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Linguistic Alchemy to unlock AutoHotkey

In the echoing halls of the Tower of Babel, myriad languages tangled, creating a confusion of tongues and leaving humans estranged.  Fast forward to the present day, professional translators stand as the modern-day heroes, bridging linguistic divides and fostering global connections.  Yet, these linguists often grapple with the technical juggernaut of AutoHotkey scripting. AutoHotkey, an … Continue reading Linguistic Alchemy to unlock AutoHotkey




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Going, going…. gone!

It may be a little small to read but my social highlights for twitter  were: joined in July 2010 tweeted 24.3K times follow 16 users followed by 1878 users With the exception of youtube twitter was the only social media account I had retained.  youtube is more of a place to host and share videos … Continue reading Going, going…. gone!




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Working under a cloud!

In the heart of LingoVille, translator Trina was renowned for her linguistic prowess but was a bit behind in the tech world.  When her old typewriter finally gave out, she received a sleek new laptop, which came with OneDrive pre-enabled.  Initially hesitant about this “cloud magic,” she soon marvelled at the convenience of securely storing … Continue reading Working under a cloud!




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XML… unravelling chaos

Whilst I would definitely not claim to be an expert, writing this blog has allowed me to learn a reasonable amount about XML over the years.  Most of the articles I’ve written have been about explaining how to manage the many amazing features in the filetypes that are supported by Trados Studio… and of course … Continue reading XML… unravelling chaos




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Back to school… again!

After I did my last studies, apart from all the endless mandatory HR type training we have to endure these days, I thought that would be it for any sort of formal training for me.  In fact the main reason for me doing my last formal studies, TCLoc Masters degree at the University of Strasbourg, … Continue reading Back to school… again!




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Working with CSV’s…

CSV, or files with “comma separated values”, is a simple format that everyone should be able to handle.  Certainly you’d think so except nothing is ever that straightforward and if you’ve ever spent time trying to work with these files and having to deal with all the problems inherent to this format then you’ll know … Continue reading Working with CSV’s…




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AI and Community

I’ve written quite a few articles in the last year or so on the use of AI in a localization setting, and in general as a tool to help you complete technical tasks you may not have been able to do without help until now.  Certainly I’ve been making extensive use of this technology to … Continue reading AI and Community




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You can take a CAT to water!

The phrase “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” emphasises the idea that you can offer opportunities or advantages to someone, but you can’t force them to take action if they’re unwilling. This proverb has deep historical roots, with its first recorded use in Old English around 1175, and … Continue reading You can take a CAT to water!




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Trados Studio – Powershell Trilogy Part 1

It’s been 11-years since I have written about the PowerShell Toolkit that was originally created by the development team in SDL.  Back then I was able to fumble my way through setting it up, editing a few files, and automating the creation of a project in Trados Studio.  In all the time since then it’s … Continue reading Trados Studio – Powershell Trilogy Part 1




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What is an "open source business"?

Paul recently wrote a great article on what it really means to be an "open source business." Its now posted on SDTimes! Read it and you'll be able to tell the fakes apart :-).




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Its not just standalone BPM that is dead!

There was a thread recently on InfoQ asking whether standalone BPMS is dead.


Yes it is dead.

But, that's not the only standalone thing that is dead! Standalone Business Rules Systems is dead. Standalone Application Servers are dead. Standalone ETL products are dead. Standalone Messaging products are dead. Standalone ESBs are dead. Standalone Enterprise Content Management systems are dead. Standalone Security products are dead. Yes, they're all dead.

They're all dead because customers are tired of being integration companies. What happens when a customer buys one of these standalone BPMS/BRS/ETL/etc. products is that the customer has to figure out how to integrate it to the other standalone products they've bought from other vendors. How does that help the customer's IT shop deliver business value to their organization?

Enterprise problems don't come neatly packaged into BPM problems or Business Rules problems or Data Transformation problems or any one such well defined category. Instead, enterprise problems are complex problems that require an entire repertoire of tools which can be combined nicely to solve the problem at hand. Attempting to build solutions to these complex problems with a single sledgehammer approach is one of the reasons why many IT projects take so long to complete and end up being so expensive.

The customer's IT shop is like the place which maintains the vehicle that the enterprise's IT is. What happens after a few years of taking standalone products and trying to live by their rules (not to mention their expensive consultants) and creating hodge-podge solutions is that the car ends up looking like this:
That's why enterprise middleware needs to be 100% internally self-consistent and fully integrated. Without that, every turn may drive the IT shop into a wall. Behind every dark spot on the road could be a pot hole. Or, at best, the IT shop is not able to drive the car down the freeway with cruise control turned on .. instead its constantly hitting speedbumps.

Don't like that? Well then you need middleware that can scale up and offer exactly the features that you need to solve the problem cleanly. Your IBM/Oracle/Tibco/JBoss middleware can't do that? Well then you have to try WSO2 Carbon based products .. and your car will end up looking like this :-).
The best part of course is that all of our products are 100% open source under Apache license and free for you to use. If you want absolutely world class enterprise support, call us and we'll sell it to you at $8000/server. All very simple.




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Celebrating 5 years of WSO2

While our official birthday is August 4th (pretty much a random date that I chose between the various steps of starting that we went through!), this week we’re going to be celebrating our 5 year anniversary with a bunch of events!

The entire WSO2 family has traveled (or are still traveling) to Sri Lanka – Paul is on his way from Emsworth, UK; Paul’s mom from Glasgow (Paul’s late father was of course one of our seed investors and we’re honored to have his mom be with us for this occasion!); Jonathan from Auburn, CA; Mahesh from Sydney, AU; Rebecca Hurst (our PR person, President of KineticPR) from San Francisco, CA; Pradeep Tagare (Intel Capital) from Mumbai, India and last (but never least!) James Clark from Bangkok, Thailand. We’ll miss one 3rd board member Alok Mohan who unfortunately couldn’t make it!

First up is to announce that we’re just about to cross the 100 employee mark! We have a bunch of new folks starting today .. um, yeah, 25 to be exact :). Yes, that’s a HUGE number of and we’re going to be working hard to get everyone properly integrated and settled in!

Actually when you add the 20 or so people on study leave from us working towards their PhD’s in Computer Science, we’re really about 125 employees .. but with the new group we’ll cross the 100 active members count. That’s a major milestone and its great to have it happen in sync with our 5 year anniversary as the new people get to experience our culture right out of the box.

To accommodate all the new people we’ve been doing some major office refurbishment / redesign in Colombo and have also signed up a 2nd location. That is just down the street from where we are at and we will be ceremonially opening that up later today as well! Its been a marathon effort by Udeshika and her team to get all the changes implemented and while its definitely coming down to the wire it looks like it’ll all be ready :). Awesome power of teamwork!

We’ll post some pictures of our offices soon!

Tomorrow (Tuesday 14th) and Wednesday are of course the dates of our first ever WSO2Con Conference!

We have prepared an excellent program for this and have nearly 300 people signed up to attend! We also ran a promo on WSO2 OxygenTank to give a free trip to attend WSO2Con and I’m thrilled to announce that Adam Firestone from SAIC, USA and Jagannath Nori from Inland Revenue, New Zealand were selected! I think Adam landed a few hours ago and Jagannath should be here soon as well. I look forward to meeting them in person soon!

