Responding to James

James Robertson left a long comment to my previous entry on the conflict(s) in the Middle East. I already rambled on in that entry, so I'm pulling his comment and response out here.

I think you misunderstand the nature of modern war if you think a draft would be useful, much less desirable. It takes a long time to create useful soldiers out of raw recruits. Additionally, a mass army is nothing so much as a huge target given nuclear weapons. There's a reason that the military is in the midst of reorganizing itself from large organic divisions into smaller, more easily configurable battalions. A mass draft army would run completely counter to that, and isn't something anyone wants.

I seriously doubt that any US troops will be sent into Lebanon, period. Also, it's telling that you think Israel is losing. Riddle me this: why are Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah desperately calling for a cease fire? Does the winning side ever ask for that?

I don't think a draft would be useful for anything except alerting people in the US that there are wars going on in Iraq and Lebanon (and Afghanistan -- are most people aware conditions are rapidly deteriorating there as well?). Other than a slight increase in gas prices, most people just don't seem to care that much. A draft would at least cause most of us to call for an end to our involvement there.

I never intended to imply Israel is losing. I don't know how to determine winners and losers in conflicts like this, I can barely comprehend their motivations. Disarming Hezbollah seems impossible, though. Someone will always be willing to rearm them eventually. These problems will not go away any time soon.

Just Now Waking Up

John Robb writes...

The 82nd Airborne is on tap to be sent... As Bill Lind said, this is 1914 all over again...

Things have spun way out of control. Can anyone say draft?

A draft would force most of us to turn off American Idol and think finally about what's going on around us, and our current, er, leadership. A draft would be one way for the congress to say it is time to sacrifice... for the first time since we've been at war and cut taxes simultaneously. (And frankly, they've kind of tapped the zygote topic for this election year.)

We might be asked to make a number of sacrifices, finally, beyond the soldiers in Iraq who've lost limbs and sustained severe head injuries, and the families who've lost husbands, wives, sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers.

We will have to ask, what for? What is this really for? I hope we are willing to ask that, and we'd better be determined to cut to the chase for a real answer.

One more thing -- is my son eligible for those same five deferments Cheney got during the Vietnam War? Will he too be allowed to have "other priorities" than shooting Communists, er, Muslims?

Should my son be drafted before or after Jenna and Barbara Bush? Why are they not fighting in Iraq already? All four of Franklin Roosevelt's sons were decorated for bravery in WWII.

I'd bet most Americans would tolerate several "pre-emptive", extremely destructive aerial attacks on the perceived enemies' cities much more easily than they'd tolerate a draft. Those would play a *lot* better on CNN and Fox News.

Count me out on all of this.

XMPP

Mickaël Rémond from the recent Portland Jabber Meeting...

At the end of the day, we were almost able to federate on a secure network, but there is still some interop work to be done to make this work flawlessly. That's why we all commited to make this secure federation of IM network running on different code base work in a close future. I agree with Jacques Belissent that building an open, highly secure xmpp federation based on a pretty diverse set of implementations is a very exciting and close prospect...

I deeply feel that we are only at the beginning. Something really big is now happening around XMPP (eXtensible Presence and Messaging Protocol).

Semantics

Sean McGrath...

Semantic markup is happening at last. Surprise surprise, it is not taking the shape that we had anticipated.

The Windows Live Developer Platform

Brian Arbogast, corporate vice president for the MSN Communications Platform in an article by Mary Jo Foley...

Windows Live services should be designed to support any platform, browser, language or device, and Windows Live services should make use of simple, standards-adherent HTTP-based application programming interfaces.

Lazarus the Canary

A interesting GC story from Greg Luck via Bill de hÓra.

...our main J2EE app at work with 9 second pauses. These would happen on average every 50 seconds. Needless to say this was a... problem.

In the end we consulted some engineers at Sun who... gave us the following piece of black magic:

java ... -XX:+DisableExplicitGC -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:NewSize=1200m -XX:SurvivorRatio=16

That's quite a canary. Let's name it Lazarus for the time being.

I'd bet the object story is even more interesting than the GC story.

Update:

As coincidence would have it, Greg is in town for OSCON and we ended up having coffee and then dinner with a group staying in town an extra day. There *is* a good object story behind the GC story... they are doing a *lot* in that VM with actual data and several kinds of caching. There are several ways they could slice up the objects into more VMs, in particular partitioning along data domains is natural for their application. Moving things into more VMs is something they've considered, but could take some effort working around their current use of ejb.

Accredited XP Course in Portland, Oregon

Jim Shore and Andrew Black are teaching an Extreme Programming course this summer at Portland State University. The course includes credit for undergraduate or graduate programs.

Jim writes about it in the xpportland yahoo group...

This is an in-depth course covering all aspects of XP, with emphasis on the planning game, continuous integration, test-driven development, large-scale design, testing, and retrospectives.

This course is a steal at $783.50 for Oregon residents. It's an eleven-day course that takes place over four weeks.

Any Way You Cut It

Sam Ruby on the convenience of so many frameworks...

complex frameworks... make your life easier 95% of the time, but a living hell the other 95% of the time...

Portland Smalltalk Email List

Our fair city, Portland, Oregon, has a new Smalltalk email list. Hey!

Meeting for a beer can't be far off.

