December 2008Newer: Cirque Bouglione In the past I had already designed goal trees using UML. Today I have developed several diagrams for one of my customers : goal trees, project lists, opportunities, initiatives, execution strategies.... I have put it all in one huge diagram, that I have called a mind map. So I have effectively been developing a mind map using a UML Modeling tool. I can't show you because it's confidential but I find it quiet interesting and I will do it more and more. You can try it at home... This weekend I took some time to have a look at Ubuntu. I find Windows Vista is very slow and I wanted to know how Linux would run on my machine (Acer Aspire 5315, Intel Celeron 1.7 Ghz). I downloaded a CDRom from Ubuntu's website. You can boot from that CDRom and run Linux without making any changes to your machine. Directly, I was convinced by the performance : Linux is much more reactive. When applications are slow, the OS isn't and that makes all the difference. There are however some things that make me realize it would cost me time if I would completely switch to Ubuntu :
This Sunday (Nov 30, 2008) we were at the Lotto Arena in Antwerp for the last concert of Natalia's Glamorous Tour. It's the 4th time I see Natalia in concert. The first time was ok. The second time I was disappointed. The third time was ok but I still found she was shouting instead of singing. This time was ... exceptional : 1. She was singing and not shouting: real emotions could flow instead of a mass of decibels. 2. There was a real dance floor : Natalia and the dancers provided a superior experience. 3. There were nice surprises like singing Prince and the appearance of Stam van Samang. So it was an excellent concert this time !!   November 2008Vous y croyez- vous ? Last week I bought a CD and a book. The CD is "I Love Techno 2008" : 7.5 / 10 because some parts are a bit boring. The Book is the new Jacques Attali : Gandhi ou L'Eveil des humiliés. I have not started reading it yet. Fernando Arabal : "L'artiste, c'est celui qui rate" Dans le sens : l'Artiste est celui qui ose prendre le risque de ne pas réussir, celui qui ne vise pas toujours à réussir, celui qui s'expose le plus en mettant en jeu sa propre image.
I'm looking for an association that would take my old bike and give him a second life (send second hand bikes to poor countries). Here is what I have found so far in Belgium http://www.quefaire.be/annonces/A-r-un-velo-583304_1405.shtml If you know such an association, let me know. What a mashup can do for you ? See this French mashup in Paris it shows you were there are parties, concerts, exposition, theaters tonight in Paris. See http://www.parisetudiant.com/agenda/sortir-a-paris-bon-plan.php?  Cool ! Certains spécialistes informatiques (peut-être moi-même) devraient y penser de temps en temps : notre language est très particulier et peut-être un peu opaque. J'ai trouvé ici un bon article qui illustre cela : http://urba-si.blogspot.com/2008/03/vue-mtier-et-vue-technique.html Yesterday we were in Brussels to see the Cirque du Soleil : Quidam. It's the 3rd time I go to a show of the Cirque du Soleil. This time we had places on the first row and it was really a great experience. Ce matin Tom a fait trois beaux dessins avec la palette graphique. It was now the turn of Nokia to invite us to a party this Tuesday Nov 4th 2008 : Xperience 08  The party was in Noxx, which is a nice place to party. We had already been in Noxx for a Tiesto Concert.  There was a concert foreseen of The Glimmers. I fact they were the DJs. I would have prefered they play their own music as their Mix for Xperience 08 was very "conventional". Hopefully there was another salon where we could dance on a music in the Noxx style. I guess it was with Noxx's DJs.  After the FSI reader of Playmobil, I see today - thanks to a Twit of Jean-François Ruiz - that Metro (the free newspaper) also found a good solution to let people read their newspaper online. Not a bad system. So simple... Check an example here : http://www.readmetro.com/show/fr/Paris/20081103/1/16/ Too bad : the Belgian edition is not available on this format. I just installed Gmail Mobile v2.0 on my mobile phone. Yesterday afternoon we went for a walk in the beautiful parc of Tervueren.  The big ePaper / eReader market battle is about to start. See how much companies are developing products for this potential huge market :
October 2008Commentaire de Thomas : "Je connais deux sortes de camion de pompiers: le pompe tonne et le camion avec la grande échelle. Ici j'ai dessiné le pompe tonne"
Le dessinateur : Thomas
"Aujourd'hui, il vaut mieux avoir les bourses en action que des actions en bourse". "Vendez vos actions en bourse et achetez un chien : Il n'y a plus que ça qui rapporte" (Laurent Ruquier) Yesterday I spent some time improving my start page. You can now browse my published articles month by month and one by one. See some details here : http://www.lowas.be/index.php?pagename=BrowseNews If you like the Lounge music that you hear in the Fashion Stores of Brussels or Antwerp (joke), why not give it a try with this CD : The Lounge Box
It's a very nice box. You have 5 CDs of relaxing music. Very Nice. When discussing about SOA a very common question goes about the granularity of services. I have always applied two principles to decide for myself if a service has the right granularity : 1. Does it make sense ? If a Business User of this service reads the service specification, he should be able to understand it. This requires to have servcice specifications in natural language. 2. Is it Human ? Services are ways to request for information. My basic belief is that it should be possible for a normal human being to process that information. I like to think about services in terms of web pages : how would it look like if it was a web page ? (That's probably because I'm a fan of the Semantic Web vision). The rationale is that if the service provides something that is not human (thousands of records) there is room for service re-factoring (by using an iterator for instance). A service that would dump all your emails at once on your screen in one page would be useless. What you want is a service to browse emails titles 20 by 20 and the possibility to open an email by selecting it. In addition you want a search function. Paging, Summaries and Searching are examples of human services. |
