Przesyłanie wiadomości Sub-Systems w the UK Rząd

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To być the pierwszy część trzy część przegląd UK Rząd G2G Przesyłanie wiadomości Sub-Systems . …..

Mitteilung-Subsysteme in der Britischen Regierung

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Dieses ist das erste Teil eines Überblicks mit drei Teilen über BRITISCHE Mitteilung-Subsysteme der Regierungs-G2G . …..

De Subsystemen van het overseinen in de Britse Overheid

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Dit is het eerste deel van een driedelig overzicht van de Subsystemen van het Britse Overseinen van de Overheid G2G . …..

영국 정부에 있는 전갈 하부 조직

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이것은 영국 정부 G2G 전갈 하부 조직 의 3개 부품 개관의 첫번째 부분이다. …..

Sous-systèmes de transmission de messages dans le gouvernement Britannique

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C’est la première partie d’une vue d’ensemble de trois parts des sous-systèmes BRITANNIQUES de transmission de messages du gouvernement G2G . …..

Father’s Day Klaxons

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Father’s Day this year brings the new Klaxons album (“Myths of the Near Future”), a box of chocs and a mouse mat – I was well chuffed. …..

Sun and the EU Data Retention Directive – announcing the Sun Secure Data Retrieval Server

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Gavin McLaughlin, Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Compliance Technologies, wrote this for me to include on my ‘blog:

Many EU member states have been working with Communication Service Providers (CSPs) for some time to help law enforcement agencies by providing telephony records, both for mobile and fixed line. The EU Data Retention Directive however (coming into force later this year) provides harmony across not only current member states, but ascending countries such as Bulgaria and Romania.

In the UK, this sees both Telephony companies and Internet providers needing to keep customers call and transaction records for between six and twelve months in a format that not only enables timely retrieval but ensure secure storage to prevent inappropriate access, interpretation and use.

Whilst the UK government are helping providers by offering monetary assistance, via the Home Office, it’s important to note that this is a distraction from their core business – that of maintaining revenue and retaining customers, especially with additional pressures from such items as roaming charges.

Therefore, to put a technology solution in place that requires mountains of hardware, complex relational databases, and expensive operators would not only complicate the issue, it would be a distraction from the key purpose of an operator – gaining and retaining customers, and ultimately that of making money.

When Sun put together it’s purpose-built solution, the Sun Secure Data Retrieval Server (SSDRS), four key elements were always in mind – Simplicity, Security, Performance and Cost (not only commercial, but environmental cost too). By selecting an appropriate indexing technology (in Coppereye‘s innovative “Live Archive” software) and coupling this with the Sun Thumper device (the X4500), we are able to cover all of the four key elements without potentially compromising the brand that CSPs have worked hard to build.

Yes, Sun could have put together a huge relational database, coupled it with mountains of processing power and tier one storage and made a fortune. It could easily have incorporated Identity Management software and lots of whizzy security tools but it would not only be over-kill, it would go against the key purpose of the whole EU Data Retention Act – providing law enforcement agencies with a cost-effective way to use technology advancements protect corporate citizens – oh and without creating tons of CO2 along the way !

On Sun’s side the people to congratulate are:

  • Richard Jenner – Sun Systems Practise Solution Architect (SA) and Chief Architect of the SSDRS.
  • Benedict (“Benny”) Faria – Sun Systems Practise SA.
  • Dave Walker – Sun Security Consultant – Dave’s weblog is over here.
  • Michael Bang – Sun Services – Support Planning & Design.
  • Caroline Ward – Telecommunications, Media, & Entertainment (TME) Business Unit (BU) Director.
  • Mike Osborne – TME BU Chief Technologist.
  • Gavin McLaughlin – Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Compliance Technologies.

Richard and Benny did most of the technical work with security advice and support from Dave Walker, whilst Michael Bang provided the support planning.

