Everything given a price?

Putting a price tag on everything makes money matter more, and makes life harder more for those with less money. 

Do we live in a market society where everyting is now up for sale? 

Sandel said, "If all money could buy was just yacht and fancy vacation, inequality would matter less than it does today when money determines access to health, education and political influence. And secondly, market values sometimes corrupt and crowd out non-market values worth caring about. Health, education, civic life and personal relations."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-13/everthing-given-a-price/4687194

Also check out this recent BBC documentary on the banking crisis (uk ip only, for limited time only):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01sf11c/Bankers_Fixing_The_System/

Read more...

Steps for cloning an EBS-backed AMI (between regions)

1. Create a snapshot of a working instance (via the EC2 Console - Elastic Block Store - Snapshots - Create Snapshot)
2. Copy the snapshot to your target region (Elastic Block Store - Snapshots - Copy)
3. Jump onto the target region. Create a new image from that snapshot (Elastic Block Store - Snapshots - Create Image)
4. Launch an instance from the image (Images - AMIs - Launch).
5. Update your route 53 rule for the domain accordingly

Important:
Check your aki value is set correctly to a matching type (see http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/UserProvidedkernels.html#FAQs_Kernel)
E.g.
aki-fe1354ac pv-grub-hd0_1.03-x86_64.gz AP-SE1 is compatible with
aki-31990e0b pv-grub-hd0_1.03-x86_64.gz in AP-SE2

If you get an "EXT3-fs: sda1: couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features (240)." or similar that's because it's of the wrong kernel type.

Unless the image needs to be publicly accessible (although free, by default each region is restricted to 5 elastic IPs), add the instance to the VPC, which provides many benefits including private subnet, changeable security groups, private IP (assignable via Route 53) and so on. For more information on VPC visit http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Introduction.html

Read more...

Make Yourself Indispensable!

Reposted from http://theinstitute.ieee.org/opinions/presidents-column/make-yourself-indispensable

When I was a senior at the University of Illinois, an alumnus returned to campus to give a talk about his work. While he was being introduced, he walked to the blackboard and wrote two words - "initiative" and "tenacity" - in the upper left corner. He didn't mention them during his talk, and no one asked about them in the Q&A session that followed. But as he left the stage, he pointed to the board and said, “By the way, if you don't remember me or anything else I’ve said today [unfortunately, I don't], try to remember and apply those two words. If you do, you’ll have a successful career.”

A few years later, I joined the National Bureau of Standards, in Boulder, Colo., as a postdoctoral fellow. It didn't take long to figure out that NBS was a great place to work and Boulder was a great place to live. One day, while talking to my boss, I asked about the chances of a permanent position. He responded, "Make yourself indispensable!" and abruptly ended the conversation.

A few weeks later, he invited me to join the highest-profile project in his group, a project that would eventually have a major impact on fundamental metrology, and a team that included a future Nobel Prize winner. Whether he thought my skills would be useful, or was giving me a chance to learn some new things, or wanted to see what I could do, I'll never know. I’d like to think it was all three.

I've always been grateful for those three gifts: good advice, an impossible challenge, and an exceptional opportunity. The collective message to a young engineer was that I should accept responsibility for my career. If I wanted to advance, I should find ways to become more valuable to my employer. When an opportunity to contribute and grow was offered, I should grab it.

Much has changed in the working world over the past few decades, and that message is even more important now than when it was delivered to me years ago.

Today's graduates should not expect to do the same work for 40 years. Workforce experts tell us that they will probably change jobs 8 to 10 times. Technology is progressing at an accelerating rate. Those who fail to keep their skills fresh will find job transitions difficult and will need to learn how to navigate successfully through periods of midcareer unemployment and the challenges of reentering the workforce.

Today, engineering labor is often treated like a commodity, to be purchased as needed. By choice or necessity, consulting and contracting are becoming more common career paths. This is not necessarily a bad thing - supporting a broad clientele is common in other professions, including law and medicine. However, it increases the need for career-long skills development, not only in technology but also in aspects of business, customer relations, marketing, accounting, intellectual property, and other nontechnical areas.

The former CEO of a large international technology company was recently quoted as saying, "You need to have the advanced skills that the future requires. You need to move to the future from a skills perspective." But then he added, “We do a lot of retraining every year, and we still find ourselves in the situation where people can’t move up the skill ladder. So we have to replace them with current skills.”

He may be correct that some members of our profession have not moved up the skill ladder, but I reject the idea that they can't. Engineers may lose the currency of their knowledge, but they don’t lose their talents or their basic understanding of physical principles. Technologists of all ages must commit to a lifelong expansion of their skills.

Help with that is one of the greatest benefits of belonging to a professional society. A professional society is about knowledge, nurturing its creation and—through its dissemination—helping technologists thrive, and helping innovators innovate. It's also about the nontechnical aspects of being a professional—about building non-technical skills through education and gaining experience as a volunteer. It's a source of advice and information about career management. And all of that happens through a supportive community of peers and friends.

That is what IEEE has done for me and is doing for more than 415 000 members all around the globe, helping us "move up the skill ladder," a bit closer to the elusive goal of becoming indispensable.

Gordon W. Day IEEE President and CEO (June 2012 The Institute)

Read more...

A living church is a worshipping church

"The third characteristic of the early church was its worship. They devoted themselves (literally) 'to the breaking of the bread' and to the prayers', meaning not private prayer, but prayer meetings and prayer services. What strikes me (i.e. Stott) about this summary of the early church's worship is its balance in two respects.

