Efficient Services

Java SNMP Master Agent

2009-07-07T15:09:00.001-07:00

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-6713/adyle?a=view

Impact SNMP DSA and Oracle SNMP Gateway

2009-07-01T16:25:00.001-07:00

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v8r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.netcoolimpact.doc/dsa/imdsa_snmp_c.html

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v8r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.netcool_OMNIbus.doc/gateways/snmp/snmp/wip/concept/snmp_intro.html

Netcool Webtop Timezone

2009-06-24T22:39:00.001-07:00

You have an existing IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus v7.1 ObjectServer installation with 100 users.Which file must be edited to change the default AEL and time zone setting for all of these users?

A. server.init

B. userdefaults.xml

C. userdefaults.props

D. ncoWebtopDefaults.xml

Answer:

C Explantation: This file is located in $NCHOME/etc/webtop/system and has a timezone setting in it.

Good web designing resources

2009-06-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

Good web designing resources

1) http://www.utexas.edu/learn/designprocess/

spend time to read the flow and core concepts, see the meaning of the terms as well

2) http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ucd/design.html

slightly more detailed view

3) http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000222.php

Outstanding article on web development lifecycle

4) http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/03/19/web-design-and-worflow-process-comparison/

Big picture

Software quotes - nice

2009-06-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.softwarequotes.com/showquotes.aspx?id=671&name=Larry%20Bernstein

Open project management

2009-06-22T18:17:00.001-07:00

http://www.ganttproject.biz/

Using Netcool to its best use

2009-06-21T14:42:00.000-07:00

Taking the analogy of BSM to natural disasters and enemy combats; I am coining the following two terms

WNDM - World Natual Disaster Monitoring

Saving soldiers in War:

ETM - Enemy threat Monitoring

Netcool

2009-06-18T13:00:00.001-07:00

News letter
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=203&uid=swg27012143
Impact best practices http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/tivolinci/Best+Practices

Check_ssh Nagios!!

2009-06-17T15:40:00.001-07:00

Using Check_ssh for remote monitoring in nagios using ssh as the service

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=321

beware of open source

2009-06-16T22:26:00.000-07:00

Beyond belief that a so called open source network management vendor quoted 40 grands for documentation of an implemented product ....

lesson leant: beware of open source cheap skates as well...

Rapid Insight: Open source Netcool Alternative?

2009-06-08T23:10:00.000-07:00

RI is an alternative and a complimenting product to Netcool. Visit below link in case planning/scoping/analysing the roadmap from Netcool .

http://www.ifountain.org/confluence/display/RI/RapidInsight+Primer+for+Netcool+Users

Note that blindfolded optimism and a path to migration is not the way to go when it comes to Migrating off of Netcool. Netcool is afterall a very reliable solution as well.

Strategic positioning as Michael Porter would say is needed to decide the path of NMS architecture.

Quantification and Qualification of a Service Assurance Solution

2009-04-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

Association of solution to how it impacts our bottom line [tactical and strategic (tangible) benefits]:

Measuring total number of customer calls which are not for an identified issue by SA solution. This is the highest priority and would serve as a report card for SA solution.

Inputs on the overall business continuity and growth/volume planning [strategic]:
Defining the trend analysis accountability team member

Encouragement/goveranance [strategic]:
Encouraging the team members for leveraging SA solution to ensure availability of services at all times. Association of individual performance to overall application availability and csi

Updating our customers on identified issues proactively[tactical]:
What happens sometimes is although teams are experiencing an issue, teams do not notify customer right away and start fixing the problem. Two options to fix this, documenting a problem management process with the first step to be a customer notification and communication, or auto email from the tool on the issue. Starting with the former would be a better approach.

TMN Framework

2009-04-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/tmn/topic01.asp

Logical model was most quoted, rest were terms which never took off...

