No doubt many are aware of the fact that bird flu has hit East Anglia and there’s plenty of discussion about future implications so I shan’t be dwelling on that.

From a purely techie standpoint there are some interesting parallels with the way we build and deploy IT systems. Consider that the poultry farm where the outbreak occurred claimed to be keeping all it’s birds in buildings providing “secure biological containment” such that this sort of thing shouldn’t happen and yet it did happen and look at the damage! Does this remind you of the average corporate with all its systems centralized and hidden behind a firewall?

Since the original outbreak there’s been follow on discussion about what would have happened had the birds in question been free-range. These birds would, for a start, have stronger immune systems and not be so closely packed thus potentially limiting the impact. Sounds a little like a distributed system maybe?

What about issues related to the growth of London? Transport is over-stretched because there are too many people trying to get to work morning and evening. We build more roads or attempt to cram more trains into an already congested timetable which temporarily fixes the problem and attracts more people leading to a further transport disaster and so the cycle continues. Similar effects can be seen in locating suitable housing, refuse management and water systems. All of which sounds to me like the regular stresses and strains we suffer attempting to scale our centralized IT systems to cope with load.

One suggestion for addressing the problems involves moving business out of London to locations in Wales or the Midlands or Scotland. Of course, we’d need to improve the transport network making it easier to get to airports from these other locations, perhaps building additional roads to make access easier. The argument being that such a distributed approach might be easier to build, maintain and scale because it encourages more local commuting with fewer people converging on the same place. Sounds a little like the sort of approach used by MySpace or Google?

There are other examples of distributed systems lying around like the internal workings of our own bodies. And yet, in spite of a host of counter examples and failures we still feel compelled to pursue policies of centralization in towns, poultry farms and IT systems. Hmmmmm.

Dunno what it means, dunno who’s right (or indeed if anyone is) but it’s interesting for sure.

Technorati Tags: distributed systems, engineering, technology

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Okay, so Patrick has laid down the gauntlet and I’m of a mind to pick it up but there’s a sticking point which is that I must earn a living. I simply can’t dedicate time to work on Jini documentation, books etc for free and it seems no-one else is willing to either. So, inspired by a tongue-in-cheek comment from Cameron and some other conversations, I have a tentative, likely insane proposition for feedback/consideration:

I’m thinking about something I’ll call “micro-consulting”. Normally people pay me by the day or the week to complete some agreed upon set of work products. What if I were to offer my time via the web an hour at a time to write documentation or code tackling some aspect of Jini usage? What if the entity paying for the hour of my time got to dictate or choose the subject I focused on? Perhaps the way to do this is to get together a list of possible projects, after which I would provide a “quote” for the work and then have people place sufficient “bids” against a piece of work to cover my quote. Whichever piece of work met it’s quote first would be the next piece of work I’d pickup.

Just a thought……..

Yep, there is a specification for JavaSpace bulk operations but it’s clear from recent discussions it’s still not well known. It was released in Jini 2.1 and provides:

1. Bulk write
2. Bulk take
3. Bulk read
4. New notify method

Bulk take and write are straightforward, bulk read less so because due to the nature of reads it has to provide a streaming style of interface. And the new notify method allows you to get a copy of the Entry which triggered the event but also provides facilities for Entry’s becoming available/visible again as the result of transaction aborts etc.

The JavaDoc for JavaSpace05 is here.

Technorati Tags: distributed systems, jini, javaSpaces, technology

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The first Windows release for some time and the result is a deluge of nausea inducing TV adverts here in the UK. I do use the word “Wow” from time to time but I’m just not going to get that passionate about a release of Windows.

Seems I’m not the only person to be less than enthused…….

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Notes on the human aspects of being a techie……….

Jim Gray going missing is a big deal not just because of his work on transactions, databases and the like - he’s a human being that made a significant contribution. Nor was he one-dimensional, hence his reason for being at sea and, if he is to be lost, perhaps this is the way he’d want it?

Good software comes from creativity, energy, pride, obsession, difficult to foster in a constrained environment such as the average enterprise where the “more code now” mantra is chanted un-ceasingly and without consideration for higher concerns such as pausing for thought or building creative, progressive solutions to business problems.

Why are we obsessed with one size fits all? There must be only one platform, there must be one framework, there must be one specification, we must all agree. This is mass adoption, not mass innovation. There should be no one size fits all but that’s where we try to go, destroying any room for individualism.

This stuff is important, there’s more to life than code. We claim to be a creative discipline and yet we hide from our emotion or attempt to control when/where/if emotional discussion happens. This is confining the human spirit, shying away from self knowledge, leading to a grey, featureless (work) life and stifles our creative selves.

Obsessively and mechanically adding features to language or system because they can be found elsewhere ignores the greater philosophical aspects. Languages or systems are styled, they are the way they are because they were framed by a particular line of thinking. Every little piece we add should also follow that line of thinking for otherwise we end up with an incoherent, complex mass.

Technorati Tags: engineering, philosophy, technology