First, their worship was both formal and informal...(contd. in p29)

There is an important lesson to learn here. Young people tend to be impatient with the inherited structures of the church. Understandably so, for some churches are too conservative, too resistant to change...

We must listen to young people. But the Holy Spirit's way with the institution of the church is more the way of patient reform than of impatient rejection...

If I may generalize, older people prefer the more formal and dignified services in the church, whereas younger people prefer the more spontaneous and liberated meetings in the home. We need to experience each other's preferences. The early church had both, and we need both. Every church of any size should break itself down into small fellowship groups.

Secondly, the early church's worship was both joyful and reverent...

Christianity is a joyful religion, and every service should be a celebration. Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher said before he died: ' The longer I live, the more convinced I am that Christianity is one long shout of joy!'

So Luke writes; 'Everyone was filled with awe' (Acts 2:43). The living and holy God had visited Jerusalem. God was in their midst, and they bowed down before him in that mixture of wonder and humility which we call worship.

Thus the early church's worship was both formal and informal, both joyful and reverent. We need to recover this biblical balance in our Christian worship today."

Read more...

A living church is a caring church

"If the first mark of a living church is study, the second is fellowship."

Luke 2:44-45 reads, "All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need."

John Stott continues in Chap 1 of The Living Church, "These are disturbing verses, the kind we jump over rather quickly. What do they mean? Do they teach that every living church will become a monastic community...

Certainly Jesus calls some of his disciples to total voluntary poverty. This was evidently the calling of the rich young rule in the gospels. This was also the vocation of Francis of Assisi, and of Mother Teresa and her sisters - perhaps in order to witness to the world that a human life does not consists in the abundance of our possessions (see Luke 12:15).

But not all the followers of Jesus are called to this. The prohibition of private property is a Marxist, not a Christian doctrine...

Nevertheless, although we may breathe a sign of relief that we have not been called to total poverty, we must not avoid the challenge of these verses...

So those of us who live in affluent circumstances must simplify our economic lifestyle - not because we imagine this will solve the world's macro-economic problems, but out of solidarity with the poor.

So then a living church is a caring church. Generosity has always been a characteristic of the people of God. Our God is a generous God; his church must be generous also."

Read more...

A living church is a learning church

"A living church is a learning church", thus writes John Stott in his book, The Living Church: Conviction of a Lifelong Pastor, this being the first of four marks of a living church.

Luke's penned this in Acts 2:42, "They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer."

Stott adds, "I do not hesitate to say that anti-intellectualism and the fullness of the Holy Spirit are mutually incompatible. For who is the Holy Spirit? He is 'the Spirit of Truth'; that was one of Jesus' favourite descriptions of him. It stands to reason, therefore, that wherever the Spirit of truth is at work, truth matters."

Read more...

The Book of Jeremiah

Luke’s account of Paul in Acts covered Paul's dramatic conversation from a Christian persecutor to a disciple, followed by his many missionary journeys each resembling a walk through a mine field, evangelising to not only the Jews but Gentiles also that took him across many countries from Jerusalem to Rome. It's a story you can't make up.

Who’d have thought that some 600+ years before Paul, there lived another suffering servant, who like Paul faced all sorts of oppositions and sufferings you can possibly imagine, and was God’s mouthpiece – albeit a reluctant one – to advance His Kingdom.  That person was Jeremiah.

If you consider the circumstances in which Jeremiah was called to prophetic services, there’s striking similarities between him and the Servant of the Lord as mentioned in Isa 49 (widely accepted to be the Messiah himself), but no more than Jesus who suffered the ultimate death for us all sinners. Some of the notable similarities observed are briefly outlined below:

1. Jer. 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you”.  Isa. 49:1, “Before I was born, the Lord called me”. He was set apart for Gods duties before his birth, when he was still in the womb. In the hours of darkest opposition and brutal treatment, that reality doubtless proved immensely stabilizing to Jeremiah.

Jeremiah was called to duty at a young age too (v7, I am only a child). Scholars believe he was no older than 25years of age. But again, we might also feel overwhelmed by God’s call, but he has promised to give us the strength to do whatever he asks.

2. He meets opposition that drives him to despair, though he faithfully perseveres (Isa. 49:4; Jer. 4:19–22, etc.).

3. God has made his mouth “like a sharpened sword” (Isa. 49:2), which rather suggests prophetic ministry much like the case for Jeremiah, "I have put my words in our mouth" (Jer. 1:9).  God is perfectly capable of equipping anyone he chooses. God himself would put words in Jeremiah’s mouth and make him a prophetic voice, not only over Judah but over the surrounding nations (Jer. 1:7–10).

There are aspects of Jeremiah that make him unique. He knew he’d be called to face the wrath of kings, priests, false prophets and wicked, idolatrous people as a whole. At the back of James Reapsome's book on Jeremiah, it reads,

“It’s been said that Jeremiah was a successful failure. He failed to turn the people of Judah back to God, yet he succeeded in remaining faithful to God’s call against tremendous odds."

Likewise for us, there’s bound to be times when we face struggles in our Christian life. Perhaps not understanding why God allows us to experience a particularly difficult situation. We might even question whether God has called us at all.

But we can take heart in Jeremiah who can help grow our understanding of God’s call to salvation and why service is so important.

Read more...

A succinct description of Christians and its implication

Extracted from Don Carson's May 15, 2011 For the Love of God daily devotional series.