SWOT Analysis for Business Service Management (BSM) Consulting Organization

2009-04-24T14:32:00.001-07:00

Strengths
· Displays health of organization in single pane of glass dashboard; allows tracking major initiatives and revenue streams associated to the initiatives
· Unique solution for alignment of business, operations and IT
· Only solution which reflects aggregation of Service Assurance, Fulfillment, and Billing for a service provided
· Diverse tool offerings and lack of system integrators provides a unique edge
· Integrated solution for SLA compliance, Fault management, and performance management for the entire enterprise
· Provides a strategic decision support technique which can be leveraged for executives, middle level managers, operations and IT staff
Weaknesses
· Accuracy of information displayed is very critical, this is often a big challenge
· Contextual sensitivity of the solution to fit to the environment of implementation is very difficult to achieve
· Lack of thought leadership and awareness in the industry
· Lack of open source tool availability for implementing BSM
· Lack of evaluation techniques for successful business service management solution is very often a limiting factor
· Cultural mindsets of not trusting automated systems for decision making is a significant factor contributing to resistance for BSM
Opportunities
· Early entrant in the industry, lower competition
· Multiple vendors trying to develop tools and capabilities for achieving the solution
· Open source tools are picking up the BSM theme and aligning with the BSM community; this opens opportunities for BSM consulting organization
· Multiple companies looking for aligning Business, operations and IT which creates a big client base for this solution
· SLA compliance is a mandatory for many companies and is a part of regulatory process and auditing standards
· Current economic factors play in and consolidation of systems is looked at as a strategic benefit, BSM fits perfectly in this space
· ITSM, ITIL, Problem management processes are widely followed which makes BSM a perfect solution for these companies
Threats
· Reputation and industry opinion of the solution is getting negative due to phony sales pitches and buzzwords like “8 hours to BSM” and “value of the shelf”
· Lack of standards and guidelines for implementation.
· Lack of sales pitch and strategy
· Investments required for leveraging toolsets in the organization and need to purchase if tools are not existing
· Lack of industry professionals with knowledge of BSM is a big weakness for market capitalization
· Expectation management is a problem with over-hyped solutions in the market
· Executives with old school mentality do not feel comfortable using automated solutions for decision making

RDP, Fake it!!

2009-04-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

Executive Summary

This paper is an effort to evaluate and draws a comparison between the paper by D L Parnas that discusses on RDP and the Joomla system design process followed by Joomla community. It is also an effort to evaluate the Joomla architecture documented by my team (!Minnows) in context to the RDP as described by Parnas.
One of the defining results of this study is the ability to understand and appreciate the need to fake the design process. This study also provides an insight in improvement areas of! Minnow’s Joomla system architecture documentation like the need to specify interface and behavior completely and concisely along with a need to avoid myopic approach to documenting architecture.
Discussion

D L Parnas and Clements discuss the need to practice the RDP, to the maximum possible extent (fake) for designing a system with the constraints in the view, in any software ecosystem. They very rightly point out that idealization of the process is not possible in most cases, but the importance of following the process cannot be neglected. Joomla system development process is an ideal comparison to the RDP mentioned in [Par86].
Joomla system architecture is a peculiar case of mix and match of “accidental and planned architecture” and also a classic case of “faked rational design process.”
Well planned architectural decisions in Joomla like MVC architecture, Joomla packages & extensions and the framework in Joomla are very well defined and followed to the specifications in the subsequent phases and releases of Joomla; this makes one think of it as a very much inline with the RDP. But blunders like no support for multi vendor databases and continuous security related issues in most releases immediately points to the fact that the system has large amount of accidental architecture and design decisions. All accidental decisions may or may not cause impacts key success factors or cause failure of the Joomla system; but never the less lack of documenting such decisions impacts the continuity planning, conflict resolution and strategic decisions of the Joomla system, which is also pointed out in section 5 in [Par86].
Joomla development community religiously follows the role definitions and task completion criteria, which answer “What kind of persons should do the work?” and “What criteria that work product must satisfy?”; which is also pointed out in the section IV of [Par86]. The same section also discusses the role of planning on the next course of actions and gathering information required for execution; which is the role of the core community in Joomla. The core community is dedicated to and responsible for envisioning, planning, risk approaches and steering as mentioned in the phase 1 and phase 4 of our documentation.
Critical Analysis

