May 31, 2005
On not knowing whether to laugh, cry, shrug and walk away, or gaze in fascination....
Dion Hinchcliffe is embarking on a project which I think I'm going to watch with morbid fascination: Taking Stock of Web Service Description. Specifically, he's going to put up a simple order entry web service, and publish a description of the service in a number of different candidate service description languages (SDLs). The mind-boggling part is the list of candidate SDLs:
"The list of SDLs to try to use is: WSDL 1.1, WSDL 2, NSDL, SSDL, WRDL, RSWS, WADL, Resedel, SMEX-D, RDF, RDF Forms, OWL/OWL-S, WSML, and WDL."
That's fourteen different languages. Plus he's going to explore how to use these with three different programming languages: Java, C#, and Ruby.
Back in the Craig McMurtry blog entry that I cited recently, he wrote: "One must grant though, that a primary and very good idea behind Jini lives on in Indigo. That idea is that there should be an excellent, simple programming model usable across any kind of networking infrastructure. In the years since Jini, though, we have learned a lot about how NOT to design those programming models, and those lessons suffuse Indigo." With all due respect, Dion's experiment demonstrates pretty clearly that there is no consensus whatsoever on the "how not to" question. It also seems to confirm what I said: that one size will not fit all, and that we're going to need a variety of technical solutions ranging from Jini to WRDL and beyond.
My joke
Before the web, the best Internet jokes were disseminated via the Usenet group rec.humor.funny, run by Brad Templeton. A discussion on an internal Sun email alias just now reminded me of my one and only r.h.f contribution
Music, maestro
Seen in yesterday's Parade magazine that probably accompanied a couple of million Sunday papers: an advertisement for a beautiful little scale model violin. According to the ad, it's a 1/24 scale replica, measuring 8 inches long.
Screw the violin, I want to see the fiddler who can tuck a 16 foot violin under his or her chin....
[This was posted to r.h.f on Sunday April 25, 1993, at 4:30 am EDT, apparently from my Sun workstation called tyger.east.sun.com. I wonder was I was doing at the office that early on a Sunday morning. Or maybe I was travelling, and logged in remotely. On reflection, I suspect that I emailed it to the moderator, Maddi, and she finally posted it to r.h.f. on Sunday. Just think of the mind-boggling level of detail that the web captures for posterity....]
May 30, 2005
"Brightest, but often mistaken as insane"
Another web quiz...
May 29, 2005
European Grand Prix (Nurburgring)
The story today is about tyres and gravel. It used to be the case that gravel traps were supposed to stop cars, quickly and safely, but in today's race car after car was running off the track, through the gravel, keeping going, and able to drive back onto the track. Schumacher, Alonso, Raikkonen, Massa.... And the tyre problems for Raikkonen, Massa, and others were spectacular. First, watching a strip of rubber from Massa's left front slice off the end-plate of the wing, and then just now, as I'm typing, Raikkonen's crash at the start of the last lap, while he was leading; his flat-spotted right front tyre vibrated so much that his suspension finally failed.
My man DC wound up in 4th place (beating Michael Schumacher!) after leading at one point; he might have been 3rd if he hadn't incurred a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane.
Oh yes, the result. Alonso/Heidfeld/Barrichello.
May 28, 2005
The art of cheese
As many of my colleagues have bemoaned in their blogs, the weather here in New England has been miserable for the last few weeks. However today dawned bright and warm, with a nice breeze: still a little humid, but otherwise a perfect spring day. So we headed down to the North End of Boston to poke around the Italian groceries and bakeries. We had lunch just across the street from the Paul Revere House, and visited it afterwards.
The people that "restored" it early in the 20th century seem to have brought more enthusiasm than historical rigor to the project. They actually reconstructed it as it had been first built at the end of the 17th century. To do this, they removed many of the features and additions that Paul Revere would have known when he lived there 90 years later. There's a lesson there, I feel.
Before heading home we stopped in Salumeria Italiana, a wonderful Italian grocery on Richmond Street, and picked up some bread and several kinds of cheese. Among these was a Blu del Moncenisio, which turned out to be one of those truly great cheeses that one encounters every now and then. I'm a sucker for blue cheese (preferably with a baguette and a robust red wine or port), and this was a marvellous example of the cheesemaker's craft. Recommended.
May 27, 2005
Did someone say "theocracy"?
The Indianapolis Star is reporting that: "An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to 'non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.' The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth. Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple's divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion."
What's really bizarre is that Bradford normally hears only criminal cases. Apparently he chose to get involved in this domestic matter because he read a "confidential report" (yeah, right) from a counseling bureau. "'There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones' lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages,' the bureau said in its report." So we're not just dealing with a constitutionally-challenged judge....
May 26, 2005
A bit of history: down the chute at CDG
I was sorting through some old (paper) files this evening and came across some photographs from about 15 years ago. They were of an event that, as you can imagine, I've never forgotten: evacuating an airliner by going down the emergency chute. Since several people have bugged me about this over the years, I thought it was worth posting the pictures.
In brief, what happened was this. I was flying home from Paris on a wet and windy November day: CDG-BOS on a TWA L-1011. We taxied out and started the take-off run, but just below V1 we lost the #3 (starboard) engine in a sheet of flame. Maximum autobrake but no reverse thrust, of course; the runway was wet, the plane was heavy, and we barely stopped at the end of the runway. As we turned onto the taxiway, several passengers reported smoke coming from under the starboard wing. We'd blown several tires and they were smouldering. Fire in close proximity to a wingful of fuel is bad news, and we evacuated via the port slides. For some reason I was sent down first to help to catch people as they came off the slide. A fire truck (visible in the second picture) extinguished the smouldering undercarriage, and eventually we were bussed back to the terminal.
Before they could make alternative travel arrangements for us we had to retrieve our baggage and carry-on items. So we were bussed back to the plane, and were allowed to re-enter (in small groups, under the watchful eye of the airport police) to recover our things. It was after I'd got my briefcase (and two bottles of the nouveau Beaujolais), while I was waiting for the remaining passengers, that I remembered that I had a camera in my bag. Standing in the drizzle under the nose of the L-1011, I used my last bit of film to capture the scene.
The first five thumbnails are the pictures that I took. I scanned them in and used Arcsoft's PanoramaMaker to stitch four of them into a composite. The original photos were a bit scratched up, but I hope you enjoy them.