After the conference on Wednesday night, we have organized an invitation-only Gala Dinner for business leaders, senior government officials, senior academics, and the diplomatic community in Sri Lanka to introduce WSO2 to them. I’m amazed at the strong response we’ve had from the top business leaders in Sri Lanka to our invitation! I look forward to presenting a very different kind of company to them :). We have engaged the best musical talent in Sri Lanka to help set the right environment for this event- Ananda Dabare, the lead-violinist of the Colombo Symphony Orchestra and Bhatia & Santush, the best of the best musical group in Sri Lanka!

After the conference and gala dinner we have invited partners and select others attending WSO2Con to participate in a 2-day technical workshop to give them a deep understanding of our entire platform. We have about 25 people participating in that and will have our new team join as well so they will also get a “bootcamp” session!

Finally, on Friday night comes the real celebration :). We have organized a full scale party for the entire WSO2 team, their friends and family, ex-employees etc. to get together and have fun! That’s going to be a (long) night of good food, drink and great live music and lots of dance!

Of course this celebration is nothing but a simple yet important milestone in our journey! WSO2 is really just begun .. and to use Shakira’s Waka Waka words:

You're on the frontline
Everyone's watching
You know it's serious
We're getting closer
This isn’t over

And to the WSO2 team, my message is:

The pressure is on
You feel it
But you've got it all
Believe it

Looking forward to an amazing, memorable week; followed by the next amazing 5 years!




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Congratulations Dr. Jaliya Ekanayake!

It gives me great personal pleasure to congratulate Jaliya on completing his Ph.D.in Computer Science from Indiana University in late December. His PhD work was on extending the applicability of Map Reduce to a larger class of problems. The software he developed as part of his work is available at http://iterativemapreduce.org/. Jaliya was a student of Prof. Geoffrey Fox.

Jaliya has already started work at Microsoft Research and works on applying map-reduce and other approaches to solve large scale systems problems.

Jaliya is the second person from the original Apache Axis2 team to complete his Ph.D. after Srinath. Jaliya is the original father of Apache Sandesha, the WS-Reliable Messaging implementation for Apache Axis. He, along with the rest of the original Axis2 crew, laid the foundation for a lot of the technology that WSO2 is built on. The remaining original Axis2 team members (and about 20+ others who have been at WSO2 at one point) are now in the pipeline to complete their Ph.D.'s over the next few years!

Congratulations and best wishes Jaliya for a bright future!




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Cricket World Cup - kudos to Sri Lanka Cricket

I had the fortune of landing a ticket for Saturday's quarter final match between Sri Lanka and England. Someone who had 2 grandstand tickets got sick and I was lucky to be asked whether I want it at list price :). At Rs. 4000 each I felt they were pricey but then at the event I met a friend who had paid double that for his ticket! I will comment on the ticket selling process later.

First of all, the stadium atmosphere was just incredibly amazingly fantastically electric and rocking. Being there is nothing like watching at home .. despite being able to see the match poorly, the environment is of course unbeatable. The fact that Sri Lanka gave England a total drubbing was awesome, even though as a result the game became quite non-competitive .. but I'll settle for non-competitive games up to the final and thrilling victory in the final (vs. to have it stolen like the last time).

This post is not about the quarter final match - its about Sri Lanka Cricket, the embattled organization which runs the sport in Sri Lanka.

As most people in Sri Lanka know, the organizers were hammered very very hard in the press before the World Cup started about their preparations, about how the stadiums were completed last minute and about every aspect of team selection to overall management. I'm not an expert on cricket- so I have no useful views on the cricketing aspects and will leave them alone. However, I do want to comment on the overall organization of the event.

I have made it to 3 matches in Colombo - the first was the loss to Pakistan, the second the rained out draw with Australia and the third of course the drubbing of England.

All these were held at the newly refurbished Kettarama Stadium of course- an absolutely AWESOME stadium now! I have been there a few months ago and it was a nightmare to get in and out. Now its a breeze and reminds me of the convenience of getting in and out of Purdue's Mackey Arena (for basketball). Once you are inside, the view is breathtaking. The atmosphere is amazingly electric. Every match was sold out (of course) to a capacity crowd of 35,000+.

I didn't make it to Hambantota for the first match but the news from there was that the brand new stadium there was absolutely amazing as well. The words from a friend (usually a skeptic) was "money well spent".

Same has to be said for Pallekalle in Kandy. That's again a new stadium (or a refurb'ed old ground; not sure) and while its not as built up as Hambantota or Colombo the location is just amazing and all the reports are that the place was fantastic.

There was not a single time in all the matches in Sri Lanka where something went wrong with the logistics. All the comentators have been giving kudos about the venues and the amazing environments offered by them.

I too was caught up in the press vendetta against Suraj Dandeniya (the head of the World Cup organizing team in SLC). While the work was indeed completed last minute it is time to give this gentleman a tip of the hat and acknowledge the amazing work they have done to deliver perfectly for Sri Lanka. Press  stories have a way of finding individuals guilty without judge or jury and this vendetta was played out by most of the newspapers in a merciless manner. Maybe Suraj has refused some passes for the press and their buddies? Who knows.

Yes yes I know there's one more match to be played in Sri Lanka. That's the one where Sri Lanka will whack the New Zealanders home :-). I am confident that too will go off without a hitch! At one level "may the best team win" may apply but, honestly, to hell with that .. Sri Lanka has to win to set up an amazing final in India against (most probably) India. Nothing like that victory!

(The NZ team has done amazingly well to get to the semi-finals and they've always stepped up big at the big occasions. Their country also suffered a massive earthquake recently .. only to be overshadowed by an even bigger one. If they go on to winning the tournament they'll again get some all-important PR for the recovery efforts there. To that extent I want NZ to win. Yeah, treacherous.)

Now about those ticket sales.

Fundamentally, this is a no-win situation for the organizers. 35,000 tickets for the match where 500,000 at least would love to watch in person. So no matter what approach is taken, there will be 465,000+ who will be crying foul!

There have been stories about how people stood in line, bought the ticket and turned around and sold it to someone else. I see no way to stop that - and keeping the ticket price low (lowest was Rs. 50 for group stage matches in Colombo) meant that anyone could buy them without any problem - a good thing in general.

Personally I have no issue with blackmarket sales (and I don't understand why they are banned) - the only problem it highlights is that the original ticket was sold too low! Why doesn't Sri Lanka Cricket sell the ticket for Rs. 10,000 if it can get away with it and make more money? Maybe they should've also set up an auction at EBay or something where people can bid and buy tickets at whatever price above the minimum price. No I'm not suggesting doing that for all tickets but rather for a percentage- you give some on a pure lottery, some for those who stand in line .. and the rest to the best price via auction with batches sold daily. I don't understand why they created a secondary market in the first place when they themselves could've run both the primary and secondary markets. Obviously I don't know enough about market economics.

