"Enterprise Architecture Made Simple" by Håkan Edvinsson; Lottie Aderinne

 "Enterprise Architecture Made Simple" 

by Håkan Edvinsson; Lottie Aderinne

 Pranaam! to everyone. The authors provide a nice perspective of placing information models, process models and deriving architecture models from these. The fundamental theme shared throughout
by the authors is considering 'Information' aspect of business that doesn't change as frequently as processes or systems. IT is too narrowly focused on systems and believing that is the only way to improve an enterprise. But the enterprise wide picture is clearer if once takes a step back and considers what the most value adds for business and where should the next significant transformation happen in this enterprise. A management and leadership who understands this will initiate EA in enterprise, so that larger picture is evangelised at various levels in organization and such that EA is thought leadership that consistently convinces everyone on next steps.

Authors have used Zachman 3.0 Framework. They have succeeding in providing a very clear and to the point steps in preparing today's EA, making them ready to deal with different scenarios.
The EA methodology has been broken into 3 parts viz: Ready - Prepare EA, Set - operationalize EA and Run - action as EA. The discussion is basically an expansion of top phases
in TOGAF9 which deals with Requirements phase, Initiating Architecture work(gathering sponsorship) and Business Architecture. The finer details of rest of architecture phases
are left out in favor of Information architecture and business process modeling, since these have most profound impact to business and consulting to top management and business leaders.

The language n book is to the point, straight on topic rather than exaggeration usually found on EA topics. I liked this 'Enterprise Architecture Made Simple' very much and would recommend this to anyone interested in EA.  Regards. SGN

Cisco Press' "Networking and IP Addressing Fundamentals" by Keith Barker, CCIE

Cisco Press' "Networking and IP Addressing Fundamentals" by Keith Barker, CCIE
5/5
Excellent material, a great refresher for a person interested in reverse engineering Network domain design. Looking forward to IPv6 presentation now and the impact to these fundamentals. I've been using hosts within LAN, WAN, ISP network, VPN like we all are. Its interesting to understand how routers, swtiches and hubs make this communication possible.

Regards
Sudeep

"Java Performance - Charlie Hunt Video Training"

 5/5

Pranaam!! A valuable sneak-peak, a concise presentation on Java 1.7 performance tuning, with all important GC tuning options. The course is good to reinforce Oracle Performance Tuning training or for professional performance tuners to get a refresher. Each Garbage Collection type is explained with examples from verbose GC logs. The explanation is more on what are GCs, the what to performance tune is specific to context and is rightly not a black & white answer for the audience.
The G1 garbage introduced since later versions of 1.6 is interesting and I'd like to more about this.

The sections are divided around 3 topics. Something tells me that part of this training is about to arrive with details on G1 garbage collector or improvements in concurrency in existing GC types.

• JVM Overview
• Collecting Performance Statistics
• Understand HotSpot JVM GC Logs

Regards
Sudeep Namboodiri 

"Learning VMware ESXi and vSphere 5.1 Administration" by Glen Martin

4/5

"Learning VMware ESXi and vSphere 5.1 Administration by Glen Martin"
Very good hands-on training on ESXi related administration, useful for everyone including Solution Architects and System Integration Architects apart from system administrators to understand VMware's virtualization tools. The training covered fundamental working knowledge on below areas:
You can look at topic index for more details

• vCenter, vSphere, ESXi topology
• ESXi installation, vCenter installation
• Virtual Storage fundamentals
• Virtual Network fundamentals
• Creating a Virtual Machine
• DRS
• HA
• vMotion
• Storage vMotion
• Performance tuning
• vCenter Update Manager fundamentals and installation
• VMware Update Manager
• Data protection and security

The instructions were clear and concise. The oration  appeared to fast forwarded, limiting pauses in between all segments, leaving the audience a bit stressed. This is not a replacement for VMware documentation by any means, but is definitely a very good view for howto on VMware tools. Further reading and training is necessary if you came in researching the Performance aspects of virtualization.

