Really brief this time – I have to get to bed; I’m supposed to be on a 5:30am flight from BOS to PHL tomorrow morning. (Customer visit.)
I’m an “early Stones” kind of guy: I’m afraid that I lost interest after Sticky Fingers. The great thing about this live-in-the-studio album Stripped is that they get back to their roots without a trace of sentimentality. They absolutely rip into Street Fighting Man and never let up. Great blues, kick-ass rock. Even Angie sounds good – much better than the original version. Essential stuff – and the multimedia content is nicely done too.
Monthly Archives: August 2004
Confessions of a biblioholic
It’s always dangerous to let me loose in a bookshop. Today I think I went a little over the top. Let me share the list of my acquisitions with you, in the “full disclosure” style of some self-help groups. Perhaps it will help. (But what would success look like?) In no particular order:
- Doom 3 Prima Official Game Guide
- BBC: The Weather by John Lynch (glorious coffee-table book on all aspects of the weather)
- Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton
- Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King (A colleague read about my Dark Tower project and insisted that I should read this one. “Stephen King nails the 60s and Vietnam.”)
- The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (mixed reviews, but interesting)
- Cowboy Bebop #1 by Yutaka Nanten and Hajime Yatate (manga)
- What Philosophers Think edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom (Interviews with Searle, Dawkins, Don Cupitt, Mary Midgley, Hilary Putnam and others.)
Hmmm… a depressingly typical collection. I’ve got to start thinking outside the box.
The subversive writings of the Supreme Court
Just when you think things couldn’t get any more absurd… The Memory Hole is reporting a truly Orwellian attempt at censorship by the Justice Department. The ACLU had filed some documents as part of its ongoing case against the Patriot Act, and the Justice Department – as is their right, apparently – chose to black out portions of the material before it was published. The supreme irony is that the text that they blacked out is taken from a Supreme Court decision:
“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”
Fortunately, the court rejected this redaction. I would love to read an interview with the Justice Department staffer who tried to censor the words of the Supreme Court. What mental processes were involved, I wonder. Any lawyers out there?
Interrelated aspects of interaction
For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out how to write up an idea that’s been bugging me. I think it’s an interesting idea, but until I can actually write it up I won’t be sure. So today I just decided to blurt it out into the blog, relatively unformed, certainly unfinished, definitely half-baked.
There seems to be an expectation today that distributed computing means web services – or that it will do, just as soon as the various standard bodies and corsortia get their acts together. I’m unconvinced. I see three ways – three axes, if you like – in which there are strong arguments for widely differing and incompatible positions; when you combine these, you get a 3D design space which is much bigger than what web services aficionados would claim. (And just to be even-handed, it’s also way beyond what we can do naturally with things like Jini and RMI.)
I’m just going to describe these three axes, without attempting much justification. Zealots can argue all they want….
- The first axis is interface typing. At one extreme, a service can only accept a message of a single type, encoded in one way; if the request doesn’t match exactly, no interaction is possible. (Think CORBA or RMI.) At the other extreme, a service will accept any type of message, although of course it may have to reply “Sorry, I don’t understand”.
- The second axis is control. At one extreme, the behaviour of the client and the service is rigidly specified, and the binding between the two is explicitly controlled and predictable. (Choreography languages, workflows, message exchange patterns, protocol FSMs come to mind.) At the other extreme, components are substantially autonomous; a client can search for a service at run time, a service can choose to delegate a request to a third party, and parties can renegotiate their interaction patterns on the fly.
- The third axis is synchronicity. At one extreme is the traditional synchronous request-response style, which is directly derived from the procedure call paradigm. The service is essentially passive; indeed we usually draw this interaction with a single thread of control running from client to server. There are other synchronous interaction patterns, typically described by state machines. At the other end of the spectrum, messages may be sent between the parties without temporal constraints. Partners may repeat messages, “interrupt” each other, or even “change the subject”. (I don’t want to get into the definition of [a]synchronous right now – that’s a whole blog piece on its own. Let me just say that it’s about the pattern, not the implementation technique; I’m not interested in dependency on a transport connection or blocking i/o.)
To summarise, we have:
Interface typing, from strongly typed to untyped
Control, from choreographed to autonomous
Synchronicity, from synchronous to asynchronous
Now strongly typed, choreographed, synchronous is very familiar: it’s the classic RPC style. Untyped, choreographed, synchronous is what we find in the WWW today. At the other extreme, untyped, autonomous, asynchronous corresponds to the Holy Grail of the agents and semantic web community; it’s also a pretty good description of human beings, which should come as no surprise.
What I find interesting is that I can think of really compelling use cases for both ends (and some middles) of each of these axes. One size will certainly not fit all. And in some cases we want to have our cake and eat it too:
- On control: I want the elements in my distributed system to be substantially autonomous and self-organizing, to improve scalability and avoid single points of failure. On the other hand, I want to be able to define policies that will influence the self-organization, and to have ways of observing and measuring what’s going on.