The real problem is that many tickets seem to have been sold only to "known parties". The Colombo powers-that-be who want to watch the matches shouldn't have been able to buy through back channels. If they don't want to stand in line they can certainly afford to buy the tickets on the blackmarket if they want and let some poor guy make some money. Why should these fat cats be able to buy tickets at list?!

When you are at the match (and I went to A lower the first time (Rs. 250), to C upper the second time (Rs. 100) and to the grand stand for the quarter final (Rs. 4000) its clear that most in attendance were way above average in economic terms. In practical terms, that suggests that a lot of blackmarket sales were happening. If someone's a true fan, there's no amount of money that would make them sell the ticket - so the people who sold the tickets were not real fans. Or they were true fans who felt the money was more economically valuable for them than the experience (maybe they had a sick child or needed some home repairs or whatever ..). Or they were savvy businessmen who stood in line and sold the ticket for a profit. The bottom line is that there's no way to prevent normal capitalism from taking place and the value balance ending up wherever it ends up.

So while I too am frustrated I can't get a ticket for the semi-finals, I am only upset about connected people getting tickets at list price through backchannel means. The rest of the system I have no concerns with - and next time (20-20 World Cup next year) I hope Sri Lanka Cricket does a combination of lines, lotteries and auctions to sell the tickets.

Talking about tickets .. anyone have a spare grandstand ticket for the semi final they want to sell me at list price? :-)




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Cloud players and open source collaboration

In today's keynote at OSBC RedHat's CEO Jim Whitehurst claimed that even companies like Google, Amazon and other cloud players are always collaborating .. not directly but in the form of collaboration via the various open source projects they build their offerings on.

While that's true to some extent, the reality IMO is that many of these companies end up with forks of key projects such as MySQL or Xen or use extension points to write their own core bits that are not open source and never will be. If you talk to ex-MySQL people they will tell you that while there was a lot of testing and other "low end" contributions by the community, almost no major contributions for MySQL came from random outside users. That is the general sentiment I've heard from most open source organizations, communities and projects and certainly our experience in WSO2 as well. Even in Apache, its usually people who are fairly committed to the project (either by employment, which is most common, or by personal interest/choice) who contribute meaningfully; its very rarely that you get a sizable contribution from an outsider.

In fact, the (ab)use of open source by online services companies like Google etc. is exactly why the AGPL license was created. For the uninitiated, AGPL is a viral license like GPL except that even online hosting is considered "distribution", thereby forcing service providers to ship the source code for any modifications they've done. Personally I'm not a fan of such aggressive tactics to get people to contribute (that's why ALL WSO2 software is Apache licensed) but there are many people who come from the free software mindset, in comparison to the open source mindset, of the FOSS community who are not happy with the Googles of the world not having to share any code at all even though they get a lot out of FOSS.

So IMO Jim's wrong on this- Google and Amazon and other major closed cloud platform players will NOT share anything they absolutely don't have to. As a side-effect, they will not touch any AGPL code because it will force them to be a commodity and that results in loss of key competitive advantages for them.

The FOSS movement is about giving power to the people. Cloud is a major risk for that as the cloud vendors are incentivized NOT to have a common denominator. That's why there's no freedom in the cloud without using a truly open source PaaS and building your own thing on top of it.




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Growing the WSO2 business

I wrote a blog on the WSO2 Corporate Blog on growing WSO2. Check it out!




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Congratulations Dr. Eran Chintaka!

It gives me great pleasure to congratulate Eran Chinthaka on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University on the topic User Inspired Management of Scientific Jobs in Grids and Clouds. His advisor was Prof. Beth Plale.

Eran is of course one of the founding team members of Apache Axis2 in the Lanka Software Foundation. Of the original 6 person core team who created Axis2, he's the 3rd to finish his Ph.D. (joining Srinath (back in WSO2) and Jaliya (in Microsoft Research)) and the other three are getting close to finishing up their PhDs too. Eran worked in WSO2 for a couple of years before leaving for his Ph.D. and I hope that when he finishes his Wall Street stint he'll come back home and join us again :-).

Congratulations Dr. Chinthaka!




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10 years since returning to Sri Lanka

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of our returning home to Sri Lanka.

I went to the US in 1985 where I lived for a total of nearly 16 years .. first arriving on August 18, 1985 to go to Kent State University for undergraduate studies. I lived in Kent, Ohio for 4 years, finishing both a BS and an MS, and then moved to West Lafayette, Indiana for 8 years where I was a PhD student at Purdue for 5 years and then visiting faculty for 3 more. Then I joined IBM Research in August 1997 (starting August 4th) and moved to Yorktown Heights, New York and finally left the US on August 4th 2001 and arrived back home on August 6th, 2001. That's 10 years ago today :-).

Wow, 10 years .. time flies when you are having fun!

I remember that there were pieces of airplanes on the ground at the Colombo Airport when we landed - the dreaded LTTE had brazenly attacked the airport just 10 days before that destroying 3 Sri Lankan Airlines planes and damaging 3 more as well as damaging or destroying 26 Airforce aircraft and killing a bunch of people.

What a difference 10 years makes; guns have been silent and peace reigns loudly in Sri Lanka for more than 2 years now. Whether you like the current leadership team in the country or not, we all owe them an incredible debt of gratitude for putting everything aside and destroying the LTTE menace and creating a stable nation so we have (another) chance at becoming what Sri Lanka is capable of becoming.

I was of course still working for IBM Research when I came back .. working remotely from Sri Lanka. I finally quit on April 15, 2005 and started WSO2 a few months later. I started encouraging Sri Lankan developers to contribute to open source projects in fall 2002 and ended up starting the Lanka Software Foundation in early 2003 (along with friend, colleague and mentor Jivaka Weeratunge). LSF was of course instrumental in many projects that ended up in Apache and for Sahana, the tsunami-inspired disaster management system we created. (BTW IBM recently highlighted Sahana in their 100 year celebrations .. very cool!) I also started teaching as a volunteer visiting lecturer at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Moratuwa from around 2002, where many of the brilliant brains that contributed to LSF's projects, and later WSO2, came from. (We of course get brilliant people from many sources now .. but MRT still dominates!)

One of the things I'm really proud of is that so many people have benefitted from the work done in LSF to help get them into grad school for further studies. Counting WSO2 too, there are now more than 25 people in various places doing PhD's in Computer Science. Three have finished so far.

--

Many people have asked me at various times: "Have you ever regretted coming back home?". I can honestly say: NOT EVEN ONCE!

Don't get me wrong- the US was a great country to live in and I will never forget the superb education nor the wonderful experiences and friends I made in my 16 years there. However, this is home and there's nothing like home (for me). I love the fact that I can have some small impact on young people who can help Sri Lanka get ahead in its journey. I love the fact that I am not second class in any way in my home country. I love the fact that my kids are growing up here with roots in their home country - where they end up as adults is their decision, not mine. But at least they have a firm footing here as their home.

Moving back to Sri Lanka is not without its challenges. Many things that are easy in the US are not so easy here. At the same time, many things that are hard in the US are quite easy here. So its always a mixed bag .. what matters is your mindset about the journey: if you are committed to moving back then you can come back. If you are half-hearted and look for problems instead of challenges then you will run back to wherever you attempted to move back from.

