Geoff Arnold

Frustration and optimism

Collective frustration and optimism for a bunch of Sun engineers, marketeers, and managers is....

We're at a week-long workshop held in a secure facility, which means no network connections, WiFi, etc. So we all book into the same hotel (so we can share cars), and we obviously pick a hotel that proudly advertises free Internet access. And then the hotel WiFi goes out... for several days. The poor desk clerk, who has no control of things, gets harrassed by all and sundry. Just now, in sheer desperation, a colleague and I walked to another hotel just down the road and paid $10 each to get a few hours of our "drug of choice" - pure WiFi Internet, served straight up, no chaser.

Although it has been an occasionally frustrating week (bad weather, no opportunity to visit the city, not even a quick look around the Air and Space Museum, though we drive past it twice a day), overall I have to say that it's been a very productive one. It's always good to get a chance to work closely with colleagues from California, Colorado, New Hampshire, and England, whom I usually encounter as disembodied voices on a phone conference. As usual, the challenge is going to be sustaining the team commitment and energy after we all head home and have to work with out different organizations, with colleagues who haven't been a part of this workshop. Nonetheless I'm very optimistic about this particular initiative. We'll see. Kudos to my colleagues Brian Wong and Mary Vanleer....

The completion of "The Project"

I finished "The Project" last night: the reading of all seven volumes of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. I don't have time to write a full review right now, but I found the final volume very satisfying indeed. King feels the need to defend his use of metafictional elements, but from my perspective no defense is necessary: they are wholly natural in this many-worlds context. The penultimate truth - that art is our defence against chaos - was nicely capped in the Coda.

This was a most enjoyable project. The last time I did this (read all of a long series of novels in order) was when I was a student in 1970; I decided to read every novel by Thomas Hardy during one summer. Exhausting and exhilarating.

Getting to Washington (or rather to Chantilly)

Yes, I'm here - so yes, the hotel WiFi works. But the journey was interesting. The flight was United 861, a routine 415 mile hop in a Boeing 757 from BOS to IAD. I checked in online from home, and managed to swap my middle seat for a window - 30A. Boarding was uneventful, though the flight was absolutely full.. The pushback was delayed slightly, and the captain came on the PA to explain that there were aircraft in the "alley" blocking us in; he also mentioned that "radio communications are available on Channel 9". (This is my favourite thing about United - if corporate policy permitted, I'd only fly on United, just to listen to ATC on channel 9. But anyway....)

A minute or two later the aircraft was pushed back, and as it was, there was an audible bump. We stopped, and suddenly channel 9 switched from radio to muzak. Hmmm.... We sat there for about 15 minutes. Eventually the captain announced that during the push-back "the push bar had been bent", and he was "having a maintenance engineer check it out." After a further delay, we taxied out, and normal channel 9 was resumed. Obviously we'd missed our "slot" into IAD, so we were held at the "Bravo hold point" until the top of the hour (0000Z) before we were allowed to take off. (We also switched our call-sign - from "United 861" to "United 8143" - to reflect the fact that we'd had to file a new flight plan.) The flight was uneventful, and so was the landing, though I must admit I held my breath as the nose gear hit the tarmac and reverse thrust came on. We were about 30 minutes late.

In the "mobile lounge" that transports passengers between terminal C and the main building I caught up with the captain of our flight and chatted to him about the incident at Boston. What had actually happened was that during pushback the tug driver turned a bit too sharply, and rather than the tow bar steering the nose gear, it popped off the lugs on either side on the gear. "The tug driver isn't an engineer," said the captain, "and I wanted someone to take a look at it to make sure that it hadn't damaged anything." We talked about what it might have hit, and agreed that "it's better to fix these things on the ground - they're a bitch to repair in-flight!" Various aviation geek stories ensued. "I notice you turned off channel 9 when it happened," I said, and we discussed the fine balance between keeping people informed and alarming them unnecessarily.

So overall it was an very enjoyable flight, more interesting than most.

P.S. Chantilly is the Virginia community occupied by Dulles airport; it's also where my hotel is. Of course I take this on trust; the hotel is indistinguishable from thousands of others across North America (and now, sadly across Europe too).

