Version 1.4 of Axis2 was released five days ago. I was trying to download it, but I'm getting an internal server error when I try to get to the download page of version 1.4. I sent an email to the webmaster, but until they get that fixed, you can download it from any mirror. Well, I'm currently downloading it from http://apache.hoxt.com/ws/axis2/1_4/. Thought you'd like to know, in case you want to download it and face the same problem.
EDIT 8 May 2008:
Download link in apache website now working
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Bubble Wrap, Hani Suleiman and Logging Abstraction
Let's imagine that you are in an antique shop and a beautiful vase or a statue caught your eye and you thought of buying it, either for yourself or as a gift for a friend. You look at the price tag, and you find that it has a reasonable price. You compare it with the other antiques in the shop, and you decide that this is the one that you want.You then call for the sales person to take the antique (let's just say that it's a vase) that you chose to the cashier, where you go to pay for it, and to, more importantly, choose the box! Why a box? And why is it that important?
Well, imagine going home with this vase un-boxed. The risk of it shattering, or at least getting a part chipped off is quiet high, and you wouldn't like this to happen, would you? Boxing is very important for reducing the risk of your vase getting broken or chipped off. But there's one more thing. The vase you chose is an antique hand made vase. It did not come out of a production line that produces thousands of replicas. It is one of a kind, handcrafted by a craftsman somewhere in the world, so it does not have a box specifically made for it with an image of the vase printed on it. You'll have to choose a box that will suit your needs. You can choose a fancy looking box if this is going to be wrapped as a gift, or you can choose a cheap box if you just want to take the vase home, and don't care about the box. The box can be made out of paper, cardboard or wood. You have the freedom of choice, and you have a really large variety to choose from, because this antique shop has got everything.
So, you choose a box that suites your needs, and now everything is OK, right? No, it's not OK. If the vase does not fit the box exactly, then you'll be facing some trouble, because the vase might break inside the box after banging to the walls of it a several times. Even if it's a perfect fit, you still have a problem. What if you decide to buy a cheap ugly looking wooden box, that is a perfect fit, but after going home, you remember that your best friends birthday is next week, you didn't get him/her a gift, and this vase matches his/her taste exactly. You'll certainly need to get a new fancy box for the occasion instead of the cheap ugly one. What will you be doing then?
Cushioning is the answer. Foam peanuts, styrofoam and bubble wrap are all great ways to cushion your valuable vase in the box that suites your needs. If you'd ever need to change boxes, there will be no problem, since you can wrap your vase in bubble wrap, and you're done. After all, this is what bubble wrap is good for (even though some people think that it's good for annoying other people by popping them in public).
What does all of the above have to do with anything? Well, let the vase be a software product, the box be the logging framework and the bubble wrap be the logging abstraction framework. That simple! You buy the software solution because this is what you want, but you need logging to trace transactions and exceptions that occur in the system, so you can tell the vase manufactures, sorry, the software vendor to give you patches that fix those problems. Using a logging abstraction framework helps you changing the logging framework very easily, without the need to change anything your software. Imagine having to change the vase, simply because the fancy box you got to put it into for your friend doesn't fit. It would be insane, wouldn't it.
OK, so what about Hani Suleiman? He's the CTO of a consulting company, and the owner of the controversial BileBlog. He's also a member of the executive committee of the JCP, and on the expert group of several specification requests. In his last post before his disappearance from the blogsphere (which was 9 months ago), he was ranting about Tapestry's creator, Howard Lewis Ship, moving from ACL (that's Apache Commons Logging, not Anterior Cruciate Ligament :P), more commonly known as clogging or JCL, to SLF4J. He was referring to Howard's blog entry, which didn't give much technical details (actually no technical details) on SLF4J in my humble opinion.
Well, I have to disagree with Hani here. Even though Log4J is one of the most widely used logging framework, it's not the best. You've got Logback for example, which was created by the founder of Log4J, and has several performance enhancements. You also have a lot of other logging frameworks, and it's totally wrong to force your consumer to use one of your choice.