I am writing this because I am very very keen to attract Sri Lankans living in other countries to come back home. We need our educated, experienced, connected, knowledgable Lankans to come back home and help us rebuild after the 30 year nightmare that ended 2 years ago. The opportunities here are absolutely amazing and this is the start of a boom period .. now is as good as ever to come back home.

OF COURSE Sri Lanka is not a perfect place. Neither is the US (can you say "debt ceiling"?) nor any other place. The advantage Sri Lanka offers to Sri Lankans is that this is our home. Whatever hard work you do will have tremendous impact. Sri Lanka is a small country .. that means the impact of your work is much more direct and immediate too. Every problem is an opportunity if you take up the challenge!

I, along with Dulith Herath, Founder and CEO of Kapruka.com, along with SL2College (another non-profit project I'm involved in - founded by Nayana Samaranayake) are launching a "come back to Sri Lanka" effort soon. The idea is to help dispel many myths (that traffic is a nighmare, that everything is corrupt, that nothing is easy etc. etc.), get info about jobs and other opportunities, provide accurate and direct information and eventually help people who want to come back make the move and settle down (including things like kids school etc.).

BTW if you're a hardcore passionate techie wanting to come back then I know at least one great place to work ;-).

The last 10 years have been amazingly fantastic for me. The last 6 years have been most special because I have helped create a company that now employees more than 125 people here (and soon more here as well as in the US, UK and some in Europe). Thank you Paul for much of that!

The move was made easier by many many people who helped get settled in, helped get connected to various places and helped in various other ways. You are too numerous to list (and I know I will screw up by missing some key people) but please know that I know you played a crucial role in how well the last 10 years have gone. From the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU.




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Are you attending WSO2Con 2011?

WSO2Con 2011 is happening in Sri Lanka at the awesome Waters Edge Conference Center (just outside the capital Colombo) from Monday, September 12th to Friday, September 16th. Have you signed up yet? If not here are a bunch of reasons to do it NOW!

The Program

The overal agenda is a combination of superb keynotes, talks by users about various solutions / case studies, talks by WSO2 folks about various new and up and coming cool things, couple of superb panels and of course some pre- and post-conference tutorials to help get an overview first and then an indepth understanding of various topics. Here's a circular view of the week:



This year we ran an open call for papers and selected nearly 20 external speakers to present their stories from amongst a large number of submissions. The speakers are coming from more than 10 countries (14 if I remember right) from North America, South America, Europe, Asia (including Sri Lanka, of course) and Australia/NZ. With attendees coming from various other countries too this is a truly global event with one hell of a program.



I would be doing a great dis-service if I didn't highlight our keynote speakers. We have 4 outside keynotes from IBM, eBay, Google and Cognizant. Paul and I are doing keynotes too. These folks who are coming in to give the keynotes are highly accomplished individuals who will undoubtedly have superb stuff to say .. listening to them itself will justify the trip!

The Place



Sri Lanka is one of the hottest tourist destinations in the world today. In one small accessible package, Sri Lanka offers everything from awesome beaches to great surf to archeology to history to mountains to hang gliding to hot air ballooning to just plain going native. After having ended a 30-year horrendous war more than 2 years ago, we're now one of the safest places in the world! Interestingly, while most places in the world are increasing their security levels Sri Lanka is massively opening up.

We still of course have ways to go to build up many key infrastructure aspects in the country. In a way the whole country is under construction right now .. but not in the way that you wouldn't have the best time of your life here! Coming now will save you a lot of bucks too .. tourism in Sri Lanka WILL get much more expensive in the next 5 years!

Certainly don't just take my word for it. Instead, how about:
Who am I to argue with places like New York Times and National Geographic telling you to come to Sri Lanka!

The conference hotel we've chosen is Cinnamon Lakeside in Colombo. This is one of the best (5-star, of course) hotels in Colombo and sits next to the Beira Lake in Colombo. In addition to being a great hotel smack in the middle of Colombo, it also houses several superb restaurants. Do not miss Royal Thai.

The conference itself is being held at the very very cool Waters Edge Conference Center, about 10km (6 miles) out of Colombo. Its a very large facility and is in fact part of a golf course and is home to all the high-end events in Colombo. We will have buses organized to shuttle you to/from the hotel to the conference location.

The People

One of the best things about going to a conference is of course the opportunity to hang out with like minded people .. some of who will end up becoming your buddies for the rest of your life. At WSO2Con 2011 you will have the opportunity to interact with people from 20 countries, people who are total geeks, people who are world famous and of course the people from WSO2 who create and develop the products you love.

In order to make sure you get maximum time to interact and engage with each other we are also organizing several evening events. Don't plan to leave as the sessions finish!

The Deal

We want you to come from wherever you are in the world. At the same time, we realize its not easy to get travel approval these days with an unknown budget to travel to an exotic destination ("you want to go to a conference where?").

So, in order to make that process easier we're offering a complete, soup-to-nuts package that covers everything:
  • round-trip (economy class) airfare
  • up to 6 nites hotel accommodation at the conference hotel
  • all ground transportation in Sri Lanka
  • all meals within those 6 nights
  • (oh yeah) a full conference pass including both tutorial days
How much? They are priced based on where you're coming from:
  • Anywhere from South Asia: $1,900
  • Anywhere from Europe, Australia or New Zealand: $2,400
  • Anywhere else in the world (America, Africa, rest of Asia, Arctic region, Antarctica etc.): $2,900
If you've ever paid and attended a 5-day event anywhere in the US you know that you easily spend more than $2,900 for that week all told. This is an incredible value .. even your manager will grok it :). AND you get to spend a week in Sri Lanka as a bonus!

We OF COURSE are hoping lots and lots of folks from Sri Lanka will attend! We don't have airfare included rates for that :) .. you just have to register at the regular rates (and we give a special discount to most LK organizations - government, SLASSCOM members, AMCHAM members, IESL members, etc. etc.).

What are you waiting for? REGISTER NOW and reserve your spot :-).




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Congratulations Dr. Chathura Herath!

It gives me great pleasure to congratulations Chathura Herath on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University on the topic Programming Abstraction for Resource Aware Stream Processing in Scientific Workflows. Chathura is a student of Prof. Beth Plale.

Chathura was also one of the original members of the Apache Axis2 crew and is now the 4th of the original group of 6 to finish their Ph.D. degrees. He joins Srinath (in WSO2), Jaliya (in Microsoft Research), Eran (heading to Wall Street) to finish off leaving just Ajith (in Wright State) and Deepal (in Georgia Tech) in the pipeline. Chathura is heading towards an academic career. 




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Congratulations Dr. Nabeel Mohamed!

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Nabeel Mohamed on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Nabeel was an employee in WSO2 for a short time before he left to pursue Ph.D. work and is the first of many who have worked in WSO2 and gone onto doing Ph.Ds to complete the degree. Nabeel's Ph.D. thesis topic was "Privacy Preserving Access Control for Third-Party Data Management Systems" and his advisor was Prof. Elisa Bertino. The topic is of immense applicability for cloud data protection. Nabeel is staying on in Purdue as a Post-Doctoral Researcher right now.




