The demise of Hara-Kiri computing

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05.18.04

The demise of Hara-Kiri computing
If you disembowel any run-of-the-mill software application and examine its entrails - the software - you will notice that a significant amount of effort goes into dealing with errors. Pass within hearing distance of a white board when application developers are sketching a design and you will hear lots of questions of the form "what if X happens?". Most of this "what if" talk is to do with handling errors.

A non-specialist might conclude that all the what-if analysis is aimed at ensuring that the system can detect and then recover from errors gracefully. However, in the vast majority of cases, this is not what is motivating the development team. Instead, the name of the error handling game is to detect errors and then *die* with as much grace as possible. The emphasis is on graceful death, hara-kiri style, rather than graceful error detection followed by correction/resumption.
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Real-Time Data Warehousing: Challenges and Solutions
Traditionally data warehouses do not contain today's data. They are usually loaded with data from operational systems at most weekly or in some cases nightly, but are in any case a window on the past. The fast pace of business today is quickly making these historical systems less valuable to the issues facing managers and government officials in the real world. Morning sales on the east coast will affect how stores are stocked on the west coast. Airlines and government agencies need to be able to analyze the most current information when trying to detect suspicious groups of passengers or potentially illegal activity. Fast-paced changes in the financial markets may make the personalized suggestions on a stockbroker's website obsolete by the time they are viewed.

As today's decisions in the business world become more real-time, the systems that support those decisions need to keep up. It is only natural that Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence, Decision Support, and OLAP systems quickly begin to incorporate real-time data.
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The Gmail Is Not the Deadlier of the Species
There has been a lot of press lately about Google's new Gmail free webmail. Much of the furor has been criticism about privacy concerns. I am fortunate enough to be a beta tester of Gmail, and have used it over the past few days. As a privacy advocate and civil libertarian, I don't share these concerns, however.

First, let's not lose sight of the fact that people “opt in” to Gmail: it's a “want-to” rather than a “have-to” situation. Second, we should recognize that Google isn't doing anything in Gmail that other free email vendors aren't already doing. Yahoo, Earthlink, MSN, and other free email services all scan your incoming email to remove spam (and/or viruses). Google has just turned the tables by adding a sort of personalized spam to email in the form of ads based on message content.
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Cray CTO: Linux clusters don't play in HPC
Linux clustering was touted as the next big thing by many vendors last week at ClusterWorld Conference & Expo 2004.

But supercomputer vendor Cray Inc. scoffed at the notion of putting Linux clusters in the high-performance computing (HPC) category. In fact, Cray showcased a system -- Cray XD1 with Active Manager -- that will compete in performance and price with some Linux clusters upon its release ...
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Web Services: A Business Module Packaging Strategy
The World Wide Web (WWW) has created a rapidly expanding need for application-to-application communication. To promote interoperability and extensibility among these applications, as well as to allow them to be combined in order to perform more complex operations, a new standard was needed that was backed by the entire software industry. That standard is web services.

As web services become more mainstream and enterprises start adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for their application infrastructure, we need to analyze best practices and/or guidelines with this approach. This article begins a series on the best practices for XML-based web services. Through this series, we will evolve a potential framework for web services that could be leveraged by an enterprise. In this first article, we explore the use of web services as a packaging strategy for a business logic module. We'll start by providing some background information on web services that leads us to the rationale behind having web services as a business module packaging step.
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OSS in a Software Development Firm
I have been using Linux as my home operating system of choice for several years. I have used various open-source projects to do practically everything involved in hosting Web sites and databases and serving up e-mail. All of this has been done as a hobby, and I often longed for the day when I would be able to bring open source into the office.

I work for a software development company as a programmer/analyst, developing administrative software for higher education. Our original software was written in COBOL to be run on an HP e3000 using the MPE operating system. A few years back we recognized that we needed to bring our software into the 21st century, so we chose Delphi to migrate our legacy applications to the Windows platform.
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