When you are developing a framework (like the case of tapestry), you should never tie the users with a specific logging framework. I, for instance, like to use logback instead of the de-facto log4j. Being tied to a single implementation is really frustrating. You should be able to change the box if you want. I know that what you actually want is the vase, but if you have no choice but taking it an ugly cheap looking box, and no bubble wrap, you might think of purchasing another vase from another shop, just because you can't possibly give your friend a gift in this ugly box.
He casualy flaps his michelin man arms about about how easy it’ll be for everyone to migrate, and how its no big deal to CHANGE EVERY SINGLE F****** SOURCE FILE YOU HAVE.This is what Hani says in his blog, and again I wonder how would a man of his position imagine something like that? SLF4J is intended to be a drop-in replacement to clogging. You just have to read the manual (which is quiet small by the way). You can just drop in slf4j.jar and slf4j-jcl.jar in your class path in place commons-logging.jar, and you're done. Now you can use bubble wrap instead of foam peanuts!
Even if you're developing a product or a system, it's a bad practice to tie yourself with the concrete implementation of, well, anything. It's the ABC of design. You have to decouple yourself from everything. You have to "DESIGN TO INTERFACES", and this is why abstraction is so important.
Dear Hani, I have to totally disagree with you on that subject. Even if you are annoyed by people constantly popping up the bubbles in the bubble wrap, this doesn't mean that bubble wrap is a bad thing. Eliminating the use of the bubble wrap would make buying the vase a great risk, since it may break, or get chipped off. Not cushioning your antiques is a bad practice. Even if you get a box where the vase fits in perfectly, without the bubble wrap, you'll not be able to change the box (logging framework) without totally redesigning the vase :D.
The only exception to the above is with log4j and slf4j. Slf4j took the liberty of creating a drop-in jar that is intended to redirect the calls made to log4j to slf4j. This is done so that if you are using a library that calls log4j directly, and you want to use some other logging framework via slf4j. Anyway, I again repeat and insist that using a logging framework directly without an abstraction layer is totally wrong. It's like putting your valuable vase in a large wooden case in the back of your car while driving on a bumpy road, without any bubble wrap!
One last thing. Some people speculated that one of Hani's subjects waited for him in a dark alley and killed him, since it's been 8 months now since his last post. Actually, Hani is still alive, but he seems pretty busy to be blogging about anything these days. He is on the industry reviewers list of two tracks of this years JavaOne. He also had a couple of comments on a blog post, and was interviewed in February by InfoQ. Good to hear that he's still alive.
At the end, if you are a fan of popping up bubble wrap, you'll like this. Another thing, the bubble wrapped statue image was taken by Japh in the British Museum back in 2004. I contacted him to ask for his permission to use it. He gave me his permission to use it.
Monday, April 28, 2008
NetBeans 6.1
NetBeans 6.1 was released several minutes ago, and it does have some cool new features. Well, some aren't entirely new, like the JSF CRUD generation feature and java beans support that were missing from 6.0 have returned. It also has some major performance enhancements (up and above the really great performing 6.0) including an up to 40% faster startup time, lower memory consumption and increased responsiveness while working with large projects.
A lot of other features are present. Two of the best for me are the rich javascript editing features and spring framework support (including spring web framework). MySQL is supported in this release (no wonder, since it's now owned by Sun :D), and you can add a server to the DB explorer, view, create and delete databases easily with lots of other operations.
Code completion for JavaDoc is now present in this release, which is really convenient. For the Ruby/JRuby, the support has been enhanced a lot with editor quick fixes, a Ruby platform manager, fast debug for JRuby, and other enhancements.
Better shareablity of projects is also a great feature, where you can create projects that share definitions of libraries. Axis 2 support for web services have been added as well as SOAP UI integration for web service testing and monitoring. I also love the new semi-transparent windows, which may add (a little) to the productivity (you won't have to minimize and restore a lot to see what's going on in other windows), in addition of it being a real eye candy.