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Congratulations Dr. Ajith Ranabahu!

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Ajith Ranbahu on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Ajith's Ph.D. topic was Abstraction Driven Application and Data Portability in Cloud Computing and his advisor was Prof. Amith Sheth. You can watch his Ph.D. defense on YouTube ... a sign of the times!

Ajith is of course one of the 6 founding members of the Apache Axis2 team and the 5th to finish his Ph.D.! Now only Deepal (at Georgia Tech) is left to finish and it'll be an amazing record when he completes too :-). Ajith also worked inWSO2 for an year before leaving for grad school where he continued to work on Axis2 and WSO2 Tungsten (now WSO2 App Server) and where he was championing building developer tools (which I used to dismiss ;-)). He initially went to University of Georgia but moved to Dayton when Amith moved to Dayton. Ajith plans to stay on at Dayton for a while and is looking towards a research career.




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API Management: The missing link for SOA success

Nearly 2 years ago I tweeted:



Well, unfortunately, I had it a bit wrong.

APIs and service do have a very direct and 1-1 relationship: an API is the interface of a service. However, what is different is that one's about the implementation and is focused on the provider, and the other is about using the functionality and is focused on the consumer. The service of course is what matters to the provider and API is what matters to the consumer.

So its clearly more than just a new name.

Services: If you build it will they come?

One of the most common anti-patterns of SOA is the one service - one client pattern. That's when the developer who wrote the service also wrote its only client. In that case there's no sharing, no common data, no common authentication and no reuse of any kind. The number one reason for SOA (improving productivity by reusing functionality as services) is gone. Its simply client-server at the cost of having to use interoperable formats like XML, JSON, XML Schema, WSDL and SOAP. 

There are two primary reasons for this pattern being so prevalent: first is due to a management failure whereby everyone is required to create services for whatever they do because that's the new "blessed way". There's no architectural vision driving proper factoring. Instead its each person or at least each team for themselves. The resulting services are only really usable for that one scenario - so no wonder no one else uses them!

Writing services that can service many users requires careful design and thinking and willingness to invest in the common good. That's against human intuition and something that will happen only if its properly guided and incentivized. The cost of writing common services must be paid by someone and will not happen by itself.

That's in effect the second reason why this anti-pattern exists: the infrastructure in place for SOA does not support or encourage reuse. Even if you had a service that is reusable how do you find out how well it works? How do you know how many people are using it? Do you know what time of day they use it most? Do you know which operations of your service get hit the hardest? Next, how do others even find out you wrote a service and it may do what they need? 

SOA Governance (for which WSO2 has an excellent product: WSO2 Governance Registry) is not focused on encouraging service reuse but rather on governing the creation and management of services. The SOA world has lacked a solution for making it easy to help people discover available services and to manage and monitor their consumption. 

API Management

What's an API? Its the interface to a service. Simple. In other words, if you don't have any services, you have no APIs to expose and manage.

API Management is about managing the entire lifecycle of APIs. This involves someone who publishes the interface of a service into a store of some kind. Next it involves developers who browse the store to find APIs they care about and get access to them (typically by acquiring an access token of some sort) and then the developers using those keys to program accesses to the service via its interface.

Why is this important? In my opinion, API Management is to SOA what Amazon EC2 is to Virtualization. Of course virtualization has been around for a long time, but EC2 changed the game by making it trivially simple for someone to get a VM. It brought self service, serendipitous consumption, and elasticity to virtualization. Similarly, API Management brings self service & serendipitous consumption by allowing developers to discover, try and use services without requiring any type of "management approval". It allows consumers to not have to worry about scaling - they just indicate the desired SLA (typically in the form of a subscription plan) and its up to the provider to make it work right. 

API Management & SOA are married at the hip

If you have an SOA strategy in your organization but don't have an API Management plan then you are doomed to failure. Notice that I didn't even talk about externally exposing APIs- even internal service consumption should be managed through an API Management system so that everyone has clear visibility into who's using what service and how much is used when. Its patently obvious why external exposition of services requires API Management.

Chris Haddad, WSO2's VP of Technology Evangelism, recently wrote a superb whitepaper that discusses and explain the connection between SOA and API Management. Check out Promoting service reuse within your enterprise and maximizing SOA success and I can guarantee you will leave enlightened.

In May this year, a blog on highscalability.com talked about how "Startups Are Creating A New System Of The World For IT". In that the author talked about open source as the foundation of this new system and SOA as the load bearing walls of the new IT landscape. I will take it to the next level and say that API Management is the roof of the new IT house.

WSO2 API Manager

We recently introduced an API Management product: WSO2 API Manager. This product comes with an application for API Providers to create and manage APIs, a store application for API Developers to discover and consume APIs and a gateway to route API traffic through. Of course all parts of the product can be scaled horizontally to deal with massive loads. The WSO2 API Manager can be deployed either for internal consumption, external consumption or both. As with any other WSO2 product, this too is 100% open source. After you read Chris' whitepaper download this product and sit it next to your SOA infrastructure (whether its from us or not) and see what happens!




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WSO2Con 2013 is here!





After months of planning, WSO2Con 2013 is starting today in London. We already ran the tutorials in Sri Lanka last week - today (Tuesday 12th) is tutorials in UK and then the main conference is Wednesday 13th and Thursday 14th.

Yes this is a globally distributed conference! We have nearly 500 registrants (which is at least 50% more than we expected) in the two locations and they are connected via 4 high quality video streams so we have 2-way video interaction. The amount of technical details underneath is incredible - we will blog about that later. We even have one speaker doing his presentation from New York as he was unable to travel .. if everything goes off without a hitch that'll be a technological marvel :-).

We have 4 fantastic external keynote speakers:

Eben Upton, Founder & Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation talking about the hottest little computer in the world. Oh and BTW, if you haven't heard yet, we've been putting together around 40 node R-Pi cluster and that system will be live running WSO2 middleware powering the WSO2Con app. Azeez has been blogging about it.

Brian Behlendorf, Founder of Apache, CollabNet and a long time god of open source (and my friend and also WSO2 Advisor) and currently Senior Advisor for Science and Technology at the World Economic Forum talking about how open source can still save the world.

Pankaj Srivastava, Vice President of the Cisco Industry Solutions Group talking about how they are building next generation cloud and embedded business systems. Guess what stuff they use :-).

 Yefim Natis, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner talking about their view of Platform as a Service. Yefim leads Gartner's analysis on PaaS and has a super clear view of the future.



In addition, Paul and I will be doing keynote talks as well - I will be talking a bit about WSO2, our vision and most importantly how we see the future of enterprise computing. Paul will be talking about how to achieve that vision incrementally via a pragmatic milestone plan.

In addition we have nearly 20 external speakers (selected from over 50 submissions which we got in response to our open call for papers) and another 20 WSO2 speakers covering all aspects of our product platform.

We also have some super cool sponsors for the first time this time. Thank you to our Gold Sponsors Suse and Yenlo and our Silver Sponsors Grid Solut, Wipro and Redpill-Linpro.

