Chris's Rants

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Fighting Terrorism?

This TIME.com article sez:
Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.
Hmmm... Given that the Dept. of Homeland Security is also under a hiring freeze, makes one wonder exactly just how committed this administration is towards protecting the nation from acts of terrorism. They seem to have no qualms about asking an already strained government organization to place the Bush campaign on the front burner. Senator Leahy had this to say on the matter.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. The Dubya administration has developed a pattern that is highly consistent with what Mr. Clarke, Paul O'Neil and others whom the administration then smears as being "out of the loop", or "disgruntled employees seeking retribution". Bullshit!

This administration is all talk/photo-op and no action/commitment. When will the nearly 50% who continue to support Dubya in his re-election bid wake up and realize that the Emperor has no clothes?

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Monday, March 29, 2004

ebXML == ISO15000

Today, OASIS announced that four of the ebXML specifications have been approved as ISO standards.

On the one hand, I should be somewhat pleased. After all, I invested over two and a half years of my life in helping to breathe life into these specs, especially the CPP/A and Message Service specs. And yet on the other hand, I think that this move will prove to be a mistake in the long run.

What ebXML got right was that it addressed business requirements in terms that the suits could easily understand and appreciate. What it got wrong was that it did not effectively take the pocket-protector crowd's requirements into consideration. Not enough thought was given to address the issue of how the ebXML specs would fit into existing and emerging tooling, runtime platforms and programming models.

Additionally, ebXML was focused on B2B. Yet, as we have come to understand, the needs of B2B are not unique to B2B. So, the IT vendors pushed back and said that they couldn't afford to solve the same problem differently for different domains (B2B, Grid, EAI, Pervasive, etc.), there are only so many development resources to go around. Rather than a top-down approach, they advocated a bottoms-up approach that tackled each technical aspect separately so that they could get the factoring right such that the various components could be composed into a domain-specific solution.

The proponents of Web services (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and the miriad WS-splat specs) have (unfortunately) to a certain degree been too focused on technology concerns and not enough on addressing business requirements in terms that business could easily appreciate and understand. While we've made great strides with SOAP, WSDL, WS-Security, etc. we haven't done enough to explain how all of this maps to solving domain-specific business problems. Worse, as we move further up the stack, there are competitive proposed standards for transactions, reliable messaging, and federated identity to name a few.

Of course, business has a different set of priorities than the technology vendors. Business is trying to wring out cost where ever it can and is leveraging IT to do the job. The problem is that what business is looking to do is to extend the reach of its systems to those of its partners and customers. However, if every company has a different set of interfaces, then in order to engage, you'd need to develop a one-of-a-kind to match its interface and integrate with your systems. This simply isn't practical and it certainly doesn't scale.

A company cannot dictate use of a single technology for its partners and customers the way that it can for its internal IT environment. And therein lies the rub. Increasingly, companies are looking to standards to guide them as to the one way that they can integrate with the systems of their partners and customers, etc.

The crux of the problem with standards is that unless, and until such time as, the technology has matured sufficiently, the standard is just as much of an inhibitor as it was intended to be an enabler. Jim Waldo wrote about this in his blog a while back.
This kowtowing to the god of standards is, I believe, doing great damage to our industry, or craft, and our science. It is stifling innovation. It turns technical discussions into political debates. It misunderstands the role that standards have played in the past. Worst of all, it is leading us down absurd technological paths in the quest to follow standards which have never been implemented and aren't the right thing for the problems at hand.
I couldn't agree more.

Yes, the suits have real business problems to address, but the pocket-protector crowd, and to a large degree the standards wonk crowd, is still actively working out the "how". As they learn what works and what doesn't and what the best way to integrate these emerging standards into tools, runtime platforms and programming models, and as the various factions defend their various grounds, the technology morphs or is fragmented until things settle down to a stable point at which the community settles on a de facto standard or set of standards.

Let's face it, deploying IT systems is a long term commitment. Business cannot afford to fund IT to redeploy a system just because the underlying technology has shifted, yet that is the situation we are in today. Much of the technology is still unsettled. It is still too soon to be setting things in concrete. Unfortunately, today's announcement may do just that to the disadvantage of everyone.

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Sunday, March 28, 2004

Who's telling the truth?

(sigh), why doesn't the press do more of this sort of debunking of the administration's attack dogs? The american public is being allowed to be influenced and led by a bunch of liars.

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He said, she said...

Watching Meet the Press this morning, I am struck by how rational Mr. Clarke's arguments are in responding to the wide-ranging attacks that the Dubya administration and its Republican co-consp... er, attack dogs have levied against him for the past week.

