I've been blogging for roughly two and half years (counting both my Sun blog and BPM Blog). It's been great in a lot of ways. But blogging while keeping up the pace of working in a startup, and simultaneously keeping the confidentiality of the customers I've been working with, has been a challenge. So, as you've noticed, I haven't been blogging regularly.

So, I'm going to take a vacation from blogging. I'm retiring BPM Blog. Thanks to all of the readers over all the years. Blogging has made reality out of the "everyone is a publisher" vision of the internet.

Thanks again for reading.

David

Posted by davidogren in Personal | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Because of AquaLogicBPM's strong presence in Latin America, ocalization and internationalization have always been a strong feature of AquaLogicBPM. Not only does AquaLogicBPM take advantage of the strong Unicode and internationalization features of Java, but AquaLogicBPM has always considered localizing information that will be presented to end users as just a natural part of building a process.

However, as Fuego, we never had a strong sales presence in Asia. Asia is a hard market to support without a large partner presence and lots of local staff. So, despite a feature set that lends itself to easy localization, ALBPM was never localized to Asian languages.

That is going to change in the next release of AquaLogicBPM. We will be including built-in localizations for several major Asian languages. From a technical perspective there are more interesting features in the next release. But from a sales perspective, Asian localization are a big deal. The Asian market is obviously very important and up until now we have been neglecting it. With the advantage of being part of BEA, and inheriting BEA's global partners and global presence, we are seeing lot of interest for ALBPM in Asia and this next release is going to let us start addressing that demand.

So, in preparation for that next release, I am off to Asia to do some deep dive training for Asian BEA employees and key BEA partners. I'll be spending the next two and half weeks on the other side of the globe in Japan and China. I have to admit I'm a little apprehensive. I've never been to Asia. I've been to non-English speaking countries a few times. But even in those situations I knew enough of the language and culture that if I could be relatively independent. However, going to a country with a very different culture, a completely different method of writing, a haphazard way of numbering streets, and a language that I know absolutely nothing about is a lot more intimidating. I'm sure I'll be able to get around, but I won't exactly be very independent.

As much as I can, I think I'll keep a travel diary here on my blog. I may or may not get the chance to make business focused posts while I'm away. It depends how busy my students keep me. But, if nothing else, I'll at least be able to share my experiences living a few weeks a very different culture.

Posted by davidogren in Personal | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A little bit off-topic from BPM today, but I'm still thinking about the announcements from Apple's WWDC conference yesterday. A couple of quick things worth noting for a Mac user such as myself..

Apple didn't make much hoopla about it, but Sun's DTrace has been integrated into Leopard, the next release of OS X. DTrace is one of the things that I miss now that I don't work with Solaris as much. DTrace is hard to describe to people who haven't used it, but it's the ultimate debugging and tuning tool. DTrace lets you peek into exactly what is going on inisde your computer and automatically sift through that data to pinpoint and monitor exactly the data you want. I'm excited that I'll get to use DTrace on my day to day computer again someday.

Another feature that Apple did demo in the keynote is "Time Machine", however. Time Machine is a backup tool that gives you a visual view as you search backwards through backups to find a previous version of a file. Nice from a UI perspective, from the perspective that it will be a ubiquitous part of OS X, and because it will be available for third party applications to integrate with. (Meaning that you'll be able to restore your files without ever leaving your application.) More interesting, however, at least from my perspective, is that Time Machine is built under the complete assumption that you will be backing up to a hard drive. Either to an external hard drive or to a hard drive on a local server somewhere.

I think this is a great thing. One of the reasons people don't do backups today is all of the trouble spanning CDs, DVDs, or backup tapes. If the file I want to restore is on backup CD #37, what are the chances I can find the right CD and that CD #37 won't be scratched/corrupted/list/damaged? Time Machine wont' solve everything: everyone should still do periodic full backups to a separate offsite hard drive in case of fire/flood/theft, but Time Machine will be a nice step forward towards making backups more practical. It's also a complete victory for the idea that "disk is the new tape".

Finally I'd just like to say that I'm completely jealous of the new Mac Pros. With that kind of memory, processors, and disk it's basically a server in a desktop form factor. Makes me want to buy one to run Solaris and ZFS on it. :-)

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