The App

Oh yes the conference app .. we have a conference app that lets you do a bunch of stuff including rating talks and chatting to others. This too of course was written our stuff (and PhoneGap) and the back end will run on the Raspberry Pi cluster. Crazy? Yes. But super fun and majorly cool :-). Search for WSO2Con in the Google Play Store or you can use it with a browser here: https://wso2con.com/m/.  You need to have a WSO2 user account to log in - get one at https://wso2.org/user/register. Unfortunately the wonderful people in the Apple App Store haven't yet approved the updated version :-( .. we're keeping our fingers crossed it will happen today at least.

Putting it together

This event, like every previous WSO2Con event and all WSO2 events, is being organized by our internal marketing team. Hasmin (Director of Communications) is the general chair and she lives in Saskatoon, Canada and most of the rest of the team are in Sri Lanka! Harindu is out event God and he doesn't seem to lose hair yet. The "advance team" (of Harindu and Tasha) moved to London about 3 weeks ago and have been operating out of our Portsmouth office putting the final touches together. The rest of the marketing folks operating the UK event started arrived a week ago. There's another team managing the event in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka event is at a rather odd time since it starts at 2:00pm and runs until 10:30pm! We were very keen to have a live, bi-directional telecast in Sri Lanka as that's where we are based and that's where we have our team and a large community of supporters, users, and customers.

Coming back to London, overall we have nearly 50 WSO2 folks flying in from all over the world to London! I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the infinite amount of work done by Maryam and our outsourced travel team lead by Zakir .. its not easy to manage all of this while still running the daily operations of the company.

Thank you to all the wonderful team at WSO2 for putting this together! And thank you to everyone participating (whether in London, Colombo or just watching over the Internet) ... we're doing this for you.

I look forward to a fun week :-).




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Launching WorkInSriLanka.lk Initiative

Over the last many months, I've been privileged to be part of a fantastic team of volunteers working on a new effort:

This is an effort to help people who are considering moving to Sri Lanka to work and live. 

Me? Move to Sri Lanka?? What?!

Yes, Sri Lanka. No more war. No more bombs. No one trying to (systematically .. yeah we have our share of crazies) kill anyone. Great weather. Majorly improving infrastructure. A second airport (with no flights yet .. but that's ok everyone's gotta start at the bottom!). A real, honest-to-goodness highway (dinner in Galle tonite?) and many more coming. Apartments everywhere. Parks all over Colombo.

Compare that to where you're living? Do you go thru a metal detector to your workplace? Not in Sri Lanka any more. We had a long period of that .. but no more .. war finished in 2009, nearly to the day today (May 18th is the anniversary).

Anyway :-). Our objective is to first be a one-stop-site for anyone who's considering moving to Sri Lanka. Everything you need to know from what kind of jobs are available, how much does housing cost, how much do cars cost to kids schooling to visa stuff. All there, all in one place. All done in an objective, volunteer, independent kind of way. The site is still in its infancy of course .. more to come but its got a lot of stuff already!

With regards to jobs- if you're a senior person returning we will even help you get into the "network" to get into the loop of things. We have a pretty connected set of friends who are helping to get that done. We're also partnering with pretty much every industry body so that we can reach into all of those networks.

Going beyond the information portal we want to become an advocacy group to promote what's good about moving to Sri Lanka and also to work hard on breaking down more barriers. Even ex-Sri Lankans returning have some major barriers in the system now and we want to work towards removing them. 

This was a totally volunteer group of people from all over the place. Check us out at the site!

We had a fantastic launch event on Tuesday (May 14th) evening. We had the Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka come and give the keynote talk and then had a superb panel. More on that coming soon at the site itself.

Check it out and give us your feedback - plenty of places in the site to do that. Enjoy surfing!






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Congratulations Dr. Malinda Kaushalye Kapuruge!


It gives me great pleasure to post extremely belated (he completed in October last year!) congratulations to Dr. Malinda Kaushalye Kapuruge on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Swinburne University in Australia. Kau's thesis topic was "Orchestration as Organization: Using an organisational paradim to achieve adaptable business process modelling and enactment in service compositions" and was supervised by Prof. Jun Han and Dr. Alan Colman. Kau's going to stay on in Swinburne as a Research Scientist for some time.

Kaushalye worked in WSO2 for 2 years from 2006 to 2008 before going to grad school to pursue his Ph.D. work. Congratulations and good luck!

(I'm going to post a few catch up congratulations so I can be up to date :-).)




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Congratulations Dr. Dasarath Weeratunge!

It gives me great pleasure to post extremely belated (he completed in December last year!) congratulations to Dr. Dasarath Weeratunge on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana (where I got my Ph.D. too). Dasarath's Ph.D. was in compiler optimization (don't have the exact topic) and was co-advised by Suresh Jagannathan and Xiangyu Zhang. Dasarath is now working in Intel Labs.

I advised Dasarath's final year project when he was an undergrad at Univ. of Moratuwa - he worked on what became Apache Kandula, a WS-Atomic Transactions implementation for Apache Axis. Later he also contributed to Apache Axis2 and worked on making Kandula work with Axis2. He joined Purdue in August 2005 IIRC.




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WSO2 moving to a new building in Sri Lanka

After many many months of painful work, we are finally starting work at our new location in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Here's a picture taken from my cell phone yesterday afternoon:



The most awesome thing is that we will all be in one building again in Sri Lanka! That's after more than 3 years when we started adding new offices .. we had three here until yesterday; today we have one!

We still have quite a bit of work to do to finish everything .. including a nice surprise coming in the front at the street level :-). The cage you see on the roof is our enclosed rooftop basketball court! The rest of the roof is taken up by the gym and the creche - will take another month to be fully ready. I'm waiting for the punching bag.

Today's not our official opening day - that's next Wednesday with Paul Fremantle also present. We are moving in today however and will have a small ceremony (lighting the lamp and kiribath table).

Its taken just over 8 years of incredible hard work by a super team of passionate people to get us here. Thank you to everyone who made it possible - including our customers, investors and of course the killer (past and present) team! 

This is only a small step along the way however ..





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WSO2Con Barcelona 2014 in just one more week!


Time flies when you're having fun .. the conference is now just a week away and the advance team is flying in today. If you've ever been to one of our conferences you know what an awesome event it is - Barcelona is going to notch it up again with a really cool Internet of Things platform for attendees (built with our own products of course - plus soldering irons and acid baths).

Hope to see you there!



