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I wrote last year about the way Google’s Android mobile operating system was serving as a more open alternative to Apple’s iOS, but not so open that it didn’t leave opportunity for an even more open alternative.

Given that we continue to see software patent-based attacks on Android, as well as swirling FUD around coverage of the attacks and never ending suits and settlements and courtroom developments, it is clear it will be a long time before any of this legal business is ever close to settled, unless ended by settlements first, which is likely.

However, I’m more interested in the technology in the meantime. I also think it’s interesting to see, if not a ‘more open’ alternative emerging, at least another, ’somewhat open’ option in the tablet market, this being HP’s WebOS. It’s interesting that WebOS evolved from Palm, which HP acquired in March 2010 for $1.4 billion. Though Apple’s iPad is still the clear leader in tablets, it is interesting to see continuing signs that what happened in smartphones (where iPhone led and Android quickly caught up and then passed iOS) may be happening in tablets. There is also still the possibility that tablets may play out like netbooks, with wild popularity followed by a fade in favor of more traditional PCs for traditional PC needs. It is interesting to note that Google’s Eric Schmidt recently commented on the continued utility of PCs, which will remain key to professionals, consumers, and also developers, largely because of the tactical keyboard. What is most likely is continued convergence, and it will be interesting to see what ties emerge between WebOS and PCs as computer hardware giant HP rolls out the OS in tablets and smartphones.

We also see other signs that new, open entrants may be mixing things up in the mobile and converged device market, such as word of a possible Android and iOS competitor from Mozilla. There is yet another project that is already a factor in netbooks, other mobile devices and the burgeoning IT market of automobile information and entertainment systems, MeeGo, which is also open source. Even Research in Motion’s Playbook is based on the QNX operating system, for which source code was made available by its previous owner to make it more like the open source Linux OS, which was attracting developers and interesting customers.

We believed there was a fairly prominent place for open source software, open source operating systems and general openness in mobile software when we wrote our report, Mobility Matters three years ago, but we would have never guessed that the openness of this software would be so significant in two respects: defense from patent and other intellectual property attacks; the market power of open source, which draws in not only developers, but manufacturers and other third-parties. We’ve seen the speed and strength at which a project and community such as Android can grow. Will we now begin to see other alternatives that are even more open emerge as top choices among developers, hardware companies, wireless players and consumers? Never before have those alternatives really existed in the mobile software world, so it’s good at least to see the possibility is there.

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The Open DB Camp in Sardinia 2011 has had a number of sessions on varying topics. Topics range from MySQL over MongoDB to replication and High Availability.

I decided to tap into the database expert resources present here at Sardegna Ricerche by discussing a non-database issue, where one can expert database experts to have insights beyond those of end users. And they did.

The topic was the particular case of information overload many of us suffer from on our hard disks: Too many files, too hard to find.

• How do we find the bank statement from April 2007 from the more-seldom-used account?
• What are the ten best work-related pictures from last year?
• Is this the most current version of the presentation of BlackRay?
• Are these films from Cagliari already backed up? Also offsite?

It turned out that I am not the only one suffering from a slight chaos on my hard disk. We all have some basic discipline we try to follow to keep things in order, but the consensus seemed to be that disorder on the hard disk is a psychological problem to be solved by good habits, more than a technical problem to be solved by an application. This in itself is a revolutionary insight, to come from a bunch of techies.

Before going into the individual points, let me first share how I had framed the discussion:

Many OpenSQLCamp attendees spend lots of time communicating about our SQL projects, internally and externally. We spend lots of time architecting database systems, and managing the lifecycle of products.

We do little to implement a proper architecture for the non-database information we create and manage, in business and privately. We drown in emails, digital pictures, versions of downloaded PDF documents, video snippets, and attachments sent by colleagues, partners and private friends. Chaos ensues.

Disorder and low productivity are inevitable unless we are very disciplined in following some basic rules for keeping order on our hard disks, pods and pads. But what are those basic rules? And what tools can implement them?

I don't sit in with more than a rough first sketch of "an Information Lifecycle Architecture", but I'd like to share ideas, thoughts and attitudes with my fellow OpenSQLCamp attendees. I'll present some slides and guidelines, and will make an attempt at collecting your thoughts into a summary afterwards!

