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Saturday, November 2
Friday, November 1
Thursday, October 31
Political Smog [SocioPolitico]
The untimely death of Senator Paul Wellstone in the USA, compounded into a tragedy by the deaths of his wife and daughter as well as others, would be a source of sadness at any time. But in the current political environment in the USA, it's provoking some to ask whether this was a political assassination. What is fascinating is less that unspeakable question and more the observation made by Ted Rall's Yahoo Op-ed:Ronald Reagan may have been a hard line conservative, but had Wellstone died during his watch you wouldn't have heard liberals asking whether the Gipper had had him offed. Bush is different. Asking mailmen to spy on ordinary Americans, creating military tribunals for anyone deemed an "enemy combatant," locking prisoners of war in dog cages, spending a decade's worth of savings in six months, allowing journalists to die rather than provide them with help in a war zone, smearing Democratic politicians as anti-American, invading sovereign nations without excuse--these are acts that transgress essential American reasonableness. A man capable of these things seems, by definition, capable of anything. A frightening summary of the track record of a president in a western democracy. A sad reflection on the state of politics in the US at present.
posted at 2:12 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far)
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War of the Pets [WebTech]
If you're at all connected with the Java environment, you'll remember the furore over the Pet Store example. The synopsis: a verbose piece of sample code was created ages ago for J2EE that showed how to use pretty much all its features in a three-tier application intended for educational use - not pretty, but sample code for everyone. Someone at Microsoft built a two-tier application that looked similar but seemed to run faster and use less code, and their marketing department claimed that it proved .NET was better despite the fact it was a comparison of pumpkins with kumquats. Most thinking people spotted the huge holes in the argument and said that, if a benchmark was what was wanted, really it would be better it implement the same thing in both places - when people did, they unsurprisingly got neck-and-neck with the .NET version. Despite the demonstrated inaccuracy, Microsoft continued to make marketing claims that .NET was way better than J2EE on the basis of this comparison. End of potted history.
This week a consulting company has published a revised J2EE pet store implementation that they claim is optimised, and no doubt the Microsoft hype machine is spinning up to make all sorts of claims about .NET and J2EE as allegedly they were behind the work anyway - they also put two in-house engineers on tuning the .NET version. But already, analysis and comment show that the new J2EE application is (a) not designed the same way as the .NET version, (b) not optimised to use modern J2EE and (c) makes unneccessary calls. Seems it wasn't the consulting company's A-team doing the work.
Anyone who has ever been involved in benchmarking will know that it's a bad game to get into. Even when benchmarks are rigorously designed in a commodity marketplace, they are rarely if ever an accurate reflection of real-world deployment. But when the word 'benchmark' is used to describe code written for the marketing benefit of just one vendor in a marketplace where there is no philosophical unity let alone commodity implementation, the only conclusions one can come to are about integrity and intent of the participants rather than about products and technologies.
posted at 9:22 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far)
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Wednesday, October 30
Why UDDI isn't everywhere [WebTech]
Sean McGrath is a UDDI heretic, or so he claims. In his IT World article, he points out that UDDI comes a distant third to WSDL and SOAP in terms of global deployment. While some may find this a surprise, I don't. SOAP provides a general purpose object access mechanism applicable wherever loosely-coupled computer-to-computer applications are considered. WSDL provides a general-purpose description of a callable service in whichever application area it is deployed. Both are being widely prototyped and, by some accounts, even deployed for mission-critical tasks.
But UDDI only applies in contexts where a heirarchical directory is needed for service discovery. In portal integration, a properties file or LDAP directory can provide a more efficient service, and likewise in current supply-chain integration. In fact, across the board there seem to me to be few applications that depend so much on discovery that UDDI offers a better solution than LDAP at present. Not to say this will always be the case (and no doubt Anne will soon tell me that it's not the case now!), but right now UDDI seems to be a 'could use' rather than even a 'nice to have' and so, even without the deficiencies of categorisation that Sean alludes to, it's no surprise to me that it's rare today.
posted at 7:33 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far)
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Tuesday, October 29
Monday, October 28
Sunday, October 27
'For your own safety, sir' [SocioPolitico]
CS Monitor has an interesting article about the policy of credit card companies on profiling usage [via Charging the Canvas]. At issue is what happens when you travel with your card. On my last trip, I found in Sydney that a purchase I was making seemed to my card issuer to be suspect, so they declined the card and then telephoned me at home to confirm that the transaction was OK. As you might imagine, this was profoundly inconvenient; I had to complete the purchase with the 'spare' card I carry now for exactly this reason. It seems:"Your individual spending patterns are learned by the network so that when you make a purchase outside of your spending pattern, a red flag goes up," says David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, an Oxnard, Calif.-based credit-card research firm. Ah. So what can I do about that? Unless the software is very smart, every conference I go to will end up looking like fraudulent activity by virtue of being somewhere I have not been before with a pattern of stores I have not used before. My experience of having trouble with my MSDW credit card has been fraught, to the point where I can no longer rely on it when travelling. There is, however, an easy answer. When I call MSDW, I can get this card-declined behaviour prevented. At least, after I have spoken to a sullen scottish girl with her soul seared by having to work in a call centre at the hours I typically have to call to fix this stuff from Australia and been treated with so much suspicion by her that I have to ask for the supervisor (not just once, this happens pretty much every time). This advice rings true:"Calling ahead is a good idea because it advises your credit-card company to anticipate certain behavior patterns," says Jim Donahue, spokesman for credit-card issuer MBNA. So it seems I am no longer free to travel without advising my credit card company of my plans in advance. I suppose it fits the pattern - a capitalist police state? "Secure Beneath The Watchful Eyes".
posted at 12:26 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far)
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Attending JavaOne is my summer highlight. Attending the 
Not that we celebrate Halloween, but here's a cool pumpkin the kids carved today. I've made pumpkin soup from the flesh. Editorial comment from American friends suggests it may not be to the high standards expected in the former colonies, so my apologies to the rebels...