Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

Good article from Joel Spolsky on 5 easy ways that software projects fail. I really like this article as Joel articulates the common problems of software development very well. This article was forwarded to me from a person inside my company with the subject "Harsh Words from Joel Spolsky". Personally I don't think they are harsh enough and my thoughts on the article are as follows:

"This is really obvious stuff in my opinion. 

Our industry is littered with many people who do not have a proper education in IT, let alone being trained in managing projects properly. Many of these people are put in charge of making decisions or signing off decisions around projects and typically end up making ignorant simplistic decisions. Often many of the stakeholders of projects can be like this and the failure is in getting them to realise the implications of a situation that creates many of the problems discussed in this article. 

Ask a surgeon - does he/she do half an eye operation because it costs less? 

Does a civil engineer design half a bridge because of a deadline constraint? 

A big part of this is immaturity in our industry and not following many of the standards set in other professions such as engineering, law and medicine. It's all basic planning techniques and basic acknowledgement of the complexity of a problem. And it often stems from people who simply did not know what they are doing and would never admit it."

I hope I don't offend anyone – certainly not my intention. But I have to say I do feel very passionately about this issue and believe many roots of the issue stem from poor education in our industry around broad (or horizontal) skills. Feel free to publish your thoughts as comments…

I'm currently working on a large IT Governance framework for a customer and as I was doing some research on the philosophies behind governance and change management when I came across a excellent wikipedia reference on Systems Thinking. The more I read and re-read the article the more I find the "thinking of Systems thinking" to be a useful for background for SOA. It provides some philosophical clues as to why and how service oriented architectures can used to glue and manage systems together both within an internal systems and it's parts and between systems. Definitely the thinking article for today.

Recently I have been working on using Enterprise Wiki software as a mechanism for collaboration and dissemination of enterprise content in an environment where there are loads of contributors. The more I work with the concept of Enterprise Wiki for managing a collaborative content process, the more I like it. It all comes down to simple and easy contribution and inline editing of content. So, on that note here are a few good resources on Wiki's that may be of use:

Wiki Patterns – A website on Wiki implementation patterns and anti-patterns.

Wiki Matrix – A website to do feature comparison on Wiki software.

Wikipedia – The best example of a massive online Wiki.

Today (Thurs 20^th September) and tomorrow I'm chairing the 3^rd Annual Brightstar SOA and Web Services conference. It's also my third year of chairing it. The overview from Brightstar's Website:

SOA is now proving to be an effective strategy for dealing with enterprise software complexity in many organisations. The SOA journey has not been an easy task for many, but companies who have got it right are reaping the benefits, such as re-usable services and closer alignment of IT and business process.

So, what does it take to enable service oriented architecture into your organisation?  Where can you find out more about SOA and meet people with real-life experience and expertise?

Brightstar Conferences is pleased to announce our 3rd Annual Service Oriented Architecture & Web Services Conference, the number one SOA event in New Zealand.  This year's event will build upon the last two by shifting the focus on where SOA is at – internationally and in New Zealand, explore key case studies and experiences with SOA, and cover crucial issues and challenges as faced by the key players.

It's all about thought leadership, and about what we can learn from the practical experiences of those who have had success with SOA.  The journey of SOA is a challenging one, and we explore the crucial challenges along the way and ways to overcome these to enable service oriented architecture in your organisation.

Don't miss out on the Trans-Tasman case study by Catherine Anderson, Program Director, Smart eDA Program, SUSTAINABLE PLANNING, DEPARTMENT OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT, PLANNING, SPORT AND RECREATION on Addressing the Biggest SOA Challenge - The People Factor!

Key case studies from New Zealand's leading SOA and web services experts:
Simon King, Enterprise Architect, TELSTRACLEAR
Tim Chaffe, Enterprise Architecture Manager, UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND
Darko Spisic, Integration Services Architect/Implementor, Telecom NZ External/Integration Consultant

As well as all the key players in the SOA arena:
FRONDE . SOLNET SOLUTIONS . ORACLE . MICROSOFT . SUN MICROSYSTEMS . OPTIMATION . GEN-I .

ALSO - back by popular demand!  Our expert panel looks into the crystal ball of SOA on both current opportunities and considerations for the future.

Don't miss the opportunity to attend New Zealand's leading SOA event where you will find crucial information, be informed and meet all the experts.

If you haven't already seen, Microsoft Silverlight has now been fully released to v1.0.

For those who requested it, here is the TechEd talk on Software Team Best practices in PowerPoint 2003 format. 12 meg download this one…

Over at Rod Drury's blog there is a massive debate on Microsoft's Open XML standard desires. Very interesting reading indeed.

Hi folks, apologies for the delays – I know a few of you have been waiting for this post – but here is the PowerPoint from the session I did at TechEd NZ 2007 on Best Practices for Software Development Teams.