I threw in a couple of basic ideas on how to handle the type of information that we have to manage as individuals, usually on our own hard disks:

1. Separate /pub from /rep: Store raw information in its original form in one directory tree, the "repository". Store distilled information ready to be consumed in a separate directory tree, the "publications".
2. Limit the allowed /pub formats: Allow very few formats for publishing (such as .jpg .mov .pdf .mp3 .ogg but not .doc .ppt .xls .cr2 .psd .oo3 or anything even more "exotic").
3. Delete systematically: Don't save many versions of the same file. Don't save information that isn't needed.
4. Sync easily: Set up the directories (and configure your software) so that it's very easy to sync the published files with your mobile devices (Androids, iPhones, iPads, iPods, digi frames), regardless if PDFs, JPGs, MOVs or MP3s.
5. Order files by type: Above /pub and /rep, separate files by rough category: Pictures, Movies, Documents, Music.
6. Order files by year: Under /pub and /rep, separate most files into directories by year. Month or quarter would be too frequent for most personal information.
7. Order files by common sense: Under the year (or in exceptional cases directly under /pub or /rep), separate files by placing them into a smart directory structure, which you yourself decide about according to the topic, as opposed to delegating the file structure to the random preferences of some software (like iPhoto).

Beat Vontobel, Liz van Dijk, Markus Popp, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral, Sergei Golubchik, René Cannao and others came with very good ideas and anecdotes. Let me here relate some of them, while they're in fresh memory:

1. Blog your notes! Write your personal notes so that they're reusable for others. Publish them on your blog. Then you can use Google to find your own notes. I think this tip is smarter than what it sounds at first, i.e. it's applicable for quite a few situations.
2. Use version control! For some who are familiar with version control anyway, it may make sense to put presentations and various types of other personal information into a version control system.
3. Use the cloud! Put some of the information onto the cloud, for easy availability across machines, for easy synching, for backup.
4. Tags for fields should be part of the operating system. You could tag expense reports, notes, contacts, pictures, films, documents and emails alike with #opendbcamp. The tagging should ideally work across operating systems.
5. Order needs discipline. Any good habit of keeping order on the hard disk needs to be backed up by a commitment in time. If you slip once, and twice, and one more time, the discipline is lacking.
6. Storage is cheap. Or is it? Here I noted two schools of thought. One would rather just tag anything and keep order by sorting. The other school would rather delete as much as possible, so that the remainder is smaller and hence easier to keep ordered. I belong to the latter one.
7. Bad banks throw important yet unstructured information at you. You can get a bank account statement with a long filename which doesn't denote the year and month or bank account. You yourself have to parse the file, and name it properly. That's a burden even for a geeky OpenDBCamp visitor. Think of the poor average bank customers!
8. The analog world forced you to have a physical relationship to your data. In order to use your CDs or spices or books, your mental maps of organising them were backed up by some physical structure. This physical structure is missing from digital data. It becomes easier to forget that you even have the information. We end up with a lot of pictures, music and videos we never use.
9. Use Yojimbo http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/ as an information organiser, if you're a Mac user.
10. Does technology solve issues or create them? Earlier, we didn't have as many pics, films, CDs or books. Now, we have more of them, in a variety of forms. Does it really make sense to spend tens of hours sorting and otherwise maintaining your collections (of films, music, pictures)? Or is it better to have smaller collections, even of the seemingly "free" items such as digital pictures and films taken by yourself?

On that philosophic observation, let me end my personal notes from the "Information Lifecycle Architecture" session at the Open DB Camp, which I have now published and will be able to find later on by Googling it.
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I only recently found out about GigaOm's upcoming Net:Work conference.  It's held December 9 at UCSF Mission Bay conference center.  While the name of the conference is a bit ambiguous, the actual area of focus is very clear: how will we collaborate in the 21st century?  

The impact of smartphones, tablet computing, social networks, Software-as-a-Service and Cloud computing is just starting.  As a result, I think there are tremendous opportunities for startup companies to disrupt existing markets with more modern, lightweight applications that foster collaboration inside the company as well as with partners, vendors, consultants and customers.  

Companies that can more effectively tap into talent within their organization and across traditional boundaries may end up having a significant competitive advantage.  Instead of the traditional top-down view of management edicts flowing from HQ to employees and field offices, you now have the potential to develop, test and refine ideas from any part of the company or community regardless of location.  

That was the approach we took at MySQL and it worked very well with employees distributed in more than 40 countries, 90% of whom worked from their homes.  We also had a huge community of users we could tap into that contributed tremendous value to the company.  Even though we had primitive tools for collaboration (IRC, Skype, Forums, Wikis, conference calls, mailing lists etc), we always operated with a global perspective. This enabled us to develop great talent regardless of location.  Managing a distributed organization is not easy, but you get some amazing benefits if you do it right.

Speakers at the conference include Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Dave Hersh (Jive), Maynard Webb (LiveOps), Tom Kelly (Moxie Software), Doug Solomon (IDEO), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Aaron Levie (Box.net), Ross Mayfield (SocialText) and more.

