Nick Gall's Weblog

Thursday, November 27, 2003

An Web Server Survey Alternative to Netcraft. Focuses on just the Top 1000 Corporations. Obviously, Microsoft IIS does much better in this realm. You can subscribe to the monthly survey. 6:24:39 AM

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Antagonyms. I don't know what got into me, but I decided to try to determine what to call self-contradicting words, e.g., ravel, cleave, sanction. My wife, Cheryl, and I have enjoyed discussing such words for years. So I went to Google to find out what words have been coined to refer to such words, and it is a mess. Here are the results: amphibolous/words 539/4 antagonyms 573 antilogies/dust 314/9 auto-antonyms/autoantonyms/combined 43/93/142 contronyms/contranyms/combined 470/216/681 enantiodromes/-dromic/-nymy 3/75/2 janus words 126 self-antonyms 37 self-contradicting words 15 The two front runners appear to be Antagonyms and "contronyms"/"contranyms". (Amphibolous refers to a grammatical construction that can be interpreted in different ways, hence the large number. "Amphibolous words" has few hits.) So I guess I'll go with antagonyms, since there is no confusion as to spelling (i.e., zero Google hits for "antaganyms"). Here is a list of Web sites with lists or discussions of such words: http://ccins.camosun.bc.ca/~peterm/venus/contranyms.html http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-553.html http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/%7Eseth/misc/selfantonyms.html http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/cntrnmys.htm http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ecellis/antagonym.html http://thinks.com/words/autoantonyms.htm http://www.fun-with-words.com/nym_autoantonyms.html http://www.users.bigpond.com/burnside/contradicting.htm 6:52:24 AM

Monday, November 24, 2003

Amphipathic = Amphipilic. How confusing/interesting is this? Amphipathic and Amphiphilic are synonyms! It makes a strange kind of sense since both sides of such a molecule dislike something and both sides like something; they just like/dislike opposite things. I wonder how the two terms got started. I should start a collection of "opposites" that mean the same thing. There is already a list of words that mean both one thing and its opposite, e.g., sanction, cleave, ravel. (I went to find this list and came up with so many and so many words for it that I will put it in a separate post.) 4:01:31 PM

Are interface, catalyst, and surfactant/amphipath the same thing? In a previous entry (Are "interface" and "catalyst" the same thing?), I speculated as to whether "interface" and "catalyst" were essentially the same concept. While pondering this (which btw has strengthened my belief in their equivalence), I began to suspect that surfactants (e.g., soap, detergent) are catalysts and hence interfaces. I suppose I had this suspicion because I wash the dishes so much. <grin> I observed how detergent speeds up the movement of water and food across the surface of a dish. I suppose I also thought it would be very cool if the SOAP protocol, which is clearly an interface specification, were analogous to a surfactant like soap! That would be truly ironic: a word chosen for its acronym, then the meaning of the acronym is rejected, and then the de-acronymed word having a deeper meaning. (As you can probably tell, I am always trying to make connections among everything.) So I did what I always do and Googled surfactant and catalyst in various ways. Result? Connection! Surfactants are considered catalysts, at least by some. For example, "Surfactants are catalysts that work by effecting or changing the surface of a material," from Handbook Of Surfactant Analysis: Chemical, Physicochemical And Physical Methods. Even better is the connection between surfactants and interfaces. According to the Wikipedia (where I usually go after Google), surfactants are known as amphipathic compounds because they are both hydrophobic and hydrophilic, and thus intrinsically locate themselves on the surface of (or interface between) water (and whatever). Thus, surfactants are, by their very nature, organic/aqueous interfaces! As far as I can make out, the derivation of amphipathic is amphi-, which Greek for "on both sides, around" combined with -pathic from pathos, which is Greek for "passion, suffering." Also, see the definition of amphipathic in this glossary. Thus, "suffering/passion on both sides." What a great definition of an interface. But the connections gets even richer. It turns out that there is a whole field known as "Catalysis and Surface Science." Even better, my searching ran across an article in ScienceWeek entitled "ON CATALYSIS AND SURFACE SCIENCE." And once again (just as with other key concepts I am investigating, e.g., dissipative structures), a Nobel prize has already been awarded to Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) for his study of such amphipathic compounds and the "interfacial monolayers" they form. This reinforces my hope that much hunch that interfaces are the key to understanding complex systems. But wait, it gets even better. In searching Wikipedia for "amphipathic," I came across the entry on Evolution of flagella and its Talk :References section. In the references section is the following quote: "I [Thomas Cavalier-Smith] argue that proteins were primarily structural not enzymatic and that the first biological membranes consisted of amphipathic peptidyl-tRNAs and prebiotic mixed lipids." (emphasis added). So, amphipathic compounds are not only catalysts and innate interfaces, but such compounds were integral to the origin of life. Wow! This connects so much of what I have been thinking about lately: how a systematic understanding of networks of loosely-coupled modular interfaces can explain everything from physics, to biology, to computer science, to the mind. One last thread to tie in here, before I lose the thread. I have a hunch that surfactants and other amphipathic compounds are "transport catalysts" while most common catalysts are "transformation catalysts." (Note, I made up these terms, then I went to check to see if they were already in use, and--of course--connection. Here is a reference to membrane transport catalyst.) One spark behind my intuition is this quote regarding Transport Processes from Northwestern University's Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering: "Descriptions of transport of momentum, energy, and species, often accompanied by chemical reaction – i.e. fluid mechanics, heat transfer, mass transfer, and reaction engineering – are one of the central and most successful paradigms of modern chemical engineering." (emphasis added). What I am getting at in this distinction between transport and reaction is something I see as fundamental in my understanding of Service-Oriented Architecture: to describe a service, you must describe both the transport to and the function of the service (the transformation it performs). Its also fundamental to my notion of computation itself, which I see as divided into three fundamental activities: communication (transport), transformation, and persistence (storage). In all of these activities, the action is at the interfaces, enabled and accelerated by catalysts. 4:52:22 AM

