IT as a business (unit) is a bad idea

6 years ago, Bob Lewis wrote at InfoWorld an article that has since then attracted my thoughts around that topic. Here are some key statements from the article:

• "When IT acts as a separate, stand-alone business, the rest of the enterprise will treat it as a vendor. Other than in dysfunctional, highly political environments, business executives don't trust vendors to the extent they trust each other."
• "Chargebacks are an attempt to use market forces to regulate the supply and demand for IT services. If that's the best a business can do, it means the business has no strategy, no plans, and no intentional way to turn ideas into action."
• "Nobody in IT should ever say, "You're my customer and my job is to make sure you're satisfied," or ask, "What do you want me to do?"
• Instead, they should say, "My job is to help you and the company succeed," followed by "Show me how you do things now," and "Let's figure out a better way of getting this done."
• "Where did the standard model come from in the first place? The answer is both ironic and deeply suspicious: It came from the IT outsourcing industry, which has a vested interest in encouraging internal IT to eliminate everything that makes it more attractive than outside service providers."

I'm still convinced that this is actually the way to go. Why does it not happen on a larger scale? Why do Businesses still separate the two so strictly? I believe that it's mainly an issue of choosing the simplest organizational model possible - which is Business here, IT there. It's simpler to allocate costs - and be able to clearly blame IT why it is so expensive. Which reminds me of some more excellent articles written by Tom DeMarco et al. Aaah, webbing the Internet...

On Coding Habits and Noise in Source Code

The presentation and the provided slides from Kevlin Henney, found at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/7-ineffective-coding-habits, are a good summary on the most prominent "noise generators" and "focus detractors" in source code. I know that most stuff around source code formatting, commenting, naming conventions, etc. is very subjective, and things get quite religious discussing it. However there is basic knowledge about how humans can digest information in an optimal way, and that knowledge is hundredths of years old and should not be dismissed easily by none of us. Go through the slides and maybe one or the other of you finds those fundamentals appealing and you change your coding style for the better.

Enter a (masked) password on the DOS command line

If you ever had the task on how to retrieve a password from a user on the command line, you can find the right tool here: http://westmesatech.com/editv.html. The editv tool allows you to prompt a user for whatever input, and with the -m (masked) parameter, the entered value is masked with stars. Pretty cool! Thanks, Bill!

Howto: Remove processes in Unix by searching their names

I sometimes have the situation where I am left with some stuck processes from previous sessions. I'm sure this could be done better by the application, but it's not in this case. I therefore have the following command line (bash on Solaris) that solves my problem:

$ ps -ef | grep {myuserid} | grep {procname in ps} | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs -l1 kill -9

Might be of use for anybody out there.

The user interface library Qt is licensed under LGPL

There's great news: Qt will be free starting in March 2009, finally. Qt is a cross platform GUI development library. It's a library for GUI development using C++ and Java (which I was not aware of until now). The Java integration is done via JNI. Check this out, there are some Webstart based demos available. I could not get it running on my Mac OS X, unfortunately. But it's tested on Windows and Linux only, anyway.

Setup Eclipse Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4) with Subversion and Maven 2 Plugins

That's what I found, collected and provided in a cookbook format:

1) Download a fresh copy of Eclipse 3.4 / Ganymede. I've used the EE release, but the others should work, too.

2) Follow this cook book for the subversion part.

3) Install the Maven 2 plugin from this site: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/

4) Test it with a subversion based project, e.g. my favourite is CAS. m2eclipse is officially supported by that project. However, you have to activate the "Include Modules" property in the project to get rid of initial errors. I've reported this on the CAS mailing list.

Java on Ubuntu Server 8.10

Here's some in-a-nutshell information on how to deal with Java on Ubuntu server 8.10:

To find out what's on an Ubuntu system for Java:

$ update-java-alternatives -l

Running

$ java -version

shows that the OpenJRE 6 is installed by default. Aha, it's a JRE. To install and probably run Glassfish, however, you need a JDK. Off we go and install it with:

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

(and get demo, doc, source, too, while you're at it)

Ok, but now, how to make this JDK the default Java on the machine. Some tools are available, fortunately, and without much background research, we make use of them to make the switch:

$ sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

Now, calling

$ java -version

shows Sun's java to be active.

Now you can download Glassfish, install and configure it. That's very well documented already.