Also, thanks to Skip Hilton of GigaOm, there's a 50% off registration coupon: HILTONNETWORK50

• GigaOm: Net:Work 2010, Schedule, Speakers, Registration
• GigaOm: Consumerization of IT

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

I only recently found out about GigaOm's upcoming Net:Work conference.  It's held December 9 at UCSF Mission Bay conference center.  While the name of the conference is a bit ambiguous, the actual area of focus is very clear: how will we collaborate in the 21st century?  

The impact of smartphones, tablet computing, social networks, Software-as-a-Service and Cloud computing is just starting.  As a result, I think there are tremendous opportunities for startup companies to disrupt existing markets with more modern, lightweight applications that foster collaboration inside the company as well as with partners, vendors, consultants and customers.  

Companies that can more effectively tap into talent within their organization and across traditional boundaries may end up having a significant competitive advantage.  Instead of the traditional top-down view of management edicts flowing from HQ to employees and field offices, you now have the potential to develop, test and refine ideas from any part of the company or community regardless of location.  

That was the approach we took at MySQL and it worked very well with employees distributed in more than 40 countries, 90% of whom worked from their homes.  We also had a huge community of users we could tap into that contributed tremendous value to the company.  Even though we had primitive tools for collaboration (IRC, Skype, Forums, Wikis, conference calls, mailing lists etc), we always operated with a global perspective. This enabled us to develop great talent regardless of location.  Managing a distributed organization is not easy, but you get some amazing benefits if you do it right.

Speakers at the conference include Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Dave Hersh (Jive), Maynard Webb (LiveOps), Tom Kelly (Moxie Software), Doug Solomon (IDEO), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Aaron Levie (Box.net), Ross Mayfield (SocialText) and more.

Also, thanks to Skip Hilton of GigaOm, there's a 50% off registration coupon: HILTONNETWORK50

• GigaOm: Net:Work 2010, Schedule, Speakers, Registration
• GigaOm: Consumerization of IT

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

I am a bibliophile, or, to say it in plain English, a book lover. I have been collecting books since I was in first grade. I read books at high speed, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because I can squeeze useful information out of a book very quickly, and that's useful for my job, and for some of my hobbies. A curse, because when I travel one book is usually not enough to keep me busy for the whole travel, and I need to carry or buy more, with negative effects on the weight of my luggage and my on my back. Ten years ago I had a brief but intense experience with electronic books in a Palm hand held device. It didn't last long, though. The quality of ebooks and readers in that period was less than optimal, and I have left the matter rest for a while. In the meantime, I kept collecting electronic books, mostly PDF editions of technical books that I keep in my laptop for quick reference. Reading them from cover to cover, though, is not a pleasant experience in a laptop. Ditto for reading fiction or essays. The laptop screen is not comfortable for such exercise. Then, last year, I bough an ebook reader.

That changed the whole business. Reading ebooks became very similar to reading paper books. The size of the screen and the ability of increasing font size makes your reading a pleasure. As for my back and luggage problems, that's solved hands down. The weight of the device is the same, no matter if I carry one ebook or one hundred.
Suddenly, the dozen of ebooks that I had kept idle in my laptop sprang to life, and I was able to read them like a paper book, easily, comfortably, and with pleasure.
I started buying more ebooks, both of fiction and of technical matters. The latter are especially welcome. Whenever I travel to conferences, I am tempted to buy some useful book, and then I regret when it burdens my backpack during the trip home, and fights for room on my overcrowded book shelves. No more of this. Now, when I visit a book booth at a conference, I simply take note of the interesting titles, and then I buy the ebooks at the publisher's site directly. If there is no ebook, I can easily convince me that the book is not really needed.
A few months ago there was some new development. My ebook reader's screen was faulty. It was showing a few unwanted lines at the bottom and the top of the screen, making it difficult to read menus. No big deal. I sent it to the manufacturer, which replaced the screen for free. The only trouble was that the replacement took three months! During that period, I experienced reading ebooks (to which I was by then addicted) with my Android phone, using a wonderful application named Aldiko. The user friendliness of this app more than compensated for the smaller screen size, and I was able to read technical and fiction books with little problem. But I was missing the big screen. So the delay of the back shipment was partially responsible for the lowering of my defenses, when I entered an Apple store and I couldn't leave without a new iPad.
I felt guilty for a while, but the guilt disappeared in a matter of hours, when I loaded all my ebooks in the iPad, and saw what a difference a bigger and colorful screen does. Compared to the six inches of my ebook reader, the iPad is huge, and the reading is even easier and more pleasurable. I was hooked.
Since then, my personal library of ebooks has grown rapidly. I have bought 90 (yes, ninety) books from O'Reilly, including many that I had already bought on paper, and now I am giving away to friends and libraries.
I need to spend a few words of praise for O'Reilly. In the jungle of book publishing, O'Reilly is the best and more user friendly publisher available. The quality of its books is excellent, the choice of catalog vast and modern, the service impeccable. There are other publishers that offer comparable quality (e.g. the Pragmatic bookshelf or Manning) but not the same rich catalog, or a similarly vast catalog (e.g. Packt Publishing) but not the same quality.
If I have to note any negative points about O'Reilly, is that there is no wish list in their shop. So, for now, I am restricting my wishes to my list on Amazon.
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I wrote a guest column for GigaOm on how open source software, cloud and software as a service are helping to bring about the consumerization of IT: namely bringing simplicity where complexity reigned.  I cited some examples including New Relic, Box.net and Apple.

