antikoan

 |::| Wednesday, October 09, 2002

 |::|   5:52:00 PM 

I get up in the morning, and by the time I look out the window into the parking lot (seldom later than seven) there are usually only one or two cars there -- mine, and the one that belongs to my front downstairs neighbor, who works second shift as an EMT.

It's like that all through most weekends, too.

There are seven apartments in this building. Out of seven of us, only two of us are here all weekend.

I look at that empty parking lot, and I think: "Those people have lives. They have lovers to stay with. They have places to go." Then I work very hard to stop thinking about it.

 |::|   5:46:13 PM 

Ever wonder if you're missing something?

I was pretty much invisible when I was a kid. I was very good at escaping notice. (At least, that's how I remember it...) Once, in second grade, I remember playing off away from everyone else in the class for some reason (antisocial even then?), and somehow missing the call to form up and go inside. I looked around, and realized that my entire class was gone.

Going to the playground monitor and admitting I'd missed the whistle just wasn't on the menu. I don't remember exactly how I managed it, but somehow I managed to slip inside, and into the classroom. I crept carefully into the sheltered area where we kept our coats, and wedged myself, stealthily, into my own cubby. And there I stood and waited, listening to the teachers gossiping over their lunch. When people began to trickle in after lunch, I slipped out and hung up my coat as though nothing had happened. Nobody mentioned noticing that I was gone.

 |::|   5:21:24 PM 

Peter Judge at ZDNet says web services are more like junior staff than senior staff, because junior staff can get up to speed quicker, but make smaller contributions. That's tantalizingly close to the point, but Judge goes on to miss it by claiming that this is due to a lack of trust. It's not. It's due to the fact that business processes cannot be entirely reduced to a set of simple actions performed by simple-minded agents.

(I find it curious that people are so obsessed with trust in web services. Frankly, I'm not clear on what the problem is. If the connection is sensitive, then you'll find a way to make the connection secure, or you'll wait until web services have better security. What's the problem? It's not security.)

The problem, as I see it, is not so much that web services aren't trustworthy (they're as trustworthy as they are robust and secure). The problem is that people don't really understand what they're good for. Judge brushes against the real issue briefly from time to time:

Web services-based systems will have to model ALL the processes associated with a business action. For example, when a furniture manufacturer receives a purchase order for some chairs, a whole string of questions must be answered. Does the buyer have enough credit to pay for the order? Can the manufacturer get all the parts? Has it got the manufacturing capacity to put them together?

Unfortunately, all these questions do not have yes or no answers....

That's really the crux: The answers aren't simple. And web services are really only good for solveing problems that can be broken down into a bunch of terse questions with realtively simple answers.

To push the staffing analogy: Assuming that you can replace all architectural elements with web services is quite a bit like assuming you can replace all of your employees with single-task machines.

Web services, we are told, will be intelligent enough to handle this kind of negotiation. But will anyone trust them? "Web services will start out in an advisory role," says Bob Sutor, IBM's director of e-business standards strategy. "Once the confidence level rises, they will be given more trust. They will be treated like new employees."

Here's what misses the point: web services, per se, will not be advising on anything. Not unless the architecture undergoes radical changes that are wholly unnecessary. What web services will do is communicate with other web services to enable business logic processes that make decisions, which are then enacted by the simple-minded web services.

Put another way: Web services are not agents. Agents may employ web services, and will probably be accessed via web services interfaces, but they are not web services as such. That's a very important thing to remember in the face of hype. Hopefully we've learned enough in the past few years to filter down the hype a little.

 |::| It's never the same music  5:20:52 PM 

I listened [RealAudio] to a story yesterday on Morning Edition about Salif Keita. I've heard Malian music before; this isn't Malawian music -- this is nothing a "traditional" Malawian musician would think of. Much as Qatah's critical admirers may understand this as "traditional" music, it's no more traditional than Miles Davis playing "My Funny Valentine."

It's beautiful stuff -- lyrical, even haunting -- and it couldn't have happened without its maker walking through the world before coming "home" again.

"It's true what they say ... you can never go home again. But I guess you can shop there." -- Martin Blank, Grosse Pointe Blank