Hi Ho Hi Ho.. it's off to work I go.. again.

After about eight months of working on Argot, Colony and generally attempting to move Einet forward; it is time to admit defeat for now. I've accomplished the main goals of the last eight months, which was to release Argot under a shared source license. As always, it didn't go quite to plan. The Open Vendor license didn't get approved by the OSI, which was a disapointment. Argot didn't get released before Christmas which was also a disapointment. However, Argot did get written in Java, C# and C, and was released. A manual was written which describes the details of Argot's dictionary. Overall, the time taken was well worth it.

In the past month a lot of time has been taken up with looking for work. However, that task should be finalised this week.. after I've received two offers late last week. Now it's time to make the difficult decision of which one to take. Both are contracts, and both are interesting work. In the next day the final choice will be made.

In the past month I've also been working on Colony and resyncing it with Argot. It has required a few changes to the network type agreement interfaces, but it is turning out for the best. The Argot changes have been put in Subversion for anyone to check out online.

I've also started reading Ralf's blog which I found while Blog jumping last week. He has some smart theories on RPC and how to develop client interfaces for them. Have a read of Form should follow function and Coordination structures beat RPC. They offer some well thought out arguments on RPC methodologies.

I've also finished reading The Innovator's Dilema by Clayton M. Christensen. It focuses on distruptive technology and why large companies fail to adapt to new technologies. The author uses the Hard Drive industry as a case study, which is a lot more facinating than you'd expect. Do you know how many companies who made the big 14" hard drives for the original main frame market survived to make 8" hard drives for the mini computer market? Zero.. Read the book to understand why!

Finally, I've met up with the people up at NICTA/Melbourne Uni doing P2P research. They're doing some interesting research into data storage and retrieval using Distributed Hash Tables. They've even wrapped it all up and made a gaming platform to test out their theories. Hopefully after work has started I'll still have a chance to keep in contact with what they are doing. I also found out that they will be hosting Middleware 2006 in Melbourne later this year! Maybe it's time to try putting pen to paper and turn my Argot knowledge into a paper worth publishing.