From Hub to Capitol

Time for another trip: I'm heading out of here to fly down to Washington DC for a week's seminar/workshop/training. (Categories blur.) I'm going to be in a hotel close to Dulles airport, working in an office close to Dulles airport, and I'm not renting a car, so who knows if I'll have any time to get into the city? Last time I was there I went to a really cool Ethiopian restaurant not far from Dupont Circle....

And yes, the hotel has WiFi. So I'll be blogging.

The personal side of Bush's war

Three pieces caught my eye today with a common theme: the personal consequences of Bush's elective war in Iraq.

First, there was a piece in today's NYT about an ex-reservist who's been activated for duty in Iraq.

[M]y cousin Alan - the youngest - joined the Ohio National Guard after graduating from high school in 1997. [...] My primary concern was whether Alan was in good enough shape to get through the arduous training. Once that was over, he had to train with his unit for only one weekend a month and two weeks a year for the next six years. His name would then be placed on an inactive list for another two years, unless - as the recruiter who visited his high school had explained - our country needed his skills during a natural disaster or a college riot. [...] But two-day weekends became four-day weekends, two weeks stretched to three weeks, and full college tuition shrank to half the tuition for vocational school. Alan grew disenchanted with the National Guard, and [...] he was given a general discharge. His name was still placed on an inactive duty list - a roster he was told was only for an unprecedented national disaster that active-duty soldiers couldn't handle alone. [...] He packed away his uniform, and none of us ever thought about it again. Until last month. Alan received orders to report for "involuntary" duty on Sept. 12. In Iraq. For a year and a half: 545 days to be exact, with two possible extensions.

Next, I was reading PlanetSun, the aggregation of blogs for folks at Sun Microsystems, and I came across a piece by David Kordsmeier about his thoughts on coming across his (fairly unusual) name in the list of US casualties in Iraq. It's a moving piece, worth reading slowly and thoughtfully.

And then, as so often, I turned to Terry, and read his short piece on the moral issue at the core of sending someone to war. This is from an interview with Stephen Fry, quoting Bertrand Russell, as cited in Neil Gaiman's blog (and that pretty much captures the magic of the web right there):

“Don’t you understand? The sacrifice we’re asking of our young is not that they die for their country, but that they kill for their country.” That’s the sacrifice. To ask a child to kill someone else, whom you’ve never met. That’s a moral choice, pulling a trigger. Having a bullet hit you is not a moral choice. You don’t decide to be killed. It’s a terrible thing that happens to you. But killing something is something you do and that’s a desperate sacrifice.

Exactly. (See also my earlier piece on War and Morality.)

Equal rights for the secular

A thought for the day: from Fran Lebowitz's book Progress, excerpted in the October 2004 Vanity Fair:

Reversion of rights:
[...]
(3) All religious texts will be vetted and, if necessary, revised, by ad hoc committees composed of public librarians, English teachers, literary critics, and writers, in order to ensure that no representative of the secular community is in any way offended.

This seems only fair....

Update: Apparently I should have decorated this with :-) or otherwise indicated that this was intended in fun, as a reductio ad absurdum. Of course I don't want to vet religious texts, any more than I want religious types vetting, or censoring, secular texts. (And nor does Fran Lebowitz, I imagine.) I guess irony is out of fashion....

River's back

River is back with two new blog entries from Baghdad. Her thoughts on viewing a (bootleg copy of) Fahrenheit 9/11 are essential reading. Speaking about Lila Lipscomb, the mother of the US soldier killed in Iraq, River says:

I can’t explain the feelings I had towards her. I pitied her because, apparently, she knew very little about what she was sending her kids into. I was angry with her because she really didn’t want to know what she was sending her children to do. In the end, all of those feelings crumbled away as she read the last letter from her deceased son. I began feeling a sympathy I really didn’t want to feel, and as she was walking in the streets of Washington, looking at the protestors and crying, it struck me that the Americans around her would never understand her anguish. The irony of the situation is that the one place in the world she would ever find empathy was Iraq. We understand. We know what it’s like to lose family and friends to war- to know that their final moments weren’t peaceful ones… that they probably died thirsty and in pain… that they weren’t surrounded by loved ones while taking their final breath.

