Serendipity

A few minutes ago, I checked in with the BBC Sports website to see how the match between Moya and Henman was going. Quoth the commentator:

Moya 11-11 Henman
And so the epic goes on, now to Mahabharata lengths. This set alone has been going on for over an hour and a half. Moya holds to 15 with two sensational cross-court forehands.

“Mahabharata”? Qu’est-ce que c’est? And I checked the source:

The Mahābhārata… is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India… With more than 74,000 verses… and some 1.8 million words in total, it is one of the longest epic poems in the world.

And how comprehensive is it?

With its depth and magnitude, the Mahabharata’s scope is best summarized by one quotation from the beginning of its first parva (section): “What is found here, may be found elsewhere. What is not found here, will not be found elsewhere.”

Hmmm. That sounds like the Wikipedia mission statement – or perhaps Jeff‘s ambition for the Amazon.com catalog! In any case, it’s an impressive citation from a sportscaster…

A depressing sort of milestone…

Like many bloggers, I log in to the admin pages of geoffarnold.com every day to see what housekeeping tasks need to be done. The section that generally needs my attention is Comments: moderating comments from new visitors, and checking the spam catcher to make sure that there aren’t any false-positives. In common with most WordPress users, I rely on a distributed spam detection system called Akismet, which does a really good job: I’ve only had a couple of legitimate comments flagged as spam.
Today I skimmed the latest batch of spam, confirmed that they were all correctly classified, and hit the delete button. Akismet responded:
Akismet has caught 20,000 spam for you since you first installed it.
Just to put that in perspective, my blog has received 2,394 legitimate comments, a third of which pre-date my use of WordPress and Akismet. ((I started this blog in December 2003, and switched to WordPress in December 2005.)) And to put that in perspective, here’s Akismet’s big picture…
Early blogging software didn’t include any kind of defence mechanisms, of course, and we’re still living with the consequences. Quite often I find that a web search will take me to an entry in an abandoned blog. ((And sometimes not even abandoned blogs! A few minutes ago I found myself re-reading Steve Yegge’s rant about the Next Big Language, which is still attracting comments four months after he wrote it, and I noticed a number of blogspam comments. I guess Blogspot doesn’t use Akismet.)) The entry may have attracted a couple of comments when it was posted, but since then there have been dozens (even hundreds) of spam comments attached. The search engine spiders are presumably smart enough to avoid the spam, but it keeps on coming. So if you used to run a blog that you’ve since abandoned, do us all a favour by shutting off comments. Think of it as turning off the gas and water in a derelict house: do it for the neighbours!

Still life

I just finished visiting the Jameson distillery. Before we started the tour, they asked for four volunteers, and I was picked. (Competition was fierce!) At the end, the four of us were asked to take part in a five-way taste test between three different Irish whiskeys (all made by Jameson, of course), one Scotch (Johny Walker Red Label) and one American (Jack Daniels). Among that lot, the Jameson was the clear winner. Of course we all required numerous samples to get the right answer!
Whiskey stills
Sorry about the pun…

Walking the streets of Dublin

I just spent a happy four hours walking the streets of Dublin, just soaking it up. And “soaking” here is purely metaphorical: although some ominously dark clouds rolled overhead, the morning was dry and mostly sunny. My favourite bit was walking through and around St. Stephen’s Green, a beautiful city park. Dozens of local artists were displaying their paintings on the railings around the park, and I was both impressed and frustrated; there were some stunning pieces for sale.
St. Stephen’s Green
Having started out at the Guinness brewery, I eventually wound up at the corner of O’Connell and Abbey Streets, getting a little footsore ((I was wearing the sandals that I’d flown over in)) and hungry. I decided to check out the LUAS tram, and rode it the few stops to Smithfield, where I’m staying. It’s an excellent system, and obviously very popular: most trains are full.
LUAS tram
And finally, when I returned to my hotel I found that my missing suitcase had just been delivered. So now I can change into some real shoes, and upload the pictures from my digital camera, and recharge my cellphone, and…
Oh yes – and have some lunch. Then this afternoon I’m going to visit the Old Jameson Distillery, just across the street. ((Web site is here, but turn the volume down before you click it; it’s a tacky, noisy Flash thing.)) Apparently visitors are encouraged to indulge in a “practical” assessment of their quality claims! And (weather permitting) I’m planning to eat at the Bull & Castle this evening. It’s a self-described “gastro pub” recommended by Mike McHugh.
UPDATE: The Bull & Castle was a great choice. I had a pint of Guinness (what else?) followed by a superb steak – possibly the best I’ve ever tasted. Highly recommended.