(a) Christians are “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God,” their very existence designed to declare the praise of the One who called them “out of darkness and into his wonderful light” (1 Pet. 2:9). The transformation of Christians’ conduct is the attestation that they really do belong to God (1 Pet. 2:10, 25). 

(b) This also means that we no longer belong to the world. Here we live “as aliens and strangers” (1 Pet. 2:11). If we do not think in those terms, but are frankly comfortable with the world and its ways, we ought to question whether or not we really belong to the “people belonging to God.” This is the assumption Peter makes when he writes, “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Pet. 2:12). 

(c) If any of this involves hardship or suffering—as it especially did in the case of slaves who belonged to cruel and unjust masters—we can never forget that we follow a Master who himself suffered most unjustly. No moral value attaches to suffering what we deserve; we show ourselves to be followers of Jesus Christ when we suffer unjustly and endure it faithfully. “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps” (1 Pet. 2:21).

Read more...

A Venture Perspective on Cloud Computing

An article by R. Vasan of Mayfield Fund, and reposted from Google Cache.

As a result of the impact of the Web, cloud computing, and mobility, technology companies must radically rethink how they build, package, deploy, market, and sell their solutions.

The rise of open source software along with the proliferation of new languages and frameworks provides developers with an ever growing catalog of components to leverage, making it faster and cheaper to build solutions. The operational elements of software have been similarly impacted as cloud computing platforms offer drastically cheaper means of deploying and managing solutions that can serve users globally.

Simultaneously, the Web has fundamentally changed the relationship between vendors and customers. Google has trained us to search for what we want, find it, and get educated. Therefore, vendors must employ sophisticated techniques to attract, nurture, and service prospective customers. Meanwhile, customers are adopting a broad array of devices such as computers, tablets, and smartphones and will increasingly expect to access all their applications, services, and data from these different devices anywhere and at any time.

Developers Cope with Platform Shifts

Until recently, programmers were required to build most of an application's capabilities in a single programming language (C or C++) and one integrated stack, with the Windows PC as the primary platform. Then, in the early to mid-2000s, the target platform started shifting to the browser. Java and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) emerged as the preferred language and architecture for Web applications, with large developer communities coalescing around these key open source layers.

Open source has continued to flourish, and today SourceForge hosts more than 250,000 projects, the top 50 of which have been downloaded in excess of 10 million times. Consequently, there are now strong open source offerings for almost every element in the software stack, ranging from antivirus software (ClamWin) to content management (Alfresco and Drupal) to search (Lucene and Solr) to virtualization (Xen). In fact, the combination of the Linux operating system and the Xen hypervisor are the key open source technologies that provide the foundation for cloud computing.

Initially, companies achieved significant cost savings by using open source technologies, but they still had to make substantial up-front investments for servers, storage, and networking infrastructure. However, in August 2008, after two years in beta, Amazon officially released its Web services platform. The range of services began with raw computing, storage, security, and networking, but they've quickly expanded to include additional infrastructure services, such as database, content management, authentication, messaging, logging, and monitoring. Today, in addition to Amazon, various other providers, including Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce, offer compelling cloud platform capabilities with attractive and variable pricing. For example, Amazon recently added a free tier of service that includes one continuous month (750 hours) of compute with load balancing and a generous amount of storage and bandwidth—10 Gbytes and 15 Gbytes, respectively.

Virtualization, open source, and cloud computing have made it vastly cheaper to build and deploy new software solutions, thus the cloud is where developers and new companies start out.

Marketing Matters Even More

Historically, technology companies were forced to engage in expensive and inefficient direct marketing and selling processes. In enterprise technology, key analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester Research acted as trusted advisors and even gatekeepers to senior IT professionals. Companies consumed substantial funds in deploying large marketing and field sales efforts, but the difficulty of managing complex decision and budget processes led to wildly unpredictable results. Further, the high costs of product development and deployment as well as sales and marketing often forced vendors to target only large enterprises that could spend millions of dollars.

After the dot-com bubble and subsequent global recession, companies altered how they acquired, deployed, and managed technology. At the same time, consumers embraced new Web and mobile technologies that began to influence the solutions used within corporations. However, as the market has continued to grow and evolve, customers of all sizes have grown tired of the constant influx of new technology, and many don't see the value in having to install, configure, and manage multiple solutions. Instead, they expect vendors to provide them with an always-on option that's easily accessible from any device and is packaged and priced based on usage. Salesforce's "no software" motto captures this sentiment best. The new pricing and delivery model of software as a service has also greatly expanded the addressable market for vendors, since small- and medium-size companies can now be served in addition to large enterprises.

But merely addressing the software production and deployment model is no longer enough. It's also necessary to change how companies drive awareness, nurture interest, and ultimately acquire customers. As a result of the fundamental change in the relationship between buyers and vendors, prospects want to learn and convince themselves to buy instead of being sold. Therefore, vendors must provide compelling content in the form of demos, case studies, testimonials, detailed documentation, or even free trials. Patience is required, since the process of nurturing interest and converting prospective buyers to paying customers may take weeks, months, or even years. Vendors must also continue to build out their extended communities of customers and partners as influencer and support mechanisms.

Much can be learned from successful consumer Web companies like Amazon, eBay, and, more recently, Zynga. Both consumer Web and mobile businesses have demonstrated how to be efficient at running campaigns to attract and convert customers. Search is still the key starting point for most purchase decisions, but social media such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and so on are an increasingly important means of communicating and sharing information. A variety of new companies like Radian6, Gigya, SEOmoz, and Trada have emerged to specifically help marketers execute social media and search strategies.

