Tech Debug » Musings

The tale of BizTalk & BPMS

lantrix — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:41:28 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything, so here goes. I’m currently working for a client who wants BizTalk installed as an ESB. They don’t know why they want it, they just know that they want it.

Since they are a Microsoft shop it’s an assumption on their behalf, but a good one in this case. They are dealing with external agencies who will submit data on a daily basis to be consumed within the organisation. This is BizTalk’s bread and butter especially in the B2B space. Unfortunately at the moment the client will be accepting data from business partners via manual submission using web forms on Sharepoint 2010.

At least once we get BizTalk in, we can show them how then next phase of operations can automate a number of external business interactions.

One of the other benefits of BizTalk, acting as an Enterprise Service Bus, is for facilitating communications between isolated systems and applications – allowing one to avoid point to point design when applications integrate.

So the client is, without understanding it, thinking of implementing the start of Service Orientated Architecture.

The only thing that’s disappointing is this: they understand that BizTalk can orchestrate Business processes across systems, but they still don’t think of their IT system(s) as one entire Business Process Management System (BPMS). They have 5 standalone applications at launch, and are aiming to bring on board and integrate up to 15 separate business applications – most of which will be new.

They talk ITIL, Agile, methodology, and “Frameworks” – but still practice waterfall project management and don’t understand the lifecycle of a true BPMS.

In the end IT delivers not for themselves, but for the Business. The core functions of the Business is what IT is there to facilitate and support. Business and IT departments need to be engaged and working to together right from the start, hopefully with key minds that are visionary enough to deliver a BPMS to support the process of the Business!

How to try OpenBSD

lantrix — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:22:06 +0000

Download and try the following OS, and give it a go.

OpenBSD v4.7

OpenBSD is a multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system, and is fast, simple to install and secure “out of the box”.

A good introductory book for OpenBSD is the “OpenBSD Command Line Companion” by Jacek Artymiak. It walks you through an install and an intro to OpenBSD.

Other books on the OS are:

Mantra: backup backup backup backup

lantrix — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:21 +0000

Someone sent me an email which asked what to do since:

one of my external hard drives, the one with EVERYTHING I REALLY, REALLY WANT on it has died

Fixed iChat AV thru OpenBSD PF Firewall

lantrix — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:41:08 +0000

This has been bugging me for ages, but the fix is so simple.
I use OpenBSD for my router, and have PF (Packet Filter) running the firewall and NAT rules.

I have previously setup the port forwarding, etc. according to Apple, but never could get a successful connection using video or audio (or screen sharing).

After reading a post on the OpenBSD misc mailing list I went back and read the OpenBSD 4.5 pf.conf man page.

There is a section of the man page that states (my emphasis):

fragment reassemble
Using scrub rules, fragments can be reassembled by normalization.
In this case, fragments are buffered until they form a complete
packet, and only the completed packet is passed on to the filter.
The advantage is that filter rules have to deal only with complete
packets, and can ignore fragments. The drawback of caching frag-
ments is the additional memory cost. But the full reassembly
method is the only method that currently works with NAT. This is
the default behavior of a scrub rule if no fragmentation modifier
is supplied.

My scrub settings were such that I was filtering not complete packets, but fragments. The moment I changed the scrub settings to this:


scrub in on $ext_if all fragment reassemble

All worked perfect. I can initiate iChat calls and receive them too. Desktop sharing now works as well. All using Google talk (jabber) in iChat.

Note that in OpenBSD 4.6 or current there have been PF changes, so the wording of the scrub rule may be different. Always read the pf.conf man page for the release you are on.

Server Migration Complete

lantrix — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:40:44 +0000

Thanks for your patience whilst I’ve been offline, and stick around!
I’ve moved off a vm infrastructure back to a real server that I’m in control of.

Translation for the Mac by Kavasoft

lantrix — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 07:25:25 +0000

About 24 months ago I purchased a version of KavaSoft’s Translation Service application for the Mac. With the recent move from my old Powerbook to my new MacBookPro the application stopped working. Apparently the licence is tied not just to your purchase but to the computer you installed it on.

As I had used the Apple migration tool to move everything across to the new laptop, Translation Service stopped working. I dropped an email to the developer and literally got an email response 60 minutes later with an updated licence.

Now that’s customer service! There is nothing like a Mac application developer to renew your faith in customer service. After dealing with so many large companies for other IT support issues (Telstra I’m looking at you) – it is very refreshing to get such a favourable response. I’m a happy user and can still translate the odd French or Italian comments on flickr photo-streams I look at.

There is an updated version of Translation Services called KavaServices which sells for $20 and it does a whole lot of other conversion as well. I’m nothing more than a happy customer. The application is perfect for quick on the fly internet based language translation, and even translate right in the browser. Seen here are before/after shots from a flickr photo page.

