Objects in a distributed system

Thanks to Mike Champion, I found A note on Distributed Computing which resonates strongly with my own feelings about distributed computing. Namely, the word "distributed" needs to be taken seriously, you cannot and should not, try to design away the network. Embrace it, don't try to work against it, its stronger that you are :-)

Relax NG Book

Eric van der Vlist has made his Relax NG book in progress available on the Web. Highly recommended.

Formless non-physical mind and Buddhist meditation

Interesting mental chewing gum.

"The fact that the mind is formless means that it is unconstrained..it it is free from steps, loops, branches, strings, tables, stacks, queues, datastructures and all the other algorithmic constraints."

Hmmmn.

Do your bit to stamp out null pointer exceptions in Java

Don't call toString.

What have Wittgenstein, Murphy, Rockerfeller, Heisenberg, Democritus and Einstein got it common?

Nothing that I know of, so I put them together in a thought experiement on Enterprise Application Architecture.

Reliable Messaging (again)

Read this. Then this.
Sigh.

Interested in eGovernment?

A white paper on eGovernment architecture issues by my colleague at Propylon, Fergal Murray and I. My favourite line "only the data endures".