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

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

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