Another feature that I really like is that now the inspect members and hierarchy actions now work with classes that the source code is not present for (like 3rd party libraries that do not have an attached source). This is really great.
This was a summary of the new features of 6.1. For the full list of features, you can see this link. Bugs reported between December 2007 and March 2008 were fixed too. Of course I expect the release of 6.1.1 about a month or so later this year to fix any bugs that come up after this release. The next major release (6.5) is planned for October the 2nd. Keep the good work going.
A lot of other features are present. Two of the best for me are the rich javascript editing features and spring framework support (including spring web framework). MySQL is supported in this release (no wonder, since it's now owned by Sun :D), and you can add a server to the DB explorer, view, create and delete databases easily with lots of other operations.
Code completion for JavaDoc is now present in this release, which is really convenient. For the Ruby/JRuby, the support has been enhanced a lot with editor quick fixes, a Ruby platform manager, fast debug for JRuby, and other enhancements.
Better shareablity of projects is also a great feature, where you can create projects that share definitions of libraries. Axis 2 support for web services have been added as well as SOAP UI integration for web service testing and monitoring. I also love the new semi-transparent windows, which may add (a little) to the productivity (you won't have to minimize and restore a lot to see what's going on in other windows), in addition of it being a real eye candy.
Another feature that I really like is that now the inspect members and hierarchy actions now work with classes that the source code is not present for (like 3rd party libraries that do not have an attached source). This is really great.
This was a summary of the new features of 6.1. For the full list of features, you can see this link. Bugs reported between December 2007 and March 2008 were fixed too. Of course I expect the release of 6.1.1 about a month or so later this year to fix any bugs that come up after this release. The next major release (6.5) is planned for October the 2nd. Keep the good work going.
I got the best job offer ever
Yes I did! No, I wasn't offerred to be the CEO of Microsoft or anything, I was offered to be a senior software engineer (which is my current position by the way), but the offer itself was unbelievable. Well, let me start from the beginning.
Like most people, I have profiles on recruitment sites, like monster and others, where I look at the current openings in the market. There is no harm of knowing where the market is going, and what's your current price in the market. It would also help to find great offers, like the one I got (well, maybe not as great as the one I got).
Since I have a public profile on some recruitment sites (which is not a really very nice thing to do), recruiters and companies can view my profile and cv to contact me directly instead of me having to look for job postings and submitting to them (I'm kind of lazy). Anyway, on February the 21st, I got an email from Renfield Recruitment Agency in London, telling me that Duramex Petrolium PLC (also in London) is looking for all sorts of engineers (petroleum, mechanical, computer, electrical, aerospace, etc.) for an extremely large project. Accepted candidates with more than two years of experience will be given a full time position, while candidates with less than two years of experience will be given a one year contract, which is renewable on satisfactory basis.
Well, all I had to do was to send a copy of my CV to Engineer Peter Wilson on career.renfield@gmail.com, and so I did. I also forwarded the mail to two of my friends whom I thought might be interested of relocating to London. Anyway, on the 26th of February I received another email from Renfield recruitment containing two attachments. The first being the appointment offer and the second being the terms of agreement!
Yup, I was accepted as an employee in Duramex petroleum WITHOUT AN INTERVIEW. The appointment offer said, and I quote "...your placement was based on with out any form of oral interview, from; the RENFIELD RECRUITMENT SERVICES. You should also note that your placement was based on certified information found in your CV/Resume...". I know that my LinkedIn profile is quiet good, but to get me a job offer without an interview? WOW!
OK, here's a summary of the package:
Seems like a good deal, right? Actually, it seems too good to be true, doesn't it? Well, yes, it isn't true. I wasn't lying when I said that I got such an offer, but what I mean is that this was a fraud. There is no Renfield Recruitment, no International Global Visa Rites, and above all, the is no Duramex Petroleum! This was a scam from the very beginning, but it was a well played one.
