Kubuntu 9.10 released

http://www.kubuntu.org/news/9.10-release

Just upgraded my home PC and must admit, this is really cool now. Great job, Kubuntu developers!!!

Power of openoffice impress

I did this using openoffice impress and with some help from GIMP to fix up the images.

How GIMP has made me an artist :)

You also can be; http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/The_Basics/

Microsoft and (Open?) Standards

Yesterday I met Chris Levanes, Platform Strategy Lead, Microsoft Asia-Pacific Region. The first one I have met from Microsoft with whom I had a sensible dialogue about Open Standards. Interestingly, before joining Microsoft he has worked for Red Hat.

NITC 2009

I got the opportunity to present some of the national IT infrastructure work we do at ICTA as a keynote speaker in the 27th National Information Technology Conference (NITC 2009).

I had the honour of sitting in the head table with Prof. K. K. Aggarwal (2nd from the right).

KDE 4.3.0 Caizen

KDE has announced their release of version 4.3.0 of the free desktop. I just upgrade and it looks really good. Ability to have different wallpapers in each of the desktop is back with many other really user friendly improvements.
http://kde.org/announcements/4.3/

I think the KDE team has demonstrated how a community project can take a FOSS product to a level where it can out perform a proprietary product. This should iron out any perceptions on usability features of a FOSS OS/Desktops.

ESB vs Biztalk

Today I was in a seminar organized by Microsoft on interoperability. I was listening to Lorenzo Madrid and found it interesting to know his view point on open standards and interoperability. He is of the opinion, interoperability can be achieved even without open standards. Based on my questions he may have realized that I share a different opinion on the topic.

However, later on one of the example projects they have done using Biztalk lead me to read bit more about Biztalk and I found this interesting post. Of course this is an old post;

http://oreilly.com/pub/wlg/8484

But has Microsoft change their view point later on?

http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif/archive/2007/01/23/microsoft-s-enterprise-services-bus-esb-strategy-part-4-4.aspx
http://www.infosysblogs.com/microsoft/2006/09/biztalk_as_an_esb_2.html

Now what they have is a set of guidelines as to how to use Biztalk as an ESB.
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/esb-guidance.aspx

Hence, the fundamental issue still remains. Of course when you look at most of the J2EE based ESB implementations, I don't see a different with them and Biztalk.

One example of a real ESB, in my opinion, is here....
http://synapse.apache.org/