[blog.schreiter.info]

They’ve eventually done it!

Honestly, I was not that sure if some blog post like the one I wrote in last year’s December would have any impact on the Studios’ roadmap planning at all. But with Trillian Astra Beta build 88, Cerulean Studios announced Skype support.

Obviously the guys have been re-evaluating their former strategy of ignoring Skype despite being one of the major IM networks in the world. I really think the new way of considering Skype-support as a major feature is the right one.

Trillian Astra Beta Skype Plugin (Preferences screen)

Therefore, I also resumed my temporarily suspended activities in Trillian Astra Alpha/Beta testing. I’m back to active ticket writing – with special focus on the Skype plugin of course. The plugin is not yet perfect, so I’m doing my best to help squashing some of the remaining bugs (e.g. #7146, #7234).

It should be noted, that Trillian won’t obsolete the official Skype client. That is, Skype must be running in background for Trillian to work with Skype. This is due to the closed Skype protocol and the usage of Skype API, which rather works as a remote control to the original Skype application.
The circumstance of still having Skype is perfectly fine for me. I pretty much don’t care what is running in the background as long as it stays there. My purpose is to have one single IM front end and this is achieved very well with the new Skype plugin by the Studios…

February 2008: The OMG releases version 1.1 of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Almost nobody really took notice of it, though. There wasn’t even a news entry on one of the relevant news tickers – not even on the news of OMG itself!

Anyway, despite the bad marketing the BPMN community seems to have noticed the finalization of this revision of BPMN by now.

But seriously, what’s this new version all about? An official changelog is nowhere to be found. So, who is keen on screening a 318 pp. specification for differences to the old version? We did it for you and compiled it into a compacted whitepaper summarizing the delta between the new and the old version.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you would like to add your thoughts about the new version and/or the whitepaper.

I’m more than pleased to announce the link to my freshly published Master’s thesis in the field of Business Process Management. It was written in cooperation with SAP Research, Brisbane Australia.

If you are interested in a thorough look at semantics of data flow, message flow and process instantiation in the context of an executable version of BPMN you should definitely check out this thesis (or parts of it).

Please also take a look at the abstract:

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) has recently become very popular amongst business analysts as an easy-to-use yet powerful modeling notation for business processes. However, BPMN is not able to capture all the details necessary for automated execution by an engine.
The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), on the other hand, is directly executable by business process engines but lacks an intuitive graphical notation.

In order to extend BPMN 1.0 towards direct executability, the thesis presented enriches the revised control flow concepts of xBPMN (by Alexander Grosskopf) with an orthogonal data flow perspective. Sophisticated and carefully defined data flow semantics are essential to enable orchestration on execution level.
In the course of this thesis we describe use cases and introduce formal definitions of the following concepts: data object lifecycle, data scoping, data assignment, mediation and transformation, streaming/buffering, correlation, and process instantiation for xBPMN++.

You can download the thesis from here or from the publications page.

Being part of the alpha testing crowd and having access to the all new Trillian Astra, I’d like to spend some words on this already quite mature version (build 66) of the once extremely popular instant messenger. I personally have been using Trillian since the very early v0.71 back in 2002. However, since my migration to Vista pretty much 12 months ago, I almost completely abandoned Trillian (v3.1 Pro) in favour of Skype for different reasons.

Almost all of my friends are also on Skype and I needed it for telephony anyway. Spend some time abroad and you know that need…
Additionally, Skype features filetransfers that actually work anywhere (unlike ICQ and others)! Finally, the sophisticated mood messaging facility is really a nice thing to give your buddies a hint where you’re at and what you’re doing.

In fact, now that I’ve been playing around with the new Trillian for some time, and reporting a number of bugs (alpha testers only), I’d like to give a short summary especially with regards to performance and a possible Skype integration. There are quite a number of short intros to Astra already out there in the blogosphere – so I won’t bother you with the very basics…

The guys at the Studios mention the “Performance” as one of the key improvements to Trillian v3.1. And I have to say, that already in this alpha version they managed to keep their word. I’m running Astra on a 2 year old single core Pentium M running Vista w/ Aero. The new Astra is extremely reactive though looking deliciously fancy (transparency effects everywhere…)! I still can’t believe the numbers as well: running for the same time as an instance of Skype (v3.6), Trillian consumes about one third of the memory consumed by Skype (Trillian: ~10 MB, Skype: ~30 MB).
Moreover, the CPU time at similar usage of both of the messengers is also in favour of Trillian since it only uses less than half of the CPU time as Skype. And you need to keep in mind, that Trillian manages three IM services for me (ICQ, MSN and Yahoo) whereas Skype only goes for itself…

But in a way the point of this post is a different one: Astra looks extremely promising to me. It’s also a good thing that the basic concept (multi-IM with great look) remained almost unchanged since the old versions with a zero-dot-X version more than five years ago. But thing is though: There is one more major player in the field of instant messaging compared to 5 years ago, who has more than 10.000.000 active users and was bought for more than 3.3 billion US-$ some time ago.

I simply can’t believe how insistently people in official forums and even the Studios’ Bugzilla try to point people to Skyllian. This plugin has been catastrophic since its very early versions. The plugin is more than poorly supported and its usability is near absolute zero! Everybody recommending this poor piece of software can only be out of his mind or never even tried to access the plugin’s site which has been poorly accessible all over the time…

But it can’t be too difficult to grab the Skype API from http://developer.skype.com/ and build an official plugin that is actually working, can it? Are you an Astra alpha tester? Then vote for this in Bugzilla at bug #4572 and drop a line, please…

In my opinion, it is a massive mistake trying to ignore Skype from the Trillian point of view. You guys at Cerulean have the chance to build the first messenger alternative to the original Skype that is actually working. So, please go for it as part of the otherwise tremendously nice Astra!

P.S.: Check out my “Trillian Mini”:

We managed to hit the million in 2007…

(* about half of it has been crunched by disk- and headless machines running BOINCpe…)

(complete up-to-date stats)

I have to admit that it’s been a while since I published the last update to BOINCpe. However, the new version v0.5.0 now comes with an all new style adapted to the new design coming from Berkeley and some other new improvements. Hope you like it…

Additionally, the old scheduler used for the persistency service has been replaced with Gerhard Kalab’s cron. You can now easily modify the time when files are backed up to your network share. Please see the BOINCpe FAQ for further information on this.

Of course, BOINCpe includes the latest BOINC client v5.10.28. Download BOINCpe now…

BOINC undoubtedly had style since its early days. But rather in a scientific, maybe even inspiring way than in a visual way. Now check out this official new and – best of all – cool logo by Michal Krakowiak:

It happened only recently that projects like QMC@Home or entire BOINC-based frameworks such as Gridrepublic came up with stylish versions of the standard BOINC UI. Now, even the official site became kind of neat with a conservative but yet unobtrusively stylish look.
Also the useless but skinnable simple GUI variation available since BOINC v5.8 improves BOINC’s sweetness. And as a big fan of Trac I almost gave a party when BOINC development switched to use it as new platform for configuration and version management. Those guys even skinned it in a custom way! (which is remarkable… )

What I meant to say: functionality is crucial for a distributed computing application such as BOINC. But guys: if you want to make BOINC mainstream you simply have to make it look cool and make it work as it does.
BOINC lives and dies with its users. In times of fancy-looking Mac OS X and Vista you cannot afford losing users because of websites in late-90ies Frontpage-style and GUIs making you think you’re back in Win 3.1.

So folks in Berkely, even though this whole post sounds a little superficial (it’s meant to be ): get it on and get us some cute stuff.
(Ever thought of Ajaxification of the BOINC server software…)