If you google Duramex Petroleum now, you'll find tons of results on the scam, but this wasn't the case back when I got the email in February. I had to search for the company records in the official UK government register of UK companies, and do a lot of googling to find out that everything was a fake (and to shatter my dreams of wealth too :P).
Well, why didn't I blog about this earlier? Stupidity is a good answer. I thought that by contacting the authorities I would be doing a greater good, so that they can catch the villains when they're not taking care, since no one was blogging on them. I was an idiot. I could have been the number one result in Google for Duramex Petroleum by now, but NO, I didn't do that so that not to grab attention to the scam, so that the authorities could do their job. I got absolutely no response from the Interpol. The Scotland Yard website suggested to either go to the local police station (I'm in Dubai, UAE, not in UK), or to report it to the American Internet Crime Complaint Center, which sent me an automatic respond, and no one contacted me after that.
Anyway, this wasn't the end of it. One of the two friends whom I forwarded the first mail to got the same offer (well, same package, but as an IT manager) on the 15th of April. He got it directly from Duramex Petroleum this time, and not through Renfield Recruitment :D. The scammer had launched a fake website using Microsoft Office Live. I contacted Microsoft, and they replied in less than an hour to tell me that the fraudulent website had been closed. They also told me that they have taken appropriate action, and asked me about any information that would aid their investigation. I sent them the info, but don't actually know if a real action was taken against those people or not.
I really want to kick myself for not blogging about this earlier.Here are the links for the Appointment Offer and the Terms Of Agreement I received on the 26th of February. Also here is a text file with all the contact details that I collected from my communications with Renfield Recruitment and from the mail sent to my friend. This file is a part of the mail I sent to Microsoft.
Now just some few tips for you, whether you want to be able to find out scams, or to run your own scams professionally :D
Like most people, I have profiles on recruitment sites, like monster and others, where I look at the current openings in the market. There is no harm of knowing where the market is going, and what's your current price in the market. It would also help to find great offers, like the one I got (well, maybe not as great as the one I got).
Since I have a public profile on some recruitment sites (which is not a really very nice thing to do), recruiters and companies can view my profile and cv to contact me directly instead of me having to look for job postings and submitting to them (I'm kind of lazy). Anyway, on February the 21st, I got an email from Renfield Recruitment Agency in London, telling me that Duramex Petrolium PLC (also in London) is looking for all sorts of engineers (petroleum, mechanical, computer, electrical, aerospace, etc.) for an extremely large project. Accepted candidates with more than two years of experience will be given a full time position, while candidates with less than two years of experience will be given a one year contract, which is renewable on satisfactory basis.
Well, all I had to do was to send a copy of my CV to Engineer Peter Wilson on career.renfield@gmail.com, and so I did. I also forwarded the mail to two of my friends whom I thought might be interested of relocating to London. Anyway, on the 26th of February I received another email from Renfield recruitment containing two attachments. The first being the appointment offer and the second being the terms of agreement!
Yup, I was accepted as an employee in Duramex petroleum WITHOUT AN INTERVIEW. The appointment offer said, and I quote "...your placement was based on with out any form of oral interview, from; the RENFIELD RECRUITMENT SERVICES. You should also note that your placement was based on certified information found in your CV/Resume...". I know that my LinkedIn profile is quiet good, but to get me a job offer without an interview? WOW!
OK, here's a summary of the package:
- Monthly salary of 9945.00 British Pounds (YES, thats Nine Thousand Nine Hundred Fourty Five GBP) TAKE HOME (After Tax). I can ask of taking them in US dollars or in Euros by the way.
- Full medical insurance for me and my family
- Family accommodation in company community
- Local transportation will be fully provided for me and my family
- A land line and a mobile phone will be provided
- Security in both work place and housing community
- Life insurance
- Complete meals for me and family
- And the list goes on...
Seems like a good deal, right? Actually, it seems too good to be true, doesn't it? Well, yes, it isn't true. I wasn't lying when I said that I got such an offer, but what I mean is that this was a fraud. There is no Renfield Recruitment, no International Global Visa Rites, and above all, the is no Duramex Petroleum! This was a scam from the very beginning, but it was a well played one.
