Thanks Dave!

Dave Shields donates two OLPC boxes to Sahana. Thank you!

Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed

I agree 100% with everything Bill has written here.

Yes I'm a FOSS fanatic but I admire Bill Gates more than pretty much any other technology or business person. MSFT certainly pulled a few unfair business practices along the way, but his passion for winning and passion for finding a better way have had more impact on the world than most other things.

Plus the dude's running around giving away like $30B for really good causes like injections without needles.

Reclaiming the ESB

Paul Fremantle has written an article on Reclaiming the ESB .. this is somewhat in response to Steve Vinoski's original writeup against the ESB concept. Gotta read it if you are into this stuff :-).

Sri Lankan part of Nobel Peace prize team!

The Vice Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, is a Sri Lankan! AFAIK this is the first Nobel Peace prize Sri Lankan has been part of.

Axis2 now supports CORBA services

Axis2 has a new module that makes it possible to take an existing CORBA object and automatically expose it as a Web service. Developed by Eranga Jayasundara, it includes an IDL parser which is used to automate the mapping from the incoming XML message to IIOP and back. We use Apache Yoko underneath.

This used to be the territory of expensive products (such as Iona Artix) but its now completely free. In fact the mapping appears to be more complete than that peformed by the proprietary products- and the performance better too.

Eranga (who did this as his MSc project at the Univ. of Moratuwa and is currently working at the ICT Agency in Sri Lanka) has written an article on WSO2's OxygenTank explaining how the module works and how you can use it.

We're not quite done with this yet- we're also working to integrate this code under the Axis2 client API- once done that means you'll be able to talk to either a WS-* Web service, an HTTP service, a Java object or a CORBA object using the same API. In fact, once we're done any Apache WSIF style binding will be supported directly under the Axis2 client API.

REST vs. WS-*: Facts, Myths and Lies

I recently gave a talk on REST vs. WS-* at both QCon San Francisco and ApacheCon US. The slides can be found on WSO2 Oxygen Tank. I suggest reading the ApacheCon slides as those are slightly updated from the other one.

At ApacheCon Roy Fielding spoke right before me on REST. It was great to listen to Roy present his vision and to hear about REST from the horse's mouth so-to-speak. It was an honor to have him introduce me and then to have him right there to provide additional anecdotes and corrections to my points :).

Comments welcome, especially from those who feel I got it wrong (on either side).

Hillary Clinton on terrorism in Sri Lanka

I saw this a while back but never got around to blogging about it.

Ms. Clinton seems to think that some types of terrorism is acceptable. In particular, I'm annoyed because she seems to think that what the LTTE has been doing in Sri Lanka is acceptable.

WTF?? Has she been on drugs in the last 20 years? LTTE has killed villages full of people from the 80s and the world said "nahh, they're fighting for their rights." They bombed civilian sites, religious sites and economic sites (including our central bank in an attack which was comparable proportionately to the infamous 9-11 attacks).

Until 9-11 the US, Europe and many countries ignored the LTTE and effectively supported them. India supported them, trained them back in the 80s .. until they came back and killed 1500+ Indian troops in Sri Lanka in the late 80s and then killed Rajiv Gandhi. Does she not know that the LTTE leader is convicted of having killed Mr. Gandhi?

Ms. Clinton must be proud that the LTTE site has a reference to it as a way of justifying themselves. Maybe she doesn't know that the US State Department just froze the assets of the TRO an NGO which is funneling funds to the LTTE.

I cannot stand the right wing mania that is driving the Republican party in the US, but getting someone in the Oval Office who thinks that some types of terrorism is ok is far worse for the world and will do more damage than the wonderful Mr. Dubyah has done.

Tamil people in Sri Lanka do have absolutely legitimate reasons to be unhappy with the status quo. I'm a firm believer in some type of decentralized federal political structure for Sri Lanka - all people in Sri Lanka need it! However, LTTE's approach is not the way to get there.

Terrorism is a disease. Eradicating it has to be a global fight and not a fight where one country helps someone else's terrorists. That's what everyone did in the 80s and the 90s .. destroying countries like Sri Lanka in the process. It took 9-11 to change that retarded mindset. I cannot believe that a US presidential candidate really thinks like this about terrorism in 2007 .. maybe in fact she is soft on terrorism as the right wing says.

I hope she loses.