Cultural dissonance
While the U.S.A. is getting its knickers in a twist over gay marriage, children's TV depicting a kid with "two mommies", and books by gay authors, DER SPIEGEL is reporting that "there is a very real possibility that Germany's next government will be a coalition between a woman -- who will likely become Germany's first woman chancellor -- and a gay man". Right on!
Wind, rain, floods, trees
A huge storm has been pummelling New England for the last couple of days, and isn't going to move out until later tonight. (There's a low of around 995 hPa that's been stuck just south of Nantucket, blocked by a Greenland high.) The folks at the National Weather Service office in Taunton, MA, say that it's the most severe storm in late May since 1967. Just down the road there's a huge tree (a London plane, Platanus x acerifolia) uprooted, leaning at 45 degrees and resting on the roof of a house. This means that my street is blocked off while things are cleared up. Elsewhere around the Boston area there are numerous reports of flooding, power outages, trees down, and other storm damage. In our neighbourhood, we've had about 3 inches of rain; last night we experienced sustained winds of over 35 MPH, with gusts around 50 MPH.
A good day to work at home, I think.
May 25, 2005
Liverpool! Liverpool!!
GO REDS!!!!
What a stunning performance by Liverpool tonight in the Champions League Final. 3-0 down to Milan at half-time, they looked crushed. Then in the second half they came back to make it 3-3 at full time. They survived several near misses during a goalless extra time, and won the penalty shoot-out 3-2 to win the title. Sheer determination. Congratulations!
(And now as the officials prepare for the medal ceremony, the Liverpool fans are singing "You'll never walk alone"....)
May 24, 2005
Blogspam: good news and bad news
I just checked out the Activity Log for my blog. I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the MT-Blacklist module that I installed back in February has been doing its job. The bad news is that in that time it has detected and blocked 5,109 trackbacks and 854 comments. (In the last 30 days alone, it's nailed 1,012 and 60 respectively.) Just think about the bandwidth involved, and then remember all of the unprotected blogs out there....
Munich 2.0
A less sanguine, and probably realistic, assessment of the filibuster compromise....
(Via Majikthise.)
A conservative admission over the filibuster issue
Professor Stephen Bainbridge (a law professor at UCLA) points out, correctly, that "The filibuster is a profoundly conservative tool. It slows change by allowing a resolute minority to delay - to stand athwart history shouting stop. It ensures that change is driven not 'merely by temporary advantage or popularity' but by a substantial majority." That, certainly, is conservatism as I understood it - the conservatism of Burke (who would probably have felt that today's neoconservatives have more in common with Jacobins than with true conservatism).
But Bainbridge's key point is this: "BTW, any honest conservative must admit that the only reason we're having this debate over filibusters is because of Orin Hatch's changes to the Judiciary Committee rules and procedures on matters like blue slips, hearings, and so on, which deprived the Democrats of the tactics that the GOP used to bottle up a lot of Clinton nominees in committee."
Of coure this merely provokes the hard right into accusing him of being a traitor and allying himself with "Demo-Rats". Yet another example of what Andrew Sullivan has described as the tension between "Conservatives of doubt" and "Conservatives of faith".
(Via Sully - to whom I offer best wishes - see Me and my virus.)
Phil. of mind books
Herewith an almost complete list of the books in the philosophy of mind section of my collection:
Annas: Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind
Aune: Knowledge of the External World
Brook (ed.): Daniel Dennett
Cairns-Smith: Evolving the Mind
Chalmers: The Conscious Mind
Chalmers (ed.): Philosophy of Mind
Chomsky: Language and Mind
Chomsky: New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
Churchland: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul
Churchland/Sejnowski: The Computational Brain
Crick: The Astonishing Hypothesis
Cummins/Cummins (eds.): Minds, Brains and Computers
Dennett: Brainchildren
Dennett: Brainstorms
Dennett: Consciousness Explained
Dennett: Content and Consciousness
Dennett: Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Dennett: Elbow Room
Dennett: Freedom Evolves
Dennett: Kinds of Minds
Dennett: Sweet Dreams
Dennett: The Intentional Stance
Dretske: Naturalizing the Mind
Dretske: Perception, Knowledge and Belief
Elton: Daniel Dennett
Flanagan: Consciousness Reconsidered
Flanagan: The Problem of the Soul
Flanagan: The Science of the Mind
Fodor: The Mind Doesn't Work That Way
Heil/Mele: Mental Causation
Honderich: On Consciousness
Hornsby: Simple Mindedness
Humphrey: A History of the Mind
Kim: Mind in a Physical World
Ludlow (ed.): There's Something About Mary
McCauley (ed.): The Churchlands and Their Critics
Millikan: Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories
Nagel: The View From Nowhere
Noë: Action in Perception
Noë (ed.): Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?
Parfit: Reasons and Persons
Perry: Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness
Ramachandran: A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness
Ramachandran/Blakeslee: Phantoms in the Brain
Ross (ed.): Dennett's Philosophy
Ryle: Concept of Mind
Searle: The Rediscovery of the Mind
Symons: On Dennett
May 23, 2005
How do you find interesting new single malt Scotches?
Over the years I have gradually expanded my horizons where single malts are concerned. I started with Macallan, went down-market with Bowmore Islay (excellent value), then ventured into the salty mysteries of Laphroaig and Talisker. Glorious! And I've tried various others, never straying far from familiar territory. A few were disappointing, but none were undrinkable.
Last week I was in my local liquor store picking up gin and tonic, and I decided on a whim to get a bottle of Springbank, a 10-year old Campbeltown. I naively expected that a Cambeltown might be comparable to an Islay: peat, brine, a hint of iodine. After all the two are practically neighbours.
It was AWFUL: a cloying, honey-like sweetness that just wouldn't let go. I tried with and without water: it was no good. So yesterday I picked up some Laphroaig and started looking for recipes using whisky. Any suggestions? And how do I avoid this embarassing mistake in the future?
Whither Pat?
One of my favorite ex-Sun execs seems to have been ousted by her new employer, Salesforce.com. The Register reports Prez Sueltz leaves Salesforce.com: "One source said Sueltz was 'devastated' over the parting of the ways with Salesforce.com. Sueltz joined the firm believing she would be groomed for the CEO position. Sueltz did not return our call seeking comment."
Although I didn't work directly for Pat in Sun Software or Service, our paths crossed frequently; several of the Town Hall meetings that she held here in Burlington turned into Geoff'n'Pat shows. During the stressful uncertainty that accompanied the big layoffs at Sun in the years after 9/11, I always felt that Pat understood the human side of things better than any of her colleagues.