- On typing: I want the safety and efficiencies that arise from working with predefined types with efficient encodings. On the other hand, I’d like to be able to refactor my distributed system by introducing generic facades for brokering without having to teach my broker about every service type that it might have to support.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. Now to see if it makes any sense in the cold clear light of blog….
"Free Lunch Republicans"
Terry just posted a pointer to a piece by akiru:
Waking up to NPR, as you do, I heard an analyst use a golden phrase to describe half of the Congressional inactivity on fixing Social Security. Free Lunch Republicans. Gosh that’s beautiful. It’s got such wide applicability. Everytime they trot out the old chestnut about “Tax & Spend” Democrats, you can reply that only Free Lunch Republicans would imagine that you can keep spending money without having some first. It’s particularly exquisite because there is that brand of “Libertarian” Republican who is only too fond of reciting TANSTAAFL at the drop of a rhetorical hat.
Please feel free to disseminate widely.
And so I am. And so should you.
"The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete in the urban compound."
Well, Marshall McLuhan’s quotation may be accurate, but sometimes the car feels like Heracles’ tunic steeped in the blood of Nessus. All of which is an absurdly pretentious way of saying that I took my car in to the dealers this morning, “unwontedly” as it were. I carefully described the shudders from the transmission that I had felt on my way home last night, and pointed out the blinking (and undocumented) icon that had appeared on one of the dashboard displays. And after a protracted examination, it was announced (“Do you want to sit down first?”) that the vehicle needed a replacement transmission, which would cost $3,000. (“Of course, you could opt for a transmission rebuild for about $2,500, but…”, said the service manager, shaking his head slowly to imply that only a palooka would do something so foolish.)
I rather wish that this was an uneconomic thing to do; that I could simply say “Hell, no!” and get myself a new car. Sadly, the car in question (99 Mercury Cougar 2.5V6) only has 65K miles on it, and the price to repair it is less than its trade-in value (Kelly gives $5,000, NADA gives $6,175), so I guess I’ll bite the bullet.
But I feel Heracles’ pain….
[UPDATE: Several friends have urged me to look into getting the car fixed at a specialist transmission shop like AAMCO. I’ll think about it, but the logistics are extremely complicated because of travel commitments.]
Update on The Project
As I mentioned, I’m in the middle of a project to read the first six of Stephen King’s Dark Tower books in time to be ready when the seventh and final volume is published in mid-September. I’m pleased to report that it’s going well: I finished the fifth volume, Wolves of the Calla, late last night (which provoked some weird and wonderful dreams!), and this evening I picked up a copy of Song of Susannah. At this rate I’ll be done well before September 21st, even allowing for a week in England between now and then. The trip to England – specifically to Oxford – will, of course, include at least one visit to Blackwell’s bookshop in Broad Street, pictured here. I definitely won’t run short of reading material….
"And in last place we have…."
Doug (who needs to get his own blog!) just sent me a link to a page which captures the strangeness of the blogosphere to a T. It’s a celebration of last place finishers in the Athens Olympics.
Art Deco at the MFA
We just got back from the Boston MFA (Musem of Fine Arts) where a new Art Deco exhibit has just opened. It’s organized into three sections, roughly 30-50-20 percent respectively. The first presents various ideas and styles that influenced art deco – everything from Classical Greek and Egyptian, through African and Meso-american patterns and colours, to Russian ballet costumes.
The second section is art deco proper: the tsunami of styles – individual yet linked – that were launched on the world at the 1925 Paris Exhibition. I felt that the organizers of this show cast their net a little wider than I would have done. Man Ray’s Electricity, while brilliant, doesn’t feel as though it has anything to do with art deco. Nor do the wonderful miniatures (postcards, really) of Josephine Baker; not everything in Paris in the 1920s qualified as art deco. But enough quibbling: overall, this section was superb. My favourite piece was Tamara de Lempicka’s stunning nude La Bella Raphaela (shown above; click for full size). The scanned image doesn’t do justice to the work, particularly the breathtakingly sumptuous reds of her lips and the cloth she’s lying on.
The final section showed the impact of art deco on design in the USA. (Recall that the USA was offered a place at the original 1925 exhibition, but, as the MFA’s program notes, The USA declined to participate on the grounds that �there was no modern design in America�.) There are some gems here, illustrating especially the distinctive “streamline” twist that America introduced. And the huge boxwood model of the Rockefeller Center shows how art deco ideas were incorporated into the design of New York’s skyscrapers.
Overall, a very cool show. I bought the t-shirt.
I may be distracted for a few days weeks….
I just picked up a copy of Doom 3. My investment in an ATI Radeon 9600 when I bought this PC is about to pay off. (Of course I could always step up to an x800 XT Platinum and crank up my pixel fillrate from 1.3Gpixels/sec to 8.3Gpixels/sec. A snip at $499… which is almost as much as I paid for the rest of the PC! Yeah, yeah, yeah….)
Actually, the choice of a 9600 was deliberate. I didn’t want to have to upgrade my power supply to 300 Watts, which a 9800 would have required. I wasn’t just being a cheapskate: I’m a software guy, and I don’t do hardware upgrades.