When trying to analyze and compare the RDP described in [Par86] section V to the Joomla system design process; one of the first observations is that the product requirements are not documented upfront. On the contrary, designing and documenting the module structure is religiously followed by the Joomla community and was also followed by us when documenting the architecture. Joomla viewpoints, views and view packets in first three phases deliverables along with the packages mentioned in the last phase provided a really good insight into the module structure of the Joomla system. But one of the things that I think we can improve on is the interface and behavior documentation of Joomla system to describe the architecture of Joomla in an articulate manner. The documentation of Joomla severely suffers with what Parnas defines as Myopia and some of which also influenced our architecture documentation in project phases. This is another thing that I think we can improve on in our architecture.
As most open source systems, Joomla has also evolved substantially over the years due to core community members who decided to start simple and evolve as the system grows following the principle of YAGNI. This does not however mean that Joomla community doesn’t recommend using RDP or does not follow RDP, what they don’t recommend is idealization of RDP (sequential approach with check pointing). Non-idealized (fake) and non-sequential approach to RDP enables agility and a better evolution of the system allowing the system to grow.
Conclusion

Fake it, Don’t idealize the RDP!!
Figure 1: Context independence vs. Understanding

To summarize, I would like to take systemic thinking approach to RDP. Above diagram which is also one of the adopted approaches for Joomla system design process, depicts the context independence vs. understanding [1]; clearly shows that a system evolves only after certain amount of effort and iterations of implementations and cannot be envisioned, architected or designed upfront. The diagram depicts the concept of system evolution; explaining that the first level of gathered input is always data, which after evolution provides information; which by understanding the patterns provides knowledge of the systems real drivers and success factors, and further evolution by understanding the underlying principles makes a system which has the potential success drivers. This state is called Wisdom by the community. This I think is also inline to Parnas’s argument about “allowing a system to grow by faking it” and following RDP as much as possible with the constraints and ecosystem in context.
To conclude, it is not feasible for a system like Joomla! to follow RDP in an idealized manner but it definitely is possible and in fact a necessity to make a genuine effort to follow the RDP as much as possible. Understanding the difference between ideal and fake RDP will be a defining factor for the success in most current and future software systems.
Future Trends
Gartner has recently published a report that SOA [2] are failing due to “idealization” of design process, lack of evolution of system architectural processes and lack of correct governance. This is something that Parnas points out in his paper accurately assessment and provides a guideline RDP which should be faked and not idealized.
Bibliography
[Par86]
A rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It by DL Parnas & Clements

[1] Systemic Thinking on Knowledge Management http://www.systemsthinking.org/kmgmt/kmgmt.htm

[2] Bad Technical Implementations and Lack of Governance Increase Risks of Failure in SOA Projects
Glossary
RDP - Rational Design process
SOA – Service Oriented Architecture
YAGNI – You Aint Gonna Need It

linux --> solaris admin guide

2009-04-22T12:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/sysadmin_guide.pdf

Grails Advanced Querying

2009-04-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

www.piragua.com/msse

slide 18

/// grails criteria using hibernate
def c = Customer.createCriteria(){

return c.list(){

servicelevel{ // alias maps to a table

eq('name', 'Gold')

}

incidents{

}

///

def searchForCustomer( accountnumber, name, state){

def c = Customer.createCriteria(){

c.list(){

or{

like('name', 'h')

like('accountNumber', accountNumber

}

Transaction status:

slide 22

Writing & Talking skills

2009-04-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

Carlis talk on reports

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~carlis/one-draft.pdf

Carlis on talk on talking:

to add

History of Interactive computing

2009-04-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

1) As we may think: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

2) Doug Engelbard

Collective intelligence, augmenting human intelligence

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097&ei=4P3pSZmEC5TO-gGb59TPDg&q=doug+engelbert&hl=en