Basic Web traffic analysis including Omniture or Google Analytics has been around for a while, and eventually all the sales-related account information ends up in a system like Salesforce. But it's now critical to track and integrate online activity with both marketing and sales interactions, and to keep detailed historical information for analytical purposes, specifically to drive increased efficiencies in acquiring, retaining, and servicing customers.

E-mail blasts were an early form of online marketing, but now companies must also instrument their campaigns to include social media and online webinars and events (WebEx or GoToMeeting). Companies like Marketo and Eloqua have pioneered new solutions for automating marketing programs and providing detailed marketing analyses. While Web analytics, marketing automation, and customer relationship management are key building blocks, no single solution can manage the entire online marketing and selling process. Instead, marketing and sales organizations must be more tightly integrated, and all these new applications must be connected and instrumented to produce actionable business metrics.

Developers as Customers

It's also important to broaden the concept of the prospective customer beyond the end user. In many situations, the customer might be another software developer. Much of the early success in open source and cloud computing was the result of generating large communities of developers around popular software components or frameworks. Companies like JBoss, SpringSource, and Heroku were acquired as much for the communities or ecosystems they attracted as for their technology. Even in crowded markets like e-mail providers or the e-commerce infrastructure, companies like MailChimp and Magento emerged due to their focus on attracting developers with cleanly defined architectures and APIs.

Today, it's somewhat surprising but also exciting to see developers experimenting with a broad range of new programming languages like Ruby, Erlang, Clojure, and Go. Many of these languages were designed specifically to address some of the key advantages associated with cloud computing. In addition to exploring these languages, developers are increasingly taking the opportunity to rethink the entire application architecture. It might not make sense anymore to assume the traditional n-tier architecture of database, application, and Web presentation as distinct layers. Instead, developers are investigating newer frameworks like Hadoop, Memcached/Membase, CouchDB, Nginx, and Node.js. These approaches are gaining interest not only because of their simplicity and scalability, but also because they're built to take advantage of cloud economics and scalability.

Another element contributing to the reexamination of the software architecture is the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets based on iOS and Android. While Apple may garner most of the attention, Android's open nature has proven to be a compelling platform for carriers and device manufacturers. These mobile platforms and the current poor quality of wireless coverage introduce another set of problems and constraints that the next-generation application architectures must address. Start-up companies are developing intriguing new frameworks like SproutCore, Sencha, and Titanium to enable emerging standards such as HTML5 that help applications span both mobile and Web environments.

Cloud and mobile computing appear to represent yet another software architecture change. These platform shifts have happened almost every decade and take some time to standardize. Recognizing the changes in how customers and developers evaluate and adopt solutions, many start-ups are building new software services that can leverage cost advantages of massive scale while also taking advantage of online marketing to drive highly efficient customer adoption and retention. We're at the very beginning of these platform shifts that will lead to significant opportunities across the entire software landscape.

Mr. Vasan is the managing director of the Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California.

Read more...

Best Practices for Large WebSphere Topologies

This article examines large topologies and the best practices involved in configuring and managing them, from several perspectives. Different limiting criteria for cell size are explored and the considerations for each criteria is documented. The goal is to provide the most accurate information about WebSphere Application Server behaviour and scaling constraints so that you can develop the plans for your large topology based on the functional and operational priorities that are the most relevant to your organization.

Obtain the latest PDF from this link.(Currently version 2.0, dated March 31, 2011)

This is a living document maintained by the WebSphere Large Topology Task Force. A real gem!

Read more...

The Bishop of London's Sermon at the Royal Wedding

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” So said St Catherine of Siena whose festival day it is today. Marriage is intended to be a way in which man and woman help each other to become what God meant each one to be, their deepest and truest selves.

Many are full of fear for the future of the prospects of our world but the message of the celebrations in this country and far beyond its shores is the right one – this is a joyful day! It is good that people in every continent are able to share in these celebrations because this is, as every wedding day should be, a day of hope.  

In a sense every wedding is a royal wedding with the bride and the groom as king and queen of creation, making a new life together so that life can flow through them into the future.

William and Catherine, you have chosen to be married in the sight of a generous God who so loved the world that he gave himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

And in the Spirit of this generous God, husband and wife are to give themselves to each another.

A spiritual life grows as love finds its centre beyond ourselves. Faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this; the more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully revealed. In marriage we are seeking to bring one another into fuller life.

It is of course very hard to wean ourselves away from self-centredness. And people can dream of doing such a thing but the hope should be fulfilled it is necessary a solemn decision that, whatever the difficulties, we are committed to the way of generous love.

You have both made your decision today – “I will” – and by making this new relationship, you have aligned yourselves with what we believe is the way in which life is spiritually evolving, and which will lead to a creative future for the human race.

We stand looking forward to a century which is full of promise and full of peril. Human beings are confronting the question of how to use wisely a power that has been given to us through the discoveries of the last century. We shall not be converted to the promise of the future by more knowledge, but rather by an increase of loving wisdom and reverence, for life, for the earth and for one another.

Marriage should transform, as husband and wife make one another their work of art. It is possible to transform as long as we do not harbour ambitions to reform our partner. There must be no coercion if the Spirit is to flow; each must give the other space and freedom. Chaucer, the London poet, sums it up in a pithy phrase:

“Whan maistrie [mastery] comth, the God of Love anon,

Beteth his wynges, and farewell, he is gon.”

As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life. This is to load our partner with too great a burden. We are all incomplete: we all need the love which is secure, rather than oppressive, we need mutual forgiveness, to thrive.

