alek blogs

Locomotives and Computers

Perfect combination!

WS-Performance (a.k.a WS-Slowness)

Web Services Performance (WS-Performance) provides policy assertions that can be used to describe Web service performance characteristics and in particular provides set of metrics for already existing Web Services specifications. One of the most important concerns when composing Web Services is impact on performance of each specification. Therefore if there could be a synthetic indicator of performance impact of each specification it could help to automate estimation of composed Web Services performance and that is the role of WS-Performance to provide framework for such estimations.

This specification composes especially well with WS-Goodness to provide Web services that are both good and of reliable performance and although currently may be a bit slow (as all Web Services ...) but WS-Performance helps to estimate how fast (or slow) they are!

Warm, Cold, And Warm Again in Arizona ...

I took some pictures of the trip to Northern Arizona.

Here is how warm was and where did we go:

Hot Beginning of Week: Hanging Around in Phoenix and attending SC 2003

Warm Friday on way to Flagstaff stopping in Montezuma Castle, Wupatki National Monument

Very Cold Saturday With Even Coder Wind in Grand Canyon

Warm Sunday on way back seeing Sedona Oak Creek Canyon

But all in all there is way too much to see in Arizona and I will need to visit it again ...

Unusually Warm November ...

More pictures.

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Mad Milton Goes Out...

This entry is written by Milton who took a (temporarily) possession of Alek for one Saturday night on evil mission to win costume contest ("almost" success!):

and more pictures ...

Gold Red Brown Green And Beautiful Autumn ...

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Welcome to Indiana University Beautiful Campus...

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Biking / Monroe Lake @ Night ...

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Octav Was Here ...

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Chicago, Chicago ...

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Front Range @ Boulder Colorado...

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Tumble down the black hole ...

Wonderlab is a nice place to visit even though it is designed to amuse children still every geek has an inner child quite close as we checked this Saturday.

When visiting make sure to lose some pennies down deep in a gravitational hole or even your head when T Rex is checking how tall you are ...

And soap bubble machines were also quite good fun (maybe even more fun than XSOAP - for children at least).

Flower That Blossomed For Me

Flowers and other plants did not seem to do too well with me ...

But now I can show one exception:

Isn't it lovely?

So maybe something really changed. In any case I have at least those pictures.

Oh Laptop, Where Are You?

I have put together description of an ideal laptop and list of possible candidates. Still looking ....

Where Are Java Senior Engineers?

Reading a blog of such high quality as Chris Brumme where he is dissecting CLR internals in such depth (for example asynchronous operations) that it brings a joy to any engineers heart even if it is Java enthusiast.

I just can not stop to wonder where are Java blogs of such caliber that goes into such details and are written not by users but by creators. Java.net seems to be under control of "How-To" writers (exactly opposite to what Chris is doing), evangelists, SUN enthusiasts, and marketing specialists. Not exactly what I would call "The Source For Java(TM) Technology" and engineers seems to be lacking sorely from "a diverse group of engineers, researchers, technologists, and evangelists at Sun Microsystems" that was supposed to propel that site.

So where is SUN hiding all these Java engineers?

Please let me know if somebody knows where to find them ...

UPDATE: maybe other companies that also work on Java are more open? What about IBM, BEA, or other leading Java companies... ? Do their engineers blog (or are allowed to)? One has to admit that Microsoft seems recently much more open and interesting place than ever before ...

And unfortunately James Gosling posts about Zen and his grandmother even though very inspiring does not count as in-depth technical insights ...). And yes, I am impressed that this blog has now RSS feed (took only few weeks?).

Checking validity of server public key with OpenSSH

It was not obvious how to compare key signature when you access new host (or one that was upgraded say from SSH2 to OpenSSH). Easy way to verify keys is to compare key signatures (this assumes you have trustful channel to get those signatures) still after login you can do some simple verification:

$ ssh-keygen -l -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.pub
1024 bf:b2:5c:4a:84:be:23:29:0a:aa:33:18:8f:55:f3:34 foo@newschool.cs.indiana.edu

but wait (!) there is possibly more keys:

$ ssh-keygen -l -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub
1024 08:27:15:2b:d0:6b:b4:a1:c9:c4:a2:89:c9:98:a7:3a /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub

$ ssh-keygen -l -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub
1024 b9:62:0d:a9:df:66:43:e4:97:3d:b8:a0:b2:63:52:8c /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub

still what bothers me: why there are three separate keys and not just two?

Virus in air?

When you enter a room with your wireless windows laptop turned on, wireless card working, and with unfixed RPC vulnerability in your Windows NT/2000/XP then you may be "lucky" enough to catch a traditional virus and some of the latest Windows viruses ....

Sun goes down and darkness falls in NY

For one day we were back to natural cycle of life. As soon as sunset it was dark. No lights except for spurious car lights and emergency lighting. Dark streets. Playing scrabble instead of working (or surfing web). Hunting for food and place to see TV. Hunting for candles. Finding place to sleep for those stranded that could not get back to Manhattan. Staying long in night and rationalizing situation and sharing theories. Trying to ignore hot and humid night without AC ...

Back to Components game?

From Don Box talk on Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) presented during XML Web Services One conference (based on article from eWeek):

"Objects are to services what ICs [integrated circuits] are to devices. And we're moving into this world where we want services to be replaceable, we want services to be deployed independently from other parts of the application, and there's a lot of work to be done in this space."

If you replaced services by components in the statement above would it not sound like something familiar?

Maybe the way to look on this is that Web Services becomes uber components: components that are not only distributed but work for internet scale applications.

MicroLogger: dependable logging

If you need to add logging to your application without worrying about right version of log4j or commons-logging on CLASSPATH use MicroLogger. Just embed one logger class into your application package hierarchy (foo.MLogger) and either use it directly or do any tweaks necessary (source code is provided).