Rourke McNamara

A New York Times article published in October points out a major shift in the policy of frequent flyer programs; the inactivity timeout for many programs has been quietly shortened. If you don’t earn or spend miles for a certain period of time, airlines will close your account and take away all your miles. In times past, no airline would reclaim your miles until you’d gone at least three years without account activity. If you are a customer of several of the major US carriers, including US Airways, your miles will expire if you go 18 months without activity.

Three articles discussing service virtualization have popped up in the last 24 hours. Not all of them use the term service virtualization, but they’re all referring to the concept.

Todd Biske posted an article on his blog that eloquently explains the need to scale services differently from web applications — the load characteristics are not the same. Todd refers to BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition as a tool that can help quickly bring up extra instances of services hosted in a traditional application server to meet load spikes, but ActiveMatrix Service Grid is an even better option. Last week TIBCO’s Matt Quinn talked about service virtualization at a Gartner event and specifically addressed the value in scaling services at the service level, rather than scaling an entire application server instance. ActiveMatrix Service Grid is the only product on the market today that allows you to do that.

Techcrunch just covered Loopnote, a new service that allows users to subscribe to information on a given topic so they can “stay in the loop.” Publishers are allowed to create the “loops” that provide information on a particular topic to interested users. As the first few people to comment on the Techcrunch post are quick to point out, Loopnote doesn’t provide any new technology. You can get exactly the same functionality using a hosted blogging package, Yahoo! Groups, an announcement only mailing list.

I found another recipe for buckwheat crepes at Chocolate and Zucchini, an excellent food blog. This recipe calls for four parts buckwheat flour for every one part all purpose flour. That seemed more promising, so I gave it a try over the course of two nights last week.

To make batter for six crepes, use:

• 100g buckwheat flour
• 25g all-purpose flour
• 1 egg
• 25cl milk
• 25cl water

I followed the below instructions to prepare the batter, substituting my blender for the author’s food processor. I made twice as much batter and used the first half three hours later and the second half the next day. The batter did hold together much better the second day.

The partial success of my attempt to reproduce the Sunflower Inn’s raised Belgian waffles prompted to me upgrade my four year old waffler. The Villaware waffler I’ve been using was a gift from Jen that I’ve been using with reasonable success for just about four years now. Jen and I both started lusting after a new waffle iron after staying at a Best Western that allows guests to make their own waffles using a commercial waffler that rotated the waffles 180 degrees. Gravity pushes the batter against all surfaces of the waffle iron and you end up with a crisper, more even waffle. On top of the rotation, I’ve read reviews that seem to indicate that the Villaware irons just don’t get as hot as higher quality waffle irons. When making waffles, heat is everything.

Yesterday Matt Quinn of TIBCO Software, Inc. talked about Service Virtualization at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services conference in Orlando. Matt started his presentation by saying that Service Virtualization is:

Functionality designed to reduce complexity of communication, location and control as service networks increase in size.

Service Virtualization, a key feature of TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid, is a technology meant to help companies deal with the complexity that comes with doing large-scale heterogeneous SOA. Period. Matt spent some time at the beginning introducing some of the problems companies with large service networks are beginning to face, including communications management and service scaling challenges. Matt then talked about how TIBCO’s approach to Service Virtualization helps to solve these problems.