As we move towards our partner in love, following the example of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is quickened within us and can increasingly fill our lives with light. This leads to a family life which offers the best conditions in which the next generation can practise and exchange those gifts which can overcome fear and division and incubate the coming world of the Spirit, whose fruits are love and joy and peace.

I pray that all of us present and the many millions watching this ceremony and sharing in your joy today, will do everything in our power to support and uphold you in your new life. And I pray that God will bless you in the way of life that you have chosen, that way which is expressed in the prayer that you have composed together in preparation for this day:

God our Father, we thank you for our families; for the love that we share and for the joy of our marriage.

In the busyness of each day keep our eyes fixed on what is real and important in life and help us to be generous with our time and love and energy.

Strengthened by our union help us to serve and comfort those who suffer. We ask this in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Amen.      

Read more...

A brief history of WebSphere

In 1997, most companies were just beginning to understand how fundamental the web would become to the way businesses operated. Meanwhile, one of the key components of web operations - software to build, run and manage web-based applications - was just beginning to take shape. The way the web would work, and how people could work through it, was about to change profoundly.


A small team of IBM developers, working as fast as possible in just a few months, built what they would call - at the last minute, before a developer conference - IBM WebSphere.

The rise of the WebSphere brand- beginning with the WebSphere Application Server in 1998- parallels the evolution of the web itself from static pages, sites and content to today’s landscape of dynamic services, programs and real-time processing of all kinds of data and media. Application servers, with WebSphere Application Server as a leading example, are how the web has been transformed into a platform for actual computing.

From Wall Street to Main Street, application servers paved the way for virtually all commerce to become electronic, and for every dimension of business operations, including customer relations, accounting, and HR, to become web-enabled.

In the late 1990s, IBM called this big shift “e-business,” and started remaking itself around the idea to better help its clients make the transition as well. The WebSphere brand was one of the key catalysts for IBM’s evolution from a hardware-centric company to one focused on software and services.

Over the next dozen years, the WebSphere brand of products evolved far beyond its start as an application server. It became IBM’s foundation for the layer of software known as middleware that enables web applications and computer operating systems to interoperate. And it would become a cornerstone for a new enterprise computing paradigm known as service-oriented architecture, or SOA.

Today, the WebSphere line encompasses almost all areas of business: application integration, business process management and e-commerce, just to name a few.

As Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM Software Group and the executive who oversaw WebSphere product development notes, “It’s far more than just a product. The mechanism is so fundamental to the way in which commercial applications work that you’d be very hard pressed today to think about IBM strategies without WebSphere.”

In late 1997, Mills—then general manager of IBM Software Solutions—brought his senior leaders together to consider the new application server business taking shape.

At the time, the first wave of dot-com startups were igniting interest in the disruptive power of the web, but existing businesses and industries were not yet certain how such new technologies and IT infrastructure would flow into the mainstream.

One of those unconventional technologies was the open-source Apache Web Server. In 1997, it had become the leading choice for web developers. Meanwhile IBM had embraced the open-source Linux ® operating system and the broader open-source movement. Those trends and tailwinds led the team to make an unconventional decision: to build the WebSphere Application Server on top of the collaboratively developed, non-proprietary Apache software. The radical idea underlying that choice was that customers would pay for open-source software if valuable functionality was added to it.

As Mills told CRN magazine in 2005, “We wanted to leverage [Apache] as a standard and move beyond it by adding value through open- and non-open-source code to deliver a more complete application server. It is a model we have repeated over and over.”

Within IBM, the choice to anchor WebSphere Application Server on Apache was somewhat controversial because of work by IBMers to develop a commercial web server.

Another surprising strategic decision was for the WebSphere Application Server to support the Java ® programming language, which had been developed by a competitor, Sun Microsystems. But the ability for Java applications to be written once and then run on different operating systems was another sign of how open standards and open-source software were changing the IT landscape and IBM strategies. In fact, IBM would not only build the WebSphere products to work with the Java language, it would eventually develop a sophisticated reference specification for the language, Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE™).

The WebSphere Application Server began taking shape in early 1998 with a team of a few dozen IBM developers in Raleigh, NC, led by Chris Wicher and Sue Wallenborn. IBM Research also began work on a key component, the “servlet” engine. They made remarkably fast progress, building the first version in just four months. And they turned around a second version only three months later.

As Mills recalls, after the team delivered the first version of WebSphere Application Server, “we decided to incorporate both sophisticated transaction processing and message brokering functions into the product.” Over the next decade, the WebSphere line would evolve from its application server roots to become a broader brand for handling the most complex integration challenges.

That array of tools and technologies helps companies manage the rules and logic built into their business processes, as well as the messaging and communications systems to coordinate increasingly complex IT infrastructure. These capabilities are providing the backbone of many Smarter Planet projects today and helping businesses embrace cloud computing.

By 2006, the WebSphere brand helped IBM become the leader in the US$18 billion middleware business. And it led IBM’s march to become the world’s second largest software company today.

For the WebSphere brand’s tenth anniversary in 2008, Craig Hayman, then vice president of WebSphere in the Application and Integration Middleware Software Division, told E-Week: “In the early days we took WebSphere from an idea to a product, then from a product to a platform, and then from a platform to an SOA [service-oriented architecture] portfolio.”

Today, middleware is essential for integrating new capabilities into existing business systems, or linking different applications together for better performance or cost savings. And it’s why more than 100,000 companies worldwide use WebSphere products and more than 10,000 companies build applications that work with WebSphere products.