Learn more about industry trends, being a Connected Business, the WSO2 story, and much more through our esteemed panel of keynote speakers at WSO2Con EU 2014.
Alan Clark
Director of Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source
SUSE
Chairman of the Board
OpenStack®
Serves as the chairman of the board at OpenStack. Alan has developed a reputation in fostering the creation, growth, awareness, and adoption of open source and open standards across the technology sector. He will explore the evolution of open source cloud platforms in enabling the Connected Business.
James Governor
Principal Analyst and Co-Founder
RedMonk
Leads coverage in the enterprise applications space, assisting with application development, integration middleware, and systems management issues. He also has served as an industry expert for television and radio segments with media such as the BBC. James will examine how open source middleware contributes to the Connected Business.
Luca Martini
Distinguished Engineer
Cisco
Leads the Cisco virtualization strategy in two major areas: mobility and home broadband access. He has been involved in the Internet engineering task force (IETF) for the past 15 years, contributing to many IETF standards. Luca will discuss the role of intelligent orchestration and how it is more than simply a Web services engine.
Paul Fremantle
Co-Founder & CTO
WSO2
Paul co-founded WSO2 in 2005 in order to reinvent the way enterprise middleware is developed, sold, delivered, and supported through an open source model. In his current role as CTO, he spearheads WSO2's overall product strategy.
Sanjiva Weerawarana Ph. D
Founder, Chairman & CEO
WSO2
Sanjiva has been involved with open source for many years and is an active member of the Apache Software Foundation. He was the original creator of Apache SOAP and has been part of Apache Axis, Apache Axis2 and most Apache Web services projects. He founded WSO2 after having spent nearly 8 years in IBM Research, where he was one of the founders of the Web services platform. During that time, he co-authored many Web services specifications including WSDL, BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, WS-RF and WS-Eventing.
Learn how WSO2 can help you build a Connected Business
 Contact Us




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North Korea, The Interview and Movie Ethics

Its been quite a while since I blogged .. I'm going to try to write a bit more consistently from now (try being the key!). I thought I'll start with a light topic!

So I watched the now infamous The Interview two nights ago. I'm no movie critic, but I thought it was a cheap, crass stupid movie with no depth whatsoever. More of a dumbass slapstick movie than anything else.

Again, I'm no movie critic so I don't recommend you listen to me; watch it and make up your own mind :-). I have made up mine!

HOWEVER, I do think the Internet literati's reaction to this movie is grossly wrong, unfair and arrogant.

Has there ever been any other Hollywood movie where the SITTING president of a country is made to look like a jackass and assassinated in the most stupid way? I can't think of any movies like that. In fact, I don't think Bollywood or any other movie system has produced such a movie.

When Hollywood movies have US presidents in them they're always made out to be the hero (e.g. White House Down) and they pretty much never die. If they do die, then they die a hero (e.g. 2012) in true patriotic form.

I don't recall seeing a single movie where David Cameron or Angela Merkel or Narendra Modi or any other sitting president was made to look like a fool and gets killed as the main point of the movie (or in any other fashion).

I believe the US Secret Service takes ANY threats against the US president very seriously. According to Wikipedia, a threat against the US president is a class D felony (presumably a bad thing). I've heard of students who send anonymous (joking) email threats get tracked down and get a nice visit.

So, suppose Sony Pictures decided to make a movie which shows President Obama being a jackass and then being killed? How far would that go before the US Secret Service shuts it down?

In my view the fact that this movie was conceived, funded and made just goes to show how little respect the US system has for people that are not lined up in the US way. Its fine for the US government, and even the US people, to have no respect for some country, its president or whatever, but I have to agree with North Korea when they say that this movie is a violation of the UN charter:

With no rhetoric can the U.S. justify the screening and distribution of the movie. This is because "The Interview" is an illegal, dishonest and reactionary movie quite contrary to the UN Charter, which regards respect for sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs and protection of human rights as a legal keynote, and international laws.
– NORTH KOREA NATIONAL DEFENCE COMMISSION SPOKESMAN
    (From: http://www.itv.com/news/story/2014-12-27/north-korea-insults-obama-and-blames-us-for-internet-outages/.)

    Would all the Internet literati who hailed the release of the movie act the same way if Bollywood produced a movie mocking Obama and killing him off? If not, why the double standard??

    Its disappointing that thinking people also get caught up in the rhetoric and ignore basic decency. Just to be clear- I'm not saying North Korea is a great place. I have no idea what things are really like there. What I do know is that I don't trust the managed news rhetoric that is delivered as fact by CNN, Fox, BBC, Al Jazeera or anyone any more about any topic. This is after observing how Sri Lanka was represented in various of these channels during the war and after being here to observe some side of it myself. After Iraq (where are those WMDs now?) you'd think that smart people wouldn't just believe any old crap that's put out .. I distinctly remember watching the news conference (broadcast on BBC) immediately after Colin Powell made his speech with pictures to the UN Security Council where the then Iraqi Foreign Minister (can't remember his name - fun looking dude) went thru each picture and gave an entirely different explanation. We now know who was telling the truth. I try hard not to get caught up in any of the rhetoric as a result now.

    There's an entirely different topic of whether the North Koreans attacked Sony Pictures' network and whether the US government hackers shut down their Internet. It seems that the general trend (as of today) is that it wasn't the North Koreans, despite what the FBI said: http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/27/tech/north-korea-expert-doubts-about-hack/index.html.

    So I'm with the North Koreans on this one: This movie should not have been conceived, funded and produced. I don't condone the hackers' approach for trying to stop it; instead Sony Pictures should've had more ethics and not done it at all. So, IMO: Shame on you Sony Pictures Entertainment!




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    WSO2 at 10

    Today August 4th 2015 is WSO2's unofficial official birthday - we complete 10 years of existence.

    I guess its been a while.

    Its unofficial because not a whole lot happened on the 4th of August 2005 itself. Starting a global set up like WSO2 had many steps - registering a company in Sri Lanka (in early July 2005 IIRC), registering a company in the US, getting money to the US company, "selling" the LK company to the US company etc. etc.. We officially "launched" the company at OSCON 2005 in Portland, Oregon the first week of August.

    However, I gave a talk there on the 4th on Open Source and Developing Countries. The talk abstract refers to the opportunity that open source gives to "fundamentally change the dynamics of the global software industry".

    That's what we've been up to for 10 years - taking on the enterprise middleware part of the software industry with open source and Sri Lanka as the major competitive weapons. We can't claim victory yet but we're making progress. Getting into nearly 20 Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves as a Visionary is not a bad track record from zero.

    This is of course only possible because of the people we have and the way we do things (our culture) that allows people to do what they do best and do it well. To me, as the person at the helm, its been an incredible ride to work with such awesome people and to have such an awesome work environment that births and nurtures cool stuff just as effectively as how well it chews and spits out stupid stuff and BS.

    We're now somewhat sizable ... just about crossing 500 full time employees globally on August 1 this year. I am still (and will be for the next 10 years) the last interview for every employee .. no matter what level and no matter what country they're in (yeah that means Skype sometimes). I don't check for ability to do the job - its all about what the person's about, what they want to achieve in their life and how well I think will fit into our culture and approach and value system. I have veto'ed many hires if my gut feeling is that the person is not the right fit for us.

    Here's a graph of how the team has grown:


    (The X axis is the number of months since August 1, 2005.)

    A key to our ability to continue to challenge the world by taking on audacious tasks is the "so what if we fail" mindset that's integral to our culture. Another part is being young and stupid in terms of not knowing how hard some things apparently are. When I started WSO2 I was 38 .. not that young but definitely stupid in my understanding of how hard it is/was to take on the world of IBM/Oracle owned enterprise middleware market and ultimately stupid about the technical complexities of the problems we needed to solve. BUT what has worked for us so far is the "so what if we fail part" being used by young people who are regularly put in the deep end to get stuff done. I am still utterly stupid about how hard certain things are supposed to be - and I love that. Most of us in WSO2 are very stupid that way - but we're not afraid to try nor are we afraid to fail. Shit happens, life goes on (oh yeah and then we all die anyway at some point .. so why not give it a shot). I have little or no respect to the "way things are done" or the "way things work" - we've challenged and re-envisioned almost every part of our business from the way a normal software company works and I'm very proud of my team for having done that over and over and over again. And I'm of course grateful that they still talk to me for all the grief I give them daily on various little to big aspects of every side of the company - from colors to cleanliness to marketing to architecture to pricing to paying taxes.

