I was at the Rotary meeting today. It was interesting to hear the district governor speaks about the polio plus project and how it worked. He also touched topics like member recruiting and using the Rotary Business network.
The thing which stroke me the most was a fellow member Carina Heckscher, had started a project with designing business necklace. It is instead of lanyards for name tags or placing the name tags with pins. This necklace can be worn in the day and then when you need your name sign you can hang in on. You can see the product at www.check-collection.dk. It looked really nice and by buying one you can support the Cancers organizations Support breasts campain (Kræftens Bekæmpelse kampange Støt Brysterne).
What was most impressive with the project was that Carina had use only 3½ week on the project and was ready to when the campaign starts. And it looked like she burned for her project, which was really interesting to see.
Today Tanja and I were at the CO2Penhagen.com festival at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). We liked the initiative and thought it was a good cause to support. It was a really great festival with a lot of popular Danish names playing. We saw Mikeal Simpson, Lars HUG, Dúné and the Mercury Rev. For some real intimate concerts with few people, so it was possible to stand in the front for all the events. We had a blast and feet at home at DTU.
The purpose was to create the world’s first CO2 neutral festival, with energy from biofuel and trash. They also had contest with spinning bikes from eTenzor, where two teams competed on how could generate most energy. I was on the bike for 30 minutes and produces just below 300W for the period. The bikes had Watt meters and displays to configure the ride. I hope the Fitness World which I train spinning in will change to such bikes next time they need new bikes.
They also tried to conserve power on stage lights, where only LED lights were used. It did not have the same special effect as the normal stage scanners, but the LED lights did work very well. It was very powerful, fast switching, multicolor and the scanning function was also fine. It was not possible to see if they had used some other speaker or amplifiers, to conserve energy. Beside the LED it was not possible to see any places where there were changes compared to normal parties.
There were also some exhibition areas where it was possible to see electric cars and water pumps. We heard about the DTU hydrogen car, which won the ECOchallange.
The only problem was that there where to few people at the event today. I would guess there only where 300 people paying 200kr each, so they only got 60.000kr (8.500 Euro), which is not enough to pay for the tents and guards. So bands played for free. So CO2 is only something we want to talk about not participate in. I hope they will have the event next year as well. Then we would go if it is possible.
At the festival they served organic food, which probably is not very CO2 friendly, like Dúné pointed. I don’t have the facts about it, but it requires more energy to harvest 1 kg organic foods, because the crops are less dense in the vegetations. It will probably be some discussions that we will have at some point. Also producing electric on bikes is not sustainable, unless it is instead of other practices. If we where to bike just to produce energy, it would be better to use bio fuels.
I would expect that you know what Google Wave is; otherwise you are not viewing this post. If not please look at Starting on Google Wave, to get more information on the future of communication.
For a while I have been working on how to create Google Wave applications and how they can interact with enterprise application. It is an interesting area with a lot of integration work possible and productivity enhancements.
From what I have learned so fair the features of Wave can connect very well with enterprise applications and make an environment where the users can work.
I created a demo on how Google Wave can be used to manage a simple workflow application. The demo features a loan application, with possible collaboration between the customer and the bank. The demo is made without any backend integration, but it is possible to make this integration.
A more detailed description of how this works can be found at the blog.
So it is possible to create simple “workflows”. Hardcore ABAP workflow programmers will laugh of this type of workflow, since they are missing a lot of the functionality they are using. With time and implementation of a workflow framework, creating workflows will be easier. Wave workflows will be have the advantage of being a much better tool for collaborating and contain semi structured data.
With a lot of Enterprise Services on the SAP systems, it is fairly easy to find the services that you need to enable you to implement ERP functionality in third party applications. You browse the ESR to find the webservice, which you want to use. Then you create a proxy for the service and can call this from your application, in this instance Google Wave. And then when the bank employee has approved the loan the SAP system is informed about the change.
I did have some problems with calling the ES from the Google Appengine, where it is only possible run robots currently. On Appengine there are some limitations on what you can call of Java classes, and I did not manage to get Axis working with ES. Therefore I have just used Plain HTTP calls to ES, where I have created the SOAP envelope manually. Then parsing is also done using XML parsers. From an architectural point I’m not real proved of the solution, but for the demo it is ok.
An example of how it is possible to use Google Wave in SAP is showed in the following video. In this video the user enters a command. The robot then responds with a list of orders this customer have.
The integration still has some short comings, which needs to be addressed, before Wave can be used in organizations.
The list of orders is displayed as plain text, so it is not possible to interact with the text. It would be possible to add buttons or check boxes to perform some simple processing of the orders.
There is a need for a more clear communication with the robot. Using a command like the one used in this example, is not useable. Controlling of the robot can performed using a form like in the workflow demo.
When do you get rid of old text data? Using a SAP CE and BPM it is possible to design dashboards which just shows the data a user needs to see. This is not possible in Wave. It is possible to delete Blips (the boxes with text), but it might be difficult to know when the data is not useful anymore. The user can always scroll back with the replay function.
I will be sharing some more of my examples with you as I get further in my research with Google Wave and SAP. You can follow the progress at http://masteringwave.com.
Apparently it is time for a lot of mergers and acquisitions with VmWare/Springsource and Facebook/friendfeed. Brian Sommer has found the Reuters story about SAP are considering to by Tibco. Apparently they have tried to get hitched before, but without a final conclusion.
If such a fusion happed it could resemble the merger between Oracle and BEA in January 2008. It also was two companies with the same product suite for the middle layer. Oracle then had select which of the products future development should happen on. For the integration part the BEA product was selected, so all consultants had to learn the new product.
