I am a committer on the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) open source project. The code and content that makes up EPF was donated from the Rational Method Composer product and the Rational Unified Process. The open source version of RUP is called BUP, which stands for Basic Unified Process. Today you can download EPF Composer from the web site and begin authoring your own method content and publishing process configurations, or you can use the BUP method content and customize it for your own development project. There is also a published version of BUP available for download as well. EPF Composer and the published BUP web site are available from the EPF download page. ...

This past year I joined the Rational Method Composer (RMC) team at IBM. Rational Method Composer is a tool to author method content and configure that method content into processes. RMC can be used for authoring software development processes, IT operations processes, or any complex business process that requires documentation and consistency. Processes can be published and distributed via HTML sites. What I like about RMC is that is brings the concept of knowledge reuse to process engineering. Method content can consist of the roles, tasks, and work products which are essentially smaller generic pieces of a process. Those pieces can then be assembled into a process configuration and published. Using the same library of method content, a process author could build a configuration for a new software project and also a configuration for product maintainance. ...

I was first introduced to DSHIELD last month. Particularly, my interest was in the textual feeds of recommended hosts to block at the firewall. The lists come in the form of a text file formatted with individual hosts and entire networks. The feeds are refreshed on a regular basis from community input. I wrote a small shell script to pull these recommended lists and create an iptables chain that is called from my existing server firewalling rules. The input, output and forwarding chains all call the DSHIELD chain. After about a month of use it seems to have paid off, because the DSHIELD chain in my firewall rules blocks many packets from these blacklisted hosts - and so far no one has complained. This script is run nightly to refresh the DSHIELD chain. If for any reason it cannot contact the DSHIELD site, it will keep the existing rules in place. Here is the BASH shell script I use on Fedora and CentOS servers. ...

For my perfect team I want to build a software development team and staff the lead roles. There are many roles involved with the creation and sale of a software product. I am going to focus on the team responsible for the creation of the solution. The roles I chose to staff are project management, requirements analyst, engineering, content and documentation, and customer support leads. Many people can share a single role, or each person can have multiple roles. For my case, each person gets a single role. The project manager is responsible for monitoring the progress, time lines, budgets, and in general doing what needs to be done to see the project reach its conclusion. The project manager is often a central figure of communication between the development team and other groups. My project manager is Meg Whitman from eBay. [1] Meg has turned eBay into an online mainstay with $4 billion a year in revenue and a $60 billion market capitalization. The requirements analyst uses a variety of techniques to understand the problem from first hand contact with stakeholders inside and outside the organization. Grace Hopper [2] lived from 1906 to 1992. She is responsible for such ideas as compiled source languages and was deeply involved in trying to make computers easier for developers and operators. She often placed herself in the problematic situation to understand it and help propose a solution. The engineering lead is a broad role incorporating all of the technical aspects and control systems in place for the project. For this role I will choose Alan Cox [3] from the team of Linux contributors. Alan was responsible for many of the improvements to Linux that helped it gain respect as a reliable platform. Although a deeply technical person, Alan has an MBA that I believe gives him an insight to the economics of engineering problems. The content and documentation specialist is responsible for all information included with the solution that is needed by the consumer. This role is also responsible for any included templates or other information that can jump-start the solution for the user. Carl Sagan [4] will be my content and documentation producer. Carl Sagan taught science and wrote about it his entire life. He contributed to the popularization of science in America. Customer support provides help, receives and records defect reports and enhancement requests, and provides assistance with unique problems or environments. Blake W. Nordstrom [5] of the Nordstrom department stores will be in charge of my customer service organization. Nordstrom has a reputation of excellent service and has been aggressively applying technology to improve their customer’s experience. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/top50_women_fortune_111405/?cnn=yes [2] http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/hopper.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan [5] http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/M-R/Nordstrom-Blake-W-1961.html ...

Risks associated with B2B e-commerce include the technical problems of creating an Internet-facing business system that enables you and your partners to save money and react quickly by doing all transactions electronically. Additionally, I found there is some concern about the antitrust risks of business-to-business exchanges. I initially started searching for technical risks, and came across this document about the business risks of competitors working closely in collaboration to negotiate prices. http://mipr.umn.edu/archive/v2n2/gotfredson.pdf Certain models of B2B exchanges would have the competitors in an open auction against each other to win the bid for some product or service. “In spite of the promises inherent in this new business model, B2B exchanges necessarily involve collaboration between competitors in a market, and thus raise potential antitrust concerns.” There is actually nothing new here about types of antitrust activities a company might undertake with B2B. I think the point of the paper tells us that the Internet potentially makes this easier to take place. Connectivity between competitors and collaborators over the Internet and the growing sophistication of software provides an atmosphere where antitrust activities can occur without immediate notice. “A second antitrust risk associated with B2B exchanges stems from the fact that the Internet allows for the aggregation and analysis of copious information concerning the exchange’s participants.” I was not able to determine if any company has had legal action taken against them for B2B-related antitrust activities. The technical risks involved with B2B are typical for Internet-facing servers of e-commerce applications. For instance, Amazon uses a web front end to interface with their customers. The front-end of an application is one place vulnerabilities can be exploited to someone’s gain. Even though B2B exchanges may use a different kind of communication protocol, like a web-service or EDI communication, if there are weaknesses in the protocol, there is a possibility someone could use it to their advantage without immediate notice. An act that is as simple as transmitting illegal values for valid operations could allow unauthorized access because of a lack of sufficient defensive programming on the server-side. I found a PowerPoint presentation (link below) that listed some areas of potential loss from poorly designed e-commerce systems. Theft of Intellectual Property Theft of Proprietary Information Sabotage of Data Networks System Penetration Insider Abuse Financial Fraud Denial of Service Virus http://www.business.duq.edu/BusinessSecurity/docs/mootcourt.ppt ...