Before Translation

After Translation – directly in the browser!

Thanks Kavasoft for the enjoyable support experience.

Server Migration complete

lantrix — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:29:58 +0000

I’ve had an on/off outage for most of the past 4 days, so to avoid hassles I put the site into maintenance mode.

I’ve actually had to decommission my 19″ server rack and the multiple servers I had for Tech Debug. There was a DNS server, kerberos, Database and web server. All the separate functions are now hosted on one OpenBSD VM that I’ve built recently. It’s running on the only remaining “non-laptop” left in my residence, which runs 24×7.

The only delay in getting back online in the last 48 hours was the MySQL data export and import. It’s a bit convoluted, and not documented in entirely one place on the MySQL documentation site (backup here, restore here), however once done once it will be easy to repeat. I still like the simplicity of PostgreSQL administration. Specifically the backup and restore:

Backup:
pg_dumpall > savefile.dump
Restore:
psql -f savefile.dump postgres

Well, there are some prep steps you should do; but it is all in one place on their documentation page.

Let me know how the site performs on the VM.

More Work?

lantrix — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:53:05 +0000

I’m not posting much these days since I’m currently heavily involved in a current development and build effort for a Client. (Solaris platform with Oracle 10g)

All other hours are either commuting, sleeping or playing WoW. Look forward to a number of upcoming posts on Dansguardian SQL logging, OpenBSD and of course Apple and the iPhone.

Zug Zug…. you WC3 fans will know what I mean.

Little Brother

lantrix — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:22:38 +0000

I just started reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother using one of his ebooks he has relesed under the Creative Commons license.
I have to admit that I had never heard of Cory of BoingBoing fame, or his books until I read about them via CelticBear.

As a ‘paranoid’ geeked I’m hooked on Little Brother, and if you like tech, geek and drama you should check it out as well.

Update: I went to buy a copy from a local bookstore, but it is not released in Australia yet. You can read the ebook or buy it from amazon.

Coral Content Distributed network

lantrix — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:06:28 +0000

Have you ever had your website hit on a topic that people find conflicting? When the site gets viewed by the masses, you need to be prepared. If you have access to modify your web server .htaccess file then go and have a read of the Coral CDN Overview
For those interested in the techie bits, here is my .htaccess for news site flood protection, and to allow CDN to serve up all my site images – thus offloading from my puny connection the bandwidth burden for images.



RewriteEngine On
#prevent slashdot effect
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blogspot\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} reddit\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} news\.slashdot\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} slashdot\.org
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1 [R,L]
#Rewrite images to allow CDN to serve them
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*\.(gif|png|jpe?g))$ http://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1/$2 [R,L]
#Wordpress rewites
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

mod_rewrite is your friend.

Storms and Power outages

lantrix — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:57:21 +0000

We’ve had some stong winds in Melbourne yesterday. Up to 130 kph!
These winds were good enough to cause a 24 hour extended power outage in my area, meaning my provider had upstream outages and the internet connection was down. Add that to the errant html comment in my last post which made the whole page commented out.
All resolved now. Now what else do I have to debug that is technical?

Free stuff

lantrix — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 05:12:10 +0000

You may have noticed that my last 3 posts were about free software.
I like free stuff. Everyone likes free stuff. Why talk about free stuff?

A friend told me that the reason he enjoys using Open Source (and usually free) apps is he can customise them. He finds it frustrating that when you pay $1K per seat for an application like Mercury (now owned by HP) that sometimes it just wont do what you need. You either work with the (often times) limited and expensive tool, or you extend the functions using your own coding and software.

You can keep up with 90kts and his Open Source load testing efforts on his blog.

Everyone likes free stuff.

Disco burning software updated

lantrix — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:34:41 +0000

Disco is one of the smartest looking and basic (yet powerful) CD/DVD burning solutions for your Mac. Yesterday it was updated with a maintenance release to V1.0.3, which includes quite a number of fixes for crashing that may have occurred. It has been almost 1 year since the last update so this is welcomed.

Incidentally, the developer is offering this software for USD$19.95 (and there is a very good USD->AUD exchange rate) for a limited time.
Disco has the following features:

Disc spanning – if the total size of the files you’re burning is bigger than the disc, it tries to divide them amongst multiple discs
Discography – it catalogues all the discs you have burnt for quick searching
Multi-session
And a pledge to support Blu-ray as soon as it is available on Macs

I’m not affiliated, just a happy Disco user (Thanks Mac-Heist!)

Caffeine drives the Tech World

lantrix — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 08:31:12 +0000

A number of weeks ago I gave up caffeine, and was pretty OK with that. But, I have come to the conclusion that there is a direct correlation with Caffeine and all other things tech, including tech blogging.

As you may have noticed if you subscribed to my feed, or read this site, my posts have been minimal.

