Behavior turds

Pat Helland coins[1] a useful phrase : "Behavior turds". Imperatives masquerading as declaratives.

The distinction between nouns and verbs is very fuzzy at the boundaries where I spend a lot of time. A key skill in Enterprise Architecture (a really *key* skill) is an awareness about the subtleties of human language. (Example: You have never, ever sent an e-mail. The bits you composed in your machine get copied - not sent - to the destination machine.)

A lot of the REST versus WS-* babbelogue revolves around folk being divided by a common (human) language. If the phrase "System A sends X to system B" by far the most tricky and subtle word is the word "sends". I wrote about this some time ago : I'll push and you pull. The mashup approach to application integration and it will be the subject of my talk at Barcamp Galway

I would suggest that an important part of any EAI architects training should be some quality time spent learning about Speech Acts, about Frege & Russell on is and the referential theory of proper names etc.

[1] A self-referential giggle : The word 'coin'. An example in English of a noun used to coin a corresponding verb = the word 'coin' :-)

Climbing The Cognitive Wall: Human barriers to progress in IT

"Using the most prevalent models for dealing with parallelism, massive CPU power corresponds to rampant, mind-bending non-determinism in the software that runs on top. Humans, by and large, have difficulty reasoning in the face of rampant non-determinism. It seems to me that this new "skill" is like asking people to rid their brains of susceptibility to phenomena like Wason Selection" -- Climbing The Cognitive Wall: Human barriers to progress in IT

Best of luck to Bill

Bill de hÓra has taken an exciting position with Newbay. Best of luck Bill. Many moons have passed (about 60?) since that day at WWW9 Amsterdam when I was walking the floor handing the microphone to folks who wanted to ask TBL a question - you were one of them. Some time after that you joined Propylon and have been in the middle of a whirlwind of asynchronous messaging, app servers and content management systems ever since. You are probably best known out there for your work on ATOM but I'm sure you will be adding many interesting mobile-oriented strings[1] to your bow at Newbay who are very serious innovators in that whole Mobile 2.0 space.

[1] Unicode strings of course.

The Grand Unifying Theory of Enterprise Computing: 2.0

"If the details of all of this do not interest you, here is the takeaway: you cannot design away the network - you can only hide it behind tall banks of dollars bills." -- The Grand Unifying Theory of Enterprise Computing: 2.0

feisty Fawn in the year 2143

To cut a long story so short that I won't even start it, I'm now running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. So far, its excellent. Full-on EJW-compliant[1] install.

One wee oddity...during the install I was told that my partition had not been fsck'ed in 49710 days and so an fsck was being forced.

I honestly have no recollection of running an fsck in 2143 and then travelling back in my time machine to 2007 but then again...it would sure explain some of my weirder deja-vu moments.

[1] EJW = "Everything Just Works"

Developers: watch this space (online or offline if you prefer)

http://gears.google.com/

Scraping the WS-* off the shoe

Dare Obasanjo on WS-*. Both barrels smoking.