Stu says stuff

it's hot

A BEA blog entry on what I've been up to.

oh, and...

Thanks to the person who invited me to Joost. :D

Joost

Joost officially launched today. If anyone out there has a Joost membership & pile of invites, throw one my way, please. ;-)

A complementary blog

I've opened a new blog on BEA's Dev2Dev community site. I'm going to start putting my more BEA-related thoughts in the Dev2Dev pages, and will periodically cross-link. The feed you're currently reading is staying where it is; Stu Says Stuff will remain my primary soapbox of partially baked commentary.

Steve Jobs v. Bill Gates v. Old Man C64

Wonderful.. Video is safe for work, though the audio isn't, so have headphones.

(I used a Commodore 64 until 1993. I drifted between DOS, OS/2, Linux (0.99!), Win95/2K/XP, switched to Mac OS 8.5 in 1999 and am now settled on Mac OS X.)

being a road warrior

This past week I was in Calgary and Houston (one day each, with a conference in Toronto in the middle), next week is Ottawa and New York, the week after, Las Vegas. Later in March, it will be Vancouver, Boston, San Jose, Edmonton, Calgary (again). Having said that, I don't think I'm that crazy a traveller -- there are the Star Alliance Gold folks who seem to live in the air...

My gadget friends on the road...

• Sennheiser PXC 250 noise-cancelling portable headphones - perfect for drowning out babies crying on the airplane with some music or a podcast. It even has the dual-pronged airline headphone adapter.


• my black iPod nano 4gb


• Cold-fX - after experiencing the havoc that travel, lack of sleep, and overwork wreaks on my body, I've turned to this at the first sign of cold symptoms... it seems to work.


• Dell Latitude D800, soon to be replaced by a D810 and possibly a MacBook Pro. I found this laptop has the best performance to heft ratio when I got it in late 2004; it's 7.1 lbs , which was only .3 heavier than my 17 inch Powerbook G4, but the Pentium M 2ghz + 2 gigs ram + 7200 rpm + decent battery makes for a great on the road desktop-replacement -- it's what most BEA consultants use in Canada.


• Blackberry 7780. I've been a Crackberry man since mid-2000, with the original 950. I've since had a 957, the first phone-enabled 5810, and I'm now on my second 7780 (the first sadly was dropped and screen-cracked after 3 months) since Summer 2004. It has treated me well; unfortunately ever since I upgraded to Blackberry 4.0, though, it's been slower, though I enjoy the new BB messenger. Web browsing is also glacial, I think i'll need to grab an EDGE phone like the 8700r this summer.


• The Economist - short & deep enough for great reading material, before cracking into books


• Apple Airport Express which has proven invaluable for those "I wish we had a WiFi network here" moments. The great part is it works with PC's, and has proven remarkably robust -- when the D-Links of the world fall over at 12-16 clients, this little guy has served as many as 21 laptops in a room at once.

The solution architect's lot

My life - part one and two. (I even tell good jokes, but I still don't get commission).

Random quickies

World of Warcraft is possibly the most addictive game created. Apple's new Powerbooks have 128mb video memory, which is tempting me to upgrade so I can get just that extra bit of texture detail...

I submitted (with a collegue) a presentation to JavaOne 2005. It will be on "advanced SOA" (whatever that means), particularly focused on legacy systems integration. It may show up on dev2dev this Summer as well. Fingers crossed!

I've been doing a lot of reading on "lean development" and "lean manufacturing", something I got into after reading Mary Poppendieck's book, followed by Michael Kennedy's book on Toyota's product dev process. The latter is as much of an eye opener has Goldratt's "The Goal" was years ago. I'm particularly reflecting on how this relates to the IT trends that I'm most enamoured with.. web services and agile methods.

happy holidays

Happy holidays to everyone. Updates coming in a few days...

back in black

My database has been restored, looks like it was forgotten when they migrated servers at my host.

Also, I've decided to leave the telecom IT world for now and return to consulting. I am joining BEA later this month as an Enterprise Architect for Strategic Consulting Services. Looking forward to it!

OOPSLA 2004

My blog is experiencing some difficulties since my hosting provider seems to have misplaced my MySQL database (hmm). This probably won't show in the RSS feed. Anyway, here's Greg Peres & I at OOPSLA 2004.

ok, maybe not

Thoughts of the day:

- the IT world would be a better place if everyone would take a course on basic Oracle SQL Tuning
- I finally got around to upgrading my Movable Type to try to ward off spam

I have a lot of things to write about piling up, it's just about finding the time to write them. Stay tuned, if you're interested.

at eWorld

I'm in San Francisco attending BEA eWorld. updates and musings forthcoming on this and other subjects.

brief update

Not many updates lately, sorry. I'm heavily involved with 3 projects simultaneously at work (one is a WebLogic integration EAI thing , the other is an enterprise data warehouse, yet another is an e-Piphany implementation)...

Was in New York last weekend for a Microsoft architecture forum. They continue to be on a much better track with their fundamental ideas , now hopefully they'll deliver in 2006....

have a good new year

December has been a very busy month for me, with many demands for my writing...I should have time in January to write more here. There might be some articles showing up on other websites too, if I actually ever finish them.

rms classic remix

jono bacon has recorded a death metal remix of the richard stallman classic free software song. From [jwz].

i still have a pulse

I put this up at the beginning of the year in a spurt of excitement that hit me when I really began to discover the explosion of blogs on the interweb.. I had a lot of essays and posts scattered throughout the web, it might have been a good idea to smoosh them together into a central site.

But of course, like all exciting things, my eagerness to publicly blather about my thoughts faded over time, to the point that this thing has grown rather moldy from under-use.

Perhaps I'll change that soon. I just got really sleepy reading a bunch of posts on AskTom and felt like writing something of my own to wake myself up.