• From a technical point of view I didn’t like the user interface. There are too many ways of doing the same. Just take a simple feature like posting a picture… You can post it on a wall, or post it into your pictures and then reference this post from your own wall or a wall of someone else. It is just not implemented well.
• There is a prvacy and traceability aspect. I don’t want my customers to search for facts about me. The facts are mine and I want to control who knows them and who is not supposed to know. Facebook is not a platform I trust my facts, since it is designed to share my private facts with other parties.
• I was bored by poor, brainless, first-idea-came-in-mind posts. I just want to read something with substance, and in 99,999% of Facebook posts there was no substance.
• I hated the notifications and messages. I switched off all email notifications. Even not notified by email, the messages are collected and stored in your personal Facebook inbox. In general, the way notification works in Facebook is very similar to a message sent to wrong mailing list. Did it already happened in your company that you receive a incorrectly sent message and then continue to receive the “I don’t understand….” and “Remove me from the mailing list…” messages several hours, since people send those to the entire mailing list again? In particular, I don’t like broadcast-broadcast mode of communication, since it work only in cases in which all participants write the same and have the same opinion. I believe, that in such case the communication is not required anymore…
• I don’t like the word “Friend” or at least how Facebook define it. In the beginning, there is a collecting phase – people tend to add everyone to the “Friend” list – a classmate, a former co-worker, the wife of a former co-worker which had a red dress on the last corporate event – in general people you don’t know. This list also contains some real Friends – people you spend time with. After some time and tons of spam delivered from people you don’t know you may decide to go to the shrinking phase – delete all the people that are not real friends. On the other hand, you don’t need Facebook to be connected to your friends, but you need it to be connected to those people, who are not your friends! Especially you possibly would be interested in recovering a friendship with someone from the high school if you find out that the person goes to the same parties or concerts as you do. (In fact you again don’t need Facebook for that). So my last phase was anti-friend. I deleted all but my classmates, since I don’t have much contact with them and Facebook was the only way to stay connected. In doing so I ended up in having a Friend list of people I don’t really know anymore.
• People tend to post more stupid things on Facebook than the post over other channels. It is a paradox, but pretty serious “Friends” post a complete nonsense, which is not a problem in general. The problem is that 100 other “Friends” instantly vote for that nonsense. I really think that this is a problem and this problem is a part of the system Facebook. You are just one click away from liking something, but a whole post away from a dislike. This seems to be a general feature of Facebook and an extreme effective way to distribute nonsense.
• And last, but not least, people who use computers only for emailing and Facebook underestimate the privacy feature. They post over their entire life there, spending an incredible amount of time on scrolling through those nonsense messages of others and hitting the like button or leaving a stupid comment. It is addictive, and yes, I know at least five people who should go to a specialist with that problem.

In my opinion, the technology as art should move us forward. You may call me conservative, old-fashioned or just stupid, but there should be some aim in all that communication, picture sharing and messaging. Facebook doesn’t provide this aim – it is a social network for its own (Just compare it to some social network with an aim, like linked.in, FlickR or Xing is).

And finally no, there is no “like” button under this post – just a comment field, empty and waiting for your idea…
(Image taken from here).

In comparison to other Sun Certifications, this one is not focusing on a test of how good you learn the API of a JEE Specification. The theory questions aim to test a general understanding of the JEE technologies, their usage areas and their purpose. There are also some questions testing your understanding of the advantages and caveats of JEE Stack. In general it was not very difficult – I spend several days on preparation and got my 89% (you only need 57% to pass).

The assignment part is pretty interesting. You have to submit a document describing the architecture of the system under development, which contains a set of UML 2 diagrams (class, sequence, deployment, use case). This part is a good excersize for any architect. In addition, you have to identify the main three threats and describe mitigation strategies for them. I found this part interesting, since I noticed that I’m usually not doing it on such level of detail, but judge about the risks based on my own experience. The second and the third parts are evaluated together. You can get at most 160 points and need 114 to pass (71%). I spend almost a week every evening for creation of the assignment and was happy of getting 140 point (87%).

You are among the elite 1% of certified Java professionals who have gone on to achieve the Java Enterprise Architect certification.”

That’s really funny.

At any rate, I enjoyed the preparation time, the exams and I’m glad about the result.