What I fail to understand is why the press gives soooo much latitude to the administration in the face of mounting and incontrovertible evidence that the war in Iraq has nothing what-so-ever to do with the "war" on terrorism! Anyone, such as Mr. Clarke, who has the temerity to suggest that the war in Iraq has in fact distracted us from addressing the root causes of terrorism, and from engaging in tracking down the key sponsors of terrorism is labeled as a "disgruntled employee", or has their credibility besmirched by an army of White House spokespersons.

The administration and the Republican party have cast the President as some sort of mythic hero, without whom the country would have collapsed into a heap of despair over the events of 9/11. Bullshit! Had the administration given the focus that it has from the first days to addressing terrorism as it has to figuring out how to topple Saddam, maybe we'd be getting somewhere. They continually suggest that no one other than Dubya will be effective in the "war on terrorism".

As to Senator Frist's assertion that it was Mr. Clarke who influenced the shifting of publication date for the book to coincide with the 9/11 Commission hearings, that is utter bullshit. No author has any influence over the publisher after s/he turns over the manuscript for publication. One could possibly fault the publisher for manipulating the release of the book to boost sales as profiteering on the plight of the victims of 9/11, but not the author, who would have had absolutely no say in any of the process or timing decisions, especially not a first-time author.

Why does the press, who should really know better, not call Senator Frist on his bullshit assertions? Why do they simply play the tape and cast it as fact when it is pure, unadulterated, character assassination; unbecoming of a Senator, much less the Senate Majority Leader?

Fortunately, the tide seems to be turning on the current administration and its policies as regards Iraq. If I were Dubya, I'd be worried (which may explain why they attack with such viciousness anyone who even suggests that the Dubya is not the great saviour of mankind against the scourge of terrorism).

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Friday, March 26, 2004

NYT Editorial: The Wrong Target

To this, I say Amen! Me thinks thou dost protest too much Dubya.

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Thursday, March 25, 2004

I Couldn't resist

A /. poster suggests that
Microsoft do everything in mime.
For any of you who have tried to follow the history of Web services attachments, this statement is priceless.

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Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Meep BEEP!

mnot has discovered that BEEP serves as the underlying protocol for Apple's XGrid.

Kewl!

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Monday, March 22, 2004

YADE

Oh my, this is precious. First O'Neill and now Clarke have been branded as "disgruntled employees" by the Bush administration.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Here's a guy who worked for no less than FOUR administrations including that of Bush I without quitting and being branded a "disgruntled employee".
"He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff," Cheney told conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh
Really? Why the hell not?! The same lame line was used on O'Neill. If the Anti-Terrorism Czar isn't in the loop, who the hell is in the friggin' loop!?

Ultimately, this will come down to credibility. The Bush administration has none, but they've done a bang up job of leaving O'Neill with none and they are working all the stops on Clarke. However, makes one wonder when the claims of the so-called "disgruntled employees" are so consistent whether they aren't in fact closer to the truth than the bile that the White House spews forth.

Quite frankly, I'm not certain that this country can sustain another four years of dubya and his cronies.

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Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Must Read TV!

mnot recommended this site at dinner last night during a discussion in which we all found out we were closet fans of The Apprentice.

Here's a taste:
Previously on Repeated Scans Of The Patient's Head Showed Nothing: VersaCorp swept Amy back into its loving arms, saving her from spending another three days tending to Assorama's massive head wound. Trump wasn't sure that continuing to give Amy all the power was such a great idea, but she's the cutest, dammit -- ask her yourself. Teams had to choose an artist whose work they could sell, and while VersaCorp chose the lovely and simple paintings of Andrei the "abstract nature-based painter," Protégé chose the psychiatrically diagnosable works of Meghan the "somewhat crazy Photoshop freakazoid with a possible incest fixation and some weird-ass thing about frogs."
I wish it had an RSS feed!

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Apache Wiki: WebServicesSpecifications

Apache wiki has a page for Web services specifications that includes an RSS feed.

Kewl. I like the fact that it calls them "specifications" and not "standards". Unfortunately, come of the cited specifications are no longer in vogue like WS-Attachments. WS-Transactions has been superceded by the combination of WS-Atomic Transactions and WS-Business Activity. WS-Inspection isn't receiving much attention these days. Neither is WS-Routing for that matter.

There also appear to be two or three glaring omissions; notably SOAP (1.1 and 1.2), WSDL (1.1 and 2.0), UDDI (2.0 and 3.0), and SAML to name a few off the top of my head.

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Star-schmucks

Courtesy of Ian White.

ROFL!

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The Big Rip

Oh, man... game over!