SAP did a similarly integration with Business Objects, which from the side as given a lot of new products or rebranded products. For someone who has not worked with BI the integration of two products happened limited problems. From what I have heard it was the frontend from Business Objects and the backend from SAP BI, which was developed as a product, so a new best of breed application was created.
But Tibco has more than just one area of products they have complementary product whole Netweaver suite. For the integration/SOA part I have heard that Tibco should have some better products in some areas and the portal probably does not match how SAP has created the portal. Come to think of the J2ee stack it was also purchased from a company that I have forgotten. But that was on a time when SAP did not have the java stack.
Dennis Howlett says that SAP have to watch Software AG. And that Tibco’s Silver cloud platform could profit SAP.
If the acquisition is approved, then it would be interesting to see what that mean for customers, SAP and partners.
Do you have any Tibco product which you would like to have instead of the equivalent SAP products?
I want to learn some more about how to use Google Wave and how wave could be implemented in organizations. I therefore would like to develop some applications which could be used in organization. I started out very optimistic and thought at I could make an application on Google App Engine easily. I had a lot of free time, since I was not on a project, and could therefore concentrate on developing.
I tried to find a framework which could run on appengine both Jruby on Rails and Groovy on Grails. Both of the frameworks worked on app-engine, but it was too early to start on high performance development on App-engine for a beginner. I therefore spend a lot of time on working getting the frameworks to work, time which could be spend on being productive and creating a Ruby on Rails app which could be hosted on a private server.
I found a solution to my problems. I talked to Rasmus about hiring people from abroad. Rasmus recommend using replacemyself.com to hire a Pilipino using bestjobs.ph. I found some Java programmers and writers there for much less, that I would be able to hire one in Denmark. So it was an affordable way to hire on. It would be more convinent to hire a Dane, but then the price would be much more different.
So now my status has change, I’m an employer instead of a developer. I now need to specify what I want in stead of trying to get it working.
I have startet the Mastering wave project a website where we will share some to the knowledge that we have learned. I don’t have a business plan for the site, except generate a lot of excellent content for developers. I have some ideas for products that I hope to be able to implement and make a living off, but it will probably require a lot of work.
I’ll post more information as get further in this project.
I have been talking with Rasmus from http://my4hours.com/. He has the project of implementing Timothy Ferriss 4 hour work week. There is still some time to go but he has started the journey. I hope that I’ll be able to learn from him, and optimize my life.
I’m currently considering hiring someone from the Philippines to help with my work. I will have to see how it works.
Last December I wrote about how to use SFTP SSH from a Unix server, without using a Seeburger Adapter. SAP PI/XI cannot be used to access SSH SFTP sites directly, but this script can help. There have been many requests for a version which also works on windows. I do not have access to a windows server with PI or XI so it is a little difficult to test for me.
I have now written the following script, which works on my Vista labtop. I have not tested it on Windows 2003 or Windows 2008, where most PI systems will run.
I have used Putty for creating the SSH connection. I have used the pscp (an SCP client, i.e. command-line secure file copy). To try something different then using SFTP. SCP makes it easier to get files which should exist in a directory. Pscp should be downloaded and saved in the same directory as the script.
The script looks like the following.
@echo off
REM PARAMETERS
REM %1 target file PI %F
REM %2 query for where the file is located ie. root@figaf.com:dir/*
REM %3 SSH Password
REM RESET the target file
echo '' >%1
SET TARGETDIR=%~d1%~p1download
echo %TARGETDIR%
IF EXIST %TARGETDIR% GOTO SKIPCREATEDIR
mkdir %TARGETDIR%
:SKIPCREATEDIR
del /Q %TARGETDIR%\*
pscp.exe -pw %3 %2 %TARGETDIR%
type %TARGETDIR%\* > %1
The script takes the following parameters.
The %F which is the name of the file, which the adapter is currently reading.
A the location of the file on the server side in the form “user@server:path/[filter*] ie. root@sftp.figaf.com:dir/SKB*. This command logon with the user root on the host sftp.figaf.com. Then looks in the directory dir, relative to the login dir and the selects all files starting with SKB.
The users password.
The command in the communication channel should look something like.
Last year I wrote about the SCN search plugin to Ubiquity, which made it easy to search on SCN. Ubiquity is a plugin for Firefox. The problem with writing such utilities is that they need to be updated when the unpublished API changes.
The SCN search has changed to a quite fancy web 2.0 search. It is now possible to filter the results based on type, and then subtype and other parameters. The old search just had the option of choosing between few options, which all were accessible via a GET parameter. The new search uses, as fair as I can see, Google Web Toolkit as javascript framework. It looks quite difficult to interact with this framework, so the new search script just take you to the search page.
Michael Koegel informed me that a new version of Ubiquity has been released. Version 0.5 can be installed here. This new version had some changes in the way scripts was written, so the script had to be changed.
When the script is install, and the access keys (CTRL + SPACE standard) are pressed the following popup is created. First scn-search is typed and then the query phase is called. When Enter is pressed the query will be performed.
I really like the upgrade feature of wordpress. It is impressive how smooth it is to upgrade wordpress. Just click a button and it is upgraded. The same is true for plugins.
This is something that other webapplications can learn from. It is probably not easy to implement, but makes is much easier for users to use the system.
Create more bug reports than what comes thru the OSS channel. Why do SAP not use UserVoice on their other products to generate more feedback on the products. […]
Developing PI solution is a real time consumer. If you don't have the correct architecture in place you have a problem. This blog describes one of the problems with missing a PI architecture. […]
