The best $1200 you could spend this year

Posted on by Rich Sharples

Unsurprisingly and from what I’ve seen personally – tech. conference attendance is a little light this year. But if you have some budget for attending tech. conferences – I think the combined JBoss World / Red Hat Summit (Chicago, Sept 1st-4th) could be just about the best investment you make this year.

You’ll learn about all the great tech. that Red Hat and JBoss will be shipping as well as some of the technology still in the labs. But most of all you’ll learn how Red Hat can save you and your organization money – and right now that’s got to be a smart investment.

* travel and accomodation extra

Tab Sweep : JBoss

Posted on by Rich Sharples

JBoss adding muscle to Apache CXF. We’ll be increasing our commitment to Apache CXF – in term of both resource and expertise and fully support CXF in future versions of our products. More from Alessio Saldano (JBoss WS Lead), Dan Kulp (PMC Chair for CXF) and Sacha (JBoss CTO).

Talking of Sacha – he’s just announced he’ll be leaving Red Hat. Sacha interviewed me when I joined Red Hat (just under a year ago) and I’ve enjoyed working with him – super-smart, very passionate and a genuinely nice guy – a rare combination. Good luck for the future Sacha and enjoy the break – after 8 years you deserve some R&R and time with with your family.

The JBoss Tools team delivered another major release – JBDS 2.0 and we also introduced JBDS – Portfolio Edition – which included the run-times for all the new features in JBDS 2.0.

JBoss continues to slash costs – two more customer success stories, first Covad (provider of data, voice and wireless telecommunications) who moved to JBoss from “inflexible and costly proprietary middleware software” because “That’s why we love JBoss– it allows us to do more with less,”.

IWBank (online banking and financial services) of Milan also selected JBoss because “JBoss enables us to provide more and more efficient and affordable services, which is crucial in the current economic climate”.

Finally, JBoss will be a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) – you’ll have the chance to work with some of the smartest, most exerienced Open Source developers in the business. Head over to JBoss wiki if you are interested.

Microsoft and Metcalfe’s Law

Posted on by Rich Sharples

Microsoft have finally figured out that Metcalfe’s Law applies to them as much as the next software company – despite their huge footprint. To quote Microsoft’s CEO and CMM (Chief Mad-Monkey) Steve Balmer :

“In a more connected, services-oriented world…one of the greatest value-adds in some sense is what people do on the other end of the wire”

Bang-on Steve – couldn’t have put it better myself. Let’s see how wide the Kimono opens before Balmer get’s shy. Ick – that’s a poor choice of metaphor – sorry if I’ve spoiled your lunch.

Hacking FileVault (and BitLocker and TrueCrypt)

Posted on by Rich Sharples

I have FileVault enabled on my MBP thinking it was a responsible way to protect work-related proprietary information from falling into the wrong hands; turns out it’s actually quite easy (for a dedicated hacker) to crack the password / key according the this CNET article. Some pretty interesting ideas about salvaging information from memory. Hopefuly this work will help Apple improve FileVault.

Desktop Virtualization Tinkering

Posted on by Rich Sharples

Over the last day or so, I’ve been playing with VirtualBox – a type-2 desktop-oriented hypervizor; I managed to get my two favourite Linux flavours up and running pretty quickly now I’m contemplating mucking about with the networking so I can get the images talking over a virtual network.

virtual-box

Once I have that – I have a pretty decent developer sandbox – something I wish I had 7 or 8 years ago when I was still a developer. Still – should be a pretty useful setup for tinkering on home projects.

VirtualBox is pretty slick – so far – no issues – I just works – which is the way software should be. One thing I’m still looking for is a way to run windows (small W) outside the visual sandbox; I find having a bunch of windows; running in windows a bit limiting and doesn’t allow me to use my (multi)-screen real estate effectively.

Next (assuming I find the time) is to try VirtualBox on my MBP – I’m missing Ubuntu.