Gavin built sponsorship from within Sun, enlisting the help and support of the Telco., Media and Entertainment Business Unit. He liaised with the EU Commission and the Home Office (in requirements gathering and analysis), developed the solution concept, product and contract design, and worked with marketing to develop the “go to market” strategy.

He will be speaking at “Business Agility & Environmental IMPact Seminar” on the Tuesday 3rd July, 2007, more details about him here, about the event at this site, and you can register over here.

Related Links:

Thankfully, at Sun, we’re not that terminally hip that we have had to start using the TIME (Telecommunications, Internet, Media, & Entertainment) acronym – yet.

Attacked by Ravens – update

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I’ve just been assured by Mike Lee (the UK & Ireland Chief Technologist for the Commercial business unit) that what attacked Chester and I was probably Rooks or Crows. ….. 1 Trackback

Wayne Horkan – Fellow of the British Computer Society

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Had a call this morning from Brenda at the British Computer Society (BCS) that I have been accepted as a Fellow of the BCS. ….. 1 Trackback

Attacked by Ravens

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Yes – today I was attacked by Ravens, or rather, Chester, the family Labrador, was.

I’d taken Chester to the local green (Seven Acre Green in Castle Bromwich), and having let him off his leash, was enjoying watching him chase the sticks I was occasionally throwing for him.

As we passed under a low hanging cherry blossom tree, he took a great deal of interest in the corpse of a Raven at the base of the tree. After shooing him off from picking the body up, we continued around the green.

I noticed that a pair of Ravens had started flying towards him and, in turn, straight down, legs outstretched, as though they meant to strike him. The larger of the pair appeared to actually hit him, but he had no mark upon him when I quickly checked he was all right.

I’ve never seen a bird, even one as formidable as a Raven, go after such a large target. Chester is only eleven months old – but he’s already quite big, and is almost fully “fleshed” out.

I wondered what the Ravens story was, and if they were “protecting” the corpse at the bottom of the tree. Either because it was a family member or even perhaps “lunch”.

The pair of them working together made me think of my two favourite Ravens from mythology, Thought and Memory, Odin’s Ravens from the Norse myths.

I’m not sure what being “dive bombed” by Ravens portends… but I’ll just have to wait and see.

Updating PRINCE2

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Recently I was talking with Andy Murray about the evolution and update of PRINCE2 – he’s been appointed the Lead Author for the “PRINCE2™ Refresh Project” by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), the owners of the PRINCE2 copyright and standard, and The Stationery Office (TSO), the publishers.

PRINCE2, by the way, is a project management methodology, and stands for “PRojects IN Controlled Environments (version 2)” – it covers the management, control and organisation of a project.

I, and Sun, have worked with Andy, both on individual engagements and regarding the use of PRINCE2 at Sun in the UK, for a number of years, and he’s easily the best person to perform this role – I wish him the best of luck.

Andy’s first task as Lead Author is to produce a Consultation Report summarising all the feedback received from a review that’s just taken place.

I was asked to contribute, and this is the data that Andy has been collecting:

  • 3 things you like about PRINCE2
  • 3 things you dislike
  • What do you consider the essential elements (i.e. without them it would not be PRINCE2) ?
  • What changes would you like to see in the next version ?

My responses were:

  • Things I like about PRINCE2:
    1. Ubiquity – loads of people are practitioners, and so communication and understanding between practitioners is faster then would be if a common understanding & dictionary of terms would need to be created
    2. product focus versus task focus (although I’ve seen this be dependent on the PM involved)
  • Things I dislike about PRINCE2
    1. too much documentation
    2. not enough “natural English” or is that “plain speaking, common English”
    3. used as a raison d’etre / justification – either to manipulate a situation or because the person in question is process bound
    4. previously lack of examples and documentation on integrating other methods into a PRINCE2 framework. Specifically RUP, RAD, DSDM, and now XP / Scrum, but I suppose SSADM might still apply. When we come to running software projects our PRINCE2 accredited PM’s would often get upset when trying to integrate XP like methods into there PRINCE2 frameworks they were trying to implement.
  • Essential elements:
    1. A PM
    2. A sponsor / sponsoring board
    3. Discret timeboxes of deliverables
    4. Milestones
    5. Product Focus versus Task Focus
    6. A PID
  • What changes would you like to see in the next version ?
    1. Simplification – where possible
    2. Better integration with other Project Management techniques – especially those from a re-iterative background (RUP, RAD, SCRUM, DSDM, XP, etc.)