If you google Duramex Petroleum now, you'll find tons of results on the scam, but this wasn't the case back when I got the email in February. I had to search for the company records in the official UK government register of UK companies, and do a lot of googling to find out that everything was a fake (and to shatter my dreams of wealth too :P).
Well, why didn't I blog about this earlier? Stupidity is a good answer. I thought that by contacting the authorities I would be doing a greater good, so that they can catch the villains when they're not taking care, since no one was blogging on them. I was an idiot. I could have been the number one result in Google for Duramex Petroleum by now, but NO, I didn't do that so that not to grab attention to the scam, so that the authorities could do their job. I got absolutely no response from the Interpol. The Scotland Yard website suggested to either go to the local police station (I'm in Dubai, UAE, not in UK), or to report it to the American Internet Crime Complaint Center, which sent me an automatic respond, and no one contacted me after that.
Anyway, this wasn't the end of it. One of the two friends whom I forwarded the first mail to got the same offer (well, same package, but as an IT manager) on the 15th of April. He got it directly from Duramex Petroleum this time, and not through Renfield Recruitment :D. The scammer had launched a fake website using Microsoft Office Live. I contacted Microsoft, and they replied in less than an hour to tell me that the fraudulent website had been closed. They also told me that they have taken appropriate action, and asked me about any information that would aid their investigation. I sent them the info, but don't actually know if a real action was taken against those people or not.
I really want to kick myself for not blogging about this earlier.Here are the links for the Appointment Offer and the Terms Of Agreement I received on the 26th of February. Also here is a text file with all the contact details that I collected from my communications with Renfield Recruitment and from the mail sent to my friend. This file is a part of the mail I sent to Microsoft.
Now just some few tips for you, whether you want to be able to find out scams, or to run your own scams professionally :D
- People contacting you claiming to be a company or a recruitment agent should regularly have a corporate mail and domain, and not emails on Google and Hotmail. Some recruiters do use free mail servers so to reduce the number of spam on their corporate mail system. If you receive a mail from a free mail service, you should at least be a little bit careful.
- A large company or corporation should have a website, and it's usually a dot com website not a dot org. The latter is cheaper, and is mostly used with non profit organizations (or people who want cheap domains). Another thing, a corporate website will not be hosted on Microsoft Office Live, Google sites or any other similar service.
- If you suspect a website, do a whois lookup to see who's the registrant, and try to make sure that the information is true.
- ALWAYS research the company that wants to interview/hire you before taking some serious action
- If relocating to another country, ask friends who know this country about rules, standard of living, cost of living, and salary ranges for people of your experience
Finally, I would like to thank Emad Bakir a lot for helping me with information on UK, and UK companies, and for being the one to tell me that this is probably a scam.
EDIT (4th of May 2008)
Just wanted to add some links to other sources
- A post on Yahoo Answers
- Another post on Yahoo Answers
- Fraud Watchers (that was the only thread available at the time I got the offer)
- My post on java ranch
- Available on a warning page on job scams on Oil Offshore Marine's website
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Weird Tattoo!
Today I was in Deira City Center mall with my wife, and I believe that I have seen the weirdest tattoo. I don't know if this was true, or my mind was playing games on me, but I think that I saw a girl with a big (I mean really big) tattoo of McDonald's logo on her back. Most probably I was hallucinating after the the large Subway sandwich I ate. It was weird
Sunday, March 16, 2008
JDC 2
Yesterday I attended the annual Java Developers Conference, held in Cairo, Egypt. This event was the main reason I extended my vacation, so that I can attend it before coming back to Dubai. This is the second year EGJUG (Egyptian Java User Group) has such a conference (apart from their monthly meetings and seminars of course). This years event was WAY better than last year's. Well, let me summarize the event for you.
