Year: 2006

The Apple rumour mill is gearing up again

MacWorld 07 is getting closer and the Mac world is getting more and more excited. All the rumour sites are bristling with news about possible product launches or modifications of existing products. Everybody is expecting the iTV of course and possibly some new iPod model. But then there is a Quad-core Mac Pro workstation, a ultrathin 12 inch MacBook Pro and of course the mobile phone….

Well, Steve Jobs is about to enter the stage again at 0900 on January the 9th and then we will know more. For those of you that have no idea of what this is all about have a look at a past event here:

WWDC 2006 Keynote

SOA, Web Services and EAI

Today I finished a very interesting course here in Stockholm. Even though things like Service Oriented Architectures (SAO) were not new to me I found it very interesting to have some lectures about the different technologies behind this. Otherwise there is a risk that it becomes not only more than a number of buzz-words. The first SOA part contained a good disussion about what a service is, how small or big it should be and how handle versioning of services. The second part focused more on the technologies behind Web Service and how standard web servers together with a few standardized protocols provide a mechanism for server-to-server communication. The last part covering Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) contained a lot of news for me. These EAI-products works like enterprise hubs for integration efforts and makes it possible to handle large-scale integration projects where just Web Services would render “integration spagetti”. A new flavour of these products are Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which also looks very promising.

Information modeling and software integration

The past weeks have as interesting as they have been about hard work. Me and my closest collegue have become some kind of chief software architects for the upcoming experiment called Demo 06h that will take place later this autumn. It have involved a lot of work to coordinate all the different functions that are needed to support a Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) Headquarters. The setting for this experiment is focused on something called Effects-Based Approach to Operations (EBAO). Basically it is a new process and method to plan, execute and assess multinational crisis operations. This concept is essentially a new process on the same level as NATO’s Operational Planning Process (OPP). Being involved in the design of what we call the Collaborative Information Environment (CIE) is the most interesting (and fun!) thing I have done in my career so far. I realize more and more that what I like most to work with is integrating modern information technology with organizational processes. I like to mention two different tools that we have worked with. The first one is Marratech which is a collaboration client supporting video, audio, presence, text chat, whyteboard and shared desktops. The other one is a very advanced content management platform called Documentum.

MacWorld – Intel Inside

Steve & Paul

Yesterday it was time for Stevenote again (Steve Jobs + Keynote = Stevenote). Apple´s famous CEO Steve Jobs entered the scene on Tuesday morning at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the traditional opening keynote of MacWorld SF. The rumormill had been spinning for weeks about this and the most sites expected the first Intel-based Macs to be launch ahead of scheduled. They were right.

iMacs and the new laptop called MacBook Pro was introduced, sporting brand new Intel Duo Core processors making the laptop at least four times faster than the PowerBook G4 I am writing this on. I want one of these…imagine doing video compression with them!

Other new included an FM-tuner for iPod, new versions of iLife and iWork. Oh…watching the video-on-demand stream in H.264 with my 92 inch screen was really nice 🙂