Regards
Sudeep

"Data Design Introduction" by Tim Miles [2013]

A good jumpstart into database design practices, explained to the point and very lucidly. 1hr and 39min long.

http://bit.ly/162cvNY

Questions answered:
What is a Database?
What are types of databases?
What are relationships?
What is process of database design :
    determine purpose of database
    collect forms, reports, etc
    meet current and future users
    normalize the data, remove redundancy
    create the database
    review
what is Normalization?

"Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices" [2004]

Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices [2004] ,  by  Dirk Krafzig; Karl Banke; Dirk Slama

This book gives a  good introduction to SOA Concepts and associates with real case studies. The examples are useful in Enterprise Architecture strategies. The initial chapters provided a good historic perspective of technologies and approaches like CORBA, that influenced SOA strategy. I found this book to be very useful.

 

Architectural Blueprints - 'The "4+1" View Model of Software Architecture by Philippe Krutchen'

A seminal work in presenting a model for describing essential views or perspectives while architecting a software based system.
Below are the 5 broad views that are essential for covering concerns of various stakeholders dependent on the system

• Logical view : for line-of-business users
• Development view : for Project managers, solution integrators
• Process view : for Solution designers and integrators
• Physcial view : for system engineers
• Scenarios view : to iterate and develop views

By mapping from one view to another, a system can be architected to a great precision in first attempt, this becomes a stepping stone for future iterations. After 2-3 iterations the system is solid.


There are many references over internet, I used below.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/teaching/papers/4+1view-architecture.pdf

"Learning Oracle Database 11g by Lewis Cunnigham" - 2012

This is a good breezy introduction to Oracle 11g database for anyone who wants to get familiar with whats/hows of databases concepts. The presenter has touched through all important aspects, so it was very useful for me. I've intentionally skipped 3 chapters, first "Database security", "Very Large Databases" and "PL/SQL" , considering the priorities. This is a good stepping stone for Oracle Database performance tuning concepts.

Hadoop Fundamentals LiveLessons

Hadoop Fundamentals LiveLessons (Video Training) by Doug Eadline

Rating 3/5
Pranaam! Found this as a good rudimentary introduction to Hadoop architecture, hdfs and MapReduce. Essentials on HBase, Ambari, Zookeeper or other fundamental aspects are left out. Total video length is 5 hrs. Found the pace to be too slow and feel more could have been covered for impatient starters like me. Presentaton on first half of chapters are good. Lot of information is abstracted. Recommend to look at case studies in BigData to have more information.

Regards
Sudeep

"Patterns in Java : A Catalog of Reusable Design Patterns Illustrated" by Mark Grand

Pranaam! Working on "Patterns in Java : A Catalog of Reusable Design Patterns Illustrated" by Mark Grand this week. This is a "Volume 1" edition, I've got and is an old print. The notations used previous to UML 2.0, but I liked the explanation. Revising this under a tight timeline, since this needs to go back to shelf. Writing a running log here:

• Overview of UML
• This covers notations for 3 basic UML diagrams viz. Class Diagrams, Collaboration Diagrams and StateChart Diagrams

• Software Lifecycle

"Data Structures and the Java Collections Framework, Third Edition" by William J Collins

"Data Structures and the Java Collections Framework, Third Edition" by William J Collins[2011 print]

In tune with multi-threading, I'm beginning a new thread on Java Collections, in an attempt to solidify core Java essential concepts.

"Java 7 Concurrency Cookbook" by Javier Fernández

Pranaam. I'm currently working out "Java 7 Concurrency Cookbook" by Javier Fernández. It's a Oct 2012 edition. Finding these examples are lucid, that I can be very easily develop without being an expert Java programmer myself. Concurrency subject is dealt in other programming languages as well, but since Java has a large base in commercial software applications and there is ready material in-hand, it was an easy decision to work through Java 7.



