Posting Licence

I have been posting in technical Forums for a long while now. I really think that people should take a tutorial before being allowed to post. I am even thinking of proposing a “Posting Licence” that would be a compulsory part of any IT degree.
Apart from the usual recommendations: “be polite”, “say hello” etc., the “Posting Licence” training should emphasize the following:

1. Before posting you should use Google or any other search engine to try solving your problem. For example, I answered today the following question:
   “If anybody knows about the difference between Message DrivenBean and JMS please clarify to me.”
   The answer is: USE GOOGLE with the key words “MDS tutorial” and “JMS tutorial” and please take time to go through those tutorials! People can’t just assume that somebody is going to post a master course.
2. Be sure that your question is related to the forum’s technology. This type of post if for example very irritating when found in the JMS Sun Forum:
   “i want to send message to mobile through my computer, is it possible?”
   This is not a JMS related question and again please USE GOOGLE before posting! The key words “SMS java” will lead you on excellent sites with all the required information.
3. People usually answer questions at part of their spare time so, please send back an acknowledgement. Moreover when you are using the Sun forum please allocate the promise Duke Dollars! I would like to eventually get my free Mug!
4. Do not advertise your own product! This is one is for me as I have been evangelising Arjuna’s products in the Sun JMS Forum. I have even managed to upset Andreas Mueller . But the war is now over :)
5. Try not asking product specific questions as it shows the world that etheir:
   a) You didn’t buy a licence
   b) You bought a very expensive licence but cannot afford the support premium.

If only everybody could get a posting licence, life would be easier!

Arnaud 

The butterfly effect

The "Butterfly Effect", or more technically the "sensitive dependence on initial conditions", is the essence of chaos. I recently had an excellent illustration of it. We all know that my compatriots are master in making chaotic strikes! And yet again they strike!
The French air traffic controllers were on strike this Monday. Don’t ask me why because I buddy don’t know! But they managed to delay my flights! My flight from Valencia to London was delayed by 2 hours because of them. So is this because of the butterfly effect? Not really because we had to fly over France and those %$%$ controllers were throttling the traffic. Ok, but what about delaying a London-Newcastle flight by 3 hours! Isn’t it a good illustration of the butterfly effect? The French air traffic controllers did manage to delay a London-Newcastle flight by 3 hours!!! I still don’t believe it but at least this is what I have been told!

Enterprise Integration Patterns

A couple of weeks ago I read this excellent book: Enterprise Integration Patterns : Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions. Gregor Hohpe, Bobby Woolf provide us with 65 patterns (in the manner of the classic Design Patterns). Each pattern shows one typical problem in integrating applications, and how it is solved. Each pattern gives enough implementation details so it is clear how it would work, and an example or two so it is clear how it works in practice.
Even if nothing was new for me I just love very much the clarity of the book and the pattern icons that are very pretty and useful to communicate! I am wondering if somebody as done some UML libraries with them?
Definitely a must have for system integrators that want to embrace the bright side of asynchronous communication.
I am now reading Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture from Martin Fowler. Those guys from ThoughtWorks are definitely working hard!

IPT

I haven’t posted in my Blog for now a long time. But here I am back and I will for now on be posting at least an entry a week.
Things have been moving:
- I have resigned from Arjuna Ltd
- I’ll start my new job in Switzerland the 6th of June. I am joining a consultancy company IPT (http://www.ipt.ch/content/main/framesource.asp). This company is very dynamic. I am pretty confident that I’ll learn a lot as I should mainly be working on integration projects (IPT has a great deal of experience with Sonic’s ESB).
- I am very busy moving my family across
- I am much exited to start learning German very soon. To be honest, my aim is to quickly speak a better German than my best friend Thomas (he is German) speaks French.

I’ll like to wish the very best of luck to all the Arjuna boys (I still have shares so, go on guys!!). I have learned a lot with this company but I just think that now it time for me to move on.