Whistler Downhill run

I am having so much fun on my Whistler vacation. Enjoy.

Double-neck Fender Pre Bass/ Stratocaster done!

It took me a while to complete this project but it is finally done. The body itself was built in 1986 by Cremer Guitarworks out of Illinois. I originally put some cheaper necks on it to test it out but it is now complete with a 2005 Pre bass and 2008 Fender Strat.



I put custom pickup for the guitar (Seymour hot stacks) and some other custom goodies but tried to keep it the way Fender would have built it if they ever made such a beast.



Now I need to find a case for it before it can go on the road with 22nd Century and Stress Factor 9.

22nd Century at the Railway Club

Here are some photos from our recent gig at the railway club. Special thanks to Sarah Wark for taking these! We also uploaded some new songs to Mix2r.fm.




Tim, Glen & me playing Let Me Be



Banging out a Punk-metal version of "Echo Beach".



Covering 'Surrender' - Cheap Trick.

My German interview with "Die Welt" (The World)

http://www.welt.de/webwelt/article1496004/Wie_das_Web_2.0_die_Gesellschaft_veraendert.html

"In der "New Economy"-Zeit hat Duane Nickull zwei Internetfirmen an den Start gebracht und erfolgreich verkauft. Daneben war er war an der Entwicklung mehrer Internet-Standards beteiligt. Zudem verantwortete er die Electronic-Business-Strategie der Vereinten Nationen. Zuletzt trat er als Co-Autor der Buches Web 2.0. Design Patterns. A Vision of the New Internet Patterns and Models in Erscheinung, das Januar 2008 in Deutschland erscheint."

LiveCycle's new face?

Charlton Barreto and I have been working hard on some new collateral for LiveCycle in the context of SOA and enterprise architecture.

The work has been stressful and resulted in some behavior patterns most often associated with those who still think COBOL is cool. Nevertheless, stay tuned for some really new stuff on SOA.

Photo courtesy of Andre Charland (Nitobi).

New 22nd Century Songs Released on Mix2r.fm

Under my alternate ego, Duane Chaos, I play in several bands (22nd Century and Stress Factor 9 to name just two). One of those, 22nd Century, just released some new mixes on the Music 2.0 social site Mix2r. Mix2r.com allows you to take these songs, download them and add your own tracks to them or remix them.



Regardless, consider taking a listen to the most recent post - the hard rock song "Nightmare on 6th Avenue". I put down bass, lead guitar and vocal tracks on this song. It has a kind of snotty, in your face and get out of my face feel.

http://www.mix2r.com/node/173

Anyone know of any battle of the bands happening at Tech Conferences? I'd love to go and represent Adobe!

Service Component Architecture podcast

Network World recently interviewed me regarding recent developments in the OASIS Service Component Architecture (SCA) and why it is important to enterprise SOAs. The interview was conducted by Network World’s New Data Center Editor Beth Schultz.

Network World
Panorama Podcast: SOA’s ready-made architecture model

iTunes:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=220244986

MP3:
http://podcasts.networkworld.com/panorama/102207pan-soa-adobe.mp3

Vancouver Flex, AIR and RIA training date set!

The Vancouver RIA training day is now set at August 30, 2007. You can register for it here:
www.massivetechshow.com/adobe/.

This day will be all about RIA development and feature training in Flex, Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo), AJAX and other technologies. Nitobi's Andre Charland has agreed to be one of the presenters as well as Ryan Stewart from Seattle. Ross Ladell will also be there and hopefully do some Flash stuff.

Register now - space is *very* limited.

If you can't make it to this one, also consider MAX 2007 as the place to be for 2007.

Adobe on AIR tour 2007 Vancouver. Ted’s Porsche upgrade / Nitobi rocks da house!

Friggin Awesome! Sharks with Friggin laser beams!! A jam session in a sauna?