Bei der Einführung von Serviceorientierten Architekturen (SOAs) ist Wiederverwendung nur eines von vielen Zielen, die miteinander um Priorität konkurrieren. Wiederverwendung erreicht man also keinesfalls allein durch die Wahl einer entsprechenden technischen Platt form, sondern nur in Verbindung mit vielen Entscheidungen auf organisatorischer Ebene. In diesem Artikel wollen wir die aus unseren Erfahrungen wichtigsten Vorgehensweisen und Erfolgsfaktoren beschreiben, die bei der Erreichung einer hohen Wiederverwendung innerhalb einer SOA kritisch oder hilfreich sind.

The main idea of the BlackBeltFactory is to create an e-learning platform around computer engineering skills. The site provides so-called courses and workshops: real educational content to different subjects. In order to access the course material, you not only need the account at the site, but should also have a coach, helping you to consume the material. If you get one (I’ll tell you later how this works), you can study the content and solve excersises. On any questions you can contact the coach who is intended to help you, usually via skype or email.

Once you are done with studying – you should test yourself by registering to an exam. An exam is a set of online multiple-choice questions. In order to pass exams, you also require some contribution points. You get contribution points for any kind of community activity: connect you status update with twitter, edit questions, post comments, translate course materials – everything you do for the site and community gives you contribution points. In addition, you can create groups and invite people into them.

Every passed exam gives you some knowlegde points. For a number of knowlegde points earned, you get a belt. Belts have different colors: white, yellow, orange, green, blue, brown and finally black. For the black belt you not only need enough knowlegde points, but also have to be a successful coach for two other students, which means that they have to pass the exams and give you feedback.

After you get a blackbelt, you may offer coaching for money. You give 20$ + 15% of the coaching proce to BlackBeltFactory, but I suppose this is fair enough. The site gives you a possibility to create coaching offers (free or paid) and manage the students, who are looking for the coaches – a real e-learning marketplace.

I had an idea to get the black belt by passing exams of subject I think I’m expert in, without taking all the courses. It turned out, that the exam questions are pretty good – you easily pass the subject you are good in, but you ultimatively fail in subjects where you have knowledge gaps. Another problem you face is the lack of contribution points. For this purpose, there exist a so-called belt track, a series of exams in which passing an exam enables the next one without spending contribution points. The exams are predefined but cover basic Java, OO, XML and Web technolgoies, so I could use the track to achieve the blackbelt quickly.

I like the site because I have the possibility to test my knowledge. The tests are not trivial, but reveales subjects you should deepen. On the other hand the site lives from the contributions. You can do anything – from commenting bad exam question to designing new questions, exams, courses – whatever. I also liked the education part, where you have to teach a Java fundamental course for free. That’s not trivial if a person you teach really starts from scratch, but very interesting and challenging. I also like the fact that you can do a lot without paying money – very good business model.

Sometimes, the site shows strange behaviour, but you can ever finish your work. At some places the site seems to be not following its own styleguide and look&feel, but these are details. I’m a big fan of BlackBeltFactory.

Martin told about the OSGi technology and the usage of it in big projects. He advertised the OSGi module system but also pointed on some pitfalls during design of the architecture. I was a little dissapointed, since it was a kind of entry-level talk, and its main emphasis was to recollect the importance of the service-oriented principle during system design. He pointed out the importance of loosly coupling and implicit dependency which foster maintainability of the system for many years. In the same time the fulfillment ofsuch architectural principles does not come for free.

Jan Köhnlein made a talk on DSLs in general and Xtext 2.0 in particular. The guys from itemis did a nice job in developing Xbase, a new language which can be used inside of the user DSL. For me, it is a huge step towards ubiquitous application of DSLs in software projects. Xbase give the ability to specify behaviour inside of DSLs. It is statically typed, compiles to Java, supports closures and type inference, operator overloading, etc.. – many nice features to use a little more functional programming language features in your DSL. Especially the ability to mix Java Types with Types defined in your DSL in combination with higher-order functions seems very powerfull to me.

Finally, Ralf Ebert made a very decent presentation on Git – the popular distributed versioning system. I am a big fan of Git and use it for many things i develop and saw many different presentation on those – but Ralf’s was the best one. He explained very plastically the difference in usage of Git to other versioning systems like SVN or CVS. He also showed a nice demo by showing some interesting branching and merging scenarios by switching between two users (Alice and Bob) on his machine and developing a simple web application. It was fast, precise and understandable – very nice talk.

The next Nordic Coding is planned for the August 19th, 2011.

