" ratio and agree that its value is at or near zero. The many successful projects cannot possibly match the infinite hype associated with the technologies.

Loss of Comments

We had a disruption in the Commenting service provided by Haloscan this morning which lead to loss of few comments. It's happening for the first time with us so I won't say bad words yet but it's irritating. Sorry guys if you commented on something and don't find your comments now.