    The amazing thing is after 10 years we've managed to become slightly younger as a company over time! How is that possible? This is the average age of employees of WSO2 over time (same X axis as above):


    We apparently had some old farts (like me) hired at the beginning and then again a few more around 3 years in .. but since then the average age has hovered between 30 and 32! Not bad for a 10 year old company where very few people leave ...

    To me the actual physical age is not the issue - after all I'm now 48 years old but I don't hesitate to think and act like a 25 year old either mentally or physically (come and play basketball with me and lets see who hurts more at the end). Its all about how you think and act and accept "experience". I view experience and assumption as things to question and assume as false until proven true in our context. That frustrates a lot of senior people but that is exactly what has allowed WSO2 to keep growing and keep challenging the world of middleware and getting to its front. I view any assumption (e.g. "this is the way others do it") as a likely point of failure until proven otherwise. My challenge is to keep WSO2 "young" - in thinking and in age as much as possible (without age discrimination of course). I love this Jeff Bezos quote:
    If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
    Technology will never stop - it maybe SOA, ESB, REST, CEP, Mashups. Cloud, APIs, IoT, Microservices, Docker,  Clojure, NodeJS, whatever ... and more will come. We need to keep on top of every new thing that comes along, be the ones to create a bunch of these and still deliver real stuff that works.

    If we as a team continue to challenge every assumption, continue to treat each other with respect but not fear, continue to fight for doing the right long term thing instead of hype-chasing then we will never lose.

    WSO2 is nowhere near the goal I set out to do for us - take over the world (of middleware!). But 10 years later, we're now on a solid foundation to build WSO2 into a much stronger position in the next 10 years. Thank you for all the wonderful people who are still in WSO2 and to those that have moved on but did their part, for helping us get there. Its been my honor and privilege to lead this incredible bunch of crazies.




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    Time for me to stop commenting about politics and other sensitive topics

    I've been cautioned and advised by several good friends that I should take a chill pill on commenting about various political things. Some of the topics I've been quite vocal about are high profile things involving high power people .. and I might be beginning to get noticed by them, which of course is not a good thing!

    I get frustrated by political actions that I find to be stupid and I don't hesitate to tell it straight the way I think about it. Obviously every such statement bothers someone else. Its one thing when its irrelevant noise, but if it gets noisy then I'm a troublemaker.

    I'm not keen to get to that state.

    Its not because I have anything to hide or protect - not in the least. Further I'm not scared off by the PM telling private sector people like me to "go home" or "be exposed" but publicly naming private individuals in parliament is rather over the top IMO. Last thing I want is to get there.

    I have an immediate family and an extended family of 500+ in WSO2 that I'm responsible for. I'm taping up my big mouth for their sake.

    Instead I will try to blog constructively & informatively whenever time permits.

    Similarly I will try to keep my big mouth controlled about US politics too. Its really not my problem to worry about issues there!

    I should really kill off my FB account. However I do enjoy getting info about friends and family life events and FB is great for that. So instead I'll stop following everyone except for close friends and family.

    Its been fun and I like intense intellectual debate. However, maybe another day - just not now.

    (P.S.: No, no one threatened me or forced me to do this. I just don't want to come close to that possibility!)




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    El problema no es la IA

    Hay mucha controversia en torno a la Inteligencia Artificial. Algunos piensan que es la causa de la pérdida de trabajos y la bajada de tarifas. Pero no es así. Te lo contamos aquí. It’s the economy, stup$#. Con esta frase (y la palabrota) ganó unas...

    La entrada El problema no es la IA aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.




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    ¿Te cuesta conciliar en verano?

    Si a ti también te cuesta conciliar trabajo y familia en verano, lee esta entrada. Te damos algunas pistas para no morir en el intento. Menudo timo eso de la conciliación. ???? Con pronunciar la palabreja parece que ya está todo resuelto. ¡Pues no! Solo...

    La entrada ¿Te cuesta conciliar en verano? aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.




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    ????Por qué unirte al Club ahora

    En el Club de los Grandes Traductores puedes encontrar la ayuda que necesitas para desarrollar tu negocio de traducción o interpretación. ¿Quieres saber cómo? Sigue leyendo. Déjanos hacerte algunas preguntas: ¿Alguna vez te sientes sola/o en tu profesión? ¿Necesitas consejo para resolver dudas profesionales y...

    La entrada ????Por qué unirte al Club ahora aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.




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    Diccionario de inglés jurídico: Probation v. Parole

    ¿Sabes lo que significan realmente estos dos términos? ¿Y cuál es la diferencia entre ellos? Se trata de dos conceptos importantes de la justicia penal en los EE. UU. Te lo contamos a continuación. En inglés jurídico hay muchos términos parecidos, pero no iguales. Son...

    La entrada Diccionario de inglés jurídico: Probation v. Parole aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.




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    Próximas convocatorias de nuestros cursos en línea

    Si quieres darle un impulso a tu negocio en el mes de septiembre no te pierdas todas estas propuestas de formación en línea para traductores que te traemos. Sigue leyendo. Se nota que estáis volviendo ya de vacaciones. Estamos recibiendo muchas reservas para los cursos...

    La entrada Próximas convocatorias de nuestros cursos en línea aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.




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    ¿Te apuntas al reto?

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    La entrada ¿Te apuntas al reto? aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.




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    La entrada Cómo cuidar la salud financiera de tu negocio aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.



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    La IA generativa está aquí para quedarse. Debemos conocer todo su potencial y usarla en nuestro trabajo diario, pero tomando las debidas precauciones. Nos confesamos creyentes en la Inteligencia Artificial. No está aquí para sustituirnos, sino para ayudarnos a hacer mejor nuestro trabajo: pero no...

    La entrada Los riesgos (no tan evidentes) de la IA en la redacción de documentos jurídicos aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.




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    ¿Conoces el significado del término trespass? Parece sencillo, pero no lo es. En esta entrada te ayudamos a entenderlo y a traducirlo. El término trespass es uno de esos que casi todos creemos conocer y pensamos que sabemos lo que significa. Sin embargo, como muchos...

    La entrada Diccionario de inglés jurídico: Trespass aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.






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    Estamos en pleno proceso de preinscripción universitaria y algunos estudiantes se estarán preguntando dónde pueden estudiar el grado de Traducción e Interpretación. […]




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    La segunda convocatoria para defender los trabajos de fin de grado (TFG) de Traducción e Interpretación se acerca y sé que algunos […]





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    En la meetup de abril en Valladolid, descubrimos por qué WordPress es el mejor amigo para tu emprendimiento. Mauricio Gelves nos contó […]