As the WebSphere line has expanded into a global ecosystem of users and developers, the way in which it continues to be revised and extended has also evolved. Today WebSphere is a product portfolio that is enabled by global integration, with more than 6000 IBM developers in 80 locations collaborating on new capabilities in business analytics and optimization.

“In terms of technology,” said Steve Mills, “it truly has turned out to be one of the more important ideas that we ever had as a company.”

The above is re-posted from http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/websphere/

Read more...

Belief in an age of scepticism (1)

"I find your lack of faith - disturbing. " - Darth Vader

Tim Keller's 2008 book seeks to answer some of the questions that have baffled thinkers, philosophers and seekers throughout the modern ages.

Why does God allow suffering in the world?

How could a loving God send people to hell?

Why isn't Christianity more inclusive?

How can one religion be 'right' and the others 'wrong'?

Why have so many wars been fought in the name of God?

---------------

Here's the first in a series of excerpts extracted from the book as I journey through it.

Introduction - A Second Look at Doubt

Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts - not only their own but their friends' and neighbours'. It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them. Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide grounds for your beliefs to sceptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive. And, just as important for our current situation, such a process will lead you, even after you come to a position of strong faith, to respect and understand those who doubt.

1 Peter 3: 15 Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect

But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, sceptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however sceptical and cynical they may seen, are really a set of alternate beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because ' There can't be just one true religion', you must recognise that this statement is itself an act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts... Every doubt is based on a leap of faith.

Some people say, 'I don't believe in Christianity because I can't accept the existence of moral absolutes. Everyone should determine moral truth for him/herself.' Is that a statement they can prove to someone who doesn't share it? No, it is a leap of faith, a deep belief that individual rights operate not only in the political sphere but also in the moral. There is no empirical proof for such a position. So the doubt (of moral absolute) is a leap.

Some will respond to all this, “My doubts are not based on a leap of faith. I have no beliefs about God one way or another. I simply feel no need for God and I am not interested in thinking about it.” But hidden beneath this feeling is the very modern American belief that the existence of God is a matter of indifference unless it intersects with my emotional needs. The speaker is betting his or her life that no God exists who would hold you accountable for your beliefs and behaviour if you didn’t feel the need for him. That may be true or it may not be true, but, again, it is quite a leap of faith.

The only way to doubt Christianity rightly and fairly is to discern the alternate belief under each of your doubts and then to ask yourself what reasons you have for believing it. How do you know your belief is true? It would be inconsistent to require more justification for Christian belief than you do for your own, but that is frequently what happens. In fairness you must doubt your doubts. My thesis is that if you come to recognize the beliefs on which your doubts about Christianity are based, and if you seek as much proof for those beliefs as you seek from Christians for theirs—you will discover that your doubts are not as solid as they first appeared.

Read more...

IBM WebSphere, SOA and XML Certification 2011 Assess and Save Promotion

It's not too late to take advantage of this 50% discount off certification fees for this year!

Read more...

Spencer Wells builds a family tree for humanity | Video on TED.com

Spencer Wells builds a family tree for humanity | Video on TED.com

Read more...

Setting up domain name aliases on Google Apps

Google Apps support the use of domain name aliases, a feature which saved me hours of otherwise painstaking work of having to migrate my users from one domain to another. It does have a number of limitations, which are documented in detail here.

A number of things to keep in mind:

1. You cannot set different policies or configuration settings for different domains.
Think of the domain alias (or non-primary domain name) as a secondary route to Google Apps. It is essentially bound up with the primary name and pretty much inherits all features of the primary.

2. Custom URLs for accessing Google Apps are available only for the primary domain.
What this means is if you have a domain alias called myDomainAlias.org and a custom start page called start.myPrimaryDomain.org, then start.myDomainAlias.org is not going to work.

This extends to the Google Aps Control Panel whereby you must use your primary domain name in order to access it, as follows:

http://www.google.com/a/myPrimaryDomain.org

3. If you are getting a "Activate Domain Alias" state despite having had the new name verified, go to "Domain Settings -> General -> New Services and Pre-release Features".
where it says "Next generation (US English only)", change it to "Current version".

4. Once the MX records are in place for your domain alias and activiated on Google Apps, the new domain alias will automatically show up an additional email "Nickname" for all your users. However, for them to able to send (receival is already taken care of) messages using the new email nickname would require custom changes to your Gmail account setting, as detailed here.

At the time of this writing, Google Apps does not allow changing of primary domain name. The use of domain alias should address the majority of day-to-day requirements and there is no serious downside to having a non-primary domain name aka domain alias functioning as a primary one. If you must migrate to a new domain, consider using GAM which can help to automate part of your process.

Read more...

Theistic Evolution or Biologos

Francis Collins in his book, The Language of God, sets out the following 6 major premises that underlie the concept of Theistic Evolution (or to use his preferred coined term, Biologos):

(page 200)
1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago

2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.

3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.

4. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required.

5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.

6. But humans are also unique in ways that deft evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

And here's his response to some of the common criticisms of Biologos. This is garnered from the same book as well as highlights from his presentation at the Veritas Forum at Caltech in 2009 - including relevant thoughts from CS Lewis whom Collins heavily quoted in his speech and book:

1. If evolution is random, how could God really be in charge?

The solution is actually readily at hand, once one ceases to apply human limitations to God. If God is outside of nature, then he is outside of space and time. In that context, God could in the moment of creation of the universe also know every detail of the future. That could include the formation of the stars, planets, and galaxies... and the evolution of humans... In that context, evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God's perspective the outcome would be entirely specified. Thus, God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process.

