James McGovern: Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture, A
Scott A. Bernard: An Introduction to Enterprise Architecture: Second Edition
Jeanne W. Ross: Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution
Ralph Whittle: Enterprise Business Architecture: The Formal Link Between Strategy and Results
For just a moment, I thought the Slashdot Article Can Architects Save Libraries From the Internet was more closely linked to my field than to the "building buildings" kind. However the Extinction Timeline they link is quite interesting anyway. Libraries dead in another 11 years? I think that's perhaps a little pessimistic.
Well, even if true, I hope that libraries will undergo some evolution before then, and perhaps merge as a slightly different species.
I've been fooling with library toolsbars, sidebars, web and widgets for awhile now... and a few months back I'd resigned myself to finally getting around to doing a LibX library toolbar for CISTI. I'd even gotten a mostly-working version done a few months back. At the end of last week I decided it was time to finish. Lo and behold, I go to the LibX site and discover the wonder that is the LibX Edition Builder! Holy moly, it's just wonderful. Within 15 minutes I had a working toolbar for CISTI. Of course the details and testing tool a day or so, but I finally think I've gotten a version decent enough to make live and public.
This version is intended mainly for staff of the National Research Council - CISTI's parent organization - but I imagine it would still be useful for most CISTI patrons.
Check it out, and let me know what you think:
I was getting tired of having to logout other users on my XP machine at home using the task manager. Essentially, my wife and assorted guests occasionally use the computer. Often they would remain logged in and running several applications. This caused me some issues with stability, but more often, with the system performance.
I sought a simple solution that would allow me to logout other users on the system with just a click of an icon, as opposed to the more time consuming effort required by using task manager. So a made a little batch file called logoutuser.bat for that purpose.
-----------------------------
@echo off
rem logoutuser.bat
for /F "tokens=2 skip=1" %%G IN ('qwinsta tammy') DO LOGOFF %%G
for /F "tokens=2 skip=1" %%G IN ('qwinsta guest') DO LOGOFF %%G
------------------------------
qwinsta lists the current system users, I select the most common offenders, and invoke the logoff command providing the users ID as a parameter (as provided by qwinsta).
I'd not found an adequate solution for this issue elsewhere, so I thought I'd just post it.
Despite my usual rule against posting about things that Richard Akerman has already blogged, I feel it's required that I pay homage to the creativity and comedy of Llord Llama (or is it King Goose?) who provides a collection of amusing and silly puppet-based videos - mostly about libraries, copyright, publishers and such. Awesome.
The one about copyright vs publisher vs librarians is particularly poignant.
CBC is reporting that upon the retirement of the current (as well as first and only) National Science Adviser, Arthur Carty, the position will not be re-filled and will be phased out. Dr. Carty was formerly the President of the National Research Council.
theinfo.org is a nascent wiki resource for members of the library community dealing with large data sets, and related visualization, tools, algorithms.
- via oss4lib - Aaron Swartz.
- Via Richard via the Distant Librarian
At TED Larry Lessig gave an interesting talk about the issues of pre-digital copyright law, and makes a case for creative freedom through a common sense approach.
- Via Boing Boing.
The NRC's Institute for Information Technology is sponsoring a colloquium 10:20-12:00 November 15, 2007 entitled: Migrating to Service-Oriented Architectures by Patricia Oberndorf of the Software Engineering Institute. It's free, but registration is required.
Terry Coatta explains in his article From Here to There, The SOA Way how SOA isn't a silver bullet when it comes to resolving the issues of distributed systems.
I often come across the myth that web services (or as we often say, SOA services) are slower than more traditional architectures. Terry explains that (properly implemented) SOA resolves this issue through having coarse grained services. Essentially, you have to consider the data, bandwidth and latency of a particular issue first. For example instead of making multiple service calls (say, to retrieve each data component from an object independently) you should probably return all the data in a single call.
Objects are still a very good way to model systems and they function reasonably efficiently in the local context. But they don't distribute well, particularly if one tries to use them in a naive way. A service-oriented architecture solves this problem by dealing with the latency issues up front. It does this by looking at the patterns of data access in a system and designing the service-layer interfaces to aggregate data in such a way as to optimize bandwidth, usage, and latency.
I've seen several novice attempts to "serviceify" objects directly -- essentially making API's directly to object interfaces -- and I can confirm that they don't work well at all. This is one of the primary reasons that I feel that web services are best governed by SOA, and not haphazardly created. That's not to say that such governance need be bureaucratic... but better to spend a little time scoping your services than to create poorly performing or unsustainable ones.
I agree with Terry's assertion that there's nothing fundamentally new about service-oriented architectures, and that "distributed computing has always been about the same set of problems". Really, success of SOA is dependent following a good set of best practices about service creation. It really is a different way of thinking about problems than most people are used to.
