01.09.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:54 pm by yee
CNI2006fall EDUCAUSE CONNECT has some good interviews to listen to get a feel for the national IT scene in higher education.
Mashups mix data into global service : Nature is a one-year old article on mashups in scientific computation:
Will 2006 be the year of the mashup? Originally used to describe the mixing together of musical tracks, the term now refers to websites that weave data from different sources into a new service. They are becoming increasingly popular, especially for plotting data on maps, covering anything from cafés offering wireless Internet access to traffic conditions. And advocates say they could fundamentally change many areas of science — if researchers can be persuaded to share their data.
I got to remember to check in on the webcasts in early March for this fascinating conference on the future of libraries: De Lange Conference VI Emerging Libraries De Lange Conference Rice University.
Oren Sreebny's Weblog: (CSG 2007) Thursday workshop on collaboration tools:
….we have a tremendous proliferation of new species of software appearing almost on a daily basis and combining and evolving at a very rapid rate, making it very difficult to figure out which ones we should engage with at an enterprise level, or even how to construct a meaningful taxonomy of these applications.
Some recent observations:
- There is an increasing disconnect between the IT capabilities available to individuals, especially cutting-edge innovative individuals (as well as "ordinary people") and what the institution is providing.
- UCB IT needs to respond to both end-users and purveyors of enterprise computing hardware and services.
- Many, many of the tools of Web 2.0 can be used to support/enhance teaching and research. Of course, it takes some learning, reflection, and experimentation to do so.
- I'd like to learn more about Information Technology Infrastructure Library - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (ITIL).
Wondering what how to keep UC Berkeley competitive in an increasingly "flat world", I found the essay Berkeley and braving the new flat world by Richard Newton (who just passed away at the much too young age of 55) heartening:
I believe we at Berkeley must simply double-down on our efforts to identify and bring the best and brightest here to Berkeley, as undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, visiting scholars and faculty, in a strategy I call “intellectual insourcing.” We must work harder than we ever have before to build upon and extend our regional lead as the most important cradle of discovery and innovation in the world by assembling a critical mass of talent right here in the Bay Area. Ultimately, I believe such a strategy is the most important way Berkeley Engineering can help create a sizeable “bump”—ideally a mountain—on this new flat world.
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12.03.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:19 pm by yee
I'm rather sympathetic to the view that IT Architects Must Write Code — or at least should be capable of writing prototyping code.
I find A Conversation with Werner Vogels quite an inspiring picture of what we might be able to build at UC.
Rice University News & Media:
Rice University and IBM will collaborate on the development of an open-standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will help higher education institutions tie together their increasingly diverse academic software applications. The collaboration is supported in part by IBM’s Shared University Research award program, created to exemplify the deep partnership between academia and the industry to explore research in areas essential to innovation. Through the award and software from the IBM Academic Initiative, IBM has donated IBM BladeCenter hardware technology, software for an SOA platform and related services valued at $700,000.
Bubble redux? Perspectives CNET News.com:
You won't find the big ideas that ignited breakthrough developments during this phase. With all due respect to their inventors, mashups don't represent the apex of Silicon Valley's creative genius. The truly exciting stuff still waits over the horizon. That's where things are going to get more interesting.
MIT to try Python for introductory CS course (AMK's Journal):
Philosophically, the material tries to follow a “practice-theory-practice” model: First, a task is presented and students work on it. Then, students learn the theory that underlies the problem presented, and finally the students tackle the problem again, given these better techniques, Kaelbling said.
» Interested in learning how to develop mashups? Welcome to Mashup U. Online Between the Lines ZDNet.com:
My personal belief is that mashup style software development, as ecosytems go, will easily overtake most other software development ecosystems in number of developers and applications. To help acclerate that process, ZDNet, in conjunction with Mashup University (the event) now brings Mashup U directly to you, on your desktop at no cost to you.
The "circle of life" — NonCartoonist's comment on "Interested in learning how to develop mashups? Welcome to Mashup U. Online" TalkBack on ZDNet:
So, should we not use mash ups because they are easy to design and then hard to work with? No. They are part of the normal development process. "Pieces parts" or "Frankenstein" systems (now called "mash ups") typically break ground in a new area. Once the paradigm is established the "vertical solutions" that are easier to maintain move in and take over. Mash ups (or what ever their next "nom de querre" will be) move on to break new ground in a new area. It's all part of the cirle of life…
Possible alternatives to jython:
Nelson's Weblog: tech / bad / whySoapSucks:
As someone who bears some past responsibility for well used SOAP services (Google's APIs for search and AdWords) let me say now I'd never choose to use SOAP and WSDL again. I was wrong.
