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
Wordle is a web application that allows you to submit text, or use your delicious username, to produce interesting tag clouds. Lots of sites let you do this, but Wordle is particularly pretty. No surprises in mine - yep, that's what I'm interested in.
That, along with a FICO score should probably be the inputs for a good dating service.
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:
- Via Richard via the Distant Librarian
Greg the Architect has a new episode entitled Off the Grid. I love this thing, though I imagine there's a fairly limited audience for the material. I guess it fits with my fondness for the South Park and Robot Chicken genre, but it's even a little closer to home due to the subject matter.
Those darn business analysts... I knew it... I knew it all along!
Recently I'd been asked to enable an RSS feed for my SOA category in TypePad. TypePad allows for the provision of custom feeds, but only though the Advanced Template Set functionality that comes with a Pro account.
Richard had done some thinking on this awhile back, and suggested using a Blogdigger hack to accomplish it. While Blogdigger can get the job done, I was a little reticent to use that solution. Firstly, who's Blogdigger, and when will they change their *ahem* API. Secondly, the Blogdigger hack doesn't allow much control over how the results are presented, particularly the title of the resulting feed.
Since I'd been looking for an excuse to try out Yahoo Pipes, this seemed the opportune time. In about 5 minutes I'd created a custom feed from my site that allows an SOA-category-only RSS feed for this site. Unfortunately, there's a known bug in Pipes that prevents this from being used universally, but hopefully that issue will be fixed before too long.
I also made a more generic one that allows you to configure the category and feed URL as parameters (either via the Pipes site, or on the feed URL directly), so you can try it on your own site. It should work on most TypePad sites (keeping the aforementioned bug issue in mind). No warranties are expressed or implied.
All of that to say, Pipes is and awesome example of what SOA and XML should be all about. You should be able to mix, match and connect these things nearly effortlessly.
I've been asked a few times about resources for developing Firefox extensions. Lifehacker recently posted a nice overview for beginners. The definitive guides can be found at the Mozilla Developer Center.