When Pat first joined Sun, I was a little surprised (and a bit concerned) to see that she was was less confrontational and assertive than some of her peers (and certainly less than her predecessors - anyone remember JanPieter?!) Gradually I came to appreciate how effective she was in working behind the scenes, achieving her goals by patient persuasion, loyalty, and coalition-building. In talking with her it was clear that, despite her relatively low-key style, she cared passionately about what she was doing. I hope this latest event is only a temporary setback.
UPDATE: Looks like I was slow on the uptake - this story hit two weeks ago. I guess El Reg only just picked it up.
May 22, 2005
Book recommendation: "Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness" by John Perry
During my recent Philosophy of Mind course I acquired a number of fascinating books in the field. In a couple of cases I read the book immediately from cover to cover; for most, I merely dipped into the book when I bought it, promising myself that I'd return to read it properly when time permitted. Well, time now permits, and I've had a wonderful time over the last week reading John Perry's Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness.
Obviously the most important thing about the book is the argument: a careful and detailed account of a stance, which Perry dubs antecedent physicalism, that addresses the recent neo-dualist arguments such as Chalmers' zombies, Kripke's modal C-fibers, and Jackson's Mary. Now these are targets that many philosophers have been taking aim at over recent years; what makes this book so delightful is the elegance and economy with which Perry mounts his particular attack. I found his treatment of knowledge as including both subject matter content and reflexive content more satisfactory than, for example, the idea of distinguishing between "know that" and "know how". The way that he adapted the "centered worlds" argument (which I think originated with Chalmers) has caused me to re-evaluate my attitude towards issues of possibility and conceivability: I think that centering worlds (by agent and time... but what else?) makes some kinds of modal argument much more plausible. (But conceivability still feels like a very slippery notion.)
The thing that really sets this book apart, however, is the quality of the writing: simple, clear, and direct. Perry avoids both over-cautious pedantry and hyperbole. So far I have encountered relatively few philosophers that can achieve this clarity: Christopher Hill and Fred Dretske come to mind.
Highly recommended.
Monaco Grand Prix
Just finished watching the Monaco Grand Prix. Traditionally, this is a race where it's almost impossible to overtake, because the streets are so narrow. Not this year - just ask Villeneuve, Alonso, Heidfeld, Webber, Schumacher.... Congratulations Raikkonen and McLaren (sponsored by Sun).
BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Formula One | Live: Monaco Grand Prix
Lap 78: Raikkonen crosses the start-finish line for his last lap. And sure enough he cruises to a lights-to-flag victory.
Heidfeld snatches second, with Webber third - his first podium place.
One place back, Montoya tries to force his way past Alonso but he fails to make it count in the dying few hundred metres of the race. A thrilling finish to the Monaco Grand Prix.
May 20, 2005
Jini, Indigo and the "Highlander Fallacy"
In Craig McMurty's blog entry that stirred up discussion of Indigo and Jini, he mentions a piece by Don Box, in which "the four fundamental tenets" of service-oriented development are laid down. Craig further asserted that 'The "services" that one can construct with Jini do not conform to any of those four tenets'. Really? Well, given how badly Craig seems to have misunderstood Jini, I decided to go back to the source and see what the good Mr. Box has to say for himself.
So what exactly are Don's four fundamental tenets?
Boundaries are explicit
Services are autonomous
Services share schema and contract, not class
Service compatibility is determined based on policy
Plausible? Well, the first two are unexceptional, and describe Jini services quite nicely. I suspect the devil may be in the details. The third seems unduly coupled to a particular technology and language; if we replace "schema" with "interface" and "class" with "implementation", it feels OK - and describes Jini very well. And the fourth? I have no idea what it means, but on the surface it seems to conflict with the second (autonomy) and to overlap with the third. Perhaps we can resolve these conflicts later on. Let's dig into each of these ideas.
Boundaries are explicit: Back in the early days of distributed computing, it was considered a good idea to hide the boundaries, to make remote resources look just like local ones. This is what gave us remote file systems and early RPC schemes; in extremis it gave us things like Locus. Over time the wisdom of folks like Peter Deutch and Jim Waldo cured us of this. These days we all believe in explicit boundaries.
Box, however, introduces what seems to me like a non-sequitur: "Because each cross-boundary communication is potentially costly, service-orientation is based on a model of explicit message passing rather than implicit method invocation." Now this is bizarre. He's saying that because an interaction may be expensive, we have to describe it explicitly at the lowest level. Even if one is performing a higher-level pattern, such as a method invocation, one is required to unpack it by describing the individual message patterns and how they are correlated. While sometimes this may be appropriate, it hardly seems fundamental. For a start, it conflicts with the notion of autonomy. Why should a client and service, mutually consenting adults, be required to describe their interaction in such detail in advance? Why could they not negotiate a mechanism on the fly, using available resources?
Box goes on to say, "the fact that a given interaction may be implemented as a method call is a private implementation detail that is not visible outside the service boundary". But this is disingenuous. How detailed, how explicit is the message description? Either we give up on type (or schema) based notions of compatibility, or every interface requires a detailed description of request and response messages which will make the "private implementation detail" instantly public (and will significantly constrains the ways client and service can interact).
A final thought on boundaries: while they may be explicit, they are not necessarily static. Refactoring is a fact of life. In practice this means that software components will be constructed in such a way that potential boundaries are declared as such (using, for instance, the remote interface in Java), and services will be assembled and composed in terms of such interfaces. Describing a service in terms of a low-level message exchange pattern then becomes one technique among many for defining service boundaries, and one that is generally effected by a design tool of some kind. It's an implementation artefact, not a design principle.
Services are autonomous: Box's account of service autonomy is excellent. He discusses version skew, the dynamic nature of the aggregations that comprise a system, the effects of unintended usage, partial failure, and security. (He could also have said something about dynamic discovery, self-healing, the use of patterns such as broker and facade, and the use of techniques such as introspection to perform dynamic adaptation.) There is nothing here that a Jini enthusiast would disagree with.
Services share schema and contract, not class: Earlier I wondered if this referred simply to a separation between interface and implementation. This understates Box's position. He writes, "services interact based solely on schemas (for structures) and contracts (for behaviors). Every service advertises a contract that describes the structure of messages it can send and/or receive as well as some degree of ordering constraints over those messages." And he also says that "the contract and schema used in service-oriented designs tend to have more flexibility than traditional object-oriented interfaces. It is common for services to use features such as XML element wildcards (like xsd:any) and optional SOAP header blocks to evolve a service in ways that do not break already deployed code". So what we are dealing with here are relatively simple interfaces, evolving slowly, with weak consistency and ad hoc extensions.
