A Tangled Web

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http://blogs.sun.com/mwhite/date/20090219 Thursday February 19, 2009

How extreme can a motorcycle get?

Every now and then, someone decides to build a totally outrageous machine. I remember the guy in the UK who built a working 48-cylinder motorcycle by grafting 6 V-8 engines into a single power plant. I saw/heard a video clip of the bike actually being started up; it was a mechanical marvel, albeit completely impractical for any real use.

Well, enter German engineer Clemens F. Leonhardt, whose company, Leonhardt Manufacturing, has designed and built an absolute behemoth of a motorcycle, the Gunbus 410. Looking at the first two photos, it doesn't look that big, but scroll down to gain a proper perspective.

Get ready.....

A typical superbike-class sport bike has a 1000cc engine, which translates to 61 cubic inches. This baby is 410 cubic inches, or 6728cc's! The fuel-injected, 45 degree V-Twin engine runs through a 3 speed transmission with reverse and puts out 523 foot pounds of torque. The seat height is a reasonable 31.5 inches but overall length is an insane 136 inches. At 1433 pounds it might be a beast to handle. I'm still waiting to see a road test...


Posted at 12:44PM Feb 19, 2009 by mwhite in Motorcycle Mania  |  Comments[0]

http://blogs.sun.com/mwhite/date/20090211 Wednesday February 11, 2009

GlassFish Portfolio with GlassFish ESB officially announced

On February 10, Sun Microsystems announced the GlassFish Portfolio (see here). With this announcement Sun has also announced commercial support options for GlassFish ESB, including a price list.

You can see the GlassFish ESB landing page for details: http://www.sun.com/glassfishesb.

Here's a news link on Yahoo! Finance that mentions some of our customers. 

Posted at 11:45AM Feb 11, 2009 by mwhite in Open ESB  | 

http://blogs.sun.com/mwhite/date/20090210 Tuesday February 10, 2009

New article on Distributed JBI

My collegue Derek Frankforth has written a nice article about different ways to implement a distributed JBI system using OpenESB. The article is published on InfoQ here.  Anyone with an interest in using the features of OpenESB in a GlassFish cluster environment should read this article for some insights on how it all works. 

Posted at 07:50AM Feb 10, 2009 by mwhite in Open ESB  | 

http://blogs.sun.com/mwhite/date/20090206 Friday February 06, 2009

Bimota BB1 Progress

Here's the latest update on my Bimota BB1. Frank emailed me pics of the painted bodywork today. One minor detail is wrong; the fuel tank is supposed to be half black. Hopefully that won't be too much of a hassle for him to correct. But the paint looks fantastic in the photos! He'll be sanding/applying decals/clear-coating soon, I just have to wait for the corrected left side decal to get here before he can start. Oh and here's some amazing news on the decals - Don from Scuderia called me yesterday and Bimota still has a few of the decals in stock. Of course the one they are missing is the one I need, but they said they could probably make another one. So hopefully we'll hear back from them quickly.

Here are the pics:


Posted at 06:01PM Feb 06, 2009 by mwhite in Motorcycle Mania  |  Comments[0]

http://blogs.sun.com/mwhite/date/20090204 Wednesday February 04, 2009

Nice article about GlassFish ESB v2

ALT DESCR

In his article on developer.com, Kevin Meeks makes an interesting observation: “…introducing Open Source tools into any organization can be quite challenging, but an unexpected ally arrived recently which has increased the attractiveness of that option: Budget Reductions”. The article describes his recent evaluation of a number of different Open Source projects for an enterprise architecture technology stack.

Having used GlassFish for the last 18 months, Kevin was “…extremely pleased with its stability as well as the quality of the admin console”, and he decided to take a close look at another product coming out of the GlassFish community: GlassFish ESB. Kevin looked at what’s available in the OpenESB community, the uptake of the community, the cost model, etc. and liked what he saw. He concludes: "There are significant developments underway in the GlassFish project community, and as your SOA/EA efforts may face tighter budget challenges, there is real value to be leveraged by considering the GlassFish Java EE Server and GlassFish ESB project as potential core components within your infrastructure. The excellent integration with NetBeans IDE simply adds to the value proposition."

Kevin's experience is illustrated by a nice tutorial that guides the reader through the entire process, from installation to creating and testing a simple composite application. This is an excellent article for anyone wanting to quickly become familiar with GlassFish ESB.

Posted at 11:07AM Feb 04, 2009 by mwhite in Open ESB  |