Archive: July, 2008
The Attack of the Spiders from the Clouds
We have seen a lot of discussions of cloud computing in the news recently, as a technology to permit “users to access technology-enabled services without knowledge of, expertise with, nor control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.” This sounds great doesn’t it?! Users with little to no IT expertise can log into the cloud and [...]
Read moreDistributed Memory in Blackboard Systems
Paul Vincent, ex-colleague at TIBCO, kindly responds to A Brief Introduction to Blackboard Architectures with Blackboards for Complex Event Processing. Paul correctly mentions that TIBCO’s BusinessEvents software is an excellent scheduling component in a blackboard systems architecture. However, I should briefly clarify Paul’s note that “blackboard systems historically used a single memory model (i.e. multiple [...]
Read moreCEP is to Architecture as SOA is to Architecture
I am often asked pointed questions (mostly from the stream processing crowd) like, ” What product does CEP?” Sometime it seems my answer determines the fate of that relationship, as my feet are grilled over the CEP-fire to be beat of jungle drums! The amount of money I have lost in deals that did not [...]
Read moreComputing in the Clouds with AWS
The admin team at The UNIX Forums have been considering moving the UNIX and Linux Forums to the clouds – the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Amazon EC2 is one option to scale the forums, which is a LAMP application. Amazon EC2 allows us to rent dedicated servers (instances) on-demand to run applications, such as the forums. Then we can run [...]
Read moreEvent Tracking Google Style
Most readers who operate a web site are familar with Google Analytics (GA). GA users add a bit of Javascript on their web pages. The Javascript has tracking code that executes when visitors request web pages. The GA tracking code basically sets or updates cookies on the user’s browser and requests a single-pixel image from the GA [...]
Read moreA Brief Introduction to Blackboard Architectures
A blackboard architecture is a distributed computing architecture where distributed applications, modelled as intelligent agents, share a common data structure called the “blackboard” and a scheduling/control process. The blackboard can be either centeralized or distributed, depending on the requirements and constraints of the application(s). To solve a complex problem in the blackboard-style, the intelligent agents [...]
Read moreOn Measuring a Market’s Maturity
Professor David Luckham posts a good question in Measuring a Market’s Maturity. Here is a slightly revised reprint of our reply: A few folks have tried to tie “maturity” to “if the code is robust” or “if the product has certain product features.” The way we have addressed this emerging controversy over at The CEP blog [...]
Read moreA Blast From The Past: Linux-Kernel Archives 1998
Oddly enough, someone emailed me this quote, found an email signature documented in 1998, from the Linux-Kernel archives: “Linux is a movement, a philosophy, where programmers and technical people take control of their own destiny.” — Tim Bass Ref: Email signature, Re: Future of 2.0.36, G.W. Wettstein (greg@wind.enjellic.com), Sat, 24 Oct 1998 10:09:27 -0500
Read moreFollow the Yellow Brick Road
Marc Adler follows on from Muddy Waters to The First Annual Fluffies for CEP where Marc also calls into question the transparency, credibility and accuracy of the various fluffy “awards” we see from time-to-time. When I discussed this openly with Waters in Muddy Waters comments they kindly replied that “customers are loath to be a reference client for a vendor,” like this fact somehow justifies [...]
Read moreReference Clients, the Global Meltdown and CEP
Sometimes I get email from colleagues who ask me why I am working on compiling CEP/EP reference clients. My reply is that I don’t care must about reported dollar sales because these numbers are, for the most part, meaningless and mythical at this point in time. Large companies sell enterprise licenses and make up allocated [...]
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