What Should be Next for Enterprise Mashups?

My friend over at JackBe, Chris Warner, recently sent me an email asking me what the next 2 to 3 years should hold for Enterprise Mashups. JackBe, in case you don't know, is the creator of the Enterprise Mashup software Presto.  We've used Presto on a project and it's a wonderfully crafted piece of software with many, many possibilities in front of it.  Presto has, at its heart, the creation of mashups, those elusive but so useful beasts which give you all kinds of new-fangled views into your data.

This is a topic I've spent a little bit of time thinking about, fancying myself to be at least a passable user and creator of mashups.  I'm going to change up the question a bit, though, and delve into territory that is slightly afield.  So, I propose these related questions:  Just what the heck are Enterprise Mashups?  And, what's next for them?

Any Ol' Programmer
Let's be honest, any programmer can get out there and create a mashup with a little elbow grease.  The technology is there such that, with a little bit of web service lifting and a little bit of UI know-how you can create fantastical mashups that will make everyone sit up and take notice.  What's more, if you do it right, your own mashup can, in turn, become a data source for someone else to consume.  It's a bit like Sir Elton John says, that whole Circle of Life thing.

But, that's just the problem, isn't it?  We're not all programmers, now, are we?  Not all of us even have access to programmers (or, as we like to style ourselves now-a-days, "software engineers"), so it's not like we can ask someone else to do it for us.  And, most important of all, programmer time is expensive.  If you do have access to a programmer and task them with spending hours creating your pet mashup, you're likely to get a whack on the wrists from the company dumby stick.  So, what use are mashups to the common-day man?  They're nice to look at, but not really practical beyond that.

Enter the Enterprise
No, not the ship, though that would be cool.  The Enterprise is (or should be) all about putting a useful tool into the hands of someone other than an engineer.  To a certain extent it's about lowering the technical barrier of entry.  Any programmer should be able to put a mashup together, but that doesn't mean that they are easy.  There is a lot of wiring together and hacking things up that takes place.

Enter the folks at JackBe, handing us Presto.  With software like Presto it's possible for someone of a less technical bent, someone that's not a programmer, to put together a mashup that's useful.  This Enterprise tool takes some of the difficulty out of the creation.  And that, in a nutshell, is what the Enterprise should be about.

What's Next?
Even though products like Presto lower the barrier of entry, there is still a long way to go.  Presto shines at doing the actual mashing, wiring the data together to get the new view.  But, one area where Enterprise Mashup software needs to tread next is into more robust presentation of that new view.

One thing that mashups excel at is the creation of data.  One thing that data desperately wants to do is be visualized.  There are so many tools out there for visualizing data, but most of them have a similar dilemma to non-enterprise mashups:  it takes specialized skills to use them.  Enterprise Mashups need to tread here, next, lowering the barrier of entry into rich presentation of the data that mashups are so good at generating.

To Infinity...
From there, well, who knows.  I'd like to see tools which are good at creating not just a good presentation but actual interaction, all done so that the common layman can create them with minimal know-how.  I've blogged before about how it's important for people like analysts to be able to do at least some kind of rudimentary software development.  I see that Enterprise Mashups can fill this role once they come to full maturity.  It's a big area, one that needs more exploration, and I'm quite happy that I get a peek into it at the ground floor.

Wanna See Me Shave My Head?

Wanna see me shave my head?  I'll do it if you help fight childhood cancer with the Rollin' Reckers!  We're gathering funds in support of St. Baldrick's, a charity which donates money directly to the hospitals which are doing the research in childhood cancer.  St. Baldrick's is pretty simple:  raise money by shaving your head.

So, I'm going to shave my head, but I need your help to do it.  We're going to raise as much money as we can in order to fight off the types of cancer that Cole has.  We're teaming up with Cole's best clinic buddy, Ethan. 

Ethan and Cole have the same kind of cancer.  They've bonded from the first time that we met Ethan in clinic (Ethan's about a year behind Cole in treatment) and now we're all getting together to kick some cancer butt!

