Steve Vinoski: “A significant advantage of the uniform interface constraint lies in the area of scalability. For a client to correctly interact with a SOA service, it must understand the specifics of both that service’s interface contract and data contract. But for a client to invoke a REST service, it must understand only that service’s specific data contract: the interface contract is uniform for all services.”
This is an interesting article if you want to get a deeper understanding of the difference between the SOA and the REST application styles. I have to admit I wasn’t totally aware of the “uniform interface” aspect of REST, but now that I am, it just makes me like REST even more.
Paul Kedrosky: “Welcome, apparently, to Godless America. One of the unremarked-upon quirks of GW Bush’s State of the Union speech last night was the disappearance of God from the text’s closing.”
That’s not really true, apparently, as some commenters pointed out, and the New York Times’ SoU Analyzer confirms: Bush did say “God bless” at the end of his speech.
I wish it were true, though. As George W. Bush, for the first time in the history of his State of the Union addresses, pronounced the words “climate change”, having this latter phrase present, while “god” were absent, would have clearly been a case of reality trumping fantasy, for once.
There’s only one drawback: these files are big. Even though this should pose no problem to most users, I wonder whether it would be possible to have a reduced-resolution version.
This post is in Italian, because it involves an Italian company that operates in the Italian market, so I’m warning my Italian readers: Wind sucks. Short version: I’ve been without phone service for more than a week and without DSL service for more than five days.
Update: They either saw this post, or it was just chance, but today I was visited by a technician that corrected the problem, which apparently was one of cabling, so now I’m back online again.
Qualche tempo fa decisi di abbandonare la cara vecchia Telecom e di passare armi e bagagli a Wind/Infostrada come fornitore unico sia per la voce sia per l’ADSL. Dopo un po’ di tempo, mi comunicarono che il giorno 11 Gennaio 2007 avrebbero effettuato il passaggio alla loro rete e da quel giorno non avrei più dovuto pagare il canone Telecom.
Da quel giorno, sette giorni fa, il servizio Telecom è stato interrotto, ma di quello Wind nemmeno l’ombra. Il telefono è muto e la ADSL non ha segnale. Ripetuti tentativi di contattare l’assistenza tecnica non hanno ottenuto altra risposta che non fosse: “La pratica è in lavorazione, abbia pazienza.”
Data questa esperienza, che mi sta creando innumerevoli problemi, non mi sento di consigliare a nessuno di affidare le proprie capacità di comunicare a Wind/Infostrada.
Aggiornamento: non so se è perchè hanno letto questo post o se è solo fortuna, ma oggi ho ricevuto la visita di un tecnico che ha corretto il problema (apparentemente una questione di cablaggio errato), quindi sono nuovamente online.
Jonas is a well known speaker, architect and open source developer, founder of the AspectWerkz project and committer of AspectJ. He’s Senior Software Engineer at Terracotta.
The title of his talk will be Distributed Computing Made Easy: How To Build a POJO-based Data Grid:
Abstract
In this session you will learn how to build a highly scalable Data Grid using standard JDK 1.5 and POJOs.
We will start with a discussion of the Master/Worker pattern — one of the most useful parallel programming design patterns in use today. You will learn about the identifying characteristics of the pattern and how best to use it in the real world.
It is a very practical, “hands-on” session in which we will present how to build the Master/Worker pattern using standard JDK 1.5, and how to turn it into a distributed grid implementation by using Open Terracotta’s* JVM-level clustering technology. Following that, we will cover the production implications of operating and scaling a reliable work management framework, and give examples on how to address real-world challenges such as dealing with very high volumes of data, handling work or worker failure, ordering, routing schemes etc.
Check out this page for all the details about the meeting.
This is the second edition of Merril R. Chapman’s best-seller In Search of Stupidity. To the first edition’s collection of episodes of strategic blunders, marketing disasters and outright hubris on part of various high-technology companies during the 80’s and the 90’s, the new edition adds a few notable episodes. Companies listed include: IBM, Digital Research, Apple, Microsoft, MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, Siebel, Borland, Intel, Motorola, Google, Novell, Netscape, and various dot-coms from the Internet bubble times.
Apart from being a fun and enjoyable read, In Search of Stupidity is also a valuable resource for high-tech entrepreneurs, marketers and geeks wanting to turn their technical prowess into a profit. There’s nothing like learning from the mistakes of others in order to avoid repeating them, and one of the merits of this book is that it does not limit itself to making fun of clueless companies, but extracts and digests from their tales a number of immediately useful advice.
So you can expect to learn how to avoid the same sort of positioning mistakes that doomed MicroPro, how not to inimicate the developer community that constitutes the lifeblood of your products, like Ashton-Tate constantly did, how to avoid damaging your relationships with the press, and many other useful tidbits. In this respect, the Stupid Analysis chapter at the end of the book is especially useful, in case you missed some of the more subtle lessons that were contained in the narrative presented in previous chapters.