As for her comments on watching Bush and Allawi on television...

The elections are already a standard joke. There's talk of holding elections only in certain places where it will be 'safe' to hold them. One wonders what exactly comprises 'safe' in Iraq today. Does 'safe' mean the provinces that are seeing fewer attacks on American troops? Or does 'safe' mean the areas where the abduction of foreigners isn't occurring? Or could 'safe' mean the areas that *won't* vote for an Islamic republic and *will* vote for Allawi? Who will be allowed to choose these places? Right now, Baghdad is quite unsafe. We see daily abductions, killings, bombings and Al-Sadr City, slums of Baghdad, see air strikes... will they hold elections in Baghdad? Imagine, Bush being allowed to hold elections in 'safe' areas- like Texas and Florida.

Sad to say, I actually can imagine the latter. Maybe I need to get out more.

Debating WS-*

Tim Bray continues to discuss the relevance of the so-called WS-* stack: the collection of specifications related to XML-based web services. I'm not going to dive into the technology or business issues here; however Tim referred to a piece by Dare Obasanjo which argues that WS-* Specs are like JSRs. I tried to add a comment to this, but Dare's blog engine collapsed in a mess of XML, so I'll just post it here. Hopefully you'll be able to get back to read the original piece if you're interested. [Update: It looks as if my comment made it into Dare's blog after all.]

Just out of curiosity... if WS-* are like JSRs, what's the equivalent of the JCP? Where's the process documented, and what's the governance model? The statement "A JSR is basically a way for various Java vendors to standardize on a mechanism for solving a particular customer problem" ignores the fact that it's not just any old "way"; it's a particular "way" that has been publically codified, ratified by the community, and evolved to meet the needs of participants.

And then Mike [Champion] writes, "One difference of course is that Microsoft exerts a lot more architectural influence over the WS-* stuff than Sun attempts over JSRs. I think that's generally a positive thing". Hmmm: does this mean that he and his employer were actively engaged in JSR-171, JSR-215 and so forth, arguing in favour of stronger architectural influence by Sun?

Update: Over in LooselyCoupled, there's a response to Tim et al which essentially takes the position, "let a thousand flowers bloom, let mutually consenting parties decide what kind of daisy-chains to weave". My response is that this is fine until cookie-cutter garland tools start stamping out the same bloody flower patterns everywhere....

"Political Compass" test

Just took an interesting little test called The Political Compass. Yeah, I know it isn't new, but it's still fun.

I scored:
° Economic Left/Right: -3.38
° Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.03
pretty much as I'd have expected.

CD of the week: "An Audience with Tony Benn"

I know, I know: you see "CD of the week" and you expect music. Not this time. An Audience with Tony Benn is a double CD that I picked up in Oxford recently. It's simply a recording of the former MP and Labour politician Tony Benn on stage, speaking about politics and answering questions from the audience over the course of a couple of hours. Sounds boring? Anything but.

Tony Benn retired from Parliament a few years ago "to spend more time with politics", and listening to him one remembers that politics is about ideas - big ideas, about how we organize and govern our lives, and how power is acquired, transferred, and controlled. It's a refreshing - and somewhat wistful - realisation. To most people, he's identified with the label "left-wing extremist", or "socialist". While that may have been his assigned role in the bizarre game of day-to-day politics, here he simply talks about common-sense, uncomplicated ideas, with the clarity that marks a superb thinker and orator.

A couple of years ago, while visiting England, I turned on the TV late one evening and found myself watching an hour-long conversation between Tony Benn and Michael Portillo, the former candidate for the leader of the Conservative Party. Here were two prominent politicians from opposite ends of the political spectrum, having a quiet, civilized discussion about the state of politics in Britain over recent years. Obviously they disagreed about many things, but they agreed on many more - on the responsibility of those in government, and the dangers of the "politics of personality", among other things. They clearly liked and respected each other, and enjoyed the interplay of ideas. Voices were not raised, slogans and sound-bites were eschewed. It was wonderful. I thought of American politicians, and tried to imagine such an exchange occurring. Mario Cuomo and Newt Gingrich? Ted Kennedy and Bob Dole? Alas, my imagination wasn't up to the task.