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. A colleague sent me Shirky's rant on the W3C Semantic Web Activity, and I gotta say I agree with his conclusion wholeheartedly: Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta-data we generate is increasing dramatically, and it is being exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self-interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom-up design and adoption is that it is actually working now. I also love his observation of what I would call the "Version 2.0 Syndrome" (in which the second version of a wildly successful new product is bloated, complex, expensive, therefore a failure, because the designer of the original product tried to improve it in every way): This, of course, is the standard Hail Mary play for anyone whose technology is caught on the wrong side of complexity. People pushing such technologies often make the "gateway drug" claim that rapid adoption of simple technologies is a precursor to later adoption of much more complex ones. Lotus claimed that simple internet email would eventually leave people clamoring for the more sophisticated features of CC:Mail (RIP), PointCast (also RIP) tried to label email a "push" technology so they would look like a next-generation tool rather than a dead-end, and so on. Unfortunately, I think Tim Berners-Lee (and the W3C) is somewhat bogged down in his own "Web version 2.0" quagmire: The Semantic Web. He created this wildly successful thing called the Web by creating something simple, easy to adopt, and flexible. Yet most of what the W3C has done since then seems complex, hard to adopt, and inflexible. Actually, this is possibly his second V2 ballyhoo, since he was involved in or at least promoted HTTP-NG (for Next Generation)--the aborted attempt to turn HTTP into an distributed OO protocol. Web services is succeeding where HTTP-NG failed. And something I haven't seen yet will succeed where W3C's Semantic Web fails. 10:48:08 AM

Sunday, November 02, 2003

SOAP Header Blocks Best Practices. My first sighting of a best practices for SOAP Header Blocks. It won't be my last I'm sure. 6:20:31 AM

The Origin (Coining) of the Term "Middleware" I spent some of my own hard earned cash to scratch an itch I've had for a long time about the origin of the term "Middleware" as well as to test Google Answers. I am delighted with the results: The Oxford English Dictionary Online (available through personal or institutional subscription) provides, as its first two quotations: "1970 A. CHANDOR et al. Dict. Computers 254 Middleware, computer manufacturer's software which has been tailored to the particular needs of an installation." "1972 Accountant 27 Apr. 537/2 A comparatively new term 'middleware' was introduced because, as some systems had become 'uniquely complex', standard operating systems required enhancement or modification; the programs that effected this were called 'middleware' because they came between the operating system and the application programs." "middleware" OED Online [Oxford University Press] available by subscription at http://dictionary.oed.com The first citation is to "A Dictionary of Computers", a/k/a "The Penguin Dictionary of Computers", edited by Anthony Chandor et al. "The Penguin Dictionary of Computers (Penguin Reference Books)" Amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/014051127X/qid=1067540389/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_0_2/026-8392499-8130832 "Displaying books where Author is Chandor, Anthony, Title is A Dictionary of Computers" BookFinder.com http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&;st=sl&qi=OirDDTdbyRailuduqXthXDoEZVg_1594598467_2:1:3 The second reference appears to be to the London periodical "The Accountant"., which you can find by searching major library catalogs, especially in the UK, for the title "accountant". What I like about the definitions that Google Answers came up with is that they predate the "network-centric" definitions of Middleware. I'd always assumed that Middleware was coined in the early days of Client/Server to refer to the network-oriented software that linked client and server. But in fact, the Accountant citation clearly defines Middleware as any software between an application and an OS--way before C/S and even before computer networks were prominent. The Dictionary citation emphasizes customization ("tailored") of generic software ("manufacturer's software") to "particular needs". What this suggests to me is that Middleware is software that mediates software, i.e., mediates between a software resource (network) or set of resources (OS) and a software application. This supports my aphorism: "Metadata is data about data; Middleware is software about software." 6:00:55 AM

Summary of changes from WSDL 1.1 to WSDL 1.2. From Jeff Schlimmer, one of the WSDL editors. Port Type got renamed Interface! I'd better go back and read WSDL 1.2 much more carefully. 5:24:39 AM

Yet More SOAP Standards. Man, is it hard to keep up with the evolution of Web services standards. I love it! It has the feel the rush of RFC's in the early days of the Internet. In the aftermath of the PDC (as aggregated through PDC Bloggers) I picked up on Martin Gudge's blog, where he mentions the death of DIME (and other SOAP attachment stds) and the birth of PASWA/MTOM. These latter two standards make even clearer that SOAP is about interoperability of typed, reliable, transacted, secure <<Infosets>>. I also picked up on Jeff Schlimmer's blog. Jeff been an editor on several of the core WS-* standards. 5:05:46 AM

XAML and XUL, Please Talk. Benjamin Voigt has an interesting post with a set of links discussing XAML and SVG/CSS as well as XAML and XUL. Hopefully, with sufficient pressure from the developer community, by Longhorn, XAML becomes more standard not less. 4:22:24 AM