Groovy

2009-04-06T09:55:00.000-07:00

Classpath in groovy

http://dustinwhitney.blogspot.com/2008/03/groovy-classpath.html

Simple connection to oracle
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GROOVY/How+can+I+dynamically+add+a+library+to+the+classpath

Here are some books/resources if you're interested in doing some extra reading on Groovy and Grails.
Groovy Books- Groovy in Action (Dierk Konig): A little out of date, but probably the best reference- Groovy Recipies (Scott Davis)- Programming Groovy (Venkat Subramaniam)
Grails Books- DGG v2 (Graeme Rocher, Jeff Brown)- Grails in Action (Glenn Smith, Peter Ledbrook) Manning - not out in book form yet, but you can get the EAP pdf directly from the publisher)
Websites: Groovy Website: http://groovy.codehaus.org/ Some good groovy slides: http://www.slideshare.net/glaforge/groovy-and-grails-in-action-devoxx-2008- university-guillaume-laforge-presentation
Grails website: http://www.grails.org/Grails Reference Guide: http://grails.org/doc/1.1.x/

HCI: User Task Centered Design

2009-03-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

An overview of how a user interface can be defined based on user tasks that require to be accomplished:

User categories: Identify them and document concerns
Users: Identify them and document concerns
Personas: If you have a complex and elaborate user analysis for a system with variety of users, having personas will help immensly

Tasks: The conditions and goals set upon the user.
E.g.: is going from his home to an office building situated in the downtown area on Wednesday, February 4th. He has the addresses for his home and the destination place and wants to ride with CityTransit. He will go to the CityTransit website, find the route options including detailed directions, map and fare to reach the destination by 9AM. He will be choosing the best option that fits his schedule and print for reference.

Walthroughs:
Feedback: Loops through the interface that evaluate, moderate, and confirm processes as they pass from the human through the interface to the computer and back.
Everytime you have a User task centered desgin ask yourself the following questions at every step of the task at hand...

A - will the user be trying to produce the effect?
B - will the user see the correct control?
C - will the user see that the control produces the desired effect?
D - will the user select a different control instead?
E - will the user understand the feedback to proceed correctly?

Heuristic Evaluation

Spring MVC tutorial

2009-03-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

http://mhimu.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/spring-mvc-tutorial/

EA Stuff from class

2009-03-12T13:34:00.001-07:00

Read the following two materials.
1) Michael Porter’s strategy(http://www.isc.hbs.edu/firm-competitve.htm)
2) The IT Alignment Trap http://www.architectureandchange.com/2007/10/02/the-it-alignment-trap/
3) SCN (Strategic capability network)(http://www.google.com/patents?id=ftYIAAAAEBAJ&dq=strategic+capability+network).
4) TOGAF 9.0 documentationhttp://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/
5) CMM for TOGAFhttp://ocio.os.doc.gov/ITPolicyandPrograms/Enterprise_Architecture/PROD01_004935
6) Transformation of IBM: Hard copy only
7) Case study global airline: Hard copy only
8) CIO interview IBM canadaHard copy only
9) SOA BPM case studyhttp://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/dw/wes/bpmjournal/0812_jensen/SOA_BPM_EA.pdf
10) Vayghan Blog
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/enterprise

TOGAF 9: An Implementation Perspective

2009-02-27T01:26:00.003-08:00

My first observation on TOGAF 9 was that it is more business focused compared to TOGAF-8 with the addition of Business vision, drivers and capabilities (which is also inline with SCN). Before this version 9 TOGAF was definitely in the IT realm, and IT was essentially defined as hardware and software. By bringing business perspective with lifecycle into Business, Information, Data and Application architecture TOGAF has added a new set of offerings to its arsenal.

Note 1: The definition of IT in TOGAF 9 is the lifecycle management of information and related technology within an organization. In-line with what we have been discussing in class that we need to take a problem and build a business solution rather than build a solution and find Business problem.