    • The report should be out in the near future (it’s due to be published in June or July), and once approved, Andy will be busy working on a Scoping Document defining the proposed changes to the method.

    Andy’s started a weblog at www.prince2author.com to keep everyone up to date with progress and to gather further input.

    If you’re interested in PRINCE2, are an individual practitioner, or are using in your organisation, and either want to influence it’s evolution, or even just learn more, I’d recommend getting in touch with Andy at his site.

    Right – best be off – Donna and I go to Karate with our boys every Sunday, and I need to get our kit ready.

    Relevant Links and where you can learn more:

    Stabilising Look and Feel

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    Since my first post I’ve been working on getting the look and feel that I want, and although I haven’t quite finished here’s an update.

    I started with the Sun Pacifico Theme, which at the time I liked a lot. However the more I looked at my blog, the more I wanted something that was, if not unique, at least “mine” – and not just in terms of the content.

    Look and feel / web design was the most obvious area to change, but, to an extent I had held back a little, because I knew that it would likely mean delving into a host of technologies – only some of which I was up to date & familiar with.

    Wanting something that was very minimal, similar to the Blogger Template Style “Minima” by Douglas Bowman (here) of Stopdesign (here), and as used by my friend Alan Mather on his blog (here).

    I feel that the content needs to stand for itself without too many distractions calling the eye’s attention. I find that very busy websites, with lots of “eye candy“, lose detail amongst the noise. I know lots of people are enjoying using technologies like Snap (here), but I wish they would include some mechanism for the user to turn it off – as it can easily get confusing for with so many link page pop-ups appearing.

    As to the banner, I had previously been impressed with Damien Hirst’s Pharmaceuticals (2005), an example of which is here, an installation he had done as part of his show at the Tate Modern, New York.

    But instead of tablets and pills, I thought it would be effective to use small web site logos & icons instead (mainly the favicon). After getting a version working on that premise I very quickly realised that there would be a variety of copyright issues involved, as well as issues in loading a banner comprised of 300 (5 rows by 60 columns) of 16×16 pixelated images. Just too many calls to the web server, meaning page load time was very slow.

    So this is pretty much the finalised look and feel for the time being. I’m much more pleased with the banner now – and having utilised CSS Sprites, reduced the calls to two images – both of which I cache using JavaScript at the start of the page too.

    Now that I’m happy with the overall look and feel – I’m going to focus on Site Navigation, followed by a code cleanup, and then, maybe, back to the Design aesthetic.

    There might even be time for the odd post or two.

    Happy Mondays on Channel 4’s Transmission

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    The Mondays have just played a blinding version of Kinky Afro on Channel 4’s Transmission music show.

    It’s great to see the lads doing some gigs together again. I’m looking forward to getting to see them live – they’re playing at JB’s Dudley on Friday the 1st of June – so hopefully I’ll see them there.

    Obligatory links and more info…

    Channel 4’s Transmission site: https://www.channel4.com/music/transmission/index.html

    Stuff on the Happy Mondays.

    Home site: https://www.happymondaysonline.com

    MySpace page: https://www.myspace.com/happymondaysonline

    Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Mondays

    JB’s Dudley site: https://www.jbsdudley.co.uk/

    Why I work for Sun Microsystems – I

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    I aspired to join Sun Microsystems – in part because of Scott (you know, McNealy). ….. 1 Trackback

    Good luck and all the best to all of those involved in the search for Madeleine McCann. Here’s hoping that Madeleine is found safe and well very soon.

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    Tim Bray in the UK

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    Yesterday (Thursday the 3rd of May) we were lucky enough to have Tim Bray – Sun’s Director for Web Technologies – in the London City office.