In summary, this books is valuable both to entrepreneurs and managers, and to geeks who want to enter marketing, management or start their own company. Even if you are content with keeping a purely technical role, should you start recognizing the signs of stupidity on part of your company, you could at least be prepared to polish up your resume.
To be honest, it could be argued that some of the most egregious screw-ups described in the book were, at least in part, due to sheer bad luck, and that hindsight is always 20/20. Still I think that the stories told here teach some extremely valuable lessons. External circumstances alone cannot account for all that happened; it takes much stupidity and arrogance to turn unfavorable events into total disasters.
If you want to be picky, there is a couple of instances where the message of the book sounds a bit off. The first one can be found in the story of Google’s fight with CNET.com over the issue of privacy, and its supposed bowing to the censorship imposed by the Chinese government. You can argue how much you like that Google acted stupidly in these circumstances. Its behavior might have tarnished its ethical image—”Don’t be evil”, remember?. However, it doesn’t seem to have affected Google in any serious way; few people remember the episodes and Google is going as strong as ever. Compared to the other examples found in the book, this is a case of very mild stupidity, if at all, and it looks like Chapman seriously wanted to pick on Google but couldn’t find any real damning evidence.
The second point is in chapter 12, The Strange Case of Dr. Open and Mr. Proprietary, where the author traces the beginnings of the Free Software movement to the first hackers who started out by illegally copying Microsoft’s Altair BASIC. If one didn’t know better, one might start to think that Free Software pioneers were just a bunch of freeloaders, if not thieves. In the rest of the chapter, however, Chapman makes it abundantly clear that the only example of stupidity, in this case, can be found on the side of proprietary companies who failed to understand the Open Source/Free Software movement and its effect on the software industry.
To sum it up, In Search of Stupidity is a very good book, especially if you missed the first edition. Five stars are well deserved.
I have some invitations to The Venice Project beta testing program still available, so if you have a Windows machine, a broadband connection and some time to spend testing the system and giving some useful feedback, drop me a line.
Update: Since I’ve received a number of requests and cannot satisfy them all, I will henceforth only send invites to people who have a blog and promise to write a short review of the product on theirs. Adding to the buzz is all I am asking for.
Today His Steveness finally unveiled the long awaited iPhone and once more left the world gasping in awe and wondering how can a company be so consistently innovative and miles above and beyond the competition.
Excuse me if I let myself be totally swept away into Job’s Reality Distortion Field, but this iPhone is such a thing of beauty that is leaving me completely helpless. It’s not just that it’s probably the smart phone with the best user interface around (we still need to verify how good the multi-touch, but I don’t think Apple can blow it). It’s also not just that it’s a wide-screen video iPod too.
What really blows my socks off about it is the fact that it’s running OS X! Can you imagine it? Not some brain-damaged or crippled OS like Symbian or WinCE, but OS X. And it’s got Safari, of course. A real browser, not a joke like the Symbian browser or Opera Mini, and with that screen resolution, you can really browse almost any website. If you ever tried browsing the web with a typical smartphone, you know that most sites are actually off-limits. And it’s got Wi-Fi too!
Does the fact that it is running OS X mean that most Mac applications will run on it unchanged? This is not clear, but I see no reason why this shouldn’t be the case. What follows from this is that thousands of desktop-class applications will immediately be available on the iPhone. Can you say “great mobile platform”? I knew you could.
No wonder that shares of RIMM and PALM are plummeting through the floor today. Would you buy a Blackberry or a Treo if the iPhone were available today?
And would you buy a Zune? If there’s one thing that the iPhone is not is…brown ;).
To be honest, the only thing that the iPhone lacks is more memory. 8GB is not that much if you want to carry around lots of music, videos and a great deal of applications and associated data. Let’s just hope that by the time it actually becomes available, advances in Flash memory density bring us a 16GB model, at least.
Finally, I cannot close this post without a mention of the other product that was announced today. The Apple TV is a great product, but its importance risks being overshadowed by the much sexier iPhone. It would be much sexier if my friends at The Venice Project could port the Venice client to it ;).
Update: Looks like it won’t be as open a platform as I had hoped, which is a pity, and tends to cool my enthusiasm a little bit. It’s still probably the best iPod ever (minus the tiny memory size) and a cool gadget for mobile Web and email access, but not such a revolution. However, this is just the first version, so I guess it’s better to wait and see.
For these books, and a couple more I haven’t read yet, I wish to thank one of our customers, who very kindly gave all their collaborators an Amazon gift certificate as a Christmas present. It was very much appreciated, thanks!
Now I could use the rest of this post to reflect on the year just ended and make predictions for 2007, but I won’t. I’m not good at either reflections or predictions.
I will limit myself to noting that starting today, for the first time in my life, I’m officially employed (by Sourcesense, of course) and not a free-lance anymore. Not that it changes anything, in practice, but it’s an important milestone nonetheless.
I have some invitations to 
Today His Steveness finally unveiled the long awaited 