Did I say that?

One curious feature of search engines is that they remember stuff better than you do. I bumped into this truth earlier this morning, while testing the new a9.com search engine from Amazon. I naturally(?) began by searching for my name. After getting the usual hits, I found a bunch of stuff I'd never seen before - things like email exchanges about the NFS implementation in the BSD/386 distribution, and JXTA discovery. And then I came across this article by James Odell from 2002: Objects and Agents Compared. This post-dated my active involvement in the autonomous agents community, but nonetheless James quoted me twice - and both seem relevant to my recent pieces on software engineering, such as this.

On synchronous vs. asynchronous interactions:
According to Geoff Arnold of Sun Microsystems, "Just as the object paradigm forced us to rethink our ideas about the proper forms of interaction (access methods vs. direct manipulation, introspection, etc.), so agents force us to confront the temporal implications of interaction (messages rather than RMI, for instance)".

On typing:
Geoff Arnold has considered the question of third party interactions which are very hard for strongly typed object systems to handle. Here, two patterns come to mind. The first involves a broker that accepts a request and delegates it to a particular service provider based on some algorithm that is independent of the type of service interface (e.g., cost, reachability). The second involves an anonymizer that hides the identity of a requester from a service provider. Models based on strong typing, such as CORBA, RMI, and Jini, cannot easily support these patterns.

Hmmm. I wonder what else I said. In the meantime, I'll happily cite myself as these issues unfold....

Sky Captain

We* went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow yesterday. Wonderful! Visually it's an art deco treat, from the searchlights over the skyscrapers to Polly's aluminium-framed dark glasses, from the Royal Navy's "air ships" to the ray gun. ("Just shake it.") And film buffs will have so much fun identifying all of the references.... I'm sure that when the DVD comes out there'll be a "director's commentary" explaining all of them, but until then it's going to be a great game.

This is one to see again.

* "We" being The Fellowship, the group that went to each of the Lord of the Rings episodes together, plus my son Chris, who's visiting from Seattle.

"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all"

Sobering reading from The Guardian, also available here:

According to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

And the politicians can't blame the military for this.

After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.

As David J. Morris writes in Salon:

The mainstream press has largely overlooked the fact that in the case of Fallujah, the White House unnecessarily injected itself into the military's tactical decision-making process in Iraq, ignored the informed opinions of ground commanders, and in effect micromanaged the battle. According to many observers, the seemingly contradictory U.S. military actions over the course of the siege were largely the result of the wishy-washy directives being issued by the Bush administration and its failure to appreciate the implications of sending in a large Marine force to seize a notoriously hostile town.

To both outside observers and former high-placed officials, including former U.S. Central Command chief Anthony Zinni and historian Robert Kaplan, it appeared as if the Bush administration had ordered the punitive campaign out of anger and then lost nerve when Arab outrage over civilian casualties rose to a fever pitch.

I don't care about Bush's ANG career, or even that he was a pathological liar at college. I care about the fact that he's demonstrated that he's totally incompetent, and that his bad judgment has caused thousands of deaths. He deserves impeachment, not re-election.

The computer is the network is the computer

In a recent blog posting, Masood Mortazavi waxed lyrical on the importance of the fundamental statement of Sun's vision: The network is the computer. He wrote:

In my mind, there's no more revolutionary concept in computing, networking and information technology than the motto which Sun coined in many of its corporate PR campaigns: The Network is the Computer. [...] Many others, including Tim O'Reilly, have opined on the motto.[...] To me, it has an almost esoteric meaning.

I added a comment that I then decided to reproduce here:

Masood: I agree absolutely. As a 19 year veteran, I have found that "the network is the computer" has always been at the core of what Sun means to me. Occasionally we get distracted: we focus on the components and lose sight of the vision; but we always come back to it. You've reminded me to do something that I've wanted to do for a while, now: grab the domain name thecomputeristhenetwork.com. I want to use it to talk about some of my thoughts on the future of computing. Much of what I do revolves around the question that Rob Gingell asked a few years ago: "If the network is the computer, what is the computer that is the network?" It sounds Zen-like, but there's a profound issue here. Hint: it's NOT a Von Neumann machine. And no, it's not isomorphic to a Turing machine. Turing machines are fundamentally synchronous. The network is fundamentally asynchronous.