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10.31.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:03 pm by yee
I'm looking forward to seeing how Christopher Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University, plans to relate cyberinfrastructure to learning technologies at his talk Teaching and Learning via Cyberinfrastructure on Nov 7, 2006. Much of the cyberinfrastructure discussion I've seen has focused on the research implications of this new tech-infrastructure. Will Dede help us think about the learning implications? The abstract for the talk is:
The National Science Foundation is evolving an ambitious vision of cyberinfrastructure–the integration of computing, data, networks, digitally enabled sensors, observatories, and experimental facilities. As the nation begins to actualize this vision, novel, powerful capabilities are emerging for educational simulation, visualization, and real-time data collection. Through cyberinfrastructure, students in any location could conduct sophisticated inquiry activities across barriers of distance and time, customizing their learning portals and participating in virtual communities. Instructors could use sophisticated methods of assessment based on real-time collection of information about individual student performance. What are the implications of this initiative for practice and policy today?
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Posted in Uncategorized at 2:34 am by yee
This morning, several of my colleagues and I listened to Planning and Delivering Service-Oriented Architecture, presented by Marty Backer and Christopher De Rosa, both of UCSD. (See the accompanying Powerpoint slides. Audio is also available from the presentation page.) I will recommend this talk to my colleagues and managers — there is a lot there.
Here I want to record the questions I asked during the session and my summary of the answers given:
- Have you used SOA in the context of academic/scholarly applications or only for administrative apps? Answer: There is a new app for academic personnel, which will include scholarly works.
- Have you consciously applied what we learn from mashups and other Web 2.0 approaches to SOA? That is, more lightweight service invocations (REST instead of SOAP, for instance.) Answer: Yes, they have followed mashups fairly closely. Their system does support multiple protocols. They build an internal service component and then wrap them. SOAP/WSDL…very interested in REST….lots of scripting language usage on campus.
- What type of education/traiing efforts are you putting into place for UCSD developers AND managers? Answer: The slides gives some answers.
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10.26.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:37 am by yee
Just hot off the press: start Zotero Developer Documentation. Developers, start your engines! (I've printed them out already and am already pondering how I'm supposed to add data from an external process without directly touching the zotero.sqlite file….)
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Posted in Uncategorized at 1:33 am by yee
Today, after receiving my book order of Understanding Enterprise SOA and Semantics in Business Systems: The Savvy Managers Guide from amazon.com, I set out to start re-reading them in earnest. I'm looking to them to help shape my understanding of service-oriented architecture and the infrastructure we need to build for better data services on campus. There's lot of hype around SOA; I'm trying to distill some concrete actions I can recommend for my colleagues and me to take with respect to SOA. Furthermore, how can I explain this topic quickly and effectively to people throughout the organization, specifically for my context, which is higher education.
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10.23.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:27 pm by yee
I often turn to Educause for a specifically higher ed take on information technology. Lately, I've started wondering how other universities are responding to all the talk and much hype around service oriented architectures. A good place to start is the Service-oriented Architecture section on the Educause website. I've printed out the slides from a talk on SOA by Jim Phelps of University of Wisconsin-Madison earlier this year. Has UW-Madison actually successfully implemented a SOA process?
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09.21.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:54 am by yee
A friend just asked me how the trackback mechanism actually works. I'll refer him to the trackback technical specification
but want to link to an entry in my JazzUpTheWeb blog to see whether a trackback shows up.
later: yes, the reference worked but I learned that it's a pingback, not a trackback, that is being used in wordpress.com.
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09.19.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:55 pm by yee
I'm reading Dave McComb's Semantics in Business Systems: The Savvy Managers Guide, thanks to my colleague Thom King. Skimming the book left me with the impression that I can grok the essential message of the book but I won't be able to get to the real depths unless I carefully re-read the book. To that end, I begin at the end of the book with Chapter 15 ("Getting Started"). Two lines strike me:
At this point you should be experimenting with OWL and RDF, Web Services, and message brokers, if you haven't already done so. You should also been experimenting with some of the more abstract concepts brought up here, such as semantically inspired elicitation and data profiling as a means to find meaning."
and
build a message model as the basis of your integration efforts
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08.08.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:28 pm by yee
As a data architect, though I'm usually focused on the backend systems, I also deal with clients. I'm also part of a larger organization that deals with with many customers beyond my area of work. I will have to refer the folks designing our customer service operation to a recent article by David Pogue, Business 101: Quality Customer Service Breeds Customer Loyalty - New York Times:
What are they, nuts!? They are actually *inviting* people to call them for free technical support? Don’t they have any idea how that idea will kill their revenue stream? Haven’t they learned anything from the computer industry?
Now, this isn’t really a review of the Pioneer AVIC-D2, although I’m generally happy with it. [....]
No, this is actually a review of the company and its policies. The fact that 25 readers independently wrote to recommend Crutchfield tells me that this hyper-service-oriented approach has succeeded; the company has essentially cornered its market and generated a massive audience of rabid and repeat customers.
I have found the phone service of most companies I've dealt with to be uninspiring. IBM has (or had) highly competent support for its Thinkpads. Apple Computer hasn't treated me that well with a close-lipped, pseudo-friendly attitude. Now, Konica-Minolta's support for its color laser printers has impressed me thoroughly. Each of the several times I've called (save for one instance) has gotten me a friendly, knowledgeable, straightforward, and helpful service agent.
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