You can donate or, better yet, you can volunteer to have your head shaved and raise money on your own!  Whatever you do, come join us.  The more of us that get involved means the fewer children which have to suffer through what Cole and Ethan have suffered through.

Go to our team page and click the donate button.  You can do it!

Budgeting

Starting in November of 2008 I took over the budget from Dalynn.  For most of our marriage Dalynn and I have passed the budget back and forth.  It would work like this:  I would see Dalynn get stressed about our finances, attempt to take them over, bounce a few checks or make a few payments late, then hand them back to her to salvage.  This happened many times, probably around 5 or 6.

The reasons that I've always struggled with money are myriad.  To begin with, I'm not a person that deals with self-inflicted pain well.  I always relish the idea of buckling down, but when I actually do buckle down, I don't enjoy it nearly as much.  As well, I never really learned how to handle money.  I grew up knowing that money had to be handled, just not how.  The last, and perhaps most important reason is that I'm impulsive.  I will go out and make a snap decision and the consequences be damned, I'm going to do what I want to do in spite of them!  Oh, and I can easily make an excuse that "just this once" won't hurt while I'm doing that...

All of these factors have conspired throughout my life to make me terrible with money.  This time, though, I've been handling our finances for over a year, and doing well.  Here's how.

First off, I had to find a system that worked for me.  Dalynn knows how to handle money, but her method of handling money is like a black art to me.  Ironically, the method that I've chosen to handle money is akin to a black art for her.  Neither of us thinks about money in quite the same way.  With that in mind, I decided I would find a way that made sense to me.

I eventually found (or should I say re-found) the envelope system.  I've read about it over the years but I've always felt that surely I didn't need such a simplistic system!  Turns out I did, and I'm glad I finally humbled myself.

The envelope system is easy.  It works like this:

1. Start saving your receipts.  If you've never tracked your spending, you'll need to do this for about a month before you will have an idea what your spending habits look like.
2. Using the receipts you've saved, create categories (or envelopes) based on how you spend your money.  Some examples would be things like fuel, groceries, dining out and savings.
3. Take a ballpark figure of what your monthly income is and divide up that income into all of the categories you've created.  You can use your months worth of receipts to give you an idea of what you're spending on a given category.  Once your monthly income hits zero, stop funding and instead apportion money between the categories.
4. When you get payed you put the money directly into the categories that you've created.  So, if you get payed twice a month, each paycheck you'll be filling each category with half of it's total value.
5. When it comes time to spend money, you pull the money from the category which it belongs to.  If you're going to go out to eat, then you would pull the money from "dining out".  If you're going to go grocery shopping, then you pull the money from "groceries".
6. When a category runs out of money you either stop buying things that fit in that category or you borrow from another category, but you can never make a category go negative.
7. At regular intervals you assess whether or not a category is reasonable and move money around to reflect reality.

I chose this system due to its simplicity.  It's easy to understand what I have to do when a category runs out.  I stop spending or find the money somewhere else.  If I maintain this discipline, I can never over-spend!

I had two goals when I started budgeting:  get an iPhone and make sure we live within our means.  I have now accomplished both of those goals!  As a matter of fact, I was able to get my iPhone rather quickly.  Making sure we live within our means took a little more time, but probably not more than six months.

The beauty of our budget became abundantly clear to me this past September.  Dalynn came home from a doctor's appointment for Ava and informed me that she was going to have to go on formula.  It wasn't just any formula, though.  It was the most expensive formula on the market!  It looked like Ava's formula was going to cost us about $250/month.

I walked around for about a day wondering how we were going to do this.  Then, I turned to our budget (with many prayers, I might add).  In the span of about an hour, I found out that with a little trimming in some non-essential categories (like dining out and our miscellaneous category) we were well able to fund a new category specifically for Ava with $250/month.  By doing some other smart things, like shopping the formula on Amazon and being very careful about wasting it, we've been able to stretch the formula a lot farther than we initially thought.

Our budget brought us peace.  There's no way we would have been able to figure out whether or not we could have afforded that kind of expense without it.  What's more, now that that money is out of our budget proper we've decided to keep it that way.  When Ava goes off of formula (which should be in the next month or so) we're going to keep that money separate and use it in August to send both boys to preschool.  There are many other benefits besides peace of mind, but that's a pretty awesome one.

