Spot the change control item

I was in Brussels most of this week. My room number was 404. How perfect is that! :-)

Anyway, being a geek, it was difficult to gaze upon the beauty and splendour of the Town Hall and its famous architectural anomoly without thinking of it in computing terms.

In commercial IT, it would be known as a "change control item". A flaw that is simple to state yet ... rather expensive to fix.

In commercial IT, we see "buglets" on a par with the Town Hall anomaly on a regular basis. Unfortunately, software is rather abstract and explaining the cost implications of fixes is sometimes very challenging. You cannot simply stand on front of it and say "look!" :-(

Take one sequoia, thinly sliced

Take one sequoia, thinly sliced is an ITWorld article about the ineffable vastness, language defying hugeness and all round very-big-indeed-ness of the Web.

WSDL woes

Rich Salz in WSDL 2.0.

Oh dear.

Something to read over coffee

Gregor infuses a nice analogical brew for asynchronous messaging - Starbucks.

The real world is full of great examples of asynchronous messaging, pipelining, and transformations. Three key ingredients in Service Oriented Architectures in my book.

Now that I come to think of it, before lunch I tend to use revolving Sushi bars and restaurent order processing as examples of real world SOA ideas.

In the afternoons, when talk turns to the business side of SOAs, I tend to use Joseph Bazalgette's incredible implementation of a sewerage system in london in the second half of the Nineteeth century.

Hmmmm. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?