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Adding to David's Restaurant Reviews

Tonight, some of us geeks got the yen for some Chinese food. There wasn't anything on David's list, so we checked with the concierge desk at the Palisades and she recommended the Shanghai Chinese Bistro.

Great recommendation. All of the dishes we ordered were great, but we were most impressed by the Szechuan Chili Beef. A real slow burn. As Mr. Burns would say; "Excellent!".

We topped off the evening with a stroll over to the Mondo Gelato which David highly recommended. I od'ed on a double scoop of the limone. Simply awesome.

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Tuesday, March 16, 2004

A Day at Whisler

A bunch of us here in Vancouver, BC for the WS-I Community Meeting went skiing at Whistler yesterday. Actually, we spent the day on Blackcomb.

The conditions were akin to spring conditions in New England, but ungroomed so in places very crunchy-granola in texture. Kinda like skiing on a concrete rumble-strip. It was extraordinarily foggy at various times, with visibility measured in feet, and the lack of contrast made for interesting if not tentative skiing.

I took the boobie prize for the most spectacular fall. Chris Kurt said it was like one of the classic scenes from Roadrunner where Wyle E. Coyote finds himself suspended over an abyss with terra firma hundreds of feet below and realizes he's cooked... after a second, he falls and leaves behind a comic balloon that sez "pfftt".

We had just gotten off the quad chair and were assembling off to the side. The fog was so bad that you couldn't see more than a few feet at best. I skied over to where Chris was standing to wait for the guys in the chair behind us. Having never skied Whistlet-Blackcomb before, little did I know he was standing on the edge of a precipice with something like a 70-75% pitch. As I came to a halt, my left ski found itself unsupported by the ground below. As I fell straight down a foot or so to a narrow ledge, I let out a brief "Whoa!". I tried to balance myself, only to find my skis were again no longer in contact with terra firma. This was immediately followed by a more sustained "Ahhhhhh!" and I pitched over and slid straight down the embankment, probably about 30-40 feet before I managed to spread-eagle myself to stop my slide.

Fortunately, I was uninjured save my bruised ego. I am really glad that I was wearing my helmet as it could have been more serious for me had I not. The other guys didn't know whether to call for the ski patrol or laugh... once they realized I was fine... well, I'll leave that to your imagination.

While in certain fora, we represent our respective companies (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, webMethods) as fierce competitors, we had a great day and managed not to talk about work, which is an accomplishment in and of itself.

Good fun, good friends...

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Look what the stork brought!

NASA researchers have discovered new planetoid. I'm fairly certain it won't be the last.

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Monday, March 15, 2004

Reach for the stars

Sean McGrath writes about Reach which has a well thought out
versioning strategy for its Web services. Way cool!

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Saturday, March 13, 2004

Went to a fight and a hockey game broke out

Tom Glover writes about the most recent incident of excessive violence in the NHL.

I agree, the violence is completely unnecessary. It's one of the reasons that I am not an avid NHL fan, though I did enjoy playing hockey as a kid. It is interesting though that in the minor leagues (we have the Worcester Ice Cats and P-Bruins nearby), there isn't nearly as much violence as you typically find in the NHL... I had always thought it is because those kids are skating to get noticed by the NHL franchises their minor league teams feed. When we do go to a hockey game, we go to an Ice Cats game or occasionally a P-Bruins game, they are much more enjoyable because there's far less fighting.

But to his main point, I agree that while Todd Bertuzzi certainly deserves whatever punishment is meted out to him for his act, the real culprits are the team owners and corporations that have, and will likely continue to, fostered if not encouraged this sort of behavior in the belief that it would improve the bottom line.

I doubt that they'll face the music though.

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Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Web Services Reliable Messaging

A new version of the Web Services Reliable Messaging spec has been published today. I'm really pleased with the spec:-)

The substantive changes are as follows:
  • added two (optional) operations that enable a destination (or its proxy) to assign the Sequence Identifier (at the request of the source), thus providing for the ability for the destination to perform more efficient resource reclamation
  • added abstract WSDL definitions for the Create/TerminateSequence operations
  • removed the DeliveryAssurance policy assertions section and the associated schema definitions. (The authors believe that this only added to confusion and would be best handled in a separate specification).
  • revised the Security Considerations section to address the issue of retransmission of a message with the same MessageId value.
  • added an optional MessageNumber element as child of the AckRequested header
  • disambiguated the terms "Source" and "Destination" so that there is a clearer distinction between the Application Source/Destination and the RM Source/Destination, reflected this in the model and diagrams of the model
  • revised the section on Faults to provide specific mappings/bindings of fault properties to both SOAP1.1 and SOAP1.2 serializations
  • Other minor editorial nits such as the SOAP1.2 namespace URI, grammatical errors and the contents of the Notational Conventions section

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Sunday, March 07, 2004

Doesn't GET it

I noticed this new IBM developerWorks article entitled: "Tip: SOAP 1.2 and the GET request" and was intrigued.

