Distributed Caching

At work the need for no-sql mem cache solution appeared. It should be scalable, secure, highly available. For this reason I started looking at Windows Server AppFabric that has caching functionality. At the same time I am going to talk to my college who has experience in Oracle Coherence development. Particularly I am interested in tuning and  usage bottleneck aspects.
I found a good overview (from MSFT of cource) of AppFabric. It was made last year at MIX still a good point to start with.

Financial Chemistry

During my trip I read a book Modelling single name and multi name credit derivatives. It found it one of the best for understanding mathematics and computational mechanics of credit derivatives. At the same time good knowledge of mathematical analysis and probability theory is needed.

For this reason to have a broader outlook at the nature of such products I started with a guide from Merrill Lynch. 

It is amazing when all that chemistry becomes clear.

Hockey World Cup in Kiev

In April I watched a hockey match between Ukraine and Great Britain. Unfortunately our team lost that game nevertheless there is enough space to improve in both teams. But the overall impression is good. This was a nice present to my birth day. Thanks a lot!

Lean Six Sigma from MIT

System Thinking and Software Architecture

This evening I decided to surf the web looking for updates on MIT SDM site. It seems the group in linkedin is dead since no activity is seen for the last 2 months.

I was surprised to find a webinar page. Nevertheless webinars are organized more or less regularly the last two are completely useless for the joint program like SDM. It seems in MIT there are also professors from Mars. Sorry.

Still I found an interesting presentation about system thinking tools and practices used for system architecture. I enjoyed it since the lecturer shares her own experience that has a concrete practical impact.

In Praise of Resource Constraints

The article "In Praise of Resource Constraints" by By Michael Gibbert, Martin Hoegl and Liisa Välikangas in MIT Sloan Management Review raises an important question how to allocate resources effectively. At first site a sound idea will be to allocate resouces according to the needs. But the authors have a different insight at the problem:
It may pay to remember the old Finnish army adage (derived from Finland’s battles against much bigger adversaries throughout the course of its history): “If the heavy armor does not move with four people pushing it, take one man away and let us see if three can do it!”

I would agree, there should be a reason to innovate. But still a sound balance should be kept. This is where an art begins...

Do You Write Right Stuff

Today I have read an article "They write the right stuff" . It is completely not new. Still I enjoyed some chritisism of existing and widely used approaches to software engineering.
And probably they have the right to do so, look:
According to statistics the last three versions of the product contained only 1 issue per 420,000 lines of code (no code generators, this is shutle onboard computer!)
Jone Manson, software engineer and professor of informatics, says that compute science is not a science at all. "It is a cave art!"
According to the studies made 70% (by GDP I believe) of the companies stucked in chaos or something that is a little better than chaos.
It is a pitty but I would agree ...

It's Been a Hard Day's Night

I know, it has been a difficult week for the planet. But believe, everything will be fine ;)

Data Stream Management Systems

Recently I have read an article in IEEE Computer Society, Dec 2010 about Data Stream Management Systems and their application to finance sector. Later I found a full article that is available here .
In the article Microsoft StreamInsite engine is used as an example. It is a part of MS SQL Server Platform 2008R2.
I was also curious whether there are any other commercial products that implement such an approach and can be used for an enterprise. Unfortunately I couldn't find any. And Wikipedia gives references on academic investigation projects only like STREAM or Aurora. Strange...