21st April 2011. The date the machines rise. The date the  ”Global Digital Defense Network” known as Skynet becomes sentient and takes over the world. Except Amazon had other ideas. It’s also the date Amazon’s cloud infrastructure went down for an extended period. When the machines rose it was a case of “all dressed up and nowhere to go”.

It also exposed some people to an uncomfortable public airing of their griefs. This company was monitoring patients’ ECG outputs using the cloud and were unable to fulfil their commitments to patients’ lives. They took a bollocking for putting a system on which peoples’ lives depend in the cloud without any backup or failover strategy but is that really the case? There are some real howlers in the extended exchange, from which Amazon support is noticeably missing. Gems like: (more…)

Have you ever written a method in a Java class and then wished you could return two things from it? Have you also noticed a strange odour coming from your machine at the same time? That’s code smell! Any time you think you need to return two completely unrelated values from the same function means the method is trying to do too much. Let me explain with an example from the other day.

I’m in the latter stages of developing and testing a distributed provisioning system that I wrote in Java and has Apache Camel and ActiveMQ at its heart. One system I need to provision is Novell eDirectory and the messaging code basically boils down to processing an incoming User message and if it could create the account in eDirectory it sends a success message to the hub and also returns a a reusable MatrixConnection object which is passed in, in subsequent calls, for sending more success messages.

public MatrixConnection processUser(User user, MatrixConnection previousConnection) {
  createUser(user);
  return sendSuccessMessage(previousConnection);
} (more...)

You can download it from Guanxi::SP::Engine@github.

This release adds the Internet2 Embedded Discovery Service user interface (more…)

The 2.2.3 release supports Google Apps SSO. Download it from IdP@github. (more…)

Our quick time streaming upload and hinting application is coming along quite nicely but one of the problems we had early on, was developer keenness. Basically, the velocity of the developer was way above the velocity of the project so they were left spinning after the stories for the next release were ready and tested. So we moved to a different model. Now we create stories all the time, pile them up and work on them as and when we need to. Then, when the fortnightly release date approaches we get together and decide which stories can go in the next release. Works a treat and apparently it’s called Release Trains.