First of all, Ahmed Hashim, EGJUG's leader gave the keynote of the conference, then he was followed by words from the two golden sponsors, Etisalat Egypt and Microsoft Egypt. Yes, you read it right. Microsoft was a golden sponsor for the Egyptian java developer's conference!
I believe that Microsoft found this as a chance to give a better image to the developers, and show them how good they are. I don't believe that they were supporting java, since I've heard from my sources in a Microsoft parter company, that Microsoft did some pressure on them to stop them from sponsoring the event (both last year and this year). I believe that Microsoft thought that improving their image, and promoting port25 and codeplex is worth sponsoring JDC, but since thew would have gained nothing from their partner companies sponsoring the event, Microsoft pressured them to not do it. Anyway, this post is about the event not about company politics, so let's go on.
After the keynote and the sponsor messages, Ed Burns gave a great session on Demystifying JSF. His presentation slides were divided into two parts, but he gave part one only, due to the time constraints. Ed was followed by Hossam Karim (Software Architect at ITWorx) who is one of the eldest members of EGJUG, and a great contributer to the java community. Hossam's session was on "Enterprise Integration: A Service Oriented Architecture perspective", where he spoke about the methods of integrating different enterprise applications from different vendors together, with the pros and cons of each method. He spoke about the types of integration(information portals, data replication, shared business function, SOA, distributed business process and business to business integration), the styles used (file transfer, shared database, remote procedure invocation and messaging) an then he spoke a lot about messaging with its problems, solutions, concepts and implementation. I believe that it was a really great session, but he needed some more time, because the material was quiet large.
We took a coffee and a prayers break, then we went back for the next couple of sessions. The third session was given by Gisele Consoline from IBM Brazil, and it was titled "Discovering Business Driven Development for SOA". This session was one of the worst sessions I have ever attended in my whole life. First of all, I believe that the title should have been "How to use Eclipse for absolute beginners". The "Business Driven" part in the presentation was a sentence she said in the middle of the session that can be summarized as "before you begin coding, take the requirements from the customers, so that you don't code something different from what the customer wants"! As for the "SOA" part, she was not using just any Eclipse, she was using IBM's WebSphere that supports SOA development! Overall the session was a terrible experience for me, especially I was sitting in the front row, so it would have been embarrassing if I had gone to sleep :D.
The fourth session was given by Pooya Darugar, from Microsoft. I don't know if having a Microsoft speaker was part of the sponsorship agreement or not, but the session was nice. The session was titled ".NET and Java Interoperability" (Notice that .Net comes before java in the title :P). The session was really nice. Pooya had great presentation skills and was able to catch everyone's attention. Afterwards, when I was evaluating the session, I found out that the session can be summarized as this: "Microsoft, along with other companies, standardized web services so that .NET and Java web services can communicate with each other, without the need of customization from the web services developers". As you can see, nothing new was gained from the session, but Pooya used his skills brilliantly to make the people feel that it's a valuable session. At the end of the session, he had a couple of slides promoting Microsoft products/sites/technologies, like WPF, silverlight, codeflex, popfly, etc. Overall, it was a good session, but the gain from it as a technical person was just this: "Web services now can work together without any problems, regardless if they are written in java or in .net", which is why web services were created in the first place.
A lunch and a prayer break, then the final two sessions. The next session was given by Ed Burns (again). I thought that he would give part 2 of the first session, but instead he gave a session titled "Enterprise Grade Ajax and JSF", which was really great as well. The last, but certainly one of the best sessions (if not the best) was given by Alef Arendsen, and was titled "Spring Dependency Injection & Java 5". The session was mainly on the new method of configuring spring beans using annotations.
After that, there was the giveaways raffle, where I won my third free book in quiet a short period. The book I won was given by O'Reilly, and it's titled "Enterprise Java Beans 3.0, Fifth Edition".
The overall experience of the event was great. It's not just the sessions, but also meeting people that I haven't seen in a very long time, like Amal Kheirallah from ITWorx Alexandria, and like Mohammed Hamed, Ahmed Rizk and Mostafa Askar who were with me in college, and who I haven't seen in a really long time.
