Re-wired

I’m addicted to high-information entertainment. Hey, so are most of you reading this. But it’s such a throw-away line that is ceases to mean much to us anymore. But I think I might really mean it.

I sometimes play the mental game, when I’m bored, of imagining what I would do if suddenly transplanted to times long ago. The immediate realisation is that while I have lots of good technological concepts, I don’t really know how to go about, say, finding iron ore or making those cotton spinning machines that were a part of the start of the industrial revolution. And even if I could take my reference material (ie. my laptop) along with me, I could spend my life trying to remember exactly how 1 volt was defined, so as to make a generator to power it.

There is another side to it though: would I be happy? I imagine one would spend the day working, maybe farming, and a lot of the rest of the time writing books and trying to invent stuff. But there would be no email, no websites, no blogs, no TV, no movies, no magazines, few books, infrequent music — no information-rich entertainment. Ok, there would be people around the village, but conversation wouldn’t have the constant input of new social memes, or news stories from around the world, or the mixing that is inherent in a big city of well-travelled people — all in touch with a thousand different new ideas every day. Think of what that would mean for your conversations.

Clearly, humanity survived this state of affairs just fine, for most of history. But we’ve grown up with information all around, and to us entertainment means constant injection of new information, of a hundred different forms. Has this changed the way our minds function? Clearly we’ve developed all sorts of skills in handling new computer interfaces easily, and filtering information very rapidly, even when it arrives on many channels simultaneously. (Indeed, general intelligence tests have showed an average increase of 3 points per decade, around the world — which may have something to do with our increasing familiarity with graphical interfaces, which are somewhat similar to many intelligence tests). So I suppose my question is: has our information-rich environment changed the way that we can relax, too?

I’m reminded of experiments (I believe by the Nazis) that showed that if babies were completely deprived of human attention, they got sick and even died. We’re “wired” to be social animals, and so to need human contact. Is it possible that the environment in which we’ve spent our lives submersed has “rewired” us to need high-information entertainment?

SOA - Modularity, Delegation, and Federation

What are the core features that bring power to an SOA? I think they really come down to three things: modularity, delegation, and federation.

• Modularity is the componentization of software into discreet functional unit (the real key here is standardization within the modularity)
• Delegation is the ability to act as a delegate to perform a unit of work for another process
• Federation is the ability to provide a network of delegates that are independently maintained and operated.

I’ll get into a lot of this stuff in more detail in future entries, because each of these really has some interesting nuances, but I think that there are two really interesting things about these three items.

1) These three things are completely independent of the underlying technology, and;

2) You can have an SOA that doesn’t do a very good job at one or two of these, and you’ll never really get the full benefit of SOA

SOA Anatomy

Having worked as Technical/Enterprise Architect for a while, I thought about writing my views on an Agile SOA based architecture. I am starting with a rough sketch of a generic architecture, which I'll keep on detailing as I continue to fill my blog space. I plan to create 3 generic architectures for J2EE, .NET and OpenSource product families. So here is my first stab at it.

Diseased with religion?

Religion is like a disease of the human mind. It's like rabies. You get bitten and suddenly there's this great foaming at the mouth, all senses and reason thrown to the wind. There's a lot of shouting and then you bite someone else in all the madness and it gets passed down the line across generations, and national boundaries. Forget AIDS. This stuff kills millions.

Work Haiku V 1.0

All day I sit here

Pretending to work real hard

While I write haikus