Monday, May 31, 2004

Service Oriented Architecture vs Web Sevices?

Of all of the Microsoft bloggers, far and away, the most insightful and most likely to call it like it is, is Dare Obasanjo (he works in the XML group at Microsoft). This post talks about what the difference between Service Oriented Architecture (the current buzzword) and Web Services (last years buzzword) is. As you might expect, the difference is more one of perception than reality - the idea is that SOA encompasses SOAP, REST and CORBA without the negative connotations (slow, buggy) that real Web Services implementations have met with. He goes as far to pick on the fiasco that was Hailstorm:
Another reason I see for XML Web Services having negative buzz versus SOA is that when many people think of XML Web Services, they think of overhyped technologies that never delivered such as Microsoft's Hailstorm.
The thing with Web Services is you have to dig through the crap (and there is so very much crap) to get to the reality which these days means Web Services on the intranet. Kudos to Dare for calling it like it is - even if it doesn't tow the line that his employer currently is selling.

Even more crazy RC Models


It turns out the B52 was just one model amonst many -- here are many more. I built some remote control gliders in my youth, none of which flew very well so I appreciate how difficult building something like this would be. Kudos to the builder!

Collective Intelligence of the Organization

James Surowiecki has an interesting article in Wired (of all places) about how Companies are structured. Essentially he argues that they value the CEO and his cohorts as a set of annointed saints whereas the rest of the company is made up of autonomous, interchangeable drones (despite what they might say at the company meeting).
while it's clear that some CEOs are excellent leaders and managers, there's little evidence that individual executives are blessed with consistently good strategic foresight. In fact, in an extensive study of intelligent CEOs who made disastrous decisions, Dartmouth's Sydney Finkelstein writes, "CEOs should come with the same disclaimer as mutual funds: Past success is no guarantee of future success."
Surowiecki argues his case from a "perfect markets" point of view - that instead of letting the CEO make the big strategic decisions (where they may not have access to the best information for a variety of reasons), they should surrender to the collective intelligence of the organization. In the same way that the stock market (at least in theory) absorbs information in order to value stocks (in the long term), organizations can use the collective intelligence of their companies to make strategic decisions. He proposes setting up an internal "market" for the opposing positions and let the organization decide.
In the late 1990s, for instance, Hewlett-Packard experimented with artificial markets to forecast sales. Only 20 to 30 percent of employees participated, and each market ran for just a week, with people trading at lunch and in the evening. The market's results outperformed the company 75 percent of the time.
The Wired article seems to be somewhat of an advertisment for Suowiecki's book on the same topic, The Wisdom of Crowds. I've read Suroweicki's column in the New Yorker / Slate for years though and he definitely has interesting ideas.
UPDATE:Tim Bray has picked up on this too.

Sunday, May 30, 2004

Frontline: the way the music died

Frontline had another great episode about how the music industry is eating itself alive. The thesis is that, by making itself a business that is run on a quarterly basis, it is starving itself of the sort of long term investments that it needs to be successful. There are alot of analogies between this and the software business - a lot of the issues are the same without cluttering it up about how "artists" need to work. In general, any publically traded company (yes, any one Google...) has a huge amount of pressure to perform quaterly and people just don't see the long term problems. Eventually some upstart will come along and do it better, before they get to big / important and the same factors kick in -- it's the cycle of life really. More generally the problem is one of optimization - the world is becoming more "efficient" as a means to becoming more productive but you never know if your going to get stuck in a local minimum (i.e. quaterly result optimization) versus finding a better global minima. In general, capitalism is messy and does not go about these things efficiently - it's more of a gradient descent / greedy search. Another interesting tidbit was an interview with Touré (a rolling stone reporter) about whether downloading is killing the industry:
Not at all, not at all. Any basic economist will tell you, if you go into the supermarket and there's a girl standing there with a platter of free cheese, everybody's going to take a piece of cheese. That does not mean that everybody who took a free piece of cheese would've bought one. It's not a one-to-one comparison. So the record business would love for you to believe that every download equals a sale lost. It simply doesn't bear out in common sense level.
In a sense, the downloading of songs acts to counteract the industries own self destructive behaviour.
And for the record, PBS is NOT paid for by your taxes (at least any more). If you want quality programming like this, please support your local PBS / NPR station when they start in with the annoying pledges.

Business Week on Wiki's

Business Week is covering the increasing use of Wiki's in business.

javadocs.org

The next time you need something from in JavaDoc, check this out/

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Quitting with panache

From Gawker here is an example of how to make sure you're never asked to return. An excerpt:
I dare say that I would rather be dressed up like a pinata and beaten than remain with this group any longer.