More pictures in my FlickR set…

Recently, I went out with my friends and made some pictures outside. I always try to record the geo information if possible, so I used my GPS-Logger. After I shared the GPS track with my friends, I realised that the recording and the extraction steps changed a lot since my last post on it in 2008. Since my friend wanted to know more details, I would like to report about the geo steps in my photo workflow.

The principle of storing geo information is simple. Pictures shot by the camera contain timestamps. A GPS signal receiver gets its time information from the satelite – so to any time of GPS fix, the time information is available. A recording device just samples the GPS coordinates and timestamps. A simple correlation of this two sequences allows to enrich the image data with geo information.

In practice, I’m using a GPS Logger Holux M-1000C for recording. The usage is simple – I just switch it on before my photo session and it starts recording. After I get home I first read out the track from the device using the ezTour software which is a kind of a driver to produce a GPX file. Then, I import the pictures from the camera and store them into an arbitary folder. Finally, using the GPicSync software I write the geo information into the EXIF tags of the RAW-format pictures. For this purpose, the GPX file and the folder with RAW files is selected and the synchronization process is started.

Before further processing in the workflow, it is important to make sure that the metadata information is up-to-date. In Lightroom, I have to explicitly update the metadata, since it is stored in the catalog. I prefer the geo information in IPTC keywords, EXIF and in image description, but you can choose where to put it in. After processing and export to FlickR, the geo-coded pictures can be displayed on the map.

Several years I attempted to create a local, German photo-community page, a PHP and Web Design site and some other web pages. Why did I do that? Because I believed to understand something about how the pages should be designed. Maybe I was mistaken, but probably there is another important reason, that I was neglecting. Communities are not built around good-looking, convenient, user-friendly platforms, but much more around a unique idea, which I never had. There are hundreds of web-technology pages and journals, and many German local photo pages. And the fact that I know five web-interested people and fifteen hobby photographers seems to be not enough to maintain and fill the page.

I had an interesting discussion with Alex regarding the fact, if it is a good idea to create several, narrow-topic pages or one blog with all topics. My opinion was that a clear-addressed page will attract more people, than one page reporting about all subjects. I must concede that in theory I still believe that, but in practice it doesn’t work if you are the only person posting. And sorry to say that, but in the end I was the only one writing. In the same time, I already have a page on which I’m the only writer – this one.

A further reason of separating pages is the language of writing. I’m writing English and German (my Russian writing went never so far, that it would be not possible to write them in one of the already mentioned languages) and it seems that it is not a good idea to mix different languages on the same page. Bojidar gave me an advice to write English, since most people using Internet like I do, understand English. On the other hand, it seems stupid to write English for Germans living in the same German city, so my photo page was in German. Surprisingly, after I started to write this post (and decided to close the DigitalExperiement site), there is a new idea and justification for letting it online. I never finished the gallery section of the page and found out that this is probably the most important part. I’m posting my best photographs in different photo community sites, mostly for the reasons of getting feedback. In fact I don’t like any of the pages seriously, so I will re-post the best pictures on Digital Experiment someday. In fact I found at least two other people who are interested in putting their high-gloss pictures into the gallery. But as long as it is not ready, I just cleaned up the content and removed the unneeded content from the page.

An additional reason for creating pages, was my interest in small PHP projects. I’m a big fan of WordPress and Dokuwiki, so I spend a reasonable amount of time integrating these two systems. This included designing templates/themes which look the same on both platforms to allow for a seamless integration of the two systems into one web page. My TechJava Journal uses that, the Digital Experiment used it too. TechPHP was a kind of project home for all templates and plug-ins. In the end, WordPress 3 break the API completely and didn’t describe the login procedure in detail, so I didn’t want to reverse-engineer it again. Since the page was not hosted by me alone (but Alex participated in the project too), we decided to take the page offline.

The same will happen with TechLinux, a site produced to be an place to post about experiences in Linux administration and usage. It was never really useful, even if the page was a case study of how to program dynamic pages in PHP. It was a kind of own-written CMS with structure and content stored in the database.

Finally, I’m not taking all pages offline. I still host my high-school class homepage and the homepage of my first band. Probably, my most successful page is TechJava. I’m continuously posting on it and its Eclipse Category is aggregated on some important community sites. The official TLA+ Page is also doing well and become more and more attention by people interested in Temporal Logic of Action and PlusCal by Leslie Lamport. I decided to create some new content there about the history of TLA+. Since my employment at Holisticon AG I started to post on its blog. The blog is in German and discusses topics like software architecture, agile project management and other and I post regularly.

So, less is more on the web too…