The 2007 Adobe on AIR Bus Tour is now on its third city stop (Portland). This tour will keep the bus driving all summer long so check it out when they come to your town. This is one show you don’t want to miss. It reminded me of my old rock and roll days touring in a metal band. Of course there are some differences.

First – the guys on the bus play Guitar Hero rather than real instruments. Kind of cool given the instant gratification but as an accomplished musician (you can download my latest music for free here), I couldn’t bring myself to try it. Besides, you need long hair to really be a guitar hero right? I seemed to have thought so back in the 1980s (yes - that is me on the left):



Second – they don’t have to lug Ampeg 8x10 cabinets, Marshall Stacks, and drum kits up three flights of stairs. Trust me – this is a good thing.

They also have bloggers and other new media rather than traditional paparazzi. The media shape of the world has changed forever. This is also a good thing.

Last night the bus stopped in Vancouver, my home town. The venue was pretty surreal. We were in a greenhouse on the third floor of a downtown bar. I am not sure what rocket scientist built this without air conditioning, but last night was very hot. Finnish sauna makers should have been there to take notes.

The crowd was awesome! Vancouver developers and architects came out in droves and stayed for the entire five hours. Even the girls at the bar got into the act. Here is one wearing a Nitobi sticker.



Before the event, fellow Porsche owner and Adobe Evangelist Ted Patrick took me up on my offer to let him drive my Porsche 911 Twin Turbo with all the Ruf accessories. As you can see by this photo, Ted now wants to upgrade his Boxster. Ahh – there is no substitute! Non-Porsche owners will not understand this.



Anyways, the crowd on hand were awesome! Here is a shot from halfway back when a ton of people still could not get in the room. Standing room only. Mike Chambers, Kevin Hoyt, and Mike Downey all gave top-notch presentations which the developer crowd loved. Being on last, I was worried that there was going to be no way this crowd would stay here five hours but they did.



Then Andre Charland got up and blew everyone away. Nitobi's two demos and code samples include a Mac style dock with magnified apps built in AIR and a SalesForce.com offline AIR application with synch capabilities. The scary thing is both of these were written in so few lines of code. Andre is a genius and has the ability to consistently come up with clever little apps with his cohorts James, Alexei and Dave.

I am actually very surprised that Nitobi still exists as a stand alone company. I personally think they are the #1 acquisition target in the tech sector today. Profitable, on the leading edge, four evangelists and probably the coolest corporate culture in the industry ('Dre claims he got in 60+ days in Whistler last season ;-). DISCLAIMER: I am on the Advisory Board of Nitobi and have a financial interest. In the interest of transparency, I am following Redmonk's lead on my blog and disclosing any conflicts of interest to help readers come to their own conclusions.

Andre then proceeded to have several beers and make funny faces in front of cameras while showing off his new iPhone.



He was immediately joined by others:



Eventually even Ross Ladell (Blast Radius) and Adobe's own Suzanne got into the fray:



I'll leave it to your imagination what happened after a few more drinks in the hot greenhouse.

Anyways, I went on last trying in vain to measure up to the others and managed to squeak out a 20 minute summary on Adobe's technology platform architecture, showing its relevance to Web 2.0, SOA etc. As promised, the slides are available here. I only presented the first 15 or so due to time, but I will be recording a session with these later in the month for public consumption.

Johnny Rotten, Artificial Intelligence and LiveCycle

My new photo, taken by Matt Mackenzie, has caused a stir in the tech community, but in my own true fashion, I really don’t care. So What!! The concern seems to be that I have a striking similarity to Johnny Lydon a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols and P.I.L. fame. Of course - as a punk musician, the Pistols were one of my all time favorite bands and a major influence. In fact, my new band, F.L.U., is heavily influenced by a sound created by the Pistols. I also find that P.I.L was imenseley more musically interesting than the Pistols. Therefore, I find any comparison to Johnny a major compliment and there are some similarities:

1. Neither of us is complacent. If something is broken - do something about it.
2. Both of us are musicians who write and perform politically driven music.
3. We both push the boundaries. No society advances without someone constantly provoking it. People hate it but it needs to be done.
4. I guess there may be a slight resemblance between my picture and some from his site but you judge. I personally thought I was more like Billy Idol from Gen-X. Met the guy once - we do look alike.



