~pperalta

Motivated (or should I say distributed) by my lack of fitness, I decided to take on running last fall. I had done weights in the past but never running for two reasons: I used to live in Florida where it is uncomfortable to walk outside during most of the year, let alone run. I was also bored to tears on the treadmill so that didn’t go anywhere.

In Boston however I found the environment much more conducive to running, given that there are sidewalks and bike paths, not to mention it feels like half of the people here run. Also, the weather in the fall is very comfortable to run in (which probably explains why the NYC marathon is in November.)

Winter running, on the other hand, came with its own set of challenges. During those months I learned some lessons that I’m passing along.

At first I tried running with a thick cotton sweater. This turned out to be a bad idea, because the sweater (being a warm sweater as advertised) prevented heat from escaping my body. This, paradoxically, causes you to freeze your ass off since you now have a pool of sweat on your skin. The best practice is to wear material that wicks sweat away, including the top layer. Even on the coldest of days (my personal low was 15F) I would get comfortable after about a mile.

The biggest challenge for me was not the air temperature (at least after warming up), it was ice. On icy days my runs were much slower. On really icy days I would just skip the run. I know some hard core runners that would throw on spikes or yak tracks, but I didn’t take it to that level. A related challenge is when it isn’t quite cold enough to freeze deeper pools of water. I had the distinctly unpleasant experience of stepping into a 1 inch puddle on the bike path after wrongly assuming it was frozen over. That day my run was definitely shorter than it would have been otherwise.

For the given temperatures, I really was wearing very thin layers of clothing. This means that I had to keep moving in order to stay warm. I never slowed down to a walk because that would have been far more unpleasant than dealing with the fatigue. Running on the road in general has that advantage over the treadmill – with the treadmill you can quit anytime, whereas on the road you have to make it back home sometime, so you may as well run the distance.

Due to things being really busy lately my mileage has been decreasing. I’m hoping to turn this around soon, especially since the warm spring weather is bringing out so many runners.

So how has the running affected my fitness? It used to be that my heart and lungs were ready to break out of my chest after chasing down a bus. After taking up running, I was not only able to perform this exercise without loosing breath, but I was able to do it while carrying my 40 lbs son!

As I type this I am 35,000 feet over Alaska (no I can’t see Putin’s backyard from here) en route to QCon Tokyo. Brian was scheduled to talk but was unable to make it so I’m stepping in to present a talk on spanning multiple data grids across disparate data centers. (You can see Brian describing this talk at QCon SF here.) In addition to this presentation, I’m looking forward to sampling the food and culture in Japan. As a big city guy I’ve always wanted to visit Tokyo so I’m quite fortunate to have the chance.

As they say, when it rains it pours. I just came back from the New York SIG where I talked about real world challenges in customer deployments and passed along lessons that we learned in solving these problems. After leaving Tokyo, I will be joining Cameron and Noah in Toronto for the inaugural SIG where I will deliver the same presentation I gave in NY. Cameron will talk about the past and future of Coherence, and Noah will give an update on the latest innovations in the Coherence Incubator project.

Has everyone received their copy of the Coherence book yet? One of my favorite parts of the book is the very beginning where Aleks describes what it takes to build scalable applications. In fact a good portion of the first chapter doesn’t even mention Coherence; it just talks about aspects of scalability that developers and architects of high scale systems should be familiar with. A copy of this book was raffled at the NY SIG, and more copies will be given away at the Bay SIG and Toronto SIG.

It has been a while since I’ve posted, so I figured it would be a good time to give an update on what is happening in Coherence land.

New Coherence Bloggers

We have two new bloggers sharing their experiences with Coherence!

The first is by Oracle JDBC expert Pas Apicella who recently took on Coherence. Upon his introduction to Coherence he immediately proceeded to create a CacheStore example using PL/SQL, followed by an example of using the Oracle JDBC Data Change Notification mechanism to push updates from the database to a cache.

Additionally we have Coherence architect Andy Nguyen debuting with a detailed description of a sophisticated distributed bulk loading technique he’s employed on several customer projects.

Coherence Book in March

After many months of blood, sweat, and blisters from too much typing, Aleksandar Seovic has completed the highly anticipated Coherence book published by Packt. Having worked closely with Aleks on reviews and contributions, I believe this book will be a terrific resource for developers and architects that need to write scalable applications. Both experienced users of Coherence and new users will find relevant and useful content. Aleks was recently interviewed by Cameron Purdy about the book which can be downloaded as an MP3.

User Group Meetings

The UK SIG in London is the last Coherence user group meeting for the winter, it is coming up on February 26th. The spring events are currently being planned; stay tuned for details!

Also coming up on February 24th is the first Boston SUG meeting of the year. Although the topic won’t be Coherence this time, it will be of interest for developers and architects interested in scalable systems. We’ll be meeting up for drinks and snacks at Bertucci’s afterwards. And I’ll be there if anyone wants to chat about Coherence or any other topic!

This year I’ll be at Oracle Open World for the first time. I hear that this conference dwarfs JavaOne in size which is hard to imagine given how large JavaOne is. For those of you attending that are interested in Coherence, we have over two dozen sessions to choose from – making this the biggest Coherence event ever.

The Coherence content is available on OTN. (There’s also a PDF version that is nicer for printing out.) It includes sessions on future direction, integration with other products in the Oracle lineup, developer workshops, and customer panels describing their use of Coherence.

I’ll be talking about using Coherence to scale out external data stores (including relational databases.) This is mostly the same content that will be covered during the NY SIG.

The next NY Coherence SIG is on October 1st (two weeks from today) and it promises to be a great event. For those of you who follow my blog, I previously introduced these two gentlemen a few months ago when they started blogging.

The first talk will be by Aleksandar Seovic who has an extensive Coherence resume. In addition to implementing POF in .NET, he is also the author of an upcoming book on Coherence. In his spare time (insert tongue in cheek) he runs S4HC, a consulting company specializing in Spring, Coherence, and other technologies.

If you’re in Tampa, you can also check out his upcoming talk at Tampa JUG on September 29th.

We will also have Mark Falco, one of our rock star engineers who concentrates on our network protocol (TCMP), C++, and other areas. Mark is usually the first (and last) person I reach out to when I have questions about Coherence networking – so if you have any questions of your own be sure to bring them. He will talk to us about TCMP and how to optimize your machines and network for optimum performance.

Finally, yours truly will talk about configuring Coherence to work with an external data source (usually relational databases.) I’ll describe in detail how each of the external connectivity features work (including many features you’ve probably never heard of), best practices, and good old fashioned war stories. (Shout out to Rob for helping with the Omni Graffle diagrams!) This is the same talk that I will present in mid October at Oracle Open World in San Francisco. I’ll provide more detail on this later; for now you can check out the Application Grid lineup – which includes WebLogic Server, Coherence, JRockit, Tuxedo and Enterprise Manager.