Now there are plenty of situations where this kind of approach is just fine. As Box notes earlier, it's the kind of thing that made Amazon.com's services the success that they are today. But for other applications, this kind of thing is hopelessly inefficient or inflexible. For the vast majority of intranet services, for instance, the most common way to invoke a service isn't going to be by parsing its description and constructing a new client stub ab initio: it's going to be by invoking a copy of the stub code generated when the service was created. And if you're going to do that, why not take advantage of it - not just at compile time, but dynamically, so that the interactions with the service can reflect the characteristics of the deployed service? As for the suggestion that one needs more flexibility than "traditional object-oriented interfaces", mechanisms like introspection allow for powerful and robust run-time flexibility, without sacrificing type safety.
It seems to me that the fundamental principle involved here is the one I alluded to earlier: establishing a clear separation between interface and implementation. How we do that seems to depend on the application and context; there is no reason to believe that one size fits all.
Service compatibility is determined based on policy: It turns out that what Box is talking about here is the distinction between structural compatibility and semantic compatibility. The latter is familiar and unremarkable: XML schemas, class signatures, on-the-wire encodings, that kind of thing. But what Box is interested in is "[s]emantic compatibility... based on explicit statements of capabilities and requirements in the form of policy". He gives a few hints about what he's thinking of, but at this stage I think it's safe to say that he raises more questions than answers. Suffice it to say that this whole area is in its infancy, and it's not an immediately important issue. By the time we figure out exactly how to express such things (OWL-S?), how and when services get to " apply simple propositional logic to determine service compatibility", and exactly what customers want to use this for, our initial expectations are likely to change significantly. There's certainly nothing here that is incompatible with Jini.
So what's the verdict? Was Craig correct to claim that Jini doesn't conform to Box's "tenets"? Unambiguously not: Jini absolutely conforms to every aspect of Box's "autonomy" tenet. How about the others? Well, it all depends on whether you read the interface or the implementation: whether you concentrate on the broad principle, or how Box chooses to implement it. Jini is entirely compatible with the broad principles, but not surprisingly it's not going to conform to Box's Procrustean Bed of message-based service patterns. But why should it? Box gives us no reason to believe that this technology is the only way to realize the principles. It's just the way Microsoft chose.
I've already discussed why Microsoft took this path, but it's important to recognize that it's not the only - or even the best - approach. There are more powerful, elegant, and efficient models for realizing the principles of service-oriented distributed computing, and Java and Jini represent such a model. For Box and McMurty to argue that only one technology fulfills these principles is self-serving, not to mention ahistorical. The wide range of problems to be solved, the variety of contexts in which the solutions must operate, and the kinds of constraints and requirements that must be met, are such that multiple technologies will clearly be needed. As Jim Waldo pointed out, the "Highlander Principle" ("there can be 'only one'") is a fallacy.
May 19, 2005
Wrong premise, misleading conclusion
My colleague Warren posted a thoughtful and comprehensive response to Craig McMurty's piece on Jini and Indigo. I just wanted to point out another angle on one of Craig's assertions.
Craig says, "In the years since Jini, though, we have learned a lot about how NOT to design those programming models, and those lessons suffuse Indigo". Now from the Microsoft perspective, I'm sure that this is true. Over many years they had pushed a distributed programming model (under various names) that was inextricably tied to the Windows OS. (Yeah, I know about Mono - wake me up when it's real.) I'm quite sure that their customers told them that this was a bad idea; I know that some of them have said to me, face to face, "We have to work with you, because Microsoft doesn't understand decoupling and layering." But because of their obsession that Windows was The One and Only True Platform, Microsoft decided - incorrectly - that the only solution was to move to a (relatively) platform-neutral approach. As a result we got the wholesale shift to WSDL and XML web services. But because Microsoft still believed in the old COM model, and didn't want to give up any of the functionality, they were forced to layer tons of new protocols, starting with SOAP and ending with the WS-splat Tower of Babel. (And while some of these are open, not all of the schemas will be.)
What's wrong with this picture? First, most customers weren't asking for a new pile of stuff to learn! They simply wanted a distributed computing model that was decoupled from the OS and hardware platform, to give them some choice up and down the stack. And the technology to do that already exists: it's called Java.
Short digression: I spent some of the last year talking to large IT organizations (not all Sun customers) about their distributed computing plans. One of the questions that I regularly raised was, "How are you planning to integrate your existing applications into your future architecture?" And the answer that I heard over and over again was, "We're going to wrap them in Java." Never "Wrap them with .NET". (OK, one company was planning to implement a SOAP interface in Cobol, but...)
At the end of the day the idea of platform neutrality looks pretty lame anyway. The whole WS-splat mess has grown so complex that customers are going to be forced to treat it as another platform in its own right. And given the competitive sniping and politicking that seems to characterize these "standards", it's unclear if the result will be any less proprietary than before. The upshot is likely to be either (1) customers will focus on a small subset of the whole steaming pile (perhaps RESTful), or (2) they'll shrug, push the button in Visual Studio, and treat it all as COM++, just another proprietary stack.
The Jini proposition is very simple. If you are developing in Java - and many people are - it makes sense to use Java as your distributed service model as well as your application platform. You avoid the problem of lossy mappings between different representations, you get end-to-end type safety, you don't need to learn new languages, or exception models, or security frameworks. And as a bonus, you can use the best protocol for the job: you don't have to reduce everything to the lowest denominator of XML.
We wouldn't claim (most of us :-) that Jini was right for every case. Always mistrust sweeping generalisations! On the other hand, Craig seems to be doing exactly that: asserting that Indigo reflects the one true way. That's utter nonsense. In fact it smacks of an Aesop's Fable. Microsoft was assailed for coupling their programming model to a monopoly OS on a monopoly chip. Since they were incapable of distingishing between platform and OS, they were forced to go "platform neutral", and wound up creating another platform (and a depressingly baroque one at that).
Java and Jini suggest a different approach: make the programming platform independent of the host OS and hardware. It meets many of the customers' needs (as we've seen), and seems to represent a more elegant way of doing things. (And for those who argue that elegance is an inappropriate property, I recommend Samuel Florman's wonderful book The Existential Pleasures of Engineering.)
[Hmmm. On re-reading this, let me draw your attention to the disclaimer at the top of the sidebar, for what it's worth.]
New blogmeme - "three X's"
Picked up from soldiergrrrl (via Terry):
THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Geoff
2. Geoffrey (only my mother and the tax man)
3. ???
THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. geoff_arnold
2. seat2a
3. off_base
THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My hands
2. My hair
3. My good health (tempting fate, but still)
THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. Overweight
2. Collar size (19 - try finding shirts...)
3. Incipient RSI
THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. English
2. American
3. Social democrat
THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. Physical violence
2. Blind faith
3. Drunk drivers
THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. My laptop
2. A philosophy book
3. A pleasant surprise
THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. Glasses
2. CEC2005 T-shirt
3. My Treo 650
THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS OR MUSICAL ARTISTS:
1. Porcupine Tree
2. Al Stewart
3. October Project
THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP:
1. Shared curiosity
2. Finding the same things funny
3. Trust
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE:
1. At 54, it's time to plan the next 25 years
2. The most exciting thing is learning how little you know
3. I finally understand
THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE PREFERRED SEX(es) THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
1. Brain
2. Eyes
3. Smile
THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. Reading
2. Travelling
3. Listening to music
THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. Get over to England for a few days
2. Get my FY06 budget and goals sorted out so I can plan the rest of things
3. Simplify!
THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING/YOU'VE CONSIDERED:
1. Astronomer (as a kid)
2. Philosopher (as a teenager)
3. Historian (maybe)
THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. Painted Desert
2. Kyoto
3. St. Petersburg
THREE KID'S NAMES YOU LIKE:
1. Kate (& variations)
2. Chris (& variations)
3. Sarah
THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
1. Write a book
2. Fly in a glider
3. Surprise everybody
THREE WAYS THAT YOU ARE STEREOTYPICALLY A GUY:
1. Take things apart and fiddle with the pieces
2. Driving is more than just getting there
3. Won't ask for directions
THREE WAYS THAT YOU ARE STEREOTYPICALLY A CHICK:
1. Sentimental
2. A good eye for colour and fabric
3. Scent matters
THREE CELEB CRUSHES:
1. ? Don't
2. ? do
3. ? celebs....
THREE PEOPLE THAT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE TAKE THIS QUIZ NOW:
chris
kate
stephen
"Cluster" is so yesterday: try "flock". Literally
So this is what they're getting up to at my alma mater, as reported in Linuxdevices: "Researchers at the University of Essex are using Linux and tiny embedded computer modules to build fleets of unmanned aircraft that fly in flocking formations like birds, while performing parallel, distributed computing tasks using Bluetooth-connected Linux clustering software." Check out the project website for pictures, video, etc. And where are they going to present their first conference paper? Why, at the IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium.... [groan]
(Via Boing Boing.)
Cute tricks with fMRI
From today's Guardian: Scientists learn the taste of words: "Now you know why those restaurant menus wax lyrical about that succulent salmon on a bed of piquant herbs. The words themselves enhance the flavour. Oxford scientists today confirm what every sommelier has always known instinctively: that labels can trick the brain into a different kind of perception."
(fMRI = "functional magnetic resonance imaging". Check out the gallery. No, this particular image doesn't have anything to do with today's Guardian story, but it's too cool to pass up....)
PT@Somerville
A good show by Porcupine Tree. 
The band was really tight, though Steven Wilson's voice was a bit weak at times, as if he was getting over a cold. Fortunately John Wesley's harmonies filled out the vocals nicely. They did a number of songs from the new album "Deadwing", of course, but mixed in plenty of older stuff. Last time I saw them (at the Berklee in Boston) the best number of the evening - most energy, most inventive solos - was "Russia on Ice". This time it was "Hate Song": absolutely stunning. Both of those are from the "Lightbulb Sun" album, which is one of their strongest collections. And I was delighted by another oldie: a lovely performance of "Even Less", which is a personal favourite.
[UPDATE] The opening act was Tunnels, English, electronic vibes/bass/drums, fusion instrumentals, vaguely Soft Machine-ish. Not bad, not where my head was at. The PT setlist was: Deadwing // Sound of Muzak // Lazurus // Shallow // A Smart kid // Hatesong // Arriving somewhere but not here // Fadeaway // Halo // The start of something beautiful // Blackest Eyes // Even Less // ENCORE: Shesmovedon // Trains
May 18, 2005
at porcupine tree
grabbed some dinner at a tapas bar, and i'm now in the somerville theatre, waiting for the porcupine tree show to start.... blogging on my treo. good crowd, very mixed (unlike the LPD where most folks are goth). and yes, I remembered to buy earplugs!
May 17, 2005
Disclaimers, guidelines, policies and the like
With the publication of IBM's blogging policies, there's been a fair amount of discussion on the internal Sun bloggers' alias about our own policy. Tim Bray has a piece on the subject over at ongoing. I've never bothered with a disclaimer on this blog, since (1) it's not hosted at blogs.sun.com or any other Sun site, and (2) I have always felt that if a lawyer was out to get you, the degree of protection provided by a disclaimer would fall in the category "None at all".* Nonetheless I have reluctantly decided to follow my colleague, and have shamelessly plagiarised the disclaimer from ongoing. I've also taken the opportunity to reorganize the sidebar, eliminate a few placeholders that I never got around to creating content for, and generally do a bit of spring cleaning.
--
* From HHGTTG:
"Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?"
"How much?" said Arthur.
"None at all," said Mr Prosser.
My next laptop for Solaris?
Tulip have announced a rather unusual laptop. It's based on the new AMD Turion CPU, the successor to the Athlon 64, so it should run Solaris 10 in 64 bit mode quite nicely. However what caught my eye was the limited edition Tulip E-Go Diamond version, which has some "unusual" styling touches:
"Tulip E-Go notebook inlaid with solid palladium white gold plates in which thousands of brilliant cut diamonds have been set. The quality is V.V.S. top-Wesselton and the total weight is 80.00 Crt. The brilliant cut diamonds are microscopic and pave set with surgical precision. This magnificent end result is possible thanks to the use of brilliant cut diamonds with a large variety of diameters. A unique square cut ruby has been set in both Tulip logos. For the Tulip E-Go diamond project, Marcel van Galen Design worked closely together with Design Department product engineering and Laurent de Beer Master Jewelry Designer. Consumer price € 283,000"
I can see it now - PC Magazine comparison shopping tables listing CPU speed, RAM, screen size, weight, battery life, and carats....
May 16, 2005
Book recommendation: Japanese Graphics Now
While visiting the Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday, I picked up a Taschen book called Japanese Graphics Now. 
