Damon Rand

To the stars?

As an avid scifi fan I have read hundreds of books talking about human colonization of other star systems. At the same time I have read dozens of books explaining cosmology and reality as we understand it now.. One of the most comprehensive is the Elegant Universe.

The simple fact is these two world views are totally incompatible. I have been aware for several years now that no human being will ever leave our solar system. Not in a hundred years, not in a thousand years, not in a million years. A post by Charles Stross explains why. You don't really need to read the details, just recall what Douglas Adams said. "The universe is big, no really big!".

Much more likely, the future will be much like it is now - except more so. Human endeavour cannot scale up much further but there is plenty more room to expand to smaller scales.. A second post by Charles Stross explains that in just a few decades we can reasonably expect that it will be possible to carry the sum total of all human knowledge in our pockets.

The future is elastic

This week I observe that the guys at Enomaly have developed an Amazon Machine Image so that Alfresco can run on the EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud. Eventually Enomoly are planning to provide Alfresco hosted appliances using Amazon web services as the backbone. The are also applying this same approach to providing Drupal, Typo3 and a few other solutions using an application service provider model.

This is just one of many example of utility computing taking off in the marketplace. Here's an interesting case study I came across showing the sort of savings a medium sized web company made by moving from a local datacentre to an AWS infrastructure..

Tell the prime minister what you think

You can now petition the UK prime ministers office directly over the web.. Here are some petitions worth signing.

Rapid application development with JPA

It seems to me that the Java Persistence API is now ready for primetime. Over the next few weeks I will attempt to develop a simple CRUD application using a JPA annotated domain model.

Plan A - Initially I will attempt to use Grails to rapidly (hopefully!) develop a JPA domain model with a set of basic CRUD pages.

Plan B - If that approach fails I will try and use Wicket with a hand-coded set of services and the GenericDAO pattern.

Cross Industry Panel Session on DAM

I was delighted to be invited to be part of the panel discussing processes that span creation, production, management and delivery of digital assets today.

Embedding metadata in an image

I have been considering the question, "How can I provide a search engine with the metadata for my digital assets?". This question arose at the ECCHRD meeting recently. The context was with regard to adding human rights images, audio and video assets to Hurisearch. I came across rdfpic today. The rdfpic proposal (which looks dead in the water...) approaches the problem by using "content negotiation" filters in the http server. Crawlers are instructed to ask for photo.jpg with _application/rdf_ mimetype. The provided demo does not work but the principal seems sound.. Basically, we could provide a set of filters for popular web servers that look for embedded metadata in an asset and serve the metadata instead of the asset to search engines when requested. A second option would be for the search engine to download the asset and extract metadata from the XMP fields. And a third option would be for the metadata to be specified as photo.xml and contain an rdf:subject property pointing to photo.jpg. Some mechanism would be required to ensure that a search engine could find photo.xml. Of course, all three options are long range aspirations at the moment.. The proliferation of content management systems may eventually mean that by suitably tagging our assets with embedded metadata now we can hope that a future approach to asset metadata publication will be easier to add on without recataloguing our assets.

Four guys and the tower

Four guys and the tower, originally uploaded by damonrand.

Saturday involved a pleasant afternoon drinking with my ex-Amnesty java colleagues. The updates.. Daniel Eriksson is studying Chinese philosophy. Jerry Bate is starting a new job webifying the GCSE marking process. Conor Macmahon is off for six months in South America, Aussi and Africa.

TianAnMenKiss1

TianAnMenKiss1, originally uploaded by kennethinshanghai.

I have just worked out how to blog directly from flickr. And what a photo to start with! Anyone care to come up with a suitable caption?

New binary release of SimpleSSO now available

Thats right, SimpleSSO v0.2.0 can now be downloaded! Yes, I know, 0.2.0 doesn't sound like a very mature release. :-) But then we are told Release Early and Often. The primary change is I have migrated the codebase to Tomcat 5.5. The 5.5 release has significantly refactored the internal apis so SimpleSSO the code is now incompatible with TC 5.0.

Also worth mentioning was how much fun it is writing the docs in Confluence and see Confluenza automatically generate an attractive(ish) web page. Who needs web content management?

Hitting the high notes

Joel has written another (very funny) impassioned article about the benefits of hiring superstar programmers