Unfortunately, the article simply perpetuates certain myths that I really wish would die.

First, the author writes:
Since the publishing of SOAP 1.0, a number of people have complained about its reliance on the HTTP POST method. Many felt that SOAP utilized a popular protocol (HTTP) but showed little respect and understanding for the architecture it was built upon.
This is wrong on so many levels it scares me. SOAP was written by people who had the utmost respect for, and understanding of, HTTP. Sure, the SOAP1.1 (and I'm fairly certain that the author meant SOAP1.1 and not SOAP1.0) only defines a normative binding to HTTP POST, and maybe had the authors included a normative binding to GET things might be very different today. However, the whole point of SOAP was that it be extensible and that it could be mapped onto any transport protocol. No one had to wait around for the W3C XML Protocols WG to use SOAP in the context of other HTTP methods such as GET.

The article goes on to state:
SOAP originally supported POST requests only. Yet Web services may implement services that are safe as defined above. For example, a service that inquires about the progress of an order is both safe and idempotent. According to the HTTP specification, it should be implemented as a GET request. According to SOAP 1.0, it must be a POST.
I'm sure that I don't know where in the SOAP1.1 spec (and again, it's pretty clear he means SOAP1.1) it says that anything must be a POST.

Further on it reads:
At the time of writing, Axis supports SOAP 1.1 only, but still implements a limited form of GET.
Huh? Really? Axis 1.1 supports SOAP1.2 last time I looked.

Finally, the author gets something right:
The simple principles behind the Web have proven their scalability and reliance. It is a very positive development that SOAP, one of the major standards underlying Web services, has taken steps to align more closely with this incredibly successful architecture.
I couldn't agree more. It is heartening to see others pick up on this. But, then the article finishes with this statement:
While you wait for your favourite kits to be upgraded to SOAP 1.2 and WSDL 2.0, review your Web services and identify the safe operations that are prime candidates for migrating to the GET binding.
Why wait? SOAP1.1 doesn't preclude the use of HTTP GET any more than it precludes a binding to FTP or WebSphereMQ.

If you have static content, all you need is to construct a SOAP envelope with the content and host it as a web resource using your favorite Web server. If the content is dynamic, use a Servlet or JSP to construct the SOAP envelope. This is NOT rocket science. It only becomes a little more complicated if you intend on leveraging some of the more advanced Web services features such as WS-Security. But think about it a bit. Do you need the likes of WS-Reliability for a GET? Nope, you can GET it as many times as you like because it is both safe and idempotent.

SOAP, while no longer an acronym for anything, is still simple. The trouble with simple is that there is a tendency of some to make it unnecessarily complicated.

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Saturday, March 06, 2004

Holy Candlesticks Batman!

My son turns 21 today.

I can still remember (will never forget?) walking through the parking lot at Newton Wellesley Hospital to get my car and head into work after my wife delivered him into the world; thinking "I'm a father... I'm responsible for this kid for the next 21 years and beyond. Whoa." I was only 26 at the time so 21 years hence was an inconceivably long time.

Pretty heavy stuff, fatherhood. Kinda like taking the red pill if you ask me.

Anyway, now he can drive, vote and drink. Something tells me that tonight won't be his first taste of alcohol, but he has been a pretty good kid (compared to me!). At least tonight he'll be safely tucked into a limo with some of his friends as they go bar hoping to celebrate his birthday so we know he won't be drinking and driving and he'll actually make it through his 21st birthday intact.

He's turned out to be a pretty good kid. He's quite artistic; his major is graphic arts and he's done some impressive stuff with photoshop. He had a rough time in high school with his grades because he had ADD and we didn't recognize the problem (because we associated ADD with hyperactivity; but that's ADHD). But now he's well over that and is on the Dean's list. He seems to have made it through the hell that is being a teenager and is slowly returning to the human race. He's got a steady job at Home Depot... in fact, he's had a job (sometimes two) continually since he was about 15. He's even starting to act civilly with his sister, which we haven't seen since he started grade school. Yeah, he has turned out alright. Much (most?) of the credit goes to my wife.

Fatherhood... I highly recommend it.

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Thursday, March 04, 2004

Re: Why Standards, Part Deux

Jim Waldo writes about the IT industry's obsession with standards and raises some important points worth pondering.

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