Parallel processing and optimized high performance computing are interesting subjects that can solve large compute problems .It's essential to solve a problem quickly  and make result available for the next set of actions.  Sometimes its necessary to know which areas in a compute solutions are to be parallelized and which shouldn't be. It's an intriguing subject. The next area for me would be researching Design Patterns in concurrency. But before I get to that, creating a running log of areas covered from this book.

• Thread Management

• Creating & Running threads
• Get thread information
• Interrupt threads
• Control Interruption of threads
• Sleeping and Resuming threads
• Waiting for Finalization of threads
• Creating and running Daemon threads
• Processing uncontrolled Exceptions in threads 
• Using ThreadLocal variables
• Grouping threads into a group 
• Processing unchecked exceptions in ThreadGroup
• Using factory pattern to create Thread

• Basic Thread Synchronization
• Synchronizing a method
• Arranging independent attributes in synchronized blocks using Object references   
• Using conditions in synchronized code block
• Using Lock to synchronize a code block       
• Synchronizing data read/write operations using Lock
• Lock fairness
• Using multiple conditions in Lock

• Thread Synchronization utilities
•  

"The Performance-Engagement Model: Managing the Five Personality Profiles in the Workplace" by Laura Stack

"The Performance-Engagement Model: Managing the Five Personality Profiles in the Workplace" by Laura Stack:

An interesting short article, but very crude view of people personalities. Resources are workplace are assets, are humans with very interesting facets. It's up-to a leader to bring out the best from each resources and to make them strong individual as well as team contributors. It's hard to believe the author had a successful role in keeping a team engaged to goals, let alone leading high performance team. If we conceive an ideal team to be composed of humans who work like machines decrepit of emotions, of sharp personality traits we would be living in la-la land.
Labeling this for 'Enterprise Architecture', as workplace resources belong to various enterprise teams, they are essentially one of the stakeholders.

Proof (2005)

Rating: 3.3/5
US English

A wonderful story with few twists and turns, very easy for the eyes to watch. Anthony Hopkins, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal featuring in this short story. This is about an eccentric old mathematician in his last days, at loss of memory and under care by his daughter. The story revolves around a unsolved mathematically proof which the genius of Anthony Hopkins worked on in his last days. Overall a good movie.
I felt the characters of Gwyneth and Jake could have had more depth. The plot was getting predictable and the characters didn't have much more than related to "proof" to work with. Gwyneth appeared alcoholic, unsure if this was on purpose or its usual.

"Algorithms in a nutshell" - Part 1

I'm revisiting materials on Algorithms and finding below book very useful.
The first 2 chapters are very impressive in setting a base, actively working through the rest of book.

A "problem" can be defined as collection of data processed by the program to create a solution for the data. Though its difficult to establish a standard problem
definition for real world scenarios, its can help if data inputs & data properties (encoding) are well understood.

When choosing an algorithm using abstraction on rate of growth, ex. evaluating a value in an set of number, the estimated average evaluations needed can be formulated
mathematically. Typically for high growth rate problems, the constants in formulation can be ignored. But care needs to be taken for scenarios like small growth or small number set,
as algorithm application changes. As a principle, the choice for algorithm depends on type of problem and distribution of elements in problem. There is no optimal algorithm for
problem of a given nature.
Methodology for choosing an algorithm:

Perform 3 case analysis viz. worst-case, average-case and best-case

The performance families in terms of decreasing efficiency are viz.
constant O(n)
logarithmic
sublinear
linear = eg. addition
nlog(n)
quadratic eg. multiplication
exponential

The author did lose me during the mathematical analysis and formulation of Big O notations for each member of performance family. Its a to do to check the reference section and build skills sets in those.
The graphical patterns of performance family definitely gives a visual clue as what type of operation is the algorithm using. very nice.

A side note about distribution:
binary tree distribution: works well during search when items are equally or roughly equally distributed(red-black tree) in a binary tree
ordered distribution : n/2 items need be compared on an average to search for an item