Download it from this link – its 8 Megs. If you plan to use to beyond just your personal reading, all I ask is that you let me know (LUKAS AT SVOBODA DOT CO DOT NZ) and give me credit for the content source.

I've been told that this is related to the leaked SP1 beta of Vista floating over the internet, but you can now manually download and install two Vista patches that improve performance and compatibility. I'm sure these will filter through to Windows update eventually but what I heard was that they were specifically supposed to be part of SP1 instead. Interesting! Download the Performance Path here, and the Compatibility Patch here. I haven't installed them yet, but plan to today.

Almost forgot to blog it J. This morning at TechEd NZ, I'll be talking on best practices for team based software development. I'll be looking at principles and recipes for success, how Microsoft Visual Studio Team System can help the process and giving the benefit of my experience of using team system with a specific customer case study. If you are at TechEd NZ today come and listen to my talk @ 10:45, I think its NZRoom1 or NZRoom3 from memory.

I'm using Vista as my primary OS on my laptop, but tonight I decided to install Windows XP. Mainly because I have a few multimedia things that don't work under Vista but I still need to use them every now and then (For those curious, the main one is the BlueMic Snowball – A high quality USB mic I use for Podcasting). XP and Vista ship with too different bootloaders and only the Vista bootloader will pick up an existing XP installation. For design and forward compatibility issues, the XP bootloader will not recognize any existing Vista partitions. Once I had XP installed, I then had to do a few things to make both dual boot happily. I searched quite a bit on the net before I got all the answers, I had to review a few of commands as they were pre-RTM vista. I certainly didn't find anything that documented the process fully. So here it is – hopefully someone else will find this useful:

Part 1: Installing XP

• Before you install XP, be sure to use the Vista Disk Manager (Right click on Computer and select manage) to resize down the vista existing partition and create a new partition. You don't need anything like partition magic if you have Vista
• Install XP into a new partition directly after the vista partition you created
• Restart – you should boot back into XP and have no ability to boot into Vista

Part 2: Vista Bootloader re-setup (From Windows XP)

• Once into XP, make sure you have your Vista DVD in the DVD player and your user has admin rights
• Open a command prompt window (start, run, "cmd")
• Change to your CD Rom drive by typing the drive letter and colon, e.g. E:
• Change directory to \boot, e.g. "cd boot"
• Run the following command: Bootsect.exe –NT60 All
• Restart the machine – the machine should now boot into Vista and have no ability to select Windows XP from any bootloader

Part 3: Using BCDEdit to get XP booting again (From Windows Vista)

• Once into Vista, make sure your user has admin rights
• Open a command prompt window (start, run, "cmd")
• Change directory to \Windows\system32, e.g. "cd Windows\System32"
• Run the following commands to create an XP boot option:
  • Bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d "Windows XP"
  • Bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=x:
  • Bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
  • Bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast
• Reboot
• You should now have a boot option menu for Windows XP, select it to make sure it works

Part 4: Copying over ntldr files to ensure a successful XP boot

• If you get a "status: 0xc000000f" error with "Windows failed to Load" when you try and load windows XP, do the following steps:
  • Place the follow files from your Windows XP setup CD: NtDetect.com and Ntldr into the root of your XP partition
  • These files are in the i386 directory on your Windows XP directory
• Reboot and you should now be able to select and boot into Windows XP okay

Regarding Part 4, I'm not sure whether everyone needs to do this – but I did notice that Windows XP did not place these folders into root directory of the XP probably because the XP setup wizard thought it was a single boot environment.

Disclaimer: Use at your own peril, this worked for me but I can't guarantee this works for you!

I posted on the weekend a new ARCast NZ podcast on Interaction Design which I recorded with Phil Cockfield. This is my favourite to date and looks at how the concept of interaction design works with the concepts of IT architecture. The overview of the session:

Join Lukas Svoboda and Phil Cockfield as they discuss the concept of Interaction Design (ID) and how it fits with the discipline of Software Architecture. The relationship between ID and Agile Software Development is also discussed as well as the notion that Interaction Design is the missing link in Architecture. Lastly Phil discusses how an Architect can get into using Interactive Design approaches to help develop architectures for software today.

Well Microsoft TechEd New Zealand is finally upon us again and it's kicked off well. This year the company my company Fronde is a major sponsor and I've had the pleasure of putting our stand together. I was at TechEd this morning but I've gone and found some peace and quiet to prepare for my session which is on Wednesday around team system best practices (I'll blog more later today…). If you are at TechEd, go checkout the stand, we have a professional masseuse to ease your conference tensions, prize giveaway of 1 Gig USB hard drives and iRiver music players. The stand also features video testimonials of our employees and customers.

Apparently the private beta of Vista SP1 was leaked recently. There is an interesting view of this Service Pack here at APCMAG.com. The article is particularly interesting around the issues of speed of Vista and the fact that the service pack drastically increases the performance of vista.