The future of software - postscript

Jim Waldo expressed an understandable skepticism about my inclusion of autonomous agents in my piece on the future of software; I thought I'd share my reply to him:

I think that autonomous agents may be an ever-receding category, a bit like AI. Remember how every advance in AI would provoke the retort, "But that's just X - that's not A.I." Every time we add a bit more autonomous capability to a software component (advertisement, peer group discovery, self-monitoring for SLO, negotiating over a shared security context,....) people will say, "Oh, yes, I see how you can do that, but that's not REAL agent behaviour." Some people will insist that we expose the inner workings, and if there isn't an obviously "AI-like" mechanism like multi-level planning or BDI they'll deny that it's an agent. Whatever. [shrug] I just want software systems that are a bit more robust, a bit more tolerant of version skew, a bit better about proactive resource management and self-diagnosis, a bit more flexible about how they organize themselves with their peers.

The future of software

Many of my colleagues at Sun are busy blogging about the software technologies that they work on - Solaris 10 features like zones (sorry, N1 Grid Containers), ZFS and dtrace; Java platforms (J2*E) and applications like speech synthesis and phone games; even Perl. And all of this is important - as Bruce emphasized, it's important to articulate who we are and what we do.

I spend much of my time thinking about the future: about what cutting-edge systems and software will look like three or five years out. Now I know that this isn't fashionable: Jonathan's priorities for the year, immortalized here, emphasize the tactical rather than the strategic, and that's just fine with me. And I also know that for most people the answer will be "same as it ever was", because innovation in computing tends to be additive: augmenting rather than replacing. But the beauty of the future is that it's already happening. Check out two articles in last week's Computerworld if you don't believe me.

Have Jini, will travel describes how Orbitz built their travel reservation system using Java and Jini. To quote from the article:

Under the Orbitz architecture, a customer request to book an airline ticket passes to a Java servlet container -- the Jini client -- running on BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic application server. The Jini client uses the Jini discovery protocol to find a Jini lookup service, which sends a proxy back to the Jini client. Through the proxy, the Jini client uses the lookup service to find a Jini service that can do what it needs. The lookup service then delivers the Jini service proxy back to the Jini client, and the client uses the proxy to communicate directly with the Jini service.

Orbitz registers its 1,332 Jini services on multiple instances of lookup services for redundancy, so there's never a single point of failure in the event of a power supply or hard drive failure. It also builds redundancy into the servlet containers and the services themselves, scaling horizontally through Intel-based dual-processor PCs running Linux. The PCs act as servers in the Orbitz environment. "It's not just redundancy; it's also capacity," says Hoffman. "If you need today 10 boxes to service a particular request and your traffic doubles, we can just add 10 more, and it's not only handling twice the capacity but it's now twice as redundant as it was before."

While analysts are starting to label every kind of new software methodology as "Service-Oriented Architecture", Orbitz is running a system consisting of thousands of services, with a high degree of self-configuration and self-healing. It's a compelling vision. And it's happening right now. (Shameless plug: I used Orbitz to book last week's vacation trip to England.)

So what will all of these thousands of application services be doing in the future? Another article in the same paper, Agents of change, looks at the current developments of autonomous agent software. (This is an area that I worked on some years ago; some of our thoughts are summarized here.) Agents represent a paradigm shift as fundamental as object orientation: from building software as a bunch of reactive services and wiring them up according to a fixed pattern, to creating a community of self-interested goal-driven agents that can negotiate with their peers to solve complex problems. (The anthropomorphism is inevitable.) What I find interesting is that the ideas apply at so many levels - to application business logic, as described in the article, but also to service lifecycle and systems management.

What links these two articles is that today the technologies are widely regarded as rocket science, or even science fiction. It's tempting to hand-wave and assert that a little syntactic sugar and tool-building will allow us to transform these powerful techniques into Lego components for the journeyman programmer. Well, maybe. But we should also consider how they might be used to solve intrinsically complex problems - the kind of thing that today we don't even try to tackle. One size definitely won't fit all.

