Vacation season

Vacation season ended. We've spent 3 weeks in London using home exchange (our London hosts spent time in our place). London is a great place to be.

Enterprise 2.0 conference

The next conference for 2007 should have been PDC, but MSFT cancelled it and I'm back to "vendor-neutral" conferences.
The Enterprise 2.0 conference got attention of the whole TRG (technology research group), so the work has shifted to the conference floor in Boston (June 18-21)
Despite promise and few sessions advertised as case studies the conference couldn't bring the ready answer to the main question - "how". We know what new we can bring to the enterprise, but how make an enterprise to accept those great things?
The internal presentation will be done soon and will include Web2.0Expo items too.

Web 2.0 Expo 2007 - San Francisco

Just returned from Web 2.0 Expo.
Not the first O'Reilly conference for me, and not the best one. Yes a lot of interesting presentation, but "Web 2.0" brand has overgrown initial excitement. 5 "new" implementations of Wiki doesn't turn me on well enough.
As I'm now deeply in performance tranches there were several interesting presentations on the topic, such as this one.
Geographic Distribution for Global Web Application Performance Speaker(s): Jacob Rosenberg
Sure AOL has a lot to share about WAN optimization.

My internal post-conference presentation is not scheduled yet. Will see.

On personal note - this was the first time I've combined conference with family trip - spent long weekend before conference with family and friends in San Francisco, they went home and I've worked on the conference. The kids love SF not less than me...

XSLT Training

I've just completed useful 2 day classroom training by Computer Horizons titled "Transforming XML with XSLT". The course was on time, as I'm just now applying a lot of XSLT into middle tier of Extracts architecture.
Even with 7 years XSLT experience (I've started to use it in 2000) the course has it role in knowledge organization and activation.

Extract architecture 2

On current iteration the architecture of middle tier started to emerge. First and foremost it's schema definition. Then it's services which can transform schema compliant document into view, edit and execute formats. Then there are services (code tables) which supply data for editing application.
AJAX front end provide view and edit functionality by consuming those middle tier services.
AJAX front end also initiates execution by calling into document->execute format transformation on middle tier.

AJAX Training

Completed 3 day classrom training on the AJAX.
The instructor was really good and knowledgable and the course was compressed from 4 to 3 day format, but there are still too much "water". It seems like there should be a branch of training industry which specialize on knowledge delivery to the people who already have the knowledge (sort of post-doc?).

Extract architecture

The discussion about layering architecture for extraction module turned out with interesting outcome. The module now is a separate three layer architecture. The problem is how to reuse complex front-end in SOA.
The solution is not to reuse, keep front end as separate application, open interface to middle-tier by building it as web service and publish request /response schema between front-end and middle tier.
Will need to search for existing solutions to similar problems to validate.

SQL Server optimization project

Completed 4 hour optimization project for small business SQL server. The steps included index optimization on few 200K+ heaps as well as rewrite of linear stored procedure using group by/having tricks. SQL 2005 would allow it even better with PIVOT, but SQL 2000 made it pretty good too.

Inagural post

Today I've changed my site to blog format. The previous static site hasn't changed for few years.
The change should make description of my professional life more dynamic.