2. Isn't evolution a purely random process? Doesn't that take God out of it?

Again, it might seem random to us, but if God is outside of time, randomness doesn't make sense anymore. God could have complete knowledge of the outcome in a process that seems random to us. I suppose in that way we could say God is inhabiting the process all the way along. It's not a fundamental problem, despite the way it is often portrayed as such.

3. Is it possible to rectify evolution with Genesis 1-2?

Down through the ages most theologians did not conclude that a literal reading is required. Genesis 1 and 2 portray two stories of creation, and they don't quite agree in terms of the order of appearance of plants and humans. So they can't both be literally correct. Maybe that's a suggestion to us as we read these two accounts that this is not intended to be a scientific treatise.

St. Augustine wrote no less than 4 books on the question of Genesis. Here's his exhortation:

"In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it."

4. Is free will in conflict with a deterministic world - at least according to physics?

The principle of uncertainty is a reality in quantum mechanics. It's something we have to deal with and it's a legitimate argument.

CS Lewis wrote,

"If you choose to say 'God can give a creature freewill and at the same time withhold freewill from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words 'God can.' Nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk it about God."

5. Why would a loving God allow suffering in the world?

Consider this, if the most important decision we are to make on this earth is a decision about belief, and if the most important relationship we are to develop on this earth is a relationship with God, and if our existence as spiritual creatures is not limited to what we an know and observe during our earthly lifetime, then human sufferings take on a wholly new context. We may never fully understand the reasons for these painful experiences, but we can begin to accept the idea that there may be such reasons.

There's no immunization from evil, only the reassurance that the suffering would not be in vain. This notion that God can work through adversity is not an easy concept, and can find anchor only in a worldview that embraces a spiritual perspective. The principle of growth through suffering is, in fact, nearly universal in the world's great faiths.

Lewis wrote, "We want, in fact, not so much a father in Heaven as a grandfather in Heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'likes to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.' The reality is life is more a vale of tears than a garden of delight. This may seem like a paradox but it can be reconciled if we consider this, 'His Plan is not the same as ours'."

Read more...

Carson's books on daily devotional

Don Carson is a regular contributor on the Gospel Coalition website and being a big Carson fan that's the first place where I thought I should begin my own research for ideas/guidelines on systematic bible study for the small group.

I wasn't disappointed and found this:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2010/12/28/carson%E2%80%99s-for-the-love-of-god-blog/

It's basically two books (or volumes) comprising comments and expositions from Carson married to a daily bible reading scheme devised by Robert M’Cheyne (born 1813).

Each volume covers the entire calendar year and the two are complementary - the first volume is focused mainly on what is the termed the "Family" columns (2x) and the second for the "Private" columns (2x) - altogether 4 columns. The readings labelled as "Family" can be read in family/small group devotions, and those marked "Private" are perhaps more appropriate for personal devotions.

I thought both Carson and M’Cheyne are absolutely right to suggest as Christian we should cultivate the daily habit of reading the bible in a systematic way. If we follow the reading chart diligently, it would take us through the New Testament and Psalms twice each year, and through the rest of the Bible once! In fact Carson went so far as to suggest that if we must skip something, then skip the book and read the Bible instead.

In a small group setting, Carson's edifying comments as found in either volumes would be beneficial for a leader/facilitator during discussion. Both volumes are freely available for download and use so there's no upfront cost.

The legitimate download links for these books are as follows:

Volume 1:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/tgc-documents/carson/1998_for_the_love_of_God.pdf

Volume 2:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/tgc-documents/carson/1999_for_the_love_of_God.pdf

Read more...

Is Evolution At Odds with God?

Theodosius Dobzhansky, a leading biologist once said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

And Arthur Peacocke, the distinguished British molecular biologist wrote a book titled, "Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith?"

Francis Collins, in his book, "The Language of God", where he laid out a convincing case - from a scientist's perspective - that evolution does not disprove the idea that God worked out His creative plan by means of evolution, and compelling evidence in genomic research (and he spoke with authority here as former director of the Human Genome Project) would relieve God of the responsibility for multiple acts of specific creation for each species on the planet. He also argued whilst evolution may account for biological complexities (through Darwin's theory of natural selection) and the origin of humankind, DNA sequence alone, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal desire in search of a creator. He wrote, "Freeing God from the burden of special acts of creation does not remove Him as the source of the things that make humanity special, and of the universe itself. It merely shows us something of how He operates."

Writing in Scientific American, Stephen Jay Gould, an eminent biologist and scientist outlined his position:

"To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time: Science simply cannot by its legitimate methods adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney [Gould's third grade teacher] and have their knuckles rapped for it... Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors (like God) in other spheres (the moral realm, for example).

Forget philosophy for a moment; the simple empirics of the past hundred years should suffice. Darwin himself was agnostic (having lost his religious beliefs upon the tragic death of his favorite daughter), but the great American botanist Asa Gray, who favored natural selection and wrote a book entitled Darwiniana, was a devout Christian. Move forward 50 years: Charles D. Walcott, discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils, was a convinced Darwinian and an equally firm Christian, who believed that God had ordained natural selection to construct a history of life according to His plans and purposes. Move on another 50 years to the two greatest evolutionists of our generation: G. G. Simpson was a humanist agnostic. Theodosius Dobzhansky a believing Russian Orthodox. Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism."

Is evolution at odds with God?

