ze blog of simon

Friday 6th June 2008 was the first jBPM Community Day, held in the Guinness Store House in Dublin, this is practically on my doorstep, and as we’ve been looking at jBPM for some pilots recently, I couldn’t not go.

The speakers on the day were Tom Baeyens, Joram Barrez, Paul Browne and Koen Aers. It was great to hear that jBPM is being used in all sort of environments, in some very large projects and most of all the direction of the project from the project leaders. It was also good to hear about local take up in & around Ireland (there were guests from all over Europe, including some Americans based in Budapest)

Tom & the rest of the team are taking their collective experience in the BPM and building the Process Virtual Machine, and state engine that can be used to execute processes described in many different languages, starting with jPDL, but already on the horizon are BPEL and Seam PageFlow. The PVM looks set to be the definitive state machine for process management, with plugin interfaces for persistence, task management etc.

It was a great day, many thanks to all of those who contributed to the smooth running & interesting content, and selection of a great venue!

[It’s only just struck me what a great venue, making a product that’s as consistently good as Guinness requires clearly documented processes, which soon becomes clear when you take the tour of the Store House that describes the process involved in taking the raw ingredients and producing something as fine as a smooth pint of Guinness]

Questions for the jBPM Community/Things I’m going to try and answer over the coming weeks

• Where’s the absolute beginners guide? [or, as this is in a community, where can I start one and what needs to be in it? ]
• What are the requirements/guidelines on replacing the jbpm-console or integrating functionality into your own app?
• What are the interface points/techniques in PVM for other languages?
• Drools/jBPM – what are the integration scenarios?
  • populate Drools with data/beans in a node of a process?
  • do both things operate independently?
• Integration with authentication systems? (AD/LDAP instead of SQL based accounts)

No Comments yet »

There’s a flaw in ssh-vulnkey, it doesn’t always show you the name of the file with an offending blacklisted key in it. Here’s a couple of ways round this:

For a small machine, inspect the files by hand:

strace ssh-vulnkey -a 2>&1 | grep ^stat64| grep -v NOENT| cut -d\” -f 2| sort | uniq | xargs vi

Or, a little longer, using ssh-vulnkey to find all relevant keys & reprocess them displaying the filename & then the result of the ssh-vulnkey for the individual file:

strace ssh-vulnkey -a 2>&1 | grep ^stat64| grep -v NOENT| cut -d\” -f 2| sort | uniq | xargs -i bash -c “echo ; echo {} ; ssh-vulnkey {};”

This really is a dirty hack, using strace to extract the files ssh-vulnkey and then reprocess them individually, there are a million ways this could be done better, but not on a single bash line

No Comments yet »

I’m one of the speakers at the first Mobile Monday event in Belfast, I’m still working on my slides, I have a “tech” talk and a “business” talk, I may have to toss a coin to make the decision.

No Comments yet »

I found this post Ryan Hadley a few days ago, which I got working with a little bit of time, I noticed that Thunderbird was displaying all-days events oddly, so I checked the VEVENT info being generated & tweaked to work correctly with Thunderbird/Lightening. I also dropped in the URL of the event in OWA & fixed it for situations where there are public & private names for the OWA/Exchange instance, handy when you want to go and amend an entry etc.

Hope you find it useful.

Exchange2ICS.tar.gz

3 Comments »

After struggling for ages with different guides on ldap, Apache & Subversion, I found the following guide, and everything just worked after following it. Kudos to Sander.

You can read the article in full here.

Here’s the: http://www.jejik.com/articles/2007/06/apache_and_subversion_authentication_with_microsoft_active_directory/

No Comments yet »

I used to be a big mutt fan, but with the growing amount of HTML mail I recieve, it became too much of a chore, combined with the fact that IMAP offline support is a bit kludgy (I’ve used both isync & offlineimap) I abandoned mutt some time ago and move to Thunderbird.

Thunderbird has better offline IMAP support, but it’s very mouse driven, but there are some handy extensions that can make it easier to use from the keyboard. I’m using GMailUI and keyconfig. GMailUI gives you j/k support, and single key archive (these are UI features lifted from GMail, but we all know that they came from vi/mutt originally)

I don’t use Thunderbird’s spam filters, I have a sendmail/cyrus/spamassassin mail setup, and I keep it trained using folders on the IMAP server, this also means that the rest of my family should get the benefit of my spam training.

A shorter version of this is that I want to press a single key to move a mail to a certain folder, without invoking Thunderbird Junk Mail stuff.

keyconfig to the rescue!

• Install keyconfig
• Open the keyconfig menu (Tools, Keyconfig)
• Click “Add a new key”
• Call it what you like (mine is MoveToJunk)
• Enter the following code:

  MsgMoveMessage('imap://simon@mccartney.ie/INBOX/Junk');

  Where simon@mccartney.ie is the name of the IMAP account I’m using and Junk is a subfolder of the Inbox (as far as Cyrus is concerned, everything is a subfolder of the Inbox, unlike other IMAP systems).

• Click OK
• Assign a key against it (I use Shift-J, which meant I also had to un-map the existing Junk Control keys using keyconfig, look As Junk & As Not Junk and click reset.
• Ahhh, keyboard heaven!

No Comments yet »

There are lots of different ways of tracking a project (i.e. a list of tasks, dates, calendars, time frames, notes etc), with various tools (MS Project, Basecamp from 37Signals, Google Calendar, Horde and a gazillion other applications and online tools).

But so far not all of them manage the ideal all of all of the information everywhere. I would love to have the information spread acoss my PDA (Palm, online & offline), Laptop(Outlook, Thunderbird, online & offline) & web-based online access. Certain amounts of this can be done with SyncML, various sync tools & sites (Zyb, ScheduleWorld, Funambol). I like replication. Safety in numbers. Add into this the fact that I work in some awkward environments (I have my corporate laptop, with Outlook/Exchange, I have client sites where I only have OWA, and sometimes I want to get at the data when I’m out and about)

So, how to solve this problem? An application that supports various storage backends.

Tasks & Calendars that can save out details to Horde, Google, Exchange (over WebDAV/IMAP)

No Comments yet »