Travel woes

As I was walking down the steps from the aging Air Canada 767-200 to the shuttle bus that would take us to the main terminal at Dublin, I was mentally composing a blog entry about the flight. It was going to expand on my thoughts that even though nothing really went wrong, it felt like a mediocre experience. Mediocre food. (Dinner was four different ways to deliver fat; breakfast was four different ways to deliver sugar.) Mediocre seats. Mediocre, 1983-style in-flight entertainment. (The feature film was an art-house flop, and one of the supporting pieces was a random episode of the BBC’s Top Gear from 2003. I enjoy Top Gear, but it’s less interesting when they’re featuring obsolete car models.) No duty-free. (Not that I usually buy stuff on the way out, but it was as if they didn’t care.) And mediocre communications: the flight landed 32 minutes late, but the crew didn’t even mention this fact, let alone apologize…
That was before I realized that Air Canada had lost my bag. When I checked in at SeaTac, I checked my bag all the way through to Dublin. Somewhere (Seattle? Toronto?) they lost it. That kind of thing overshadows mere mediocrity.
If all goes as well as possible from this point, they will put it on the next flight and deliver it to my hotel in Dublin tomorrow (Sunday) morning. If it doesn’t go as well as possible… Well, sufficient unto the day and all that. Meanwhile I just walked up to the nearest Marks & Spencer and picked up some things to tide me over.
I was trying to remember the last time this happened. It might have been that terrible trip that I took in the mid-1990’s, when British Airways managed to lose the same bag twice! (The first time when I was flying from Heathrow to Stockholm, the second when I was flying from Lyon to Heathrow a few days later.)
UPDATE 5:49PM: A few minutes ago, I called Servisair, the company that handles baggage at Dublin for Air Canada, but I just got a recorded message. So on a hunch, I plugged my file reference into the Worldtracer tracking page, and it reported:
Bag 1 Status RECEIVED AT AIRPORT / DELIVERY PROCESS INITIATED
Which airport? Oh, well: this seems like good news, so I’ll try to be patient.

Doin' the Maple Leaf Rag

I’m at the Maple Leaf Lounge at Toronto airport, killing time until my evening flight to Dublin. I’m not flying business class or anything like that, but my United Red Carpet Club card was good enough to get me in. The facilities are w-a-a-y better than any RCC that I’ve been in recently – the booze is free, ((though my consumption so far totals 4 cans of club soda)) there are fresh veggie snacks, and the staff are really attentive.
My reading material for the flight is the Ruby “pick-axe” book. My impression after the first couple of chapters is that the language has lots of convenient features but there’s a certain amount of ad-hockery about how they’re brought together. When I’m learning a language, I like to establish a clear relationship between the concrete and the abstract levels of interpretation, and the concrete syntax of Ruby feels all over the map to me. Nothing that a few sample programs won’t clear up, I’m sure. Meanwhile the pure OO features are sweet…

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence

From ABC News:

Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies

Excuse my while I mop up the sake that I sputtered all over my keyboard…
UPDATE: There was an excellent question raised in the comment thread:

If Cheney is not under the Executive Branch, can he still claim “executive priviledge” when he doesn’t want to testify before Congress?

Hitchens' interview

Excellent interview with Christopher Hitchens on BBC Radio Five… unusually intelligent questions for a radio show. (14.6MB MP3, 36 min.) Here’s Hitch on the metaphor of the shepherd and his sheep:

… and I have to remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I’m not a sheep and I don’t need a shepherd and what shepherds do when they’re not actually messing around with their sheep is they’re keeping them around and alive so they can be fleeced and then killed.

Personally I never understood the appeal of the “Lamb of God” idea, except as a ghastly homage to the gruesome practice of animal sacrifice. Ughh!

Half full or half empty at the W3C?

Tim drew my attention to the Web of Services for Enterprise Computing Workshop Report that was recently published by the W3C. As he put it, “I thought the pungent smells of failure on one side and optimism on the other mixed oddly, but still worth reading.”
Setting the scene:

The discussion at the workshop tended to revolve around two main streams of thought, which are not as well coordinated as they could or should be. One is that existing Web technologies can be adapted for enterprise use. In this stream of discussion it was proposed that additional standardization is not required, but this view did not garner widespread support.
While post-Web businesses such as Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Google, and others have successfully adapted Web technologies for enterprise usage patterns, they appear to have done so using a lot of custom code and minimal off the shelf software or standards-based approaches to integration.

To which I guess the obvious replies are, “Yes”, “They would say that, wouldn’t they” and “Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from this.” And reading the following passage is like getting a rheumatic twinge in an old sports injury:

At the Web Services workshop in 2001, the approach of having a stack of solutions was appealing and we decided to spin up lots of groups to build these specifications. We were to build a foundation of protocols that work within the context of the Web, with the goal of making lots of things talk to lots of other things. In addition, we wanted to create a system to support dynamic composability to meet problems as these arose and to build the corresponding tooling to make all this happen. After six years, we are half way through the spec stack, and interoperability has remained elusive.

Sigh…