Read more...

The great missed opportunity

America's greatest failing, in the run-up to the Cold War period, is that the US seemed in fact to have no foreign policy at all. In his Boston speech delivered to the Massachusetts Legislature on July 25, 1951, General Douglas MacArthur asked, "Is there wonder that men who seek an objective understanding of American policy thinking become completely frustrated and bewildered? Is there wonder that Soviet propaganda so completely dominates American foreign policy? And, indeed, what is our foreign policy? ...

He added, "Expediences as variable and shifting as the exigencies of the moment seem to be the only guide. Yesterday we disarmed, today we arm - and what of tomorrow? We have been told of the war in Korea, that it is the wrong war, at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Does this mean that they intend and indeed plan what they would call a right war, at a right time and in a right place? ... Do we intend to resist by force Red aggression in South-east Asia if it develops? These are the questions that disturb us, because there is no answer forthcoming."

The outcome of the Korean War could have been a complete triumph for the UN forces if it weren't for a lack of sound US military policy at that critical juncture. On October 17. 1951, in an address before the annual convention of the American Legion in Florida, MacArthur said,

"There is no slightest doubt in my mind that the Soviet has been engaging in the greatest bulldozing diplomacy history has ever recorded. Without committing a single soldier to battle, he has assumed direct or indirect control over a large part of the population of the world. His intrigue has found its success not so much in his own military strength, nor indeed in any overt threat of intent to commit it to battle, but in the moral weakness of the free world.

It is a weakness which has caused many free nations to succumb to and embrace the false tenets of Communist propaganda. It is a weakness which has caused our own policymakers, after committing American troops to battle, to leave them to the continuous slaughter of an indecisive campaign by imposing arbitrary restraints upon the support we might otherwise provide them through maximum employment of our scientific superiority, which alone offers hope of early victory. It is a weakness which now causes those in authority to strongly hint at a settlement of the Korean conflict under conditions short of the objectives our soldiers were led to believe were theirs to attain and for which so many yielded their lives."

History has shown that during the early stage of the Korean conflict in 1950, the UN forces, under the command of MacArthur, had achieved tremendous military success despite the seemingly impossible odds (see Inchon landing) and more importantly, created a crucial opportunity for the reunification of the two Koreas. That opportunity, sadly, was squandered. The prolonged war cost both parties dearly in material and lives and did not cease till July 1953 (although the two are technically still at war, with the conflict far from being resolved).

In the same speech in Florida, MarArthur spelt out this major blunder and prophetically foreseen a long drawn out bigger war between the West and Communism, epitomised in the longest cold war in history (1947-1991) between the US and Soviet Union.

"Military victory had been achieved for our cause, and men turned their thoughts from the task of mass killing to the higher duty of international restoration, from destroying to rebuilding, from destruction to construction (note: he's referring to post war Japan where he assumed the role of Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers between 1945-1951). Everywhere in the free world they lifted up their heads and hearts in thanksgiving for the advent of peace in which ethics and morality based upon truth and justice might thereafter fashion the universal code. Then more than ever in history of the modern world a materially strong and spiritually vibrant leadership was needed to consolidate the victory into a truly enduring peace for all of the human race. America, at the very apex of her military power, was the logical nation to which the world turned for leadership. It was a crucial moment - one of the greatest opportunities ever known.

But our political and military leaders failed to comprehend it. Sensitive only to the expediences of the hour, they dissipated with reckless haste that predominant military power which was the key to the situation (note: I can think of no place where this is truer than in Korea). Our forces were rapidly and completely demobilized... The world was thus left exposed and vulnerable to an international Communism whose long publicized plan had been to await just such a favourable opportunity to establish dominion over the free nations.

The stage had, perhaps unwittingly, been set in secret and most unfortunate war conferences. The events which followed will cast their shadow upon history for all time. Peoples with long traditions of human freedom progressively fell victims to a type of international brigandage and blackmail, and the so-called Iron Curtain descended rapidly upon large parts of Europe and Asia (note: just 4 years after his speech, the Vietnam war broke out). As events have unfolded, the truth has become clear. Our great military victory has been offset, largely because of military unpreparedness, by the political successes of the Kremlin."

Further, MacArthur's view on American's foreign policy regarding the Asia Pacific (especially Far East) is outlined in a speech in Seattle on November 13, 1951, he said, "To the early pioneer the Pacific Coast marked the end of his courageous westerly advance. To us it should mark but the beginning. To him it delineated our western frontier. To us that frontier has been moved across the Pacific horizon. ...

Our economic frontier now embraces the trade potentialities of Asia itself; for with the gradual rotation of the epicenter of world trade back to the Far East whence it started many centuries ago, the next thousand years will find the main problem the raising of the sub-normal standards of life of its more than a billion people...

Such possibility seem, however, beyond the comprehension of some high in our government circles, who still feel that the Pacific Coast marks the pratical terminus of our advance and westerly boundary of our immedite national interests - that any opportunity for the expansion of our foreign trade must be found mainly in the area of Europe and the Middle East...

There should be no rivalry between our East and our West - no pitting of Atlantic interests against those of the Pacific. The problem is global, not sectional. The living standards of the people of the Oriental East must and will be raised by a closer relativity with that of the Occidental West."

Further reading:

• Revitalizing a Nation, a book which embodies excerpts from MacArthur's public statements


• MacArthur, His Rendezvous with History


• General Macarthur Speeches & Reports: 1908-1964


• Macmillan's Great General Series - MacArthur

Read more...