Gobán Saor » Ireland

Cloudy skies, cloudy apps…

Tom Gleeson — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:53:01 +0000

Just back from a break in Clifden, Connemara, summer is nearly over, the kids return to school today, back to work.

Aasleagh Falls, Co. Mayo

Counties Galway and Mayo were like the rest of the country last week, a tad wet, but unlike the developed east of the island, flooding was not a problem; a problematic drainage area is called a lake in the west.

This August has been the wettest and dullest I’ve ever experienced but at least I saw some sunshine earlier in the month thanks to Kristian Raue CEO of Jedox who kindly invited me to visit the company’s offices in Freiburg, Germany. Freiburg is very green in both senses of the word, surrounded as it is by the Black Forest and its well deserved “eco-city” status. Its also know as the warmest city in Germany, a reputation it thankfully lived up for this visitor from a rain-soaked Atlantic isle.

August morning, Freiburg im Breisgau

If Freburg left a positive impression on my mind, so too did Jedox. The overall impression is of a company which intends to use a combination of quality, vision and the judicious use of open-source to build the Jedox brand into one associated with best-of-breed products and consultancy. This vision can be seen in the evolution of Palo, from its “good enough” beginnings to its current near-best-of-breed 2.5 version, and from talking to some of those working on the product, best-of-breed status is not that far off.

Likewise, ETL-Server which is currently a Palo only “loader”, is to be further developed into a true ETL tool, while continuing to offer MOLAP-centric specialisms.

I also got a glimpse of the next version of Worksheet Server. “Wow!”, is all I can say.

Existing web based spreadsheet products are fine for simple data analysis or basic data capture purposes but cannot compete with their client-based elder cousins when serious datasmithing is required. Well, from the demo I saw of Worksheet Server in action, that’s about to change. The look and, more importantly, the feel is similar to that of traditional spreadsheets, its interface with Palo is identical to that of the existing Excel add-in, and here’s the big one, its open source! Game-changing or what?

But …

That might enable me to move a lot of my spreadsheet applications to the cloud, but what about those applications that are more suited to an MS Access type solution?

Then try out WaveMaker. It’s open source and built on industry standards, Hibernate,Spring and the Javascript Dojo framework but has the ease of GUI database development more usually associated with MS tools. The resulting applications are packaged as a WAR file which can be hosted by any standards based Java server (e.g. Tomcat or Jetty). The latest version makes developing Ajax-fronted database applications even easier with the addition of layout templates. Its existing ability to automatically bind interfaces to SOAP web services has been extended to REST web services by means of a new WSDL auto-discover tool. And Chris Keene CEO of WaveMaker also informs me that …

We are also releasing a cloud-based IDE in October with Amazon – stay tuned…

We launched in February and will be announcing our first 7 figure deal this month. We run on Mac, Linux and Windows and are currently the #1 developer download on Apple.com (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/)

Our goal is to make it easy to build rich internet applications without complex coding – kind of a MS Access for the Web.

Jedox and Wavemaker the new breed of open-source businesses…

Nollaig Shona Daoibh

Tom Gleeson — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:39:04 +0000

It’s December 21st, the shortest day of the year; either the middle of winter or the start, depending on your view (here in Ireland, winter really only kicks in from mid-December onwards). The lucky annual lottery winners had a fantastic clear frosty morning to witness the solstice dawn in Newgrange, but the view I experienced from the hill fort in Glending, Co. Wicklow this morning was just as rewarding.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Update: My sister (the teacher) informs me that the modern spelling for Nollaig Shona Dhaoibh (i.e. Merry Christmas to you (ye)) is Nollaig Shona Daoibh, well you learn something new every day!

Trying out Vodafone’s 3G service.

Tom Gleeson — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:36:29 +0000

For over a week this month our local OmniTel wireless broadband was out of action (the 3rd major interruption of service in the last year). As usual I had to revert back to my 64Kbps ISDN line which is not as bad as analogue dial-up but it’s still a shock to the system! Being within 3Km of a telephone exchange which is due to be broadband enabled we should eventually have a more reliable alternative. A 3g mobile signal would also be an alternative but alas our local Vodafone signal is still GPRS only (and O2′s signal is non existent); living in the countryside can be idyllic but it has its drawbacks.

