http://blog.ribomation.com Some random comments on software development Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:28:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Last week (11 mars 2010), I gave an evening seminar for consultant company in central Stockholm, regarding the future of Java, in the aftermath of Oracle's acquistion of SUN. I gave my view points on the evolution of the platform and the language. My primary point was the bright future ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2010/03/16/the-future-of-java/ Last week (Mars 11, 2010), I gave a seminar (in Swedish) regarding cloud computing in general and the security aspects in particular, for HAS 4.0. HAS is an annual course in security with a very broad perspective, organized by Logica and Cornerstone. Here are my slides from my two hour presentation. Cloud ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2010/03/16/cloud-computing-and-security/ Yesterday evening I gave a seminar about Cloud Computing with the bias towards testing. I have uploaded my slides to SlideShare (see below). Cloud Computing Och Testning FöR DataföReningen 2010 02 24 FinalView more presentations from Ribomation. http://blog.ribomation.com/2010/02/25/cloud-computing-and-testing/ There has been some amount of snow this winter, here in Sweden. Well, we usually do have snow during the winter, but this amount is plain ridiculous. Who was that guy talking about global warming, was it Al Gone or Al Wrong? http://blog.ribomation.com/2010/02/21/we-got-some-snow/ Today, I gave a seminar (in Swedish) about what is Cloud Computing and how to use it. Here are my slides from the presentation. Vad är Cloud Computing, easyFairs, 17 feb 2010View more presentations from Ribomation. http://blog.ribomation.com/2010/02/17/cloud-computing-seminar-at-easyfairs-it-show/ I have recently start to learn programming Android. It's Java, but the environment is very, very different from ordinary server and/or desktop Java programming. Mostly because the device is limited in all sorts of resources. Therefore, the API puts some burden on the lone hacker. Anyway, I needed a simple tool ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2010/01/21/droidscreen/ I have been, sort of, away from this blog for a while. Primarily this comes from me being occupied with lots of other stuff. The past couple of months I have been busy with teaching/training most of the time. I have given several courses over a broad spectrum. It has been ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2010/01/21/back-again/ Just checking how easy it is to write a blog post using my HTC Hero Android phone with wpToGo. Although the typing on the soft keyboard is a pain. http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/10/03/posting-from-my-android-phone/ Last Wednesday I gave an internal seminar for a well-known and large Swedish company. The topic was on software development and I had decided to talk about my reflections/observation of software project failures. The major theme of the speech was the paradox of at one hand we have seen a tremendous ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/09/13/trends-in-application-development/ Today I gave two seminars (2 hours each) in Stockholm. The first, before lunch, was about Cloud Computing and the second, after lunch, was an gentle introduction to Groovy and Grails. Here a the slides PDF (in Swedish) Vad är Cloud Computing? Vad är Groovy och Grails? I will repeat these seminars in Gothenburg ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/09/08/seminars-in-cloud-computing-and-groovygrails/ As a response to my crashed firewall, I decided to retire my hobby mail server running Postfix/Dovecot on Ubuntu Server. Instead I have decided to join the masses and go for a hosted exchange service instead. For a die-hard Linux freak as yours truly, this sucks. However, on the flip ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/09/03/mail-migration/ Last week I was away from home/office the whole week giving for the first time my Erlang course in Linköping (200 km south of Stockholm). A day after my departure, my firewall crashed due to some hardware failure. It has been very frustrating 'watching' from a distant position no access ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/08/23/crashed-firewall/ During my work with the course-ware of a new Erlang course, I experimented with one of the programming assignments to compare the threading performance of Erlang versus Java. The assignment is one of the classical programs from teaching concurrent programming: How to generate prime numbers using a pipeline of sieve ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/08/06/generating-prime-numbers-with-erlang-and-java/ The programming language Erlang is based on micro-threads and asynchronous message passing. There is a (naive) belief that critical section problems cannot arise in languages based solely on message passing. The justification for this stand-point is the absence of mutex synchronization primitives, which is absolutely essential in shared-data based concurrent ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/07/31/the-critical-section-problem-in-erlang/ I just finished reading the paper A History of Erlang by its inventor Joe Armstrong. It's really a fascinating story and I can really recommend reading Joe's own words regarding the invention and development of the language. Back in the late 80's and beginning of the 90s I spent some time ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/06/28/the-ups-and-downs-of-erlang/ Back in January 2005 I joined an existing San Francisco based company named Wily Technology. This was the beginning of a few years of hectic traveling, hacking and trouble-shooting. Meaning I traveled around in Europe, mostly UK and Germany, working at customer sites (some very large banks) helping them with ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/06/26/introscope-extensions/ When re-launched Ribomation in April this year I hastely re-organized the web site as well, moving this blog into blog.ribomation.com and setting up the new 'corporate' site using Drupal. Something I (intentionally) left for a later time was making a new home for RiboUtils, my over the years collection of ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/06/26/new-organization-of-riboutils/ This week I gave the same seminar regarding "What is Cloud Computing" in both Stockholm and Göteborg, here in Sweden. You can watch the video from the Stockholm event. The speech language is in Swedish and the length is around one and a half hour. The video format is Adobe Flash, ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/05/15/video-from-my-cloud-computing-seminar/ I have recently made some programming using Hadoop, which is a framework for massive data processing over many numbers of servers. Hadoop reads input data from (large) files and performs MapReduce data reductions. One method of reading is input is decompressing GZIP:ed files. Java has built-in support for reading gzipped stream ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/05/07/comparison-of-decompress-ways-in-hadoop/ During the 90s I was running my own company Ribomation, devoted to training (and consulting) in advanced software development areas. In the beginning it was mostly C, C++, OOAD and threads programming in Linux. Towards the end of the 90s, it was Java only - all sorts of Java related ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/04/05/im-re-launching-ribomation/ Here in Sweden the spring has finally arrived and one of the duties I have to do is switching from winter to summer tires on my car. I did that this morning and while waiting in the garage I was reading the two articles about Actor concurrency in JavaWorld. The ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/04/03/using-tmi-instead-of-actors/ The second day of Jfokus was an ordinary conference day, with separate tracks and many talks to choose between. JavaFX The key note talk at the beginning described JavaFX, SUNs new "SilverLight and Flash" killer. The demo showing how to flip through a book with very realistic behaviour, was impressive. On the ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/01/28/scala-seems-to-be-fun/ Today I attended the first day of the two-day JFokus conference in central Stockholm. In just three years it has become one of the major Java events in the Scandinavian region. The first day was composed of two half-day sessions. I decided to go for websockets before lunch and performance ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2009/01/28/websockets-is-the-way-forward-of-pure-web-applications/ Cloud computing is a general term for a public accessible virtualization system. Virtualization + DataCenter + PublicAccess = CloudComputing Although there are more than one provider and others to follow, Amazon (AWS) has pioneered the field and I will refer to AWS only when describing hands-on procedures. Sign Up The first thing to do ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2008/12/12/how-to-jump-into-the-cloud/ Nowadays, there are many services provided by Amazon WebServices (from now on referred to as AWS). Names and acronyms such as S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, SimpleDB, CloudFront, EBS, EIA are swirling around. I intend not to describe all of these, rather I will concentrate on the second acronym; EC2 (Elastic ... http://blog.ribomation.com/2008/12/09/whats-in-the-cloud/