Pushing String

Paul writes about hospitality industry token mapping.

Another example courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service: In my condo building, we have rows of tiny vertical mailboxes, which you open with your key. If they need to deliver a particularly large wad of mail for you, they put it in one of three large general-purpose mailboxes in the mailroom, and put the key for that large box into your tiny mailbox. This works similarly to Conor’s suggestion about keying the wall safe to the credit card of the traveler who is checking into the hotel after hours.

However, sometimes I fear our postal worker is unclear on the concept. Last night in my mailbox I found a hastily scrawled note on one of those “we tried to deliver a package to you and failed” slips of paper, saying “Your mail is in box #2″. The key to box #2 was hanging in the lock, accessible to anyone who walked by. Of course, this still has more security than you get with your average unlocked outside-the-house mailbox on a post, since you need a key even to get into the building, but do I want my condo neighbors to be poking around in my personal copy of the Victoria’s Secret catalog? Ick.

The XML Summer School was quite the steamy experience this year. I’d ascribe it to global warming, except that last year’s final week in July was quite chilly. I believe it was at some point on the pub crawl when one of the locals in our delegation told me, in a moment of drunken honesty, that the same thing happens every year: The English forget it gets hot in summer and act all shocked when it happens.

Bob DuCharme writes here about his School experience. His track looked really great — I wish it weren’t opposite mine. But I did have a great time hanging out with Bob, Priscilla Walmsley, Jeni Tennison, and everyone else in the off-hours. As Bob describes, we squeezed in a singing-and-playing session outside the college bar, where I tried out my new roll-up piano for the first time. All in all, the keyboard…doesn’t entirely suck. Marc Hadley managed to capture a picture of the scene, along with some stunning Oxfordscapes (he’s a real photographer, unlike me).

At the Trends and Transients session, we added something new: all the track chairs had a chance to opine (rant?) briefly. Peter Flynn and Sean McGrath went back and forth on microformats; there was a great moment when Sean insisted, almost tenderly, that “Microformats are beautiful.” Peter shot back some advice on avoiding Tag Abuse, and advocated joining his SDATA club.

I got cute with the concept and spent my five minutes on Tr*: two Tropes, three Trends, two Transients, and a Transparent for the web services area. I think it was when I mentioned “architectures” as a Trope that Paul Downey (who took some wonderful photos himself) commented (slightly paraphrased), “Protocols are really difficult to write. Look at TCP/IP! Giving people ways to create new protocols is like giving children machine guns.” You go, Paul! If by architectures we mean the building of frameworks wherein people constantly have to invent new protocols to use them, I worry for the security of systems based on them.

The Transparent I mentioned was “policy”. Technology is rarely more than 30% of a solution, with governance, policy, legal, and other messy human issues making up the rest, and yet many of us rush to work on the technology because it’s cool and it’s tractable. I’ve seen this done recently by people who really should know better.

I’m insanely biased, of course, but I thought my track rocked. I hope my illustrious speakers don’t take this the wrong way, but I thought we achieved many moments of actual edutainment. A few highlights:

• Sean made a compelling argument for temporal decoupling in service development, meaning asynchrony. If you agree with SPLJ but you accept too much coupling by pointing directly into business logic instead of into message queues/holding areas of some kind, what you’ve got is inherently brittle. Someone followed up on this point, noting that “Asynchronous programming is defensive programming.” Sean also noted that a staged event-driven architecture lets you do better load balancing. (This prompted me to mention something I heard Don Box say some years ago — the older distributed computing technologies tried to treat all the components as equally close together, whereas web services treats them as equally far apart. Perhaps this can’t be achieved without Sean’s approach.)

  As part of this, he observed that mashups are great for information integration, but don’t seem to be so good for application integration. The transactions