Small, Opinionated Pieces, Loosely Joined

Martin Fowler on recomposing the enterprise...

Rails will do what it does, and will not complicate itself to support things it doesn't like...

I confess I like this opinionated attitude...

Rails is right, I think, to ignore the enterprisey world, but that doesn't mean that Ruby should...

there's a danger that people will hear the opinionated nature of Rails as a statement about Ruby, and thus give the impression that Ruby isn't a suitable enterprise glue. That would be a shame.

Special Forces

From O'Reilly Radar...

Operations used to be thought of as boring. It's now ground zero in the computing wars.

0 tests, 0 assertions, *but* 0 failures, 0 errors

Steve Loughran, counting the number of tests for web services standardization...

Ant has more tests than the entire specification suite of SOAP, WS-A, WS-RF, even WSDL (I think). And that is just a build tool, not the strategic glue for a planet.

ubuntu, apt-get, and ruby

This information exists here and there, but I thought I'd try to capture simply in one place.

If you are running ubuntu linux and you want to install ruby the you currently have to install several packages. For some reason, some of those packages are on the approved ubunto list (e.g. ruby) and some (e.g. irb) are not. I suppose because some people will need to run a ruby program but not need the interactive interpreter.

To get to the "unapproved" packages for ruby you need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list

There is a comment in the file about getting access to the "unapproved" universe. Uncomment the denoted lines of the file. What's not immediately clear though is you have to run "apt-get update" before the next "apt-get install ..." will recognize the newly available sets of packages.

After the update then do the following installs... (Your list will vary if you want rails, etc. You probably want to leave out the 1.8, that's just the current version.)

apt-get install ruby1.8
apt-get install ri1.8 
apt-get install rdoc1.8 
apt-get install irb1.8 
apt-get install ruby1.8-elisp
apt-get install ruby1.8-examples 
apt-get install libdbm-ruby1.8 
apt-get install libgdbm-ruby1.8 
apt-get install libtcltk-ruby1.8
apt-get install libopenssl-ruby1.8 
apt-get install libreadline-ruby1.8

Apparently rubygems has to be installed the old fashioned way.

Minix 3

Chris Double has been working with Minix 3 and a blog with Minix tips. A new release of Minix, it is more of a true microkernel design. Some interesting papers on the web site describe this evolution of Minix.

I was able to install it in short order. It runs all kinds of Unix/Linux/Posix software, including the X Window System.

Underneath the system calls is a small kernel, drivers and servers that run in user space, side-by-side with user application processes, each in their own protected address space. The system calls are implemented using message passing among the processes and the kernel. The driver processes can come and go due to bugs or intentionally, and there is a "reincarnation server" to help with this.

The Principle of Least Authority is followed, to prevent processes from sending messages they should not. This separation also enables experimenting with drivers and servers written in various programming languages.

Of course this is the same design approach that makes systems built with Erlang so reliable. Although Erlang makes the style explicit, while Minix 3 wraps the Unix API around the message-passing implementation. They are complementary systems and each have another quality: Fun.

"Scalable" is the new "Fast"

See this article on Erlang.

It used to be that if your code ran quite quickly, a year later you could run it twice as fast for the same amount of money. These days, you’re much less likely to get a chip that’s twice as fast, but you may get one with twice as many cores. If your code is highly parallel, you can just spread it out a bit more...

Two features of Erlang, both of which are built into the language, make it especially suited to writing scalable applications: process creation and message passing.

(via Mickaël Rémond)

Some years down the road, people will realize *this* model is service-oriented. There will be some kicking and screaming along the way, no doubt.

Web Services in Stockholm

Another one from Panic From Fuzzy...

I saw this a lot with EJB. I was certainly guilty of it. Having achieved some success and decent understanding of EJB, I became an ardent defender of it even though it was terrible technology.

I see this same phenomena today with WS-*.

No kidding. There are very few ways to discuss design decisions rationally with programmers fascinated by sparkling technologies, unproven technologies that promise to be the only way to develop software in the near future.

Eventually these programmers will be older and will no doubt have learned some lessons too. Until then they have to make their own mistakes.

When the lights go down in the city...

From the SOA Yahoo group...

[In] the grand design of Service Oriented Architecture (of which Web Services may be a means), HTTP plays a very insignificant role.

Sweet irony.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh 
 Somewhere ages and ages hence: 
 Two roads diverged in a wood..."

(Sorry for including Journey and Robert Frost in one post about SOA.)

Bound

That rails guy writes...

"Is DHH trying to to tighten the belts on the straight jacket of design once more?"... Why yes, I am.

(via Mark Baker)

And a rich commentary from Jim Greer including this...

To be frank DHH’s combination of “aryan” good looks, personal magnetism, and zeal for an orderly utopian world does lead to some uncomfortable associations.

But DHH doesn’t seem to want to take over the world – he wants to make a better one and let the old world come along when it’s ready.

Big

Greg geeks...

Google can store roughly 500k * 8G = 4 petabytes of data in memory on their cluster.

Four petabytes. How much is that?

It is twice the size of the entire Internet Archive, a historical copy of much of the Web. It is the same as the estimated size of all the data Google had in 2003 on disk.

It is a staggering amount of data. And it is all accessible at speeds orders of magnitude faster than those with punier clusters.

Unlebeavable

Amazing... Beavers win the title, 3-2.