Now that we've made our budget work so that we are living within our means, we're attempting to tighten things down a little here and there so that we can do more with our money.

Social Media: Capturing Knowledge in a Self-Organized Way

It's the early 80s and you sit at your terminal with a stack of papers, a document holder and a keyboard. Your mission: Enter as many of the paper forms into the terminal as possible. Exciting work, isn't it?

The problem is that this is not an inaccurate way to view data entry today. Granted, a lot of the brute force work has been done and legacy systems exist from which to pull data. Further, the forms are now entered directly into the system as opposed to copied from paper, but as regards entering novel data the situation has changed little.

The other major problem is that this type of raw entry, which is generally entering data into a form, only captures defined phenomena. The data that is being entered, especially into a form, is often classified and defined in advance. There is no elasticity to what can be captured.

This is problematic in that you must have a clear picture of what you are capturing in advance. For hard problems and complex situations you very rarely know much, if anything, in advance. If your only valid form of capturing data is via traditional predefined methods, such as forms, then your ability to capture data, and eventually knowledge, is vastly compromised.

This revelation is nothing new, of course. People have been trying to innovate data entry and knowledge capture for several decades. But, what other types of data can be captured and how?

The Army is asking this exact question, if indirectly. In reading several SBIRs the concept of capturing the knowledge inherent in soldiers heads is coming to the forefront. It is being recognized that not only do experts have valid perspectives and answers, the boots on the ground do, as well (keep in mind, this is probably not a new perspective in the military, but is one that I have seen in several SBIRs recently). Beyond that, though, they are starting to explore how to bring that knowledge into existing systems.

The how of this is a serious question. Computer systems today are clearly defined and generally purposeful to a single end. Human thought, on the other hand, is often multi-purposed and the field of understanding human thinking (philosophy) has been around for as long as humans and has yet to reach one shared conclusion on how we think. Even if we could get some Matrix-like data jack implanted into soldiers heads could we really transfer the knowledge as it is represented inside their brains into a computer system?

Perhaps we need another way of gathering data since it would seem that direct access to the human mind would avail us little. There is a new(-ish) movement which is providing an answer: social media.

Probably one of the most useful aspects of social media is how important and interesting knowledge percolates to the top. This is done in various ways. For instance, if I see an interesting tweet on Twitter, I will retweet it. If I read something worthwhile on Facebook, I may comment on it or repost it. It's this interaction with the content that causes the interesting bits to rise to the top.

The exciting thing, at least from a systems perspective, is that this is self-organizing behavior. It is through the interaction of the components of the system (here, the components are the people) that the interesting bits are being obtained. While it may be difficult to capture human thought and knowledge in its native form, it's not as difficult to capture the important pieces as they are being defined by the social system already.

Further, the nature of social media, in that it tends to interact in bite-sized, discrete pieces, means that the computer system needs not have much understanding of what it is capturing at all. The knowledge is already distilled into its core component, often with attribution, and the computer system merely need remember it. It can be stored without pre-defined labels and fields.

The thing which the computer system must crucially provide is a robust search capability. Whether this search capability is enacted after the fact, or whether there is a component of the system which searches as knowledge comes in is immaterial. As long as the system can search through the knowledge is what's important.

Eventually, this captured knowledge can be used and reused as more people interact with it. Each interaction would in essence refine the knowledge, making it more useful to the computer system and the people in general.

Toys R Us - Minutes to Midnight

Linkin Park's song "Minutes to Midnight" would have been a fitting accompaniment as Dalynn and I were preparing to rush in to the Virginia Beach Toys R Us tonight at the stroke of 12 am. My heart was pumping and I was curious as to whether or not I would have to do battle to get through the door and claim our spoils.

Yes, Dalynn and I went to a midnight Black Friday event at Toys R Us, and boy, was it something!

