What is the most widely used SOA enabled application? If you work with enterprise software, like I do, names of large German software vendor or the one here locally from Redwood City or up in the North of bay area may start popping in your head. But I would say think a little bit more. Consider this, the application being talked about is used by millions of users, across operating systems, hardware platforms with so much ease that even the metaphorical grandmas can use it. The application is blogging engines like Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger. All these engines have evolved in a service oriented framework without consciously keeping the SOA approach in mind. A typical engine offers the following services

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But one of the ideas behind the 401(k) was, “you can do it!” You own it; you run it. And you’ve got millions of people out there saying, “I can beat the averages.” What do you say to that?

I say, don’t kid yourself, pal. Look, it’s so simple. We’re not like the kids out in Lake Wobegon. As investors, we are all average, and as investors, we all share the stock market’s return. It’s going to turn out to be 8 percent return, we’re all going to share 8 percent return, but only before costs are deducted. We all share the market’s return less the cost of the financial system. All those management fees and brokerage commissions and sales loads and God knows what else is thrown in there — the advertising that you see.

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SGI Indigo was the first computer I fell in love with. Playing Flight Simulator on it was plain ecstatic. Looking at the Einstein juggling balls in Indy was fun. When I surfed for the first time on internet, the first site I went to was sgi.com. And today SGI filed for bankruptcy. Commoditization huh.. Would it be another Digital or Wang?? More on this here, here and here.

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I have been trying to maintain a personal wiki for taking notes for a long time. I have tried almost everything available under the sun. There were few basic but absolutely necessary requirements that I wanted from this wiki

1. I am the only one i.e. only I would be able to read it and no one else.
2. Someone else can not start writing to it unless I authorize
3. Ability to change look and feel

In search of this kind of wiki I started to look around. The first stop was the software that runs the largest wiki (wikipedia) i.e. mediawiki. I liked it what I saw in version 1.3.x but it didn’t meet my requirements for a personal wiki and was more geared towards the traditional wiki at that time. Bit I liked it and ended up creating a public wiki called sarvagya for Hindi on web. After this I flirted around with BaseCamp, Jot, PmWiki, Microwiki based around wordpress, tiddlywiki, WakkaWiki etc. etc.

None seemed to fit the bill besides I was spoiled by Mediawiki’s other features and a great and active developer community. One of the things that one has to consider while using open source software is that it will be around for a while ( I will confess it is same for the enterprise software which brings bread for me) But I digress. So recently during one of the conversations with a friend he pointed that Mediawiki’s users right management has been improved a lot and now it supports all the features that you want. I checked and found this page called preventing access, here are the few lines of settings in LocalSettings.php that allowed what I wanted

$wgWhitelistRead = array( "Main Page", "Special:Userlogin" );
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['createaccount']   = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['read']            = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['edit']            = false;

Third requirement of chaging the look and feel of the wiki is possible but still still a little more involved process and I don’t want to spend more time on this. I would have loved if it would have been similar to creating themes for Wordpress.

Overall I am just happy to be able to create a small personal wiki using Mediawiki

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So far I didn’t have a formal resolution for this year. But here I make a formal resolution to writing more about SAP’s technologies, focusing more the Netweaver and ESA side. This wake up call is sponsered by this post from Vinnie  Mirchandani  and my first  post  using Performancing blog writer plugin.

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The great distractor that is internet is the subject of this post from Dey Da. He also equates it with the intellectual equivalent of Kubla Khan’s “miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.”

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