The main thing that I think could have been improved is the crowd. This year, the size of the event was increased to accept about 600 people, which is great, but accommodating all those people in one place made it impossible to have desks for the people to easily take notes, and the crowd on the buffet during lunch was a disaster. I believe that dividing this event into separate tracks will allow more people to attend the event, and there will be less people in each session, causing a less crowd. The area where the buffet is held should have been larger to reduce the number of people in the queues. Other than that, it was a really great day.
First of all, Ahmed Hashim, EGJUG's leader gave the keynote of the conference, then he was followed by words from the two golden sponsors, Etisalat Egypt and Microsoft Egypt. Yes, you read it right. Microsoft was a golden sponsor for the Egyptian java developer's conference!
I believe that Microsoft found this as a chance to give a better image to the developers, and show them how good they are. I don't believe that they were supporting java, since I've heard from my sources in a Microsoft parter company, that Microsoft did some pressure on them to stop them from sponsoring the event (both last year and this year). I believe that Microsoft thought that improving their image, and promoting port25 and codeplex is worth sponsoring JDC, but since thew would have gained nothing from their partner companies sponsoring the event, Microsoft pressured them to not do it. Anyway, this post is about the event not about company politics, so let's go on.
After the keynote and the sponsor messages, Ed Burns gave a great session on Demystifying JSF. His presentation slides were divided into two parts, but he gave part one only, due to the time constraints. Ed was followed by Hossam Karim (Software Architect at ITWorx) who is one of the eldest members of EGJUG, and a great contributer to the java community. Hossam's session was on "Enterprise Integration: A Service Oriented Architecture perspective", where he spoke about the methods of integrating different enterprise applications from different vendors together, with the pros and cons of each method. He spoke about the types of integration(information portals, data replication, shared business function, SOA, distributed business process and business to business integration), the styles used (file transfer, shared database, remote procedure invocation and messaging) an then he spoke a lot about messaging with its problems, solutions, concepts and implementation. I believe that it was a really great session, but he needed some more time, because the material was quiet large.
We took a coffee and a prayers break, then we went back for the next couple of sessions. The third session was given by Gisele Consoline from IBM Brazil, and it was titled "Discovering Business Driven Development for SOA". This session was one of the worst sessions I have ever attended in my whole life. First of all, I believe that the title should have been "How to use Eclipse for absolute beginners". The "Business Driven" part in the presentation was a sentence she said in the middle of the session that can be summarized as "before you begin coding, take the requirements from the customers, so that you don't code something different from what the customer wants"! As for the "SOA" part, she was not using just any Eclipse, she was using IBM's WebSphere that supports SOA development! Overall the session was a terrible experience for me, especially I was sitting in the front row, so it would have been embarrassing if I had gone to sleep :D.
The fourth session was given by Pooya Darugar, from Microsoft. I don't know if having a Microsoft speaker was part of the sponsorship agreement or not, but the session was nice. The session was titled ".NET and Java Interoperability" (Notice that .Net comes before java in the title :P). The session was really nice. Pooya had great presentation skills and was able to catch everyone's attention. Afterwards, when I was evaluating the session, I found out that the session can be summarized as this: "Microsoft, along with other companies, standardized web services so that .NET and Java web services can communicate with each other, without the need of customization from the web services developers". As you can see, nothing new was gained from the session, but Pooya used his skills brilliantly to make the people feel that it's a valuable session. At the end of the session, he had a couple of slides promoting Microsoft products/sites/technologies, like WPF, silverlight, codeflex, popfly, etc. Overall, it was a good session, but the gain from it as a technical person was just this: "Web services now can work together without any problems, regardless if they are written in java or in .net", which is why web services were created in the first place.
