Hi folks,

I have some announcements to make.

First, I have a personal web site: www.CiaranMcHale.com. Actually, I
have had this for a few months but I wanted to populate it with some
interesting, technical articles before announcing it.

Second, an embarrassingly long time ago I started writing a book
called
"CORBA Explained Simply", and I have *finally* finished it. I am not
publishing the book in the traditional manner, but rather am making it
available free of charge from www.CiaranMcHale.com. Links on the home
page of my web site enable you to read the book online, or download it
as: a PDF file containing hypertext links for easy on-screen
navigation,
a "2-up" PDF file to save paper if you print it, or as a
zip/compressed-tar archive of HTML pages.

The copyright notice in the book says that you must not remove the
copyright notice but, aside from that, you can make copies of the
book,
give them away for free, sell them on eBay, and so on. Here's some
practical uses for this book:

    - Download the book and keep it on your computer as a convenient
     reference.

    - If there are several people in your company who work with
     CORBA then copy the book onto your company's intranet so your
     colleagues can access the book easily.

    - If you teach distributed systems in a university then give
     your students a copy of the book.

    - If your company has a CORBA training course that you teach to
     customers then your training course probably has lots of
     PowerPoint slides and some hands-on exercises but little, if
     any, textual notes to complement the slides. If that is the
     case then you can help your students by giving them printed
     copies of "CORBA Explained Simply" to complement your training
     manuals.

    - If you work in the technical support department of a CORBA
     vendor then you may be able to answer a lot of customer
     questions simply by giving them a URL to a particular section
     in the online (HTML) version of "CORBA Explained Simply" at
     http://www.ciaranmchale.com/corba-explained-simply/.

    - If you work in the sales or marketing department of a CORBA
     vendor then you might find it useful to give copies of "CORBA
     Explained Simply" to (potential) customers.

    - Some implementations of CORBA consist of good software but
     inadequate documentation. This is especially common in
     open-source implementations. You can help your users by
     bundling a copy of "CORBA Explained Simply" into the "doc"
     directory of the CORBA implementation.

Third, I have released a new version of my "CORBA Utilities" package.
This is a collection of portable utilities that dramatically simplify
the development and deployment of C++ and Java CORBA applications. You
can download this from www.CiaranMcHale.com. If you would like to
browse
its documentation on-line before deciding to download it then you can
do
so at http://www.ciaranmchale.com/corba-utilities/.

Regards,
Ciaran.