(The other thing that links them is that they describe how our customers are building the future today. And that's a tactical business opportunity - right, Jonathan?!)

Why no US TV coverage of the Paralympics?

As Boing-Boing reports, quoting the BBC's Stuart Hughes:

The Paralympics will boast:4000 athletes. 140 countries represented.525 gold medals at stake. 19 sports. There will be no American TV coverage of the Paralympics. Let me repeat that. There will be NO AMERICAN TV COVERAGE OF THE PARALYMPICS. Not one hour of live coverage. Not one commentator. Not one Olympian on the commentary team. Nothing. This at the same time that a record number of journalists are preparing to cover the Paralympics."

This is really shameful. I just emailed my opinion to the NBC Olympics feedback address. I recommend you do the same.

Contact

FYI, there's now a new way to contact me: first.last@gmail.com. Make the appropriate substitutions.

How come "pro-life" doesn't include the mother's life?

Respectful of Otters just posted a piece about so-called "partial birth abortion". It cites an article in Ms. about a woman whose baby died in utero at 19 weeks. She was forced to spend a week carrying a dead fetus inside her - bleeding steadily, at risk of hemorrhage - before she could be treated. Quite simply, no-one was willing to treat her, because the safest procedure for removing the fetus was proscribed under the "partial birth abortion" ban.

Excellent analysis of the strategy behind 9/11 by Juan Cole

Please read Juan Cole's piece on September 11 and its aftermath. I doubt anyone who reads my blog actually believes Bush's blatherings about the perpetrators "hating freedom", so I may be preaching to the choir, but this piece explains the real strategic thinking involved.

Heading home

We're flying home to the States today. The day started with the hotel fire alarm going off at 6:20am just as I was turning on the shower. That was exciting. While we were sitting outside in the car, waiting for the all-clear, I read Robert Fisk in today's Independent on the third anniversary of 9/11. Powerful and pointed as always. (Hands up those who knew where Fallujah was three years ago.)

After showering and packing, I came over to the WiFi hotspot to log in. As I started typing this, Morrissey's America Is Not The World started playing over in the restaurant. I've heard it almost every day while I've been here. What a tragedy, that Bush and his henchmen should so totally squander, trash, and sh*t upon the worldwide compassion and empathy that followed 9/11. And how depressing that Americans appear unable to see Bush for what he is.

Talking to people over here, mostly professional or academic, I find a curious attitude towards the US Presidential election. Of course they are interested, and of course they hope that Bush is defeated, but it's not accompanied by any great expectations. It's almost as if they've written America off: it's a hopeless case, perhaps it will come to its senses some day, but there's no point in thinking too much about that. (I saw one op-ed piece that pointed out that since the actions of the US had such an impact on everybody around the world, maybe we all should be entitled to vote for the POTUS. And the lapsing of the assault gun ban was the occasion for the usual head-shaking about the suicidal insanity of a gun-drenched culture.)

Of course this raises more questions than it answers. But that's for another occasion.

Update: We're now home - but not before experiencing yet another fire alarm: this time in Heathrow Terminal 3. Every passenger in the terminal was herded into the structure that links the terminal to the more remote gates, while ear-splitting sirens blared overhead. It was 20 minutes before the Terminal was declared safe.

Lucky timing

This morning we went into Oxford to do some shopping - some more books (surely not?!) and some items for my mother. Lunch time rolled around, and we decided to try a place in the Covered Market that sells authentic Cornish Pasties. (No, nothing to do with costume accessories for West Country strippers..!) While Merry had a second cup of tea, I went round the corner to the Auto Model shop, with a vague idea of buying one more model.

In addition to the man who runs that branch, the district manager was there, ranting on the phone to someone. When he'd finished, and saw that I was about to buy a small bus model, he jerked a thumb in the direction of a pile of large boxes and asked if I had any idea what was in them. "Take a look at these before you buy anything," he said, and opened the top box to reveal a 1/24 scale Sun Star RM8 Routemaster model. This is reckoned to be the finest bus model ever produced for retail; only a couple of thousand are being made, and all have been reserved for months. But he had one cancellation... and so I bought it, for £99, and arranged for them to ship it to the US for me. It'll be the culmination of my collection; I doubt I'll buy many more bus models after this. But what a way to go.

