The ancient art of hacking in Ireland

I have been responsible for numerous hacks over the years in my work. It goes with the territory.

Recently, I discovered that we modern day Irish may be genetically pre-disposed to the quick, inelegant but highly performative solutions known as "hacks".

Last weekend, I encountered a wonderful quick hack that an anscestor of mine executed (click to enlarge):

The Dolmen is from a Megalithic cemetary a few miles from my house in
Sligo in a place called Carrowmore.

Note the wee stone that has been slipped under the big stone in order to make the big stone sit horzontal to the ground :-) A hack executed some six thousand years ago:-)

Compatibility in a temporally decoupled distributed world

Carlos comments on the one-sided nature of Liskov's Substitition Principle.
As I've said many times, in a document-centric, message-centric world, objects are not the center of the universe so API substitutability is not a useful metric for compatibility. (Example, in REST, there is only one "API" so substitutability does not arise).

I think Carlos is right when he says we need to look at both the "provider" and "requirer" sides. We need to focus on foreward and backward compatability of message *notations* by means of a message processing model, not API comptability through polymorphism.

RIG 6 in the interoperability guidelines I am working on with the Irish government for the public services broker, addresses this issue.

Dave Orchard is well worth reading on this topic.

Document-centric intergration

Great stuff from Greg Wdowiak on document-centric integration and the perils of APIs.

Molly Bloom the blogger

yes when I put the blog in my web like the Andalusian geeks used or
shall I use a red css yes and how he spidered me under the Moorish
firewall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked
him with my eyes to add a comment to my blog yes and then he asked me
would I yes to say yes to a trackback my mountain flower and first I
put my spam filter around him yes and drew him down to me so he could
see my logs all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I
said yes I will Yes.

Happy Bloomsday.

Learning from the Tralfamadorians

Data Storage and Data Transmission is a transcript of a short paper I delivered last week at a technology seminar held in Carrowmore by the IPTT (Inter-Planetary Technology Troika). Delegates from all three members: Earth, Tlön and Tralfamadore were in attendance.

4th European Conference on e-Government

I will be presenting a short paper on the Service Oriented Architecture underlying the Public Service's Broker at ECEG 2004 in Dublin Castle later this week.
If you are coming to the conference, please come up and say hello.

How to spot an pushing-forty Emacs user like moi

Simple. They have something like this:

(set-default-font "-outline-Courier New-normal-r-normal-normal-*-*-96-96-c-*-*-#163")

in their .emacs file.

Why is it that default font sizes in applications keep getting smaller year on year :-)