For past few years, IT has been looked at a medium of simply automating tasks to reduce cost and getting tasks accomplished by throwing requirements over the wall. TOGAF provides an approach of integrating IT with Business using the ADM as a comprehensive guideline for establishing Enterprise architecture program by step by step procedures. This is especially useful for organizations considering starting an Enterprise architecture program.

Note 2: The single biggest news about TOGAF is a new, mature, well-defined architecture content framework of 170 pages, built on the experience of major systems integrators through hundreds of architecture projects. Emphasizes on Organizational learning (also discussed in class) via meta model is an important aspects.

Developing meta-model for enterprise content across the organization and utilization of the content for strategic and operational planning is the only way Business, Operations and IT can be aligned together. Most large organizations like the one that I work for; have multiple data repositories disparately fragmented across the organization. Due to lack of catalog management of this data, the organizational learning curve is low and leads to accessibility problem for right information at the right time and for the right objective. TOGAF proposes a detailed solution to this problem with the architecture content framework; by putting emphasis on the actual information, its access, presentation, and quality, so as to provide not only transaction processing support, but analytical processing support for critical business decisions provides great edge to TOGAF. This change gives new perspective value proposition for Enterprise architecture framework.

Note 3: TOGAF 9 puts emphasis on Service Oriented Architecture and Integrated system approach – Business Perspective of SOA
The biggest implementation aspect of TOGAF 9 is the emphasis on service oriented systems and integrated system approach. This is due to involvement of system integrators; who are one of the most important stakeholders of the Enterprise architecture program. To get the best return on investment for SOA, it is important to understand from a business perspective what capability your business has and why. One thing that’s really key about TOGAF 9 is that it takes a lot of ideas and practices that exist within individual organizations or proprietary frameworks, building a consensus around it, and releasing it into a public-domain context. Once that happens, the value you can get from that approach increases exponentially. Now, you're not talking about going to one vendor and having to deal with one particular set of concepts, and then going to a different vendor and having to deal with another set of concepts, and dealing with the interoperability between those.

Note 4: TOGAF 9 allows enterprise architecture to be molded with operations management, system design, portfolio management, service management, business planning, and the Governance Institute's COBIT guidelines. – Compatibility

One critical aspect of adopting a framework is evaluation of compatibility of the framework in the organizational ecosystem. TOGAF is very well equipped in this aspect due to compatibility guidelines for managing operations, systems design, portfolio management, service management, business and strategic planning. In addition to this, TOGAF provides governance guidelines to ensure alignment of Business, operations and IT and providing the equilibrium to provide optimal solutions for priority business problems.
To conclude, Fred Brooks has very truly pointed out that there is no silver bullet for building the best solution and “Doing the things right!!” but using TOGAF solves four of the most critical aspects for reducing the accidental complexity which are: Organizational learning via Content model frameworks, emphasis on Business perspective of SOA, Value propositions alignment to investments and finally the guidelines for effective governance by Enterprise architecture program.
References

Name
Reference
TOGAF 9 users see benefit for SOA
http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid26_gci1347340,00.html
TOGAF 9 advances IT maturity while offering more paths to architecture-level IT improvement
http://briefingsdirectblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/togaf-9-advances-it-maturity-while.html
Never Mind the Architecture Frameworks: Here’s TOGAF 9
http://rasmussenreport.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/never-mind-the-architecture-frameworks-heres-togaf-9/
TOGAF 9 Architecture Documentation
http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/

BSM, Service Quality Management: Identity Crises

2009-02-12T14:25:00.000-08:00

Here is another post which outlines what is wrong with the current BSM solutions @DougMcclure.net Lot of readers and lots of feedback as well!!

Realizing a BSM Solution: Implementation Perspective

2009-02-12T14:21:00.001-08:00

Recently i started guest authoring Doug Mcclure's website to provide insights on what is the future of BSM.

Here is one of my posts that articulates the right reciepe for BSM success.

Retrospection

2008-12-13T22:56:00.000-08:00

Looking backward, this semester was a bit more fun than the last one, which was pretty much slogging all the time. I think a subject like software architecture is a must for any software engineer with some experience, i am glad that i learnt it.