A big, handsome coffee-table tome (600 pages, around $40) covering all aspects of contemporary Japanese graphic design. And the piece de resistance: "We've also thrown a DVD into the package, on which you'll find a video tour of the coolest places to visit in Tokyo, interviews with art directors, filmmakers, and designers, and the latest and greatest television commercials from Japan."
(The Suntory "cherubim" commercials are delightfully bizarre, as is the one for WOWOW. As for the video tour of Tokyo, it brought back so many memories for me.....)
May 15, 2005
Refuting the argument from fine tuning
In my earlier posting about Antony Flew's Introduction to God and Philosophy, I noted that Flew had identified the "argument from fine tuning" as a "development" which future authors in this area should take into account. In this post, I want to explain what this argument involves, and why it is completely devoid of merit.
The argument from fine tuning is a derivative of the argument from design. (It is also one of several theories that have been associated with the phrase "anthropic principle", but since this term has been applied to various mutually contradictory theses, wise people will avoid it.) One of its chief proponents is the former astronomer Hugh Ross. A summary version of the argument runs as follows:
There are many fundamental parameters in physics which determines what kind of a universe this is. Examples include the Plank's constant, the mass and charge of the electron, the gravitational force constant, the speed of light, and many others. It turns out that if some of these numbers are slightly different than their actual values, our universe would not be able to support life. It is virtually impossible that the universe came to have these correct parameters for life by chance, because so many of these numbers must all lie in such a small range of values. So it appears that the constants of the universe were fine-tuned for life.
The being who did this fine-tuning must be God; without such a being, there would be virtually no chance that life could exist.*
At first glance, it is tempting to argue against this proposition on its own terms, by examining the actual values of cosmological and physical constants and calculating whether or not the proposition describes the circumstances accurately. The web site from which this quotation is drawn cites one such argument, and goes into great detail to refute it. However this is (mostly) beside the point, for the following reason:
Every intelligent species that observes the universe that it lives in will find that the constants of its physical and cosmological models of this universe appear to be fine-tuned to support its own life - even if these constants are radically different from those in another universe, such as ours. If the constants of a particular universe are such that life is not possible, there will simply be no species to observe this fact. And we have no a priori reason to say how many possible universes fall into each category, and therefore no basis for asserting how likely or unlikely life is.
Consider the following thought experiment. In another possible universe, the cosmological and physical constants are such that large dense bodies such as planets cannot form; instead, stars are surrunded by shells of gas. Stable patterns can form in this gas due to some resonance phenomenon, and over time self-replicating patterns emerge. Since this patterns can change, and gas resources are finite, Darwinian evolution will occur, and one may suppose that in time intelligence may arise. Such cloud-creatures might develop cosmology and physics, and may think to themselves, "How fortunate we are that the constants of the universe are so finely tuned. If they were slightly different, solid planetary bodies might form that would gravitationally disrupt our fragile forms; life as we know it would be impossible!"
The proponents of the argument emphasize the "fine" in "fine tuning", but this seems unwarranted. In any universe, every system of cosmological and physical science devised by a sentient species will include a wide range of constants and other fundamental properties. Some of these will be such that the overall system is particularly sensitive to their values; for others, the precise values will be relatively unimportant. Chance alone will dictate that some of these constants will seem to be finely balanced. Since these properties are largely emergent and are likely to be contingent in ways that we do not understand today, this "balance" may well be completely illusory. **
So where does this leave us? Every intelligent life form in any universe will necessarily perceive a "fine tuned" situation, whether it is true or not. There is no reason to believe that there is only one type of universe that might support life, no way to observe those universes that do not, no way to assess the significance of particular constants. (Indeed the argument is consistent with the hypothesis that a malevolent designer is manipulating physical constants to reduce the probability of life!) The bottom line is that the argument is a bust. It purports to derive an ontological statement from a contigent epistemological argument, but the unquantifiable character of the argument renders it meaningless.
--
* I struck out the final sentence because it is such a grotesque non-sequitur that I'm sure no reasonable person would want to be associated with it.
** In his important new book A Different Universe - reinventing physics from the bottom down, the Nobel physicist Robert Laughlin makes the point that many of the "laws" of chemistry and physics are dramatically insensitive to precise numbers, pure samples, and other properties that we might expect to be important. Since we only know the large-scale properties of one universe - this one - we are on very shaky ground if we presume certain kinds of sensitivity.
Antony Flew: at last, the book
The story so far...
Last year there was a flurry of media attention around the "revelation" that Antony Flew, the British philosopher, had renounced his lifelong atheism and now believed in god. The main impetus for this was the publication of a book and video of a "debate" between Flew and a number of Christian writers and philosophers. In response to questions from various people, Flew made a number of comments, which I documented in previous blog entries. He also advised people to wait for the new edition of his 1966 book God and Philosophy, and promised that the new introduction to that book would answer all questions. I have now obtained a copy of this. Now read on....
First, a comment on the book itself. It was out of print, and has now been reissued by Prometheus Books. Apart from a Publisher's Forward and the new Introduction, the text is unchanged, so if you already have God and Philosophy (also published as God: A Critical Enquiry) you should only buy this if you really have to have the new Introduction - 7 pages, plus a page of end-notes. As for the place of this book in a library of the philosophy of religion, I'd recommend it only for "completists"; it has largely been superceded by newer treatments of the subject.
"But what does he say in the Introduction?", I can hear you asking. The short answer is: nothing earth-shattering. Flew does not claim any particular position, whether atheist, desist, theist, or whatever. (Indeed if it were not for the Publisher's Forward by Paul Kurtz of SUNY Buffalo, there would be little reason to pay much attention to the Introduction.) Rather, Flew lists a number of recent developments which "any intending successor to God and Philosophy would need to take into account", but without indicating whether such developments have caused him to change his position. As Kurtz notes, there were four drafts of the Introduction submitted to Prometheus, and "it is up to the readers of his final introduction published below to decide whether or not he has abandoned his earlier views."
Those who were looking for a definitive answer to l'affaire Flew can stop reading here. Those who would like to dig for clues will presumably want to learn which "recent developments" Flew considers significant. Let's examine them in order.
Flew first draws attention to the "multiverse" theory, citing Geneziano and Paul Davies. He doesn't explain why this is relevant, and in re-reading his treatments of the Cosmological Argument and other classical moves, I couldn't see how they would be changed by replacing the Big Bang by a multiverse model. (One form of the multiverse idea would rehabilitate the notion of an infinite chain of causation. Since this would presumably remove any need for an "uncaused cause", it wouldn't give comfort to any theist.)