Friday, May 28, 2004

Scale B-52 Model


Me wantee!
UPDATE:Fixed the image. Here are some links to Akamai'd movies of this thing flying!

Thursday, May 27, 2004

My Summer Reading List

These are books I am planning to read over the summer. When I'm done, I'll write some pithy sophmoric comments about each! That is all!

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

The myth of SUV Safety

Which do you think is safer in an accident: a mini or a ford F-150? Take a look at this photo and then see if you change your mind. Malcolm Gladwell had a great article in the New Yorker on the myth of SUV safety. Amongst the gems:
  • Most SUVs are built to the truck standards to avoid the Fuel Mileage / Safety requirements for cars. To wit:
    In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade--the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator--has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan--a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame--are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.
  • SUVs are built heavy (really heavy) because bigger is better. But you much more likely to need it because the accident avoidance characteristics are much worse
  • People buy cars they think are safe (high off the ground, big, with small windows that people can't see into) rather than are actually safe (low roll over characteristics, good visibility).
Frontline also had a great program on this topic: rollover: the hidden history of the SUV which describes the lengths Ford did not go to to make the Bronco II and then the Ford Explorer rollover safe despite massive evidence to the contrary. The NHTSB also basically did nothing for ten years. It's a searing indictment of the abuse of the gub'ment.

Monday, May 24, 2004

Death Row Hipocrasy

I'm a big advocate against the death penalty, mostly because the spate of death row exonerations have made it clear that innocent people are being railroaded. Until the legal system doesn't have to rely on Northwest college students to clean up it's mistakes, you can't even begin to dicuss the moral questions. But this is interesting - a death row inmate is arguing that the needle used for the lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment because his veins are shot from doing drugs! Junkie Rights! Lesson learned: If your ever on death row, make sure to partake of some prison grade heroin.

Archive.org

Archive.org has (amongst other things), freely available live music archive. Now your thinking, "Sure this is bunch of no-name crap that I've never heard of" and it is. But! There are some cool things in there too: Enjoy!

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Latent Semantic Analysis

There is an interesting article about how the Spam filtering in Mac OS X Mail App works. Basically rather than using filters or rules (or Bayesian filtering) it uses Latent Semantic analysis -- looking at the latent properties of the textual content to classify it against a set of known documents (the corpus). When you move an email from good to the junk folder (or vice versa) it changes the corpus for spam and not-spam. In theory you can use it to classify the emails as well if you (the user) are willing to do the training. The clustering uses Singular Value Decompositon (aka Karhunen-Loeve transform) to create an N dimensional classification space from the corpus. Then you can use standard statistical classification techniques (Bayes, etc) to do the classification of new data. I expect that the app ship with some baseline spam / no-spam data and the rest is customization (it seems to work pretty well out of the box). As with all classification problems, using a set of overlapping techniques is crucial so I'm sure they do some rule based filtering / heuristics.
I think alot of the reason these things work so well are:
  • My spam is different from your spam. The solution should be tailored to me so the active training makes this work
  • To the extent that everyone's spam filter is different, it makes life much more difficult because they have to simultaneously work around an (effectively infinite) # of constraints. Do computational linguistics people "go bad" and work for spammers?

Monday, May 17, 2004

The blood is in the water...

The fish is starting to stink in the Bush administration. Powell has a meltdown with Tim Russert (admitting that the "evidence" of WMD for the Iraq war was based on the information from an unverifiable witness and went against what their own analysts were saying) to the extent that a PR flunky tried to cut the interview short. Seymour Hersh has been leveling a weekly barrage and this week the story is that the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal went all the way to the top and was by Rumsfeld's design. People are comparing it to Iran Contra and Watergate. If Kerry can't win off the back of this, we're all in serious serious trouble...
"In Vietnam, the bullshit piles up so fast you need wings to stay above it"
-- Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now

Sunday, May 16, 2004

I am dilbert...

This pretty sums up how I feel these days...

Saturday, May 15, 2004

Intellisense for VIM

This VIM add-on adds intellisense for Java / C# / / XML to Vim. I wish it supported C++ but it's still pretty cool. Aces!

Another new OSX RSS Aggregator

Pulpfiction is yet another aggregator for OS X. It reads RSS and Atom (0.3 I guess...) and seems to be designed to square off against NetNewsWire.

Call me Uncle Barnaby...

As of today I am an uncle! Bueno! No name as of now -- hopefully the kid won't be called Seven...

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Full Metal Blog is sponsored by...