All and all a good semester, one more to go :))))

Extending Joomla! for Oracle

2008-12-07T19:21:00.000-08:00

Hi Folks!!

In this post, i am going to talk about my views on extending Joomla! for Oracle. After 3 months of extensive architecture study of Joomla!; i can assure you that it is doable.

Change Description

The current version of Joomla does not support Oracle as a database. The Objective of this change is to adapt the Joomla! architecture to make it compatible with Oracle database and leverage the existing Database package for accomplishing this change.

Architectural Background

One of the reasons adaptability of Joomla has suffered in large organizations is its inability to work with Oracle. Organizations which tend to recommend Oracle at enterprise level are not willing to use Joomla which is compatible only with MySQL database. This compatibility failure is a well know issue and often a topic of debate in the development community. Even though this change has been under consideration for almost 3 years, it has not been successfully implemented.

Even at the macro level, the extensibility of the internal system architecture has been one of the issues for Joomla system. This proposed change would act as the facilitator for further enhancements for the systems internal architecture.

Architecture Overview

In this proposed architecture change; i plan to contain the changes for extending Joomla to the Database package in the Framework Tier. The Current Joomla! Database package is as shown below. Note that the classes which are with blue eclipse in the background will be impacted due to the proposed change.

Key: Purple Eclipse shows impacted classes

Figure 1: Current Joomla! Database Package

The Database package responsible for interaction with currently supported MySql database is expected to have some changes due to the proposed change. The main class which is envisioned to be impacted is the JDatabase class. This class is expected to be modified for extensibility reasons to accommodate Oracle Database driver along with the MySql driver. JDatabase is an abstract class representing a database connector. The current implemented extensions of JDatabase are JDatabaseMySQL and JDatabaseMySQLi. JDatabase follows an adapter pattern, therefore all the extended classes sit in an adapters sub-folder.

The classes JQueryElement, JSimpleRecordSet and JQuery will be modified to accommodate the syntactic changes between the query languages. These classes would be generalized to incorporate possible extensions to other databases as well.

Figure 2: Changed Architecture

Key:

Orange: New Classes

Yellow: Existing Classes

Green: Modified Classes

The JQuery would eventually be branched out into factory along with the JQueryElement class to return valid instance. JSimpleRecortSet class will be modified to accommodate changes for extending itself to Oracle.

Philosophy: Service vs. Project

2008-11-30T17:32:00.001-08:00

Understanding the philosophy behind the notion & concept of “service” and “project”, and their relation to software engineering is an important factor.

Project prominently is defined as “finite endeavor with a finite completion timeline undertaken to create a unique product or service.” This definition when looked at in context of software engineering, with knowledge that the term “unique” and “finite” are really debatable because of the below facts:

A recent study shows that almost 50% of software components are seen to be a reuse of some sort. (Unique?)
80% of software activities are continuous processes i.e. either support or maintenance (Finite?)

The point that some amount of uniqueness lies in every software engineering effort is acceptable, but the notion of an effort related to software being temporary is difficult to relate to because of the amount of continuity activities involved in software engineering. Evolution of the notion of “project” has developed from core engineering disciplines (Mechanical, Civil, and Electrical), defense efforts; all these discipline have one thing in common: a definite end; but software on the other hand has a vague and often undefined notion of the “end”. Another aspect which is worth noting is the key measurement principle for a project completion which is: A project is considered to be successful when it meets the scope, budget and time defined.

Service is defined as “Service is a (continuous/onetime) provider/client interaction that creates and captures measurable value.” This definition coincides very well with the notion of software engineering with an underlying sense of continuity involved. Notion of service is a relatively for software engineering but is evolved from the Latin word “servitium”. All definitions of the term service do coincide with the “continuity”. Another aspect of service is that it is measurable and definitive in terms of value provided to the customer, not just once or in an audit basis but continuously and on a real time basis. Hence, measurement principle for service is more inclined towards continuous satisfaction and experience of the consumer.