Waiting in line was an event all in itself and quite festive. There were a ton of teenagers in line, all waiting to secure their $199 iTouch 8GB with a $50 gift card attached. There were a lot of parents mine and Dalynn's ages. There were also plenty of people missing teeth. Quite an eclectic crowd.

And the smoke! Seemed like every 5th person was puffing away, one after the other. I've never been outside and felt like I was in a pool hall before.

Then the line started to move and in we went! It was a bit like going over the drop on a roller coaster. As we rolled through the front entrance we realized that the line actually wrapped completely around the building, back to the front entrance. This is basically a strip mall, the line was ginormous!

I did not, in fact, have to do battle to claim my spoils. Being prepared to wait was more the order of the day. We waited in line outside (see above) from 10:45 til 12, then waited in line inside the store (see below) as people piled up trying to get to one thing or the other. The biggest traffic jam occurred at the electronics station and it backed traffic up to the front of the store.

The layout of the store was completely insane. Imagine the main aisles of a Toys R Us being turned into one-way streets and you might have a good approximation of what it was like. Everyone was funneled in the same direction, with people branching out to claim a prize then merging back in to the main flow. And nothing was moving quickly. You basically had one chance to grab what you wanted and then hunt for the checkout.

And hunting for checkout was the truth! Once you had claimed your spoils you had to venture against the flow of traffic, back to the middle of the store. The exact middle. From there a line ran out to the front of the store where you could pay for your spoils. I've never seen a bigger cluster in my life!

We made it out, having paid half of what we would have, to see that a rain storm had passed while we were inside. The line still wrapped around the building and people were soddenly and vainly hoping to make it inside for the real deals.

It was actually really fun! I imagine that we might do it again.

Shifts in Perspective - Addiction

Addiction is an insidious thing. It worms and weasels its way in, altering how someone thinks. Because so much of it is taking place in the mind it is often not apparent to the one that is addicted how their perspective, how they see things, has been altered.

Though I am no expert here, simply having been a passenger on this boat, I see that there are two ways in which something can be addicting: physical and mental. I don't intend to address the physical portion here, but by physical I mean the way in which the body gets used to, and consequently needs, the addicting substance. It is a physiological response with physiological repercussions. Anyone who has attempted to quit smoking will have experienced physical addiction and withdrawal. The physical portion of an addiction is often most apparent to the addicted individual.

The mental aspect of addiction is often not realized until much later, if at all. As I sank deeper and deeper into my addiction I was unaware of what the substance was doing to me. I was not cognizant of the aggression and moodiness, the anti-social behavior, the sheer arrogance that I was exhibiting. Those that were around me saw it writ boldly and clearly, especially Dalynn, but these changes were happening to my mind. How I thought was being changed, I was completely unaware of the changes because I couldn't see them, it was as if I was blind to them.

Imagine, if you will, that your ability to see a color, let's say green, is changing over time. There's no one time you can point to where you can say "Here I can see green, there I can not", it just goes over time. After a while, you can be looking at green and not know it is there, or not realize that that gray color you see is actually green. So it is with addiction. Your mental self-image changes over time and you become blind to all of the changes that are taking place within you. Some of this blindness is due to your obsession with whatever you're addicted to, some of it is due to the changes that are taking place in your mind as you start to think differently. After a while, you just lose the ability to tell that anything at all has changed.

Except, there are some times where you are shocked back into a realization that something is wrong. Times of misery, times of hurt, times where you suddenly wonder how you came to this terrible, lonely place. It is during these times that a shift in perspective, how you see the world and yourself, can take place.

Truth be told for many it will probably take countless times of misery to drive home the point that something is wrong! I know it did for me. It took losing my family as Dalynn left me and took Cole with her, due to her fear of me, to drive home to me that something was wrong. But, even that wasn't enough! I had to suffer through endless days of loneliness and contemplation of the unimaginable before I realized how perversely my mind had been altered, to see how shockingly my thoughts were warped. It was like looking in a mirror after thousands of days without seeing myself and finding a wretched, wan reflection of who I thought I was.

These are times of shifts in perspective. These are saving moments, when reality can reassert itself. These are horrible moments that the Lord in all His mercy lets us experience. The worst thing that can be done for an addict is to save them from the consequences they have inflicted on themselves!