Full Metal Blog is brought to you by Fishy Joe's! Try our new Extreme Walrus Juice! 100% fresh-squeezed walrus. Ride the walrus!

ATOM

Blogger only supports Atom XML syndication feeds. There is no official explanation for this and it seems kind of premature since the spec is only at 0.3 (and has been for a while) and is missing a great many things (like widespread aggregator support). For example, an important part of RSS is extensions. Here I quote the full section of the Atom Spec on extensions:
7  Extending Atom [[ ... ]]
If you can generate Atom, then generating RSS is trivial. So it must be for some political reason which is fine but as an end user it makes using Blogger with other tools is a total pain in the ass. As a developer, supporting 2 totally different syndication formats is something I don't really need. At this rate, I'll have to look into supporting HTTP error code 448... The interesting thing about Atom is the support for a SOAP based posting / management API that would work across different platforms. This, however, has nothing to do with the syndication format. Update:Dare Objasanjo points out that if the 0.3 ATOM spec which everyone is racing to implement (the one that says DON"T IMPLEMENT THIS is not compatible with the 1.0 spec then there is going to be a user issue. Seems like Google / Blogger should be thinking about this...

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

The problems in Iraq

I'm not prone to wishing for the death of a member of the human race but these assholes reneged on their membership dues a long time ago. When you say your sorry, it helps if you actually mean it. Like actually doing something about it. Congratulations, the U.S. is now the Texas Rangers of the World. Good luck in November!

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Test Email Posting

Testing posting a link to Full Metal Blog from email.

Monday, May 10, 2004

On the speed of zombies...

I recently saw the re-re-make of "Dawn of the Dead" (capsule review: bit of a downer, what with all the death but otherwise pretty good). One thing that occurred to me was that Zombie's in current movies seem to move a lot faster than they used to. For example, in the original Dawn of the Dead, they kind of slowly trumbled around bumping into things (in many ways, they remind me of John Kerry). With the advent of Resident Evil / 28 days later / Dawn of the Dead, zombies now run after you at high speed which makes them a lot scarier. Slate just had an article on this very topic so I'm not the only one who has been thinking about zombies. And Jamie Zawinski has a collection of funny Zombie related headlines (my fave: Zombies defeat robot Jesus) I can't wait for Resident Evil : Apocalypse later this year!

Get out of my namespace...

There's an interesting article by James Gleick about the nature of namespaces (I'm not linking to the New York Times where the article originated because I hate them). It reminds me of another article I read some years back in Salon about companies that come up with names -- the article was written back in the go-go 90s (as opposed to the no-go 00s). The best was "JamCracker":

It seems that when Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don'tknow what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."
As it happens, not long after the article appeared, a company did end up using the name Jamcracker. The article also alludes to computer generated programs (which is what I would do) that automatically generates candidate names. Every language has N-gram probibilities that indicate the prior probibility that a given set of N characters will occur. For example, in English e-r is alot more common than e-g and q is always followed by u (this is much of the reason why you can swap the letters in words and they are still readable -- languages are very redundant. So now, come up with names that are combinations of these letters and you will come up with "English sounding" word -- ignoring the N-gram probibilities is a good way to come up with a word that no one can pronounce, spell and/or remember. I'd come up with some examples but I can't remember any.

The Elegant Universe

Nova had a great program on String Theory. (The PBS program can be viewed online) When I studied particle physics, String Theory was still not that popular. It seems like with the advent of M-Theory (which unified the 5 possible string theories), it has caught on much more and Field theories have fallen by the wayside. Never let it be said that physics is not capable of great change. It is a little disturbing that all of this can basically not be tested currently and that the scale of experiment needed to test these theories is going to be very expensive! But I'm for any theory that claims that we're all living in a loaf of bread!

Tax me if you can


Frontline had a great program on tax evasion by US corporations. You can watch the episode online here. Notable items:
  • First Union leased the sewers (complete with human waste!) from a german city and then leased them back to the city as a tax "shelter"!
  • Individuals would only need to pay about 1/2 the taxes they pay today if corporations paid what they should.
Start writing your congress-person now

What's with the title?

The title of this blog is an homage to the greatest anit-war film ever made -- Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. The film was based on a book called "The Short Timers" by Gustav Hasford which is out of print but available online (Yay!). I think most Kubrick films are based on books -- The Shining and 2001 are obvious examples, Eyes Wide Shut is based on the book Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler. Full Metal Jacket is probably the best example of Kubrick's theme of the dehuminization of man, in the first part of the movie with the Paris island boot camp and later with the battle in Hue City.

Test Post

Just making sure everything is working!