Nevertheless, my wife’s new Nokia n70 is 3G enabled, and as we were visiting a 3g enabled area this bank holiday weekend, I decided to install the N70′s modem drivers on my laptop to try it out. Two hours later, I eventually got it to work, I pity any non-technical person who attempts to set it up. The Nokia PCSuite installed OK but when the Modem was detected on the USB port the drivers failed with a “Windows could not load installer for modem. Contact the hardware vendor” error.

Likewise, when I attempted to un-install existing Bluetooth / GPRS modems I use with my own Sony Ericsson in case a conflict was the cause of the problem I got the same error but this time with a message saying Windows 2000 couldn’t remove the drivers (I’m on XP SP2 !!).

Eventually I discovered I was missing a mdminst.dll from my windows/system32 folder, took a copy for another Dell laptop, REGSVR32′d it ( getting the message “The module ‘c:\windows\system32\mdminst.dll’ was loaded, but the entry-point DllRegisterServer was not found.”) and , hey presto, it worked. Why was I missing the dll? I guess I’ll never know but thanks to this www.driverguide.com thread for pointing me in the right direction.

The modem connected with a speed of 460.8Kbps, but my actual download speed was about half that with an upload speed in the mid 50s. Well ahead of ISDN download speeds and much cheaper (taking into account ISDN has a monthly fixed charge AND is charged by the minute ,while 3G is traffic based). So for those of you in a 3G area, if you still depend on ISDN for either backup or for your main internet service, throw it out and replace it with either a USB modem, router or even a member of your family’s mobile; don’t you just love having alternatives!

Excel 2007 bug and the chance of being hit by a meteorite.

Tom Gleeson — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 11:01:57 +0000

Joel On Software gives a very good technical explanation of the Excel 2007 53,535 as 100,000 bug. And, as he points out, it only affects 12 out of a potential 9.214*10^18 floating point numbers, so is he worried?

…no, the chance that you would see this in real life calculations is microscopic. Better worry about getting hit by a meterorite(sic).

But then again, on April 25th 1969, I witnessed a fireball cross the night sky over my childhood home town of Killenaule, Co. Tipperary. It appeared to be the size of a full moon with a streaming tail and made a “whish’ing sound” – it turned out to be a meteorite. At the time, “The Bunt” Shaw said it landed in the town’s “well field“, but it actually fell to earth over Northern Ireland. So it can happen.

The above image is from the new Irish Times archive service.

UPDATE:

Fix now available.

Rain Has Stopped

Tom Gleeson — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:04:45 +0000

Summer eventually arrived, the rain has stopped; last two weeks of August have being warm and dry if not always sunny. Managed to give the kids at least some more time at the beach before they had to go back to school. As usual for our short breaks we headed to Waterford’s “Copper Coast” where I made the acquaintance of the little fellow on the left – first time I heard grasshoppers chirping this summer.

It’s still raining….

Tom Gleeson — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 01:33:02 +0000

Fantastic picture from a July post to the Ice Cream Ireland blog. It’s now mid-way through August and it’s still raining…

Rain Radar

Tom Gleeson — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 15:07:40 +0000

As those of you reading this from Ireland or the UK know, this has been a very very very wet summer. The most useful technology for dealing with it has been breathable wet gear on the principle that there’s no such thing as bad weather just bad clothing. But on two occasions this summer another technology, the mobile internet, has come to my aid dealing with this biblical-like flood we call Summer 2007, namely the Met Eireann rainfall radar. On two separate holidays by the coast (East Cork and last week Achill/Connemara) I’ve used the updated-every-30-minutes radar (accessed via GPRS on my Sony Ericsson 750i, using the Opera Mobile browser) to decide which beach to head for to avoid the many showers and bask in the not so frequent sunny spells.

What use is a blog to a small business?

Tom Gleeson — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:56:05 +0000

In future when Frank Fullard is asked that question (and the associated “What would I blog about?”) he’s going to point to the Ice Cream Ireland site. I’ve been in their shop in Dingle (if you like ice cream you’ll love it) but I was unaware they also had an outlet in Killarney, now I know, as a result of reading their blog.