I Really Don’t Know

The Hum^H^H^HBabble of The Machine

Ward Cunningham has been using automated speech to monitor activity on his wiki…

Where does the time go…

Busy times, child number three on the way, due at the end of next month; along with trying to buy and sell houses and work has been great fun. I want to blog about some of the technicalities of what we’ve been building, and will try to get around to that, but in the meantime we’re talking about some of it at:

http://silkworm.talis.com

Essentially, we’re working on services out in the cloud that provide content discovery, interoperability and access services for content providers. I can highly recommend the white paper by our CTO Justin, available for download from above.

more coming soon.

The Hum of The Machine gaining ground

previously I wrote about The Hum of The Machine, an idea I’d like to see^H^H^Hhear much more of.

Seems PragDave has picked up on people doing it for real and even has it ‘by default’ on his Apple G5.

More Security or Different Security

We’ve just been having a discussion at work about the benefits of Impersonation and Delegation in .Net. That is, the ability of an application to perform actions using the identity of the human user driving them.

For web applications, web services, database access etc this can be very useful, giving a trail throughout a multi-tier application showing which user performed an action.

The obvious perception is that this is, of course, more secure. But that’s just not true…

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Data Latency and Astronomy

I found these posts on Pat Helland’s Blog, actually, I didn’t, Dave did, but hey.

SOA is like the Night Sky…
It’s All in a Name: What’s a Service?

The timing was really interesting…

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Term: Technology Previa

As in “Placenta Previa” where the placenta is positioned to arrive before the child. Technology Previa is the positioning of a technology to arrive before the requirement. ;-)

Subversive Patterns

Well, we all do a jolly good job at making the right technology decisions and having a good go at building great systems for our customers, but from time to time you get one of those situations where some functionality has been chosen or bought and mandated despite it’s lack of suitability.

You know the situation, flashy sales demo is followed by a purchase, the CTO/Strategy Team/Architecture Group/Project Sponsor hands you the box and says “we’re going to use this for our foobits logic processing”.

Well, here are two subversive patterns I’ve used to tackle the problem…

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The Hum of The Machine

Rachel Davies has been writing about some insights she gained from a tour of the Toyota plant in Derby, which reminded me I should write something about a couple of concepts Steve Jones (of Egg) and I worked on as analogies for large scale systems monitoring.

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Agile Techniques for Business

Dave Fellows, a partner in crime on one or two projects has a note on his blog about releasing a business proposition but delaying the build of supporting IT infrastructure until just before its required

This reminded of the heady days of Egg during the dotcom boom…

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ASP.Net Traditional Web Anti-Pattern

ASP.Net introduces some new concepts in Web Development that many aren’t familiar with. I’ve come across enough projects done badly in the same way that I’ve concluded this must be an anti-pattern…

“The ASP.Net Traditional Web Anti-Pattern” is what web developers coming from all web backgrounds Perl/CGI, ASP/COM, JSP, PHP and others all seem to build if not given adequate time, guidance or training in .Net Web Development.

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