Open source has gone a long way toward putting power back in the hands of developers, who can download, install and deploy software without having to go through any kind of convoluted sales or budget approval process.  You want MySQL?  You can download and install in 15 minutes, and you don’t have to talk to anyone to do it.

Software as a service (SaaS) takes this to an even broader audience, enabling employees to get the kind of lightweight, consumer, self-serve capabilities in their job without even having to run their own servers.  Platforms like Amazon AWS, Heroku, Makara, RightScale and others put this same kind of SaaS power in the hands of developers...

My view: ease of use trumps a long feature list any day of the week. There are both techological reasons as well as sociological and economic reasons for why organizations are seeking greater simplicity.  Part of this stems from the fact that complex enterprise applications grew beyond the ability of most organizations to successfully adopt.  

Head over to GigaOm for the full post.

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David Cornelson of TextFyre has embarked on an ambitious plan to create a new open source virtual machine, FyreVM.  This new VM will run Interactive Fiction games (e.g. Zork and newer works written in Inform) on a dozen different mobile platforms such as Android, WinPhone 7, Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry.  The goal of FireVM is to take advantage of specific user interface capabilities on each platform, whether it's the touch screen of Android tablets or the 5 way button on the Kindle.

To help with this project, TextFyre has started  a fundraising effort on Kickstarter with a goal of raising $5,000.  To make it interesting, Cornelson is offering several incentives for sponsors:

•  $20  -- A copy of all TextFyre's current products
•  $50  -- A copy of all TextFyre's current products plus two in the works
• $100  -- Your IF game will be commercially published by TextFyre
• $500  -- A Kindle loaded with TextFyre games and a t-shirt
• $1000 --An iPad or Android tablet with TextFyre games and a t-shirt

The Kickstarter funding ends Saturday October 16. I hope you'll join me, other MySQLers, and IF fans  in making a donation. I think interactive fiction is an interesting retro area and want to encourage the development of open source tools and platforms.  Note that Cornelson is publishing TextFyre under an open source license.

• TextFyre: Main site, Games, Blog, Kickstarter page
• IFDB: The Shadow in the Cathedral, Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter

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Financial services on the go - GlassFish for Fundamo and profit
Alexis recently published a new Adoption Story on how Fundamo uses GlassFish v2 and OpenMQ for its Enterprise Platform. Overview at stories entry, details in questionnaire, and an overview in this earlier short video interview.
We are always interested in more GlassFish adoption stories, both from (non-paying) users and from (paying) customers.   Stories come from all industries and around the world, the last few entries are PSA Peugeot Citroën (France/Auto), iVox (Belgium/Print), NHIH (US/Gov-Health Care) and Suncorp (Australia/Finantial).

OSGi/JMS/MDB Example
Sahoo's latest post describes a hybrid OSGi/JavaEE example that uses JMS and Message Driven Beans and leverages GlassFish v3.  Post includes source code and detailed description.

Siebel CRM Support for the iPad
Oracle shows how to use their server-side REST APIs and the iPad SDK to provide access to Siebel CRM from the iPad.   Devices like the iPad (and the iPhone) seem a very good match for the Oracle Fusion Applications. 

Innovating at Warp-Speed: Monitis Announces Java Monitoring from the Cloud
Monitis announces Java Application Monitoring, a cloud-based monitoring solution for JMX-based applications, including GlassFish containers.  More details in announcement and product page.

EJB 3.1 Asynchronous Session Beans
From Paris, with love... Patrick Champion provides a short example of using EJB 3.1's @Asynchronous annotation.  More benefits of JavaEE 6!

Alfresco community 3.3 installation on Glassfish
A short but detailed description of how to install Alfresco Community 3.3 with GlassFish v2.1 and MySQL.

Getting started with Glassfish V3 and SSL
The JavaDude provides a tutorial on how to use GlassFish v3 with SSL.

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Topics for this podcast:

*Matt Asay moves from Alfresco to Canonical
*GPL fade fuels heated discussion
*Apple’s iPad and its enterprise and open source impact
*Open source in data warehousing and storage
*Our perspective on Oracle’s plans for Sun open source

iTunes or direct download (32:50, 9.2 MB)

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