A lunch and a prayer break, then the final two sessions. The next session was given by Ed Burns (again). I thought that he would give part 2 of the first session, but instead he gave a session titled "Enterprise Grade Ajax and JSF", which was really great as well. The last, but certainly one of the best sessions (if not the best) was given by Alef Arendsen, and was titled "Spring Dependency Injection & Java 5". The session was mainly on the new method of configuring spring beans using annotations.
After that, there was the giveaways raffle, where I won my third free book in quiet a short period. The book I won was given by O'Reilly, and it's titled "Enterprise Java Beans 3.0, Fifth Edition".
The overall experience of the event was great. It's not just the sessions, but also meeting people that I haven't seen in a very long time, like Amal Kheirallah from ITWorx Alexandria, and like Mohammed Hamed, Ahmed Rizk and Mostafa Askar who were with me in college, and who I haven't seen in a really long time.
The main thing that I think could have been improved is the crowd. This year, the size of the event was increased to accept about 600 people, which is great, but accommodating all those people in one place made it impossible to have desks for the people to easily take notes, and the crowd on the buffet during lunch was a disaster. I believe that dividing this event into separate tracks will allow more people to attend the event, and there will be less people in each session, causing a less crowd. The area where the buffet is held should have been larger to reduce the number of people in the queues. Other than that, it was a really great day.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
The Missing Perfect Processor
On the 23rd of January, I sent an email to the editor of PC Magazine Middle & Near East. Well, I like the content of this letter, so I decided that I would post it as a blog entry here, so here you go.
I read your February issue article on the "CPU Road Map 2008", and I started thinking about how far we are from the perfect processor. I'm not talking about future processors that are going to have gazillion cores and do everything from simple arithmetics to 3D graphics processing. I'm speaking about the processors that we could have this day with today's technology.
Intel is better in developing transistors; they keep producing smaller transistors each day, giving the possibility of putting more cores on the same chip and reducing power consumption and heat (especially after they created the High-k metal transistor). Another thing is that Intel supports DDR3 with it's greater speed (even though the FSB is still slower than the fastest DDR3) and lower power, while AMD moved to DDR2 recently.
AMD is, and was always, better in their processor architecture. They created the 64 bit PC processor more than a year before Intel adopting it to make it's own EM64T, AMD is not using an FSB to access memory, which is a great advantage and finally, AMD's Phenom processor is going to be a real Quad-Core processor, and not two dual cores glued together.
With the technology available from both manufacturers, we (the consumers) could have had better processors than we have today, especially that each of the two companies is excelling in something totally different from the other. Unfortunately, since they are competitors, and it's impossible to convince any of the companies of sharing their secrets with the other company, then we are never going to have the perfect processor, because there will always be great differences, that if combined would have produced a far more greater processor.
Well, this was the end of my letter to the editor, and I hope that you like it.
I read your February issue article on the "CPU Road Map 2008", and I started thinking about how far we are from the perfect processor. I'm not talking about future processors that are going to have gazillion cores and do everything from simple arithmetics to 3D graphics processing. I'm speaking about the processors that we could have this day with today's technology.
Intel is better in developing transistors; they keep producing smaller transistors each day, giving the possibility of putting more cores on the same chip and reducing power consumption and heat (especially after they created the High-k metal transistor). Another thing is that Intel supports DDR3 with it's greater speed (even though the FSB is still slower than the fastest DDR3) and lower power, while AMD moved to DDR2 recently.
AMD is, and was always, better in their processor architecture. They created the 64 bit PC processor more than a year before Intel adopting it to make it's own EM64T, AMD is not using an FSB to access memory, which is a great advantage and finally, AMD's Phenom processor is going to be a real Quad-Core processor, and not two dual cores glued together.
With the technology available from both manufacturers, we (the consumers) could have had better processors than we have today, especially that each of the two companies is excelling in something totally different from the other. Unfortunately, since they are competitors, and it's impossible to convince any of the companies of sharing their secrets with the other company, then we are never going to have the perfect processor, because there will always be great differences, that if combined would have produced a far more greater processor.
Well, this was the end of my letter to the editor, and I hope that you like it.
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