No limit to bandwidth means that it would be possible to send any amount of information across a network with no latency. Such an achievement would change more things than just the web. For instance, with the capability of limitless bandwidth, data storage and processing power would no doubt have made equivalent leaps as well. These are components of networking infrastructure as well as general purpose computers. So, networking equipment that provided limitless bandwidth would also include processing power to handle the load - processing power with no limits. Moving any amount of information with no latency also means you need some place to put it - data storage with no limits. With these limits removed, there might be no need for a web at all. The ability to move any amount of information instantly might mean we keep a copy for ourselves of everything we interact with, continually accumulating and indexing data at a constant rate from other information providers for the rest of our lives. From this I can imagine having my own reference database of accumulated information that becomes our private web, or life encyclopedia. ...

The Internet is the worldwide network of networks, which is available to business, government, education, and individuals. Many different services are provided over the Internet, including electronic mail, instant messaging and web applications. Single devices and entire local networks can join the Internet and become connected worldwide at a variety of speeds. Many large telecommunications companies carry the backbone of the Internet. The Internet “provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.” [1] An “intranet is a private network inside a company or organization that uses the same kinds of software that you would find on the public Internet, but that is only for internal use. An intranet may be on the Internet or may simply be a network.” [2] I have found that Intranet and internal web are often interchanged, as well as Intranet and internal network. I think in general it is safe to refer to the all services available within the private networking domain of the organization. The Intranet of a company is often available by plugging into the network at a business office or virtually plugging in to it through remote Virtual Private Network access. I have found several overlapping definitions of Extranet, but in general they all refer to the same concepts. An Extranet is a company provided extension of its Intranet services to customers and business partners. [3] Using Amazon as an example, they do business over the Internet with the majority of people with a web application. They also have business partners that receive orders and provide special services to Amazon’s customers. Business partners have access to Amazon’s Extranet, which allows them to interact with the private portion of the business’ network services, but only those services Amazon allows. [1] http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/internet/definition.html [2] http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Glossary.html [3] http://elab.vanderbilt.edu/research/studentprojects/extranet/execsumm.html [4] http://elab.vanderbilt.edu/research/studentprojects/extranet/extranet.html ...

Logical design is, “The part of the design phase of the SDLC in which all functional features of the system chosen for development in analysis are described independently of any computer platform.” [1] A logical design for a network is an abstract functional specification for a telecommunications solution. A logical design lacks specific details such as technologies and standards and focuses on the needs at a general level. A logical network design can be a view of any part of a network. An entire enterprise educational network can be a composition of many logical designs. The lower level designs can be a university campus network that connects each building to the Internet, or it could be a view of the standard office telecommunications setup. The important quality of a logical design is that is communicates all needs in general terms.Logical designs communicate with abstract concepts, such as a network, router or workstation, without specifying concrete details. A definition of abstraction that I like is, “the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances.” [3] Another is a “general concept formed by extracting common features from specific examples.” [3] Abstractions for complex systems, such as network designs are important because they simplify the problem space so humans can manage it. An example of a network abstraction is a WAN. A wide-area-network carries data between remote locations. To understand a WAN, you do not need to understand the physics behind fiber optic data communication, although WAN traffic may be carried over optical fiber, satellite, or copper wire. Someone specifying the need for a WAN connection on a logical network diagram can understand the concept of a WAN connection without understanding the detailed technical specifics behind it.Logical designs are often described using terms from the customer’s business vocabulary. Locations, processes, roles from the business domain can show up in the logical design. An important aspect of a logical network design is that it is part of the requirements set for a solution to a customer problem. The basic idea of physical design is that it communicates “decisions about the hardware used to deliver a system.” [2] A physical network design is created from a logical network design. A physical design will often expand elements found in a logical design. For instance, a WAN connection on a logical design diagram can be shown as a line between two buildings. When transformed into a physical design, that single line could expand into the connection, routers and other equipment at each end of the connection. The actual connection media might be shown on a physical design as well as manufacturers and other qualities of the network implementation. The primary difference between logical network design and physical network design is that of iterative production of a solution from the identification of a problem. For example, when a business needs to share information in real time with remote offices, they are thinking in terms of business first and technology second. This is where identification of a problem begins, and as the problem is documented, it can be iteratively evolved from a logical solution into many possible physical designs. The logical design of a network can be re-implemented with new technology, and yet the logical design remains the same. Logical designs can span generations of technology, while a physical design is one realization of a logical design. References[1] http://myphliputil.pearsoncmg.com/student/bp_hoffer_modernsad_3/glossary.html[2] http://lms.thomsonelearning.com/hbcp/glossary/glossary.taf?gid=21&start=p[3] http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn2.0?stage=1&word=abstraction ...

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Adios to the best damn tennis-ball-fetch dog ever. Get some rest fella. From Dogs