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Monday, June 17, 2002 |
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Routine intertwingularity and manufactured serendipity
Peter Drayton reports on a free, community-oriented ASP.NET tool just released by Microsoft:
WebMatrix (nee Saturn) finally shipped! Congrats to the ASP.NET team for producing a kick-ass IDE for ASP.NET - I love how it is more fully-featured than VS.NET in some regards (as in it has web service-specific wizards, an FTP browser, community integration and more). [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]
In my new role as an InfoWorld analyst, I received a press release about this as well. Fascinatingly, Peter's news reached me hours before the press release did. Here was my comment to the PR rep, who happens to be an ex-military-intelligence person and had, from that perspective, recently written to me about my postings on blogging and homeland security:
Interesting how the world works now. I found out about this a few hours before receiving your email, by way of Peter Drayton's weblog. As a result, your email reached a prepared mind. An interesting example of what Dave Winer calls "triangulation". Now if only the people who protect our lives could figure this out, eh?
This kind of intertwingularity used to be scary, but now it's just routine. Like Doc settling in for a coffee in London and running into Ben walking his dog.
10:16:29 PM 
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Baby boom
A minor baby boom has occurred in my weblog neighborhood. Congratulations, Gordon and Jeroen! A few years from now, these magical days will still be as vivid as they are right now. The challenges will be different, but the rewards will be as great.
9:45:01 PM
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The GPS friendly fire incident: design versus training
On Saturday I mentioned Alan Cooper's anecdote about a design flaw in a military GPS device. An email correspondent, Jim Hanna, who I'm quoting with permission, clarifies the story:
I have followed this story closely, from an interest in GPS and an interest in failure modes of technical infrastructure. I read an account shortly after the incident that included much more detail than you usually see in reporting on these things. It was from the web version of some newspaper, but I haven't been able to find the link. Anyway, this account differs in a small but significant way from the one you cite. It said that the guy with the GPS had the target coordinates in the device and was about to perform some transformation on them before transmitting them (via a separate communication channel, which I believe was voice radio communication. He lost battery power, and inserted new batteries. When the GPS powered up, it displayed it's own position first. That's what all GPS units I've seen normally do. The problem was that the guy had a very short time to get the coordinates to the aircraft which was enroute and nearing the target zone. So in his haste, he forgot that the coordinate displayed was not the coordinate he was working on when the device powered off, so he did the transformation on the coordinates he saw (his present position) and radioed them to the aircraft.
This is consistent with my experience from using similar devices and suggests the problem is as much one of training as one of design.
Jim cites this URL, which quotes Stephen Cole writing for The Strategy Page, as his probable source.
Cooper would doubtless argue that design and training are inverse sides of the same coin. For example, Cole's account shows that the "design" of the entire system was such that a transform from Navy to Air Force coordinates was evidently needed:
A few minutes before the deadly mistake, he used his PLGPS to determine the target's location in degrees, minutes, and seconds so it could be attacked by Navy F-18s. Then, he recalculated the position in "decimal fractions of a degree" which is the way that the Air Force wants it.
These tales of non-interoperability used to be funnier than they seem now.
6:42:24 PM
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Traction Software's k-logging system
Last week I suggested that the FBI might profitably use a private network of weblogs to more adroitly manage its internal flow of information. Today comes a press release from Traction Software that says in part:
Providence, Rhode Island, June 13, 2002 - In-Q-Tel, a venture group funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has recently signed an expanded enterprise software license agreement with Traction Software, Inc., providing use rights for the latest version and multi-year upgrades of Traction's workgroup information-sharing software.
"Traction's product is a valuable tool among our growing portfolio of cutting-edge technologies that benefit enterprises like the CIA," said Gilman Louie, president and CEO, In-Q-Tel. "The value of Traction is that it makes collecting, organizing, and publishing information to the web or intranet as easy as using email."
According to Traction's literature, it is "a hypertext journaling system that combines elements of popular web logging software with advanced permissioning, auditing, action tracking, search, in-line commentary, and email integration essential to business users."
Traction was formerly known as Twisted Systems, a name that clearly didn't cut the mustard in government circles.
I'm an aficionado of such things, so will be on the lookout to try this software, and to hear from others who have experience with it.
3:09:58 PM
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Is web services orchestration a new class of problem?
I agree with the RESTian argument that SOAP-accessible web services should support HTTP GET where appropriate. The notion is that this will help ensure low coordination costs both for person-to-machine as well as machine-to-machine communication.
In TAG Finding: URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET, Dan Connolly sums up the recommendation that resources be made URI-addressable where possible, and dispels two myths that have clouded the issue:
- Myth: Search services will not index anything with a "?" in the URI.
- This was a heuristic to avoid infinite loops in some search service crawlers, but it was not an architectural constraint, and modern search services use more sophisticated heuristics to avoid loops.
- Myth: URIs cannot be longer than 256 characters
- This was a limitation in some server implementations, and while servers continue to have limitations to prevent denial-of-service attacks, they are generally at least 4000 characters, and they evolve as the legitimate uses of application developers evolve.
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How this relates to the orchestration of web services is still very unclear though. Consider this remark on the TAG mailing list, from Edwin Khodabakchian, CEO of Collaxa:
- we need to acknowledge the fact that we are solving a new class of problem that is more about machine-to-machine communication
Perhaps this really is a new class of problem, but if so I would like to see spelled out more clearly exactly how and why that is so, and what it implies.
11:47:56 AM
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Dave Winer's get-well e-card is here.
9:45:10 AM
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Intertwingularity, strange loops, tangled hierarchies
Sam Ruby is moving to http://intertwingly.net. It's an apt name, attributed to Ted Nelson:
``Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep
pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and
sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.'' -- Ted Nelson
The term has often been cited by those imagining new and more intertwingular forms of groupware, from Jamie Zawinski to (the elusive) author of ZOË.
Douglas Hofstadter has some other terms for intertwingularity. He calls it strange loops or tangled hierarchies.
9:32:08 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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