A shift in perspective need not always be a horrible thing, though it often is. It need only be a life-altering thing (as if those come along all that often). The birth of a child, for instance. During these times I think we all can step away from ourselves and introspect on to what we are, but for the addict, this time can lead to realization.

Seeing what I had become gave me the will to fight the addiction and ultimately conquer it. Self-realization, looking in a mirror, did for me what my wife had been praying so diligently for. That led me down the road to breaking the addiction and then recovering my life, piece by piece, that has brought me to where I am today. By no means complete, but in a much better place.

Had someone stepped in during that time and attempted to "rescue" me, I doubt I would be recovered today. Had I not been able to partake of the consequences of my actions I don't believe I would have ever changed. It is a terrible thing, but then again, so is addiction.

Two Years of Cancer

November 12, 2009 marks the second anniversary of Cole's diagnosis of ALL (leukemia). In light of this Dalynn and I have spent the last several days preparing to post an update for this momentous yet silent event. In that time, we have spent many hours looking through pictures we have taken over the last two years. The effect it has had on me, personally, is profound.

It's amazing what you remember, and how you remember it. I don't remember Cole as looking sick. I remember him much as I see him now, vibrant, alive, talkative and energetic. In my memories, I place the Cole of now back into the settings that we were in back then. Cole chatting away in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV. Cole, picking at food and talking to me on Christmas day.

The reality, especially of those first few months, is very different and much grimmer. My little boy was so sick. He was swollen to near-unrecognizability from steroids. He was so weak. He talked very little and had to have help to eat. His legs were mere sticks and if he could walk at all it was with a pitiful gait, dragging his legs almost behind him. I cannot believe that I lived through that time and have forgotten so much of the detail.

But, perhaps, it is that same forgetfulness that is a blessing. I remember that things were hard, I remember that it pushed me to my breaking point, but it's a bit like remembering facts. Oh, it has left an indelible mark on my soul, I have been forever changed by this tangle with cancer. But I don't remember these events in crystal clear detail, and thank the Lord for that.

Cole has fought long, and he has fought hard. As I have said, marrying the images of the Cole of then with the Cole of now is almost impossible, and oh, how thankful I am for that. For, you see, Cole is more than winning this fight, he is thriving in the midst of it. He is facing it with an indomitable spirit that does not even recognize that the option of surrender exists. I can see in his actions a heart that will continue to strive for life regardless of what the circumstances say. In looking back at these pictures I am amazed by what an inspiration my little boy is.

I was telling a friend the other day that I am hopeful that Cole will remember his fight. I hope that he always carries with him the realization that if he can overcome this heinous demon he can overcome anything. So much better for him to draw strength from this later in life than for him to forget.

Yet, at the same time, I can also say I hope he does forget. I hope he forgets the pain, the suffering, the terrible days of misery. I hope that he can continue to live life as a normal little boy, vibrant and fully certain of the safety and continuance of life. It would be terrible for cancer to have taken away his sense of security in his childhood. So many children lose that so young, how much better if my boy is not one of them.

For all of my hopes and aspirations, though, I must leave them, and indeed Cole, in the hands of the Lord. God will shape Cole and mold him as he grows older, into a "big boy", into an adolescent and finally into a man. I can only pray that the Lord will allow me to instill in him the values and character that will see him in good steading later in life. As a fallible man, one who is so utterly human and ultimately inconsistent I know that it will be the Lord that shapes and molds Cole, not I. Let Him make of him what He will.

Please join us on this wonderful day in saying a prayer of thanksgiving for the gift of Cole's life that the Lord has given to us. I cannot remember what life felt like before him and I hope that I never have to experience life without him. He is truly a blessed boy and I am a blessed father.

Join with us in thanking the Lord for all the good that has come out of cancer. We are a stronger, tighter family than ever before. We are each individually stronger. We have a reference on what tough times truly are and the certainty that we will make it through the tough times ahead. Most of all, pray with us that the Lord will use this to His glory, to carve a path straight to Him. What better way could Cole's illness serve the world?