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Archive for February, 2007

Inventory Management for Developers

Posted in programming, tagged on February 28, 2007 | No Comments »

The excellent Alistair Cockburn discuses why software development is remarkably like manufacturing and how we can learn from modern manufacturing theory to better structure our software delivery processes (or indeed any business process where the internal inventory item is the ‘yet-to-be-validated decision’).

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Build your own Bebo

Posted in Web2.0, education, news, tagged , on February 27, 2007 | No Comments »

I see that Ning (co-founded by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame) has settled on a revenue model. Ning allows anybody to create their own social network site (think Bebo, MySpace, if you don’t know what I’m talking about just grab any 17 year old and ask). The resulting networks can be either public or [...]

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REST vs. WS-*

Posted in Web2.0, data, tagged on February 21, 2007 | No Comments »

Joe Gregorio does a good job of explaining why REST is a better alternative to WS-* for most distributed SaaS/Web Service scenarios. His argument is that WS-* is really only suitable within homogeneous environments such as .NET to .NET or Java to Java. REST may lack the comfort blanket of defined standards [...]

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Want your kids to have the programming itch, then Scratch it!

Posted in Ruby, education, excel, programming on February 19, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Having looked in the past for a suitable introduction to programming for my 10 year old son I had come to the conclusion that the existing options (such as KPL) where too ‘wordy’ and not able to compete with the point and click powered online/gaming worlds that youngsters now inhabit. That was until [...]

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Data vs. Design

Posted in BI, ETL, data, excel on February 14, 2007 | No Comments »

I’ve just re-read Stefano Mazzocchi’s 2005 article Data First vs. Structure First. His argument is that “data first” strategies are more intuitive than “structure first”, e.g. Excel vs. databases, blogs vs. CMS, tags vs. hierarchies. As an IT guy you might expect me to be in the “structure first” camp but after more [...]

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Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…

Posted in ETL, Proto, Web2.0, programming, tagged on February 9, 2007 | 3 Comments »

What have these three fantastic products in common?

Proto, an application for building “desktop mashups”;
Kettle, a visual ETL design tool;
Yahoo Pipes;

… you guessed it, pipes. The classic idea of the unix pipe has been given a new life in these three easy-to-use products, but this time the target audience is not the sysadmins and professional [...]

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It’s a wonderful Web …

Posted in Web2.0 on February 8, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Take a look, it explains why there’s no going back….

Thanks to Dennis Howlett
Also see… Shift Happens

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PALO plugin for Kettle (Pentaho) ETL

Posted in ETL, Palo, kettle on February 7, 2007 | 2 Comments »

The much awaited Palo plugin for the Kettle ETL tool has been released. Oh happy days!
Palo is an open source MOLAP database developed by the German company Jedox. Although it doesn’t the match the power of established OLAP engines such as Essbase and many simple cross-tab/pivot requirements can be handled by an Excel [...]

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Web2.0, make way for BI2.0

Posted in BI, ETL, Proto, excel on February 7, 2007 | No Comments »

An article in www.intelligententerprise.com states that BI1.0 is over, prepare for BI2.0. Who will win this BI2.0 battle, will it be MS Excel/Sharepoint, will the old-school BI vendors abandon their bloatware practices, will Open Source or Google grap the initiative or maybe something like Proto? Interesting times ahead, methinks.

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Code Snippets Sold

Posted in news, programming on February 5, 2007 | No Comments »

I see Peter Cooper has sold the excellent Code Snippets site, congratulations Peter. This site and Google CodeSearch are a must-have in the toolbox of all lazy developers; a category in which I proudly place myself. If fact, I agree with Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, who believes the best programmers don’t really want [...]

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Build a Data Warehouse using Ruby On Rails

Posted in ETL, Palo, Ruby, tagged on February 4, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Nikola pointed out ActiveWarehouse , a new RoR Data Warehousing project. Haven’t tried it out myself but the author has posted an excellent tutorial on using the plug-in to create an example warehouse. Along with its ETL and SQL Views sub-projects ActiveWarehouse provides a great foundation for Ruby based BI systems. [...]

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What’s so good about SQLite?

Posted in ETL, Ruby, SQLite on February 1, 2007 | 2 Comments »

…continuing my posts on Ruby and SQLite as a micro ETL environment.
I’ve written before that my most important take-away from Ruby On Rails was the language Ruby, but RoR also introduced me to SQLite. Although its typical use in Rails is as a development database I quickly realised this open source ,very fast [...]

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