Nick Gall's Weblog

Thursday, April 29, 2004

Update re the "Page 23 Meme". Turns out that several people are investigating the origin of the meme popularly known as the "Page 23 meme" (as opposed to the lame name I gave it in my previous post: "Grab the Nearest Book" meme). See Normlife's post for a list. While Normlife and others credit seamusd and kricker, who credit each other (creating a looping dead end). I now credit Burkean's post of April 6th at 4:20 pm. Clearly, MarketSquare got the meme from Burkean. I'm waiting to hear from him as to whether he is the originator. 5:37:41 PM    comment []  trackback []

Why the "End to End Arguments in System Design" is wrong. (This thought just hit me so I wanted to capture it immediately.) Briefly, with more to come later, a federated architecture, e.g., an internetwork, requires not only the federation of heterogeneous and autonomous endpoints (i.e., hosts), it requires the federation of heterogeneous and autonomous "subnets." Now the Internet enabled heterogeneous link architectures, which it unified with IP transport. But according to the end to end arguments all other "unification" should done at the end points, e.g., TCP for reliable sessions, SSL for secure sessions. But the end to end arguments directly contradict the Internet's design goal of being a "network of networks"! The Internet is not fully a "network of networks" because it does not enable network services such as security, reliability, transactionality, etc. to be federated across heterogeneous instances of such services into a unified end to end service. The end to end arguments claimed that such services were not "network services" but "application services". This merely begs the question of how to build a federated "application level" network. Web services is the answer to this question. I'm surprised I haven't run across this argument against the end to end arguments given how compelling it is. Has anyone run across it? I suppose this counts as the follow up I promised in an earlier entry on the End to End. 5:19:54 AM    comment []  trackback []

Monday, April 26, 2004

The "Grab the Nearest Book" meme. Late to the party as usual, I just picked up on the constant "explosion" of LiveJournal memes (see also "LJ memes") over the past several years, a blog hosting site favored by the young and restless. A great example of such a meme is "Grab the Nearest Book" meme, which looks like this: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. "Grab the Nearest Book"'s Google Number is 13,200. I think I came across it at Due Diligence, one of the blogs I subscribe to via Awasu. Of course, rather than wanting to continue this meme, I instantly wanted to discover where it had orginated. Using Google (what else), I think I discovered the origin of the meme (or for those searching with different keywords: the original source of the meme, the beginning of the meme, the start of the meme, where the meme originated, where the meme started, and who started the meme). Why do I think this is the origin? Well, for one, the date of April 6th is the earliest I can find, and this blog post discussing the origin of the meme (the only such discussion I could find) credits the same site. One of the interseting things about this meme is how it seems to have mutated from a survey question on a LiveJournal survey. Of course, there are much earlier memes regarding random sentences from books. See this meme from The Church of the SubGenius. 7:30:03 AM    comment []  trackback []

Friday, April 23, 2004

Here's what I've been thinking about in the meantime. This is a list of ideas to blog about that I kept during my hiatus. I hope to follow up with an entry on each one. Compare “pov is worth 80 IQ points” to “a good notation” Dunbar Number Governance vs. Management Network Encapsulation (IFaPs) vs. Software Encapsulation (APIs): related to declarative vs. imperative, decoupling ends (how it is used) and means (how it works) Adapting is both changing how something is used (finding new niches for system as is) as well as changing how something works so it can be used in more ways (changing system to fit new niches) Evolution is not about “fit”; it is not survival of the “fittest”; play with the fit/fittest idea to accommodate Rorty’s apparent distinction between fitting reality vs. mere prediction/control. All evolution is co-evolution: spirit is not coming to know itself in the world, it is co-evolving What is history? History is recycled into the future since we can discover it. History is a theory we put on the world to explain the world. “Predicting the past.” (What fossils should I expect to discover.) History is the narration of the world. Or the contextualization of the world. It is the result of our interaction with the world. Textual “histories” are artifacts we produce (outputs) that then become inputs as things in the world to be (mis)read in our (mis)reading of the world. How does this jibe with Keith’s assertion that the only ahistorical/acontextual directions are entropy and “increasing historical richness”. Evolution from name binding to structure binding. Follow up to blog entry: http://radio.weblogs.com/0126951/2003/10/09.html#a64 . Name binding binds a scalar or structure to a name: reification. “A natural consequence of expandability is competition. Competing definitions should be accommodated, with some means for ranking them according to quality.” (http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/od/Existing_Automatic_Linking_Systems.html) This seems profound. To translate it to my language: “A natural consequence of extensibility is competition.” This leads to the realization that competition occurs on both ends of the hourglass: extended uses (users) and extended implementation (providers). This leads to the realization that competition only occurs when there is some common (standard) to compete within. This common standard is the result of some form of cooperation! Thus all competition is coopetition. Cooperation and competition are a duality/dialectic. Dialectic is the process view of duality, which is the information (data, material, static) view. What is the relationship among binding, naming, reifying/reification. “Data Encapsulation” analogy to sw encapsulation: packet terminology uses “data encapsulation” to describe packet headers and trailers Look for commonality among beaver dams, spider webs, bees nests, bird nests, in other words: complex extended phenotypes; especially look for ones that may be linked to sexual differentiation; see if symbiosis is involved in such phenotypes (or is the extension the symbiosis) Think about Semantics = data + behavior point Look into Universal Data Elements (UDEF): http://www.udef.org/ Is a legal way around the SOAP prohibition against looking in the body to use an xpath pointer in a SOAP header, eg, WS-BizContent? Make the business protocol argument. MOA to SOA is creating models that are biz protocol models. Hybrids/Symbionts: Semiconductors; semi-pro (amateur publishing); transforms “As the standard history from the Internet Society notes, the "key underlying technical idea" of the Internet was open architecture networking - the ability to link together completely different networking technologies provided they followed the appropriate protocols.” From Netcraft. Generalize to: the "key underlying technical idea" of SOA is open architecture process networking - the ability to link together completely different business processes provided they follow the appropriate protocols.” 4:36:27 PM    comment []  trackback []

Back and Badder Than Ever. On Wednesday March 17, 2004, just one week after my last entry, my new IBM T41 laptop drive died. Of course I did not have a recent backup of my weblog. So my drive was sent out for data recovery. Yesterday, I finally got my drive data back. Apparently, I didn't lose anything. So here I am, ready to blog again. Hooray! I've missed it so much. 4:33:30 PM    comment []  trackback []