The use of TV drama to enhance fear and panic?

Last night I watched part two of The Grid on BBC. This is a joint BBC/TNT/Fox drama that "explores both sides of the escalating war on terror". Call me a cynic, but it seemed to me that the main effect that the producers were looking for was to convince the viewing public that (a) the law enforcement and counter-terrorism forces in the US and UK are mostly incompetent, and (b) we should all be VERY, VERY, AFRAID of everyone and everything. Carl Rove (Bush's choreographer of campaign dirt and panic) must have been delighted.

American cars are boring

OK, not all of them. But when I was driving down the M40 yesterday towards Oxford and was overtaken by a couple of Vauxhall VX220s and MG TFs, I wondered what had happened to the American sports car. The Corvette? The Viper? And while I was musing on this, a Ford Streetka blasted by. Now that's just plain fun. Much more enjoyable than the typical American SUV (with the aerodynamics of a brick and handling to match).

Unclear on the concept

As I noted, the Little Chef next to my hotel has a WiFi hotspot. For some reason, they turn it off every night at 10 when they close. And the manager hasn't told the staff that turning it on is part of the regular opening procedure. So this morning I came over at 7:15 for breakfast and a quick fix of Internet, and the WiFi was down, and the poor minimum-wage school-leaver who had just opened the store and restaurant had never heard of "WiFi" or "network", and thought that the manager "might be getting in by 8:15." (He wasn't.)

Oh well, things are working now (mid afternoon). But I wonder why they turn it off at night. It probably takes less electricity than the Budweiser sign in the window....

On vacation... where's the hotspot?

I flew over to the UK on Friday for a week's vacation. Good points: Virgin Atlantic upgraded us from Economy to Premium Economy for free; service was excellent. Bad points: the flight was oversold, and it took Virgin an hour to sort out who's on and who's off. And it was a daytime flight - I was neutral, but my wife preferred it. After the event, I am no longer neutral. Daytime eastbound transatlantic SUCKS. Instead of having a short, broken night which stresses your body into taking up the new schedule, you have a short broken day, so it's impossible to get to sleep. Never again.

Normally when we come to Oxford we stay with relatives, but this time it wasn't convenient, so we stayed at a random motorway-type hotel at the A34/A40 intersection. On Saturday morning we walked into the Little Chef diner next door for breakfast, and I saw a WiFi hotspot sign. "Heaven, I'm in heaven..." So that's where I am now. (And of course the setup time on my PowerBook was just as long as it took me to type in a credit card number to buy a few hours of credit. Sweet.)

The weather here is perfect, and forecast to remain that way for our stay. So more anon, with pics (and perhaps video).

I'm being traded???

While doing a little vanity Googling (speaking of which...), I came across this page: the BlogShare page for geoffarnold.com. It seems to be some kind of fantasy stock market in blogs; apparently my valuation is B$3,481.90. What the hell does this mean? Tim's valued at B$96,968.51, which makes some (relative) sense, I guess.

Amazing how people change over 3 years....

Yesterday the faux-Democrat Zell Miller spoke at the Republican Convention, and lambasted John Kerry mercilessly and with visible anger. He ranted that "For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure."

Yet a scant three and a bit years ago, the same Zell Miller lauded Kerry as "one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders - and a good friend". In a speech introducing Kerry at the Democratic Party of Georgia's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in March, 2001, Miller waxed lyrical:

"In his 16 years in the Senate, John Kerry has fought against government waste and worked hard to bring some accountability to Washington. Early in his Senate career in 1986, John signed on to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Bill, and he fought for balanced budgets before it was considered politically correct for Democrats to do so. John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public education, boost the economy and protect the environment."

Yes, it's amazing how people can change - and I'm not referring to John Kerry! Zell Miller should be bloody well ashamed of himself, if you ask me.

Thanks to Mark M. for the tip.

UPDATE: Apparently Jimmy Carter was also upset with Zell, and wrote to him to say so.

Interaction: Typing

[This won't make much sense unless you've read the original piece first....]