    Tim’s been over to the UK to make some customer visits, mainly amongst the Finance Sector in the City, where the rapid development of applications to reduce time to market for systems is a principal topic. Lucky for us he had a free afternoon to present, at very short notice, to a number of the Sun UK Customer Engineering team (UK Field Operations).

    Tim’s famous for a whole host of web related innovations and notable contributions to the Internet Age, not least being a co-inventor of XML (along with Jon Bosak, the “Father of XML”, Sun “Contrarian Minds” entry here).

    You can find Tim’s blog here, his Sun Bio. here, some more from Sun here, and his Wikipedia entry over here.

    Tim gave a great talk on his views on Web 2.0, the state of of Dynamic Languages, Atom (Tim’s Chairman of the IETF working group – link to the Atom Standard Wikipedia entry here) and about REST.

    REST stands for Representational State Transfer – basically the fashion for lightweight and extremely scalable web services based around XML & HTTP. It’s use is actually endemic across the Internet, and it’s an application architectural model which I fully support and champion, especially as I’ve used it in implementation a number of times (does this make me a “RESTafarian” ?).

    As I’m such a technology fan-boy I was extremely pleased to find Tim was very approachable and friendly (don’t get me onto the time I met Andy Bechtolsheim, and got so starstruck I couldn’t speak).

    Tim’s got some really valid things to say especially regarding time to market and the rapid development of applications – I’d recommend having a look at his site, and getting in touch with him if you’d like to know more.

    P.S.

    Apologies for the title – I couldn’t resist.

    P.P.S.

    Updated with some Tim Bray links (on 04/05/2025)…

    Weblog language translator – beta

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    I’ve just implemented a weblog language translator, based on Google Translator.

    It’s very rough and ready, deserving of the title “beta”, and very simple, but it appears to do quite a nice job of translating into the majority of the World’s most used languages.

    I had just been reading The Aquarium (over here), and I was very impressed with it’s multi-lingual support.  I don’t know how the guys are doing this, but I’m presuming that they are actually translating the text manually (i.e. with human editors), after searching on the topic of blog translation.

    The languages that I’ve included are: Mandarin (Simplified Chinese), Chinese (Traditional Chinese), English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, Korean, French and Italian. 

    I wanted to do the fifteen or so most used languages – however the sources I found disagreed slightly on actual numbers and rankings.  The sources I used to understand the breakdown of percentage of languages spoken by the World population were:

    1) Dr. Dennis O’Neil’s website (here) at the Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marcos, California.

    2) The “Languages of the World” article (here) at The National Virtual Translation Center.

    3) The “List of languages by number of native speakers” article (here) at Wikipedia. 

    Unfortunately it suffers from two major issues. Firstly it’s limited to the languages supported by the Google Translator service, which unfortunatly does not cover a number of the World’s most used languages (notably Hindi and Bengali).  Secondly the Google Translation service modifies the page links so that the “Language” links I’ve implemented are translated twice, which fails in the service at runtime. 

    Other issues include: maximum text amount that can be translated is limited (or appears to be, so that part of the page doesn’t get translated), the banner I’ve implemented goes awry in some of the translations, the sidebar isn’t getting translated (might be due to the text length limit issue, as the sidebar is written after the content), and, as I don’t speak the majority of these languages, I’m presuming the translation that it does is no means as good as an actual, professional, human translator. 

    I’m going to tweak the code and look at how (and if) I can use the service to perhaps translate individual components, plus I’m going to see if the Google API can provide a more succint and elegant dynamic solution.  I had tried to implement in both Google Translator and Yahoo Babelfish, but the Babelfish service was erroring out, thus the use of Google – I might try it again later though.

    I have a other requirements for this functionality too: ideally it should produce pages which can be indexed by the major search engines and it should translate feeds – both RSS and Atom. 

    Have a look and see what you think – any opinion would be good, especially from those who aren’t native English speakers.