Yet after having caffeine on the weekend in an energy drink, and subsequently picking up where I left of with decent illy coffee, I have had the urge to blog again. Nothing tech yet – but here I am.

I’m back baby!

The End of Input Managers and Safari Extensions?

lantrix — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:18:11 +0000

With the 10.4.11 upgrade came Safari V3. It looks neat, but I started having issues with closing Windows. It turns out the SIMBL input manager that I was using on Safari was conflicting with it. By deleting ~/Library/InputManagers/SIMBL it fixed the issue.

On the same theme, here has been a lot of talk lately about Input Managers and whether they will be completely removed in Leopard. Just recently David Watanabe blogged about the uncertain future of Inquisitor.

It would be a shame for such an awesome Safari extension to become extinct, but thankfully Input Managers are not the only way to skin this cat.

Information Overload

lantrix — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 10:32:21 +0000

Did you ever have too many RSS feeds you are subscribed to?
Wasting your time posting updates to Flickr, Twitter, facebook, and so on?
This guy thinks he has the answers. Cut out the IM and stop reading your email so often. Me? I just removed 70% of my news feeds in my reader, turned my phone off, and I’m going to bed to read a book (and get away from this blog for now).
As for four hours a week working? I don’t think I can scale back to that yet – but it would be nice.

Keep your beliefs to yourself

lantrix — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:33:18 +0000

Some guy was on the train today reading his “Face to Face with God” book, an he kept glancing over my way. No doubt noticing my copy of Morning of the Magicians that I was reading. As he got off the train, he starts saying a bunch of Jesus stuff and handing out these cards – and as he passes me I say NO THANKS! But he forces it on me. It has a tired cliché “Know Jesus No Hell, No Jesus Know Hell”.

He shows himself as some crazy evangelical feeling he has to save everyone to be saved himself, which shows him as being in the final moment only concerned with his own welfare. The thing I hate is that my own background and parental teachings (Hi Mum!) about religion gave me, at that moment, a gut wrenching nagging feeling. Its the polarisation of these issues – Heaven/Hell that get on my goat. I won’t do this guy the justice of linking to his website shown on his card, as it’s full of religious ideology.

Keep your beliefs to yourself people, and I will do the same (unless you ask).

Quit WoW again

lantrix — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:15:52 +0000

Looking in my inbox today I read this:

This message is being sent to confirm that all credit card information has been removed from the World of Warcraft account ********, effectively cancelling its recurring subscription as of September 23, 2007 5:47 AM UTC. The account will not bill or renew any further unless new payment information (credit card or game card) is manually entered in.
The account will remain playable for the remaining time it has already paid for.

So I did it… again. Cancelled. I was wasting money. Hadn’t played the game in weeks, and when I got on even with my mains and alts it was boring. I have BC expansion, but still am lvl 51 on my main, so I’ve never seen the new content except on the public test realms. Its all a pretty useless game at the moment. Having no one else I know who plays doesn’t help either.
They do say:

At this time, Blizzard has no plans to delete or “expire” characters, even if an account is deactivated

which means there will always be the nag in the back of my mind that I could go back – in fact they are betting on it. I think I’ll trade one addiction (WoW) for another (exercise) and I’ll be a lot healthier for it.

Taking a Break

lantrix — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:48:08 +0000

I’ll be taking a blog-break due to workload at work… Back soon! In the mean time listen to some decent music. Ssssh! It’s Secret!

Public Transport Woes

lantrix — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 01:36:20 +0000

I have to say something about policing transport in Melbourne. I have had a number of occasions where I have called emergency services. Only once were they able to respond, and they let the crazy violent people back onto the train – the crazy people acted normal for the Police and resumed their craziness after they left. In the case of calling 000, it is difficult to advise the operator where you will be (which station, town, etc.) by the time Police will get to respond, hence I see a low level of response from them.

Any other policing on Melbourne trains is done by the internal security of Connex Melbourne. Their main focus appears to be revenue gain by ticketing as many people as they can. I have had them stand on a carriage watching the crazies in the next carriage, and do nothing. It was my action in initiating a 000 call that got something done about it, but as I said previously the Police were able to do little. I don’t blame the Police here, I think they do the best with what resources they have. It is the engagement of Connex and Police that is lacking.

Trains are dirty. Seats stained with whom knows what. Barrier jumping graffiti taggers get away (the ones I see and report). Why is it that I have to call 000 to report graffiti? I think an SMS/Text reporting number would help, so the train cops could respond.

The reason I care to blog about all this? The train driver was smoking on the train this morning. I had to move carriages, and will raise a complaint today. How do you police that? Had I been smoking (I don’t smoke, but hypothetically) then I would have the full extent of the transport law applied to me to prosecute or fine me. What happens to the driver? Nothing, Nil, Nada.

Ultimately, Melbourne transport is an undesirable necessity.