The mathematics of n-way whitelisting mean that point to point whitelisting won't scale. Indeed. I'm amazed the number of times come accross n-way "solutions" out there - especially in system integration.The trouble is that the problem creeps up on you. You connect A to B - no problem - A to C and B to C, still no problem, but the time you get to Z the interconnect costs dwarf the value proposition of the interconnected space. Nature figured this out a long time ago. Thats why so many biological systems are based on messaging through hubs. You big toe does not have a point to point connection to your liver but that does not mean they cannot communicate..

posted by Sean 5:38 AM

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This is clever. I have a few uses in mind for this.

posted by Sean 11:21 AM

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I fnally got around to adding a blogroll. I should have done it ages ago...

posted by Sean 6:48 AM

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Objects Have Failed by Richard P. Gabriel. Part 7 of the argument says

"Objects require programming by creating communicating entities, which means that programming is accomplished by building structures rather than by linguistic expression ..."

Amen. Put in simple terms the poverty of the OO approach for me is that we all think it is about getting things to "talk" to each other but there is no sign whatsoever of a linguistic structure to OO theory. We know a lot about "talking" from our own human experience, from linguistics and other walks of life. Nowhere, outside of software engineering do we conceptualise "talking" as sending method invocations between "objects".

Its high time we modelled software conversations as conversations dammit. Roll on the doc/literal style of Web Services and the emergence (finally) of a conversation as the key modelling paradigm..

posted by Sean 5:48 AM

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Hubs happen. Deal with it.

posted by Sean 2:09 AM

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Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?. Trouble is, increasingly under the hood is a solid block of metal with a Centronics port. Without the telemetry kit the garage have, you haven't a clue whats going on. You can play under the hood but only with specialist and costly tools. Non open source code is often similar. The hood is not spot welded down but only a limited set of tools are availalble, only certain access is allowed and you can take it or leave it.

posted by Sean 2:52 AM

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