Secondly, Flew raises the "fine tuning argument". His choice of words is careful, yet disturbing: he simply says that "whatever [its] merits or demerits, it must... be allowed that it is reasonable [for believers in theistic religions] to see [it] as providing substantial confirmation of their own antecedent religious beliefs." But this, surely, is beside the point: believers have many reasons for their positions which are wholly out of the scope of rational inquiry. The fine tuning argument would only be relevant to a successor to God and Philosophy if it constituted a substantial move in the debate. And it doesn't: it is a wholly specious proposition that falls apart under even a cursory examination. (I'll defend this position in a subsequent blog posting, for reasons of space.)
The third point that Flew raises is that of abiogenesis: how the first forms of life on Earth might have arisen from inanimate matter. Flew is "delighted to be assured" that science has this question in hand, and cites Richard Carrier's excellent papers on the subject.
The fourth "development" is puzzling. Flew simply draws attention to Roy Abraham Varghese's book The Wonder of the World, and says that it "provides an extremely extensive argument of the inductive argument from the order of nature". Now Flew's review of this book is on the web. In it, he wrote "until a satisfactory naturalistic explanation has been developed, there would appear to be room for an Argument to Design at the first emergence of living from non-living matter.... You have in your book deployed abundant evidence indicating that it is likely to be a very long time before such naturalistic explanations are developed, if indeed there ever could be." Thereafter Flew noted that his views diverged with Varghese. Yet just above we noted that Flew was "delighted" that the scientific accounts of abiogenesis were in good order. So which is it?
The fifth "development" cited by Flew is a "revival", due to David Conway, of "the classical conception of philosophy" and the Aristotelian notion of god. If one re-reads the original text of God and Philosophy, it seems that Flew has already considered all of the points that he raises (at inordinate length) in this "development"; there is, literally, nothing new here.
Finally, Flew says that "mention must be made of the radically new and extremely comprehensive case for the existence of the Christian God made by Richard Swinburne in his Is There a God?" Radically new? Why haven't we been told?! In fact, as Flew is forced to admit, Swinburne's argument, "is, like the fine tuning argument, something that [believers] may very reasonably see as... confirmation." For myself, I found Swinburne's arguments remarkably unoriginal: he merely recycles the Paley argument for design and then makes an unsupported move from designer to personal montheistic deity.
So what's the verdict? My reading is that Flew got drawn into an unsustainable position, realized his mistakes (as noted in my earlier blog entries), backed off, and removed anything controversial from the Introduction. However he still felt compelled by duty of friendship to give a favorable reference to those that he corresponded with during 2004: Varghese, Swinburne, and Conway. The end result, despite Paul Kurtz's attempt in the Forward to whip up a controversy, is a damp squib. Oh, well.
May 14, 2005
Another vaguely philosophical web quiz
Seems a bit over-simplified to me, but never mind....
 | You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements.
What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com |
UPDATE: Amusing to see that David Chalmers took the same test, and came out as postmodernist.
That atheistic theory of freezing water....
Nice cartoon in Salon today by Ruben Bolling: Creationists challenge the teaching of water's freezing point. (As usual, click the thumbnail to view it. If you're not a Salon subscriber, you may have to jump through a small hoop.)
The punch line: The creationists found unlikely support among students in China and India. "Yes, America, we would like very much if you would teach your children religious dogma instead of science. We'd like their jobs."
Joining my colleagues in South Park
Many Sun bloggers have been trying to draw South Park characters that look like them - all because this crazy German SP fan Janina Köppel designed a South Park Studio using Flash. (And she did a really nice job of it.) Anyway, here's my effort - click on the thumbnail for a larger image (if you must)....
May 12, 2005
Texan infidels
In her blog, Eike Rathke of the OpenOffice team skewers the idiots in Texas who want to ban suggestive cheerleading: "Why don't they just burn some of them as it would be appropriate in God's own country obeying God's own laws?" Indeed. If you really believe in infallible, unalterable religious texts, you can't afford to pick and choose.
(Plus Eike includes a really cool Manga animated GIF....)
Required reading for anyone using Mac OS X "Tiger"
Joy-joy: "Safari / Dashboard vulnerability in OS X 10.4"
And this Widget Manager preference pane might be useful, too.
[Right now I'm running without any widgets in the Dashboard, and I've disabled Spotlight indexing - see man mdutil. The system feels much more stable and predictable - virtually no spinning beachballs....]
May 11, 2005
That's that, then
So that's the end of the Philosophy of Mind course that I've been taking. Lectures, check. Term paper, check. Final exam, check. Now I wait to hear how I did.
I came out of the final exam feeling pretty good about it. Yes, I'd blanked on two of the short disambiguation questions (on Block's psychofunctionalism and Rosenthal's HOT), but I felt that the essays were OK, if slightly unbalanced (9 pages for one, 6 for the other). Now, of course (a couple of hours later) all I can think of is the defects: what I forgot to include, why I wasted time on McGinn instead of talking more about Churchland, why I didn't say more about how varieties of functionalism might be compatible with dualism, etcetera. However I guess that's only to be expected.
And now I've got this philosophy-shaped hole in my life! I'm not taking any courses this summer (too many potential distractions), so until the Fall Semester I guess I'm going to be reduced to reading some of the (many) books I acquired during the course. Summer reading, sitting on the deck, with a long cold drink... it could be worse.
May 10, 2005
Too busy revising to blog
I've been so busy revising for my Philosophy of Mind final on Wednesday that blogging has had to take a back seat. Yet while I wrestle with questions like Brentano's view of the intentionality of mental phenomena, I'm concerned that one of the biggest challenges is going to be mechanical: handwriting. The two hour exam will include a short multiple choice section and two essays. I don't think I've handwritten more than half a page at a sitting since the mid-1970s. There's a real danger that I'll hand in a bunch of stuff that's completely illegible....
May 08, 2005
Raikonnen in Spain
Today's F1 Grand Prix was from Spain, and once again it was being televised on network TV five hours after the event. Again I face the dilemma: whether to avoid all sources of news so that I can watch the race without knowing the result. I decided to do so, with some difficulty - even my screen-saver is a news channel! (Mac OS X "Tiger" includes a cool RSS reader screen saver.)
An impressive performance from McLaren (which is sponsored by Sun - so where do I find a T-shirt?) and Kimi. Ferrari's awful season continues: perhaps Bridgestone tyres should quit....
May 06, 2005
Caesar's Bath thread: "what's all the fuss about?"