There are at least three issues packed up in this topic:

• An implementation issue, about whether the middleware even permits the sending or receiving of messages that do not conform precisely to a particular encoding and type/schema.
• The relationship between the type(s) of messages that can be exchanged and the description of the service.
• The extent to which message types are accessible, manipulable, and negotiable. Another way of thinking about it is how early or late message types are bound.

[DIGRESSION: For different distributed computing frameworks, we need to distinguish between feasibility (is it possible?) and idiom (is it a natural way of working within the framework?). For example, I can use XML to encode a rigid, unchanging message structure based on a well-known DTD; I can also use Java RMI to exchange opaque blobs that I interpret using some private mechanism; neither of these reflects the natural, idiomatic use of the technology.]

When we talk about "untyped", we must recognize that it's a relative term. Eventually there has to be a semantic match: the request must be expressed in a form that the service can interpret, and the response must be comprehensible to the requester. In that sense, the client and the server must structure their messages using mutually compatible formats, schemas, types, whatever.

Some mechanisms (e.g. CORBA, RMI or COM) bind the message type at design time. They depend on the use of software tools which typically generate client and server stub code that is, literally, incapable of handling messages that do not conform to this type. The client cannot generate invalid messages, and the service application logic never even sees invalid messages; they are rejected at a lower level. There are XML-based mechanisms that support this kind of model, using XML simply as an object serialization format.

In some cases it may be desirable to defer type binding to run time. This is particularly true if a service is identified by a persistent identifier (such as a URI) with no, or weak, type information. The most common example is a simple XML/HTTP web service: the client sends an XML message via an HTTP POST, and the service parses the message to determine whether it corresponds to a request that it can handle. In simple cases, the service only understands one type, and if the request doesn't conform it will be rejected. Semantically this is similar to a classic RPC; however it is likely to be less efficient, and the failure modes are different. However we are not restricted to such simple cases. A service may, for example, delegate the request to another, more capable service; or it may invoke a translator to map the request into a form that it can understand. Such examples highlight an assumption that is not found in the RPC world: that type matching is not always a simple black-or-white, true-or-false proposition. This in turn requires [or is that too strong?] that the message be expressed in a language that supports some form of composition.

[DIGRESSION: I was trying to imagine how one might do this in Java. Given a blob that represented a serialized Java object, one could deserialize it into something like a Java bean that supported introspection so that for each property you could obtain both accessor methods and type information that could be used by a classloader. This feels convoluted, but maybe someone has done it.]

The interface type is also involved in service descriptions. In some cases, such as Jini, a service description is based on the annotated interface type: it makes no sense to talk about discovering a service independent of its type. At the other extreme, a service is simply a network addressable end-point, with no type information specified or even available. And then there's WSDL, the web services definition language which is rich enough (or perhaps over-engineered enough) to describe a spectrum of service types. Although the specifications suggest that it can be dynamically interpreted at runtime, the complexity and (relative) rigidity of WSDL seems best-suited to design-time use. (Curiously, there is no standard way of retrieving the WSDL corresponding to a web service URI, although there are some common practices.)

So why is all this important? Well, as distributed systems scale in various ways - number of services, number of replicated component services, number of cross-domain service dependencies, lifetimes of services, and so forth - there is increasing interest in services that are relatively loosely coupled, with more flexible, less brittle, often asynchronous interactions. (Most of this is additive, not alternative: existing RPC-style services have advantages that are still important.) Maybe it's a throwback to the Internet mantra of "be liberal in what you accept", maybe it's influenced by agent-style anthropomorphism, maybe it's the result of overloading the simple HTTP protocol to do distributed computing, maybe it's just a recognition of a world in which version skew is a way of life. In any case, one way in which we decouple these components is by deferring type binding, from design time to run time, and by making the type of a message accessible to the application rather than being hidden below the marshalling and serialization infrastructure.

Is this a dichotomy or a spectrum? I can certainly identify a number of styles which I can order in various ways, so it feels like more than just an XOR. But that's all for now.

More on Interrelated Aspects of Interaction

I got a number of interesting comments on this piece. I think I'm going to follow up in a series of individual posts rather than one big chunk. Jim felt that most of the ideas were XORs rather than continuums (continua?). I suspect that this is because I was trying to pack too many ideas into each axis. Let's try again.