JBoss Drools in Rome

The second half of this week I spent in Rome teaching some local rules enthusiasts about the finer points of JBoss Drools.

There is much to see in Rome, but what posting would be complete without at least a picture of the Colosseum. I don't want to make you too jealous, but I spent almost every evening eating dinner (spaghetti and clams, see picture) with this as a backdrop. My hotel was 10 minutes walking distance from the Colosseum!

It is a two day course diving into the details of JBoss Drools v4.0.7 and held in a very beautiful old Rome apartment that functions as the Red Hat offices here. The course was over two days and contains the following topics with extensive technical labs for the students to complete:


Day 1

• Introduction to JBoss Drools
• The Drools rule language
• Domain specific languages
• Decision tables
• Business Rules Management System (BRMS)

Day 2

• The RETE Algorithm
• Advanced rule authoring
• Execution control
• RuleFlow
• Performance considerations & debugging

If you are contemplating a project with JBoss Drools in the mix, I would strongly recommend that you look into Red Hat training as this course provides a very good foundation. Upon completion you could even become the proud owner of the certificate stating your Drools expertise!

jBPM in Rome

Today we finished up the JBoss jBPM training course which took place in Rome, Italy. I was asked to fly in and teach this for some of the local enthusiasts here.

There is much to see in Rome, but what posting would be complete without at least a picture of the Colosseum. I don't want to make you too jealous, but I spent almost every evening eating dinner (spaghetti and clams, see picture) with this as a backdrop. My hotel was 10 minutes walking distance from the Colosseum!

The course covers jBPM v3.x in great detail, and as their was enough interest in the newer version I was able to impart some information regarding the direction jBPM v4.x has taken. It was a very beautiful old Rome apartment that functions as the Red Hat offices here. This is where the course was held, with a very nice balcony to take our breaks on (see picture). The course was over three days and contains the following topics with extensive technical labs for the students to complete:

Day1

• Introduction to jBPM
• Process modelling
  
• jPDL designer
• Deployment

Day2

• Client programming
• Context variables & expressions
• Advanced process modelling
  
• Task management
  

Day3

• Web console
• Persistence
• Integration & customization

The students included a business consultant and developers, so the mix was rather interesting. You can see that we even have jBPM chicks out there in the world!

If you are contemplating a project with jBPM in the mix, I would strongly recommend that you look into Red Hat training as this course provides a very good foundation. Upon completion you could even become the proud owner of the certificate stating your jBPM expertise!

Fedora 11 KDE install

Now that I have upgraded my world to Fedora 11 I wanted to take KDE for a spin. The default is Gnome on the desktop, so here is what I had to do to provide the option to use KDE as a desktop:

# install the kde package group.
#
$ yum install @kde-desktop

# but got some errors that the libavcodec.so.51 was a dependency
# to k3b-extras-freeworld package, but Fedora 11 has a higher 
# version on my machine (libavcodec.so.52), so had to skip-broken
# with yum to avoid installing this package.
#
$ yum --skip-broken instal @kde-desktop

# if you want to default KDE on the machine you can do some or
# all of the following.
#
$ yum install switchdesk-gui switchdesk

# for gui run the switchdesk command and select KDE.
#
$ switchdesk

# for cli run with kde option.
#
$ switchdesk kde 

# for gui to make KDM the default display manager.
#
$ yum install system-switch-displaymanager-gnome

# for cli to switch to KDM display manager.
#
$ yum install system-switch-displaymanager

# for gui run the system-switch-displaymanager command and select KDM.
#
$ system-switch-displaymanager

# for cli run with kdm option.
#
$ system-switch-displaymanager kdm

Not much to it! ;-)

Upgrade Fedora 10 to Fedora 11 howto

A few simple steps to upgrade:

# As root you would like to have a clean start to the
# upgrade, so get an update out of the way.
#
$ yum update rpm

$ yum -y update

$ yum clean all

# Should a new kernel install/update require it,
# reboot before continuing with the rest.
#
# Then install the preupgrade package.
#
$ yum install preupgrade

# For console upgrade, use:
#
$ preupgrade-cli

# If you like gui's to upgrade, use this.
#
$ preupgrade

Setup KVM (virtualization) in Fedora 10

I was looking at the various howto's on the internet to get this up and running, but it would not work for me. I kept getting the two error messages below depending on the type of virtualization used (Xen vs. Qemu):

# with Xen I got this when trying to connect my local 
# default machine.
#
Unable to open connection to hypervisor URI 'xen:///'

# and with Qemu I got this when trying to connect my
# local default machine.
#
Unable to open connection to hypervisor 'qemu:///'

A few things needed to be installed for qemu to get this working properly so you can define and install a new virtual machine:

# Standard Virtulization packages in the group which
# once installed will get you to the same error messages
# above once you try to connect your local machine in
# the Virtual Machine Manager.
#
$ yum groupinstall 'Virtualization'

# now we need some qemu stuff:
#
$ yum install qemu qemu-launcher virt-manager virt-mem

After this I could connect to my local machine (qemu:///system) using the Virtual Machine Manager.

Letter to President Obama about jBPM

Some of you might remember that I was published with Financial Crisis Front Line: SNS Bank in June of this year in 2009 BPM & Workflow Handbook, which was released at a W3C conference in Washington, DC.

As the focus of this book was BPM in government, the publisher has sent a copy to the President of the United States with a personal cover letter.

My chapter details a financial institution using jBPM. Will jBPM get his attention you think?

Remove your email from Mutt group reply

I was having the problem that I have two email addresses that people send to me from work and when I was replying to a group in Mutt it would include my email in the .cc line. Here is how to prevent that from happening:

# Add this to your .muttrc to prevent your name being
# added to .cc on group replies.
#
alternates "emailA@yourDomain.com|emailB@yourDomain.com"

Display and read HTML mail with mutt

I have lately been running into more people out there who seem to like HTML mail, which did not by default display all that well. Here is how to get mutt to automatically display HTML e-mail in-line:

# In your $HOME you should have (or create one) a .mailcap file,
# add these lines for displaying HTML inline.
#
text/html;      links %s; nametemplate=%s.html
text/html;      links -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

# Then you need to turn on the automagic in mutt to actually
# display the HTML e-mail by adding this to your $HOME/.muttrc
# file.
#
auto_view text/html

Enjoy!