Interesting blog meme spotted over at Glorfindel of Gondolin's blog: the Caesar's Bath question: 'list five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can't really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), "Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice."'. So let's see....
Celebrity TV poker: The latest TV fashion seems to be to stick actors, or sports personalities, or whatever around a card table and viodeotape them playing poker. Tedious.... I'd rather watch the actors act, or the sportspeople do sporty things.
SUVs: They're ugly, inefficient, and seem to encourage thoughtless, selfish behaviour on the part of their drivers. When I pull into the Sun parking lot next to an SUV, and an otherwise blameless colleague climbs out of it, I never know what to say. ("Are you compensating for something, perhaps?" No, that's tacky.)
TiVo: OK, I know that a couple of times I've been rescued by people with TiVos (when I forgot to record a program), but some people seem to live for their TiVos. They spend ages discussing TiVo hacks, complicated configurations of TiVo boxes and satellite receivers, and so forth....
The Matrix: It's not just friends and colleagues. Even philosphy professors seize on the film as an explanatory device. (Think "brains in vats".) But it wasn't even a good film.... (The Animatrix, a DVD of Matrix backstory details by various anime film-makers, was vastly superior to the film itself.)
Blog hit counts (or page ranks, or whatever): Some of the bloggers I know seem to be obsessed with knowing how many people are reading their stuff. C'mon guys: with all the aggregators around, and spiders (which are getting increasingly clever at disguising themselves), and spambot probes, you can't believe any of the numbers. Just relax and have fun - OK?
May 05, 2005
Updated blogroll
Just updated my blogroll to include four philosophy-related blogs: Majikthise, David Chalmers (the "philosophical zombies" guy), The Web of Belief (a group blog authored by fellow students from Tufts), and Ignacio's individual blog. In addition, I came across Chalmers' useful list of philosophy-related blogs (which needs pruning, but never mind).
The new Al Stewart album
Just listening to tracks from the new Al Stewart album, "Beach Full of Shells" on a great Internet radio station: Radio Frontiers. A nice mix of old and new Al music, and a nice crowd on the IRC chat. The DJ, Peter, is repeating it on Saturday; I'll find out the exact schedule and update this. (UPDATE: 1pm EST.) No special software needed, really: I'm using iTunes. (Oskar reports that WinAMP with the MP3Pro plugin is crisper.)
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity
In conjunction with getting my new car, we decided to donate my Mazda Miata to charity (specifically to the Lupus Foundation of America). After filling out a form on their website, we were contacted by the company that handles the transport for them (and many other charities, I imagine), and they came to take it away. Just two more things to do: cancel the insurance, and take the plates back to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. It turns out that the former depends on the latter, so tomorrow morning I'll be stopping in at the Watertown RMV to return the plates.
While I was at the RMV website, checking on opening times and so forth, I started thinking about whether to get a custom, "vanity" license plate for the new car. Here in Massachusetts, the rules for cars are simple: 2-6 letters, letters that might be confused with digits can only be used in "recognizable words", and nothing "inappropriate". (You can use digits, but there are too many restrictions - they want to keep their options open.) And you can check online to see which combinations might be available. To my surprise, all of the following were reportedly free:
GEOFF
GEOFFA
EVOLVE
EVOLTN
EVLUTN
DARWIN
SECULR
HHGTTG
Hmmmm......
UPDATE: I'm going to apply for EVOLVE. They shouldn't have any problem with that....
UPDATE: It turns out that EVOLVE had (just) been taken. Curses, foiled again...! So I went with my second choice, DARWIN. Quite apart from affirming evolution through natural selection, and celebrating one of the most influential scientists in history, there's a nice Mac geek connection too.
HHGTTG - oh dear.
Saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this evening. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. You know it's bad when the high point is spotting the old Marvin robot (from the BBC TV series) queuing in the Vogon office. And to those who say that it's what Douglas would have wanted - yes, I agree, it's full of things that exemplify his weakest tendencies. Douglas's strength was satirical dialog, skewering pompous bureaucratic gobbledygook and content-free marketing pablum with equal energy. However, he was also a geek, always fascinated with shiny toys - even if he didn't know how to use them properly. Giving Douglas a large SFX budget was like giving a bipolar wine-taster the keys to the cellar. He was (admirably) obsessed with the environment, and endangered species; his book Last Chance To See is wonderful. But that doesn't mean turning HHGTTG into a "green" manifesto. It's a comedy, dammit! (But I noticed that hardly anyone in the cinema was laughing - including me.)
And whoever wrote that stupid theme song should be forcibly re-educated and compelled to take up a new line of work.
May 04, 2005
On the unreliability of imagination...
“Our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very little to do with the possibility of the thing itself; but is in truth very much an affair of accident, and depends on the past history and habits of our own minds.”
Mill, J. S. 1874, A System of Logic, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers
May 02, 2005
Help with Lupus (not money, just lobbying)
If you have a moment, please check out this Action Alert from the Lupus Foundation of America. They're not after your money; they just want a little help in getting the attention of Congress-critters who seem to have difficulty distinguishing between the urgent and the important. (Ritalin for all of 'em: that's my prescription.)
And thanks. Many thanks.
May 01, 2005
More on Tiger Mail
Having dug into this a little, I can confirm that when the new Mail.app converted my existing cached IMAP folders to the new format, it left the old messages in place. For example, I have a folder called CoolTech which has 4281 messages totalling 18.1MB. (I got this from the cool new Account Info window in Mail.app.) If I drill down into ~/Library/Mail/IMAPxxx/AAtech/CoolTech.imapmbox I can see two subdirectories: CachedMessages and Messages. Each contains about 4,300 files. (Remember: I've been receiving new messages and deleting some since I did the Tiger upgrade.)
So we've established that upgrading to Tiger will double your on-disk mailbox usage - at least, if you're an IMAP user: I don't know about POP. The question is, how to clean up? How about the Rebuild command? The Help describes it thus:
For IMAP accounts, the table of contents file is moved aside, and locally cached messages are also discarded. All the messages are retrieved again from the server to your hard disk and the table of contents file is rebuilt from the newly downloaded messages and from data in the old table of contents file.
So let's go ahead and try it.... [long pause with lots of network and disk activity] No, it doesn't work. Or rather, it works exactly as advertised: all of the message files in the new Messages subdirectory were refreshed, but the old CachedMessages directory was left untouched.
Obviously I know how to walk the tree deleting the old stuff (using find in a Terminal window), but it's odd that Apple didn't provide for this.