Do we look alike? !!! Or do I look more like this:



So what the hell does this have to do with artificial intelligence and Adobe LiveCycle. Artificial Intelligence is a huge waste of time and will never work. What is promising is the concept of Computational Intelligence or getting computers to aspects of mimic intelligence based on our expectations. There are two very important and almost always neglected aspects of CI. One is the lack of context. Context is everything, especially for inference. Look at the Sex Pistols putting out Never Mind the Bullocks made a lot of people at the time very upset for a number of reasons. It was insulting to the queen of England and talked about real things we all think. Keep in mind this perspective, the Queen of England once hated Rock and Roll, but has since knighted several rock musicians. In the context of rock’s invention, it was not accepted however over time, it became an acceptable art form (WFT that really means). Looking back now, the Pistols got an entire generation to sit up and say "something’s not working here and were pissed". In the right context, I would nominate Johnny and the boys for giving an entire generation the message that they better think for themselves and things can be changed. It changed my life. When I had the chance to work for the United Nations and be disruptive and tell people who were full of crap that they were full of crap. I did it and I am proud of that.

The point is that Context is everything and most approaches to artificial intelligence seem to be rather static than dynamic. Most of the AI research to date in the field of Ontologies and semantics seems to take a hard coded approach. This is not how humans think.

To add to the problem, there is one other important thing that humans do well that computers cannot do as well. This is excellently summed up in David Luckham who I consider a genius in every sense of the word. Definitely on par with Johnny. Simply stated, it is the ability to detect two events, recognize the context in which they occur and understand the causality relationship between them For example, if you came home and saw that your spouses car was gone, that is one event. If you then saw a guy carrying a TV around the corner, that in itself is another event. Now put the two events together and the causality may point to a situation where they are stealing your TV because the house is empty and they helped themselves. Easy for a human, not so easy for a programmer to capture this model in a generalized sense so it can be reused over multiple examples.

To make Computational Intelligence work, one would require a model for Complex Event Programing, an inference engine using something like the Blackboard patterns with a hypothesis limiter on it to negate the exponential hypothesis problem, a context ontology to layer over top of whatever semantic reasoning one might employ, and a large enough source of events that be used to feed it all. The latter is very important since event isolation would lead to an incomplete set of events to mine for the inference component and probably miss key things.

This is where Adobe LiveCycle enters. LiveCycle, as a platform, has several key places where events are captured and stored in a manner that they can be audited later. The next generation of the LiveCycle platform and the blades that plug into it carry a much more complex series of audit trails than the last version.

Here is a hypothetical situation where a phishing attack is starting. A mass email goes out and tells customers of a bank to use their forms to change their password because of a security breach. If you use LiveCycle Forms, served from a LiveCycle Form Manager, you will generate an auditable event each time one of your customers grabs the form. If your customers account is then accesses and a transfer form is filled out, that will also generate a second event. You now have two events that have a relationship to one thing - the unique account. This should be a relatively easy pattern to catch if you are using LiveCycle as a platform over your IT infrastructure. If you were to use multiple disparate technologies, it could also be caught however this may take more hard work to account for different Document models and mine the events at the same level of granularity.

LiveCycle Policy Server will be able to make events accessible in the LC 8 release and via the SDK, some events are available now. This should be useful to companies who are serious about thwarting criminal behaviour linked to people using their IT infrastructure.

Back to Johnny Rotten now. Things have to change in the world. The pistols and PIL changed me and now I am feeding back change into the world. People need to start thinking about this stuff and start finding ways to fix it. Come to think of it, I guess I am not too changed from my previous punk days. The picture on the left was taken in July of 2006 ;-)