Right now, people who work with me can MSN me, Skype Me, Yahoo me, Email me, call me on my Cell, call me on my desk phone, text me, track me down on my blog or on LinkedIn, walk over and see me and god forbid send me snail me. Is it just me or are we too connected in this day and age? The thing I find hardest is to concentrate on one task for more than a few hours without being disturbed. These days if I need to concentrate I usually end up turning everything off - not ideal but necessary. Anyone else got any thoughts with managing being in contact versus distraction and focus? (It's Friday arvo, and it's noisy in the office and all my contact channels are going mad – and I'm trying to write two documents – I might as well give up! J)

A good article on Stuff showing the NZ government is largely ignoring SME businesses in general. I think this shows a very sad story for NZ and tends to be typical around the current mentality shared by many government departments – that the big NZ companies or the fastest growing ones are the only ones to invest time and effort in. I'd certainly like to see this change into the future.

Kirk Jackson, the chap responsible for running the excellent .NET User group in Wellington for many years has done some analysis on the NZ.NET user group and the mailing list we use. It's really interesting to read as it concludes that mailing list concept has really served our .NET community well in New Zealand.

The mailing list is something I've maintained and managed since 2001 for the community and certainly reflects many thousands of hours of my passion for the .NET community. I would also like to thank Kirk for his acknowledgement of my efforts J

The only way to know, is to watch this crazy video J

Very interesting article in Computerworld regarding some of the frustrations that IT managers will face with allowing access to corporate resources from the iPhone. Just listening to the Apple strategy of the device shows it is very consumer orientated and certainly not a player in the enterprise. It's interesting to see how this strategy will work for Apple in its quest for mobile dominance. This strategy is distinctly different from the likes of RIM and Microsoft, who have been solving the corporate problem before attacking the mass consumer market. My prediction is that the iPhone will get a lot of attention for its looks and cool factor (typical response to anything Apple by the majority of consumers and Apple knows it) but will get a massive thumbs down when it comes to corporate integration. By the time Apple works this out, RIM and Microsoft will have copied all the cool features and be out with devices that are as cool but have much better corporate integration feastures. All-in-all, an interesting IT space to watching.

Okay, this one's partly a concession to Miramar Mike – I have to hand it Google, I'm totally in love with Google Mail. And I'm not just talking about the "Yay I get an email address @ gmail.com" service, I'm talking about the hosting all your personal domain email with Gmail i.e user_mailbox_x100@svoboda.co.nz. This is some I just discovered recently. I also had a good look to see if Microsoft was doing this as well. However their service with POP3 support is not free and a lot more expensive than even the Google premium service. One thing I didn't like was the Google Mail interface. I found it a bit outdated. It's grown on me but I would like to still see it lean, but a bit slicker and more professional looking. The other thing that worried me was the conversation threads and no folder support. I've grown to like conversation threads as now I don't lose any emails in a particular conversation and I have fallen in love with archiving and labeling instead of using folders. All in all a nice offering and providing some major challenge to Microsoft in terms of hosted email offerings.

I've finally spent some time on setting up my network and career profile on LinkedIn. This seems to be one of the free best online services for managing this type of personal information. I particularly like the network contact features which help me keep my network up to date. To see my linked in profile with my career history, go to http://www.linkedin.com/in/lukassvoboda

Interesting commentary from John Lilly, Mozilla's chief operating officer on the release of Apple's Safari browser for Windows. It's basically a "Apple needs to learn" article and certainly reflects a lot of my thinking that despite trying to maintain a "cool" image, Apple's corporate thinking is still very backward.

Proving that everyone loves a great conspiracy theory (and the IT industry is no exception) - this Computerworld article details the mystery of tiny faces on Vista DVDs. It details some of the great conspiracy theories put forward and then tells of the rather simple and pragmatic explanation from Microsoft.

Just a quick note, I haven't been posting much the last two weeks due to a rather nasty headcold turning into an even nastier ear infection. I'm back on board today and slowly getting back into things. Many things to blog on!!!

Okay this is a pretty technical post, but it does have an important enterprise implications. The proxy file (convention is to use proxy.pac) is a javascript file that defines how web browsers can automatically choose the appropriate proxy server for fetching a given URL. This is very useful to use in a company where you might have different proxy servers in different geographies and you want the person's web browser to automatically use the right proxy server. The file can also do things like turn off the use of a proxy server if it isn't in the currently used network. This is very useful for laptop users who might use their laptops on a home network at the end of the day. So in summary a proxy.pac file stops you from having to reconfigure proxy settings for your browser every time you change networks.

http://nscsysop.hypermart.net/proxypac.html - good examples on how to write complex proxies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config - Wikipedia Resource

http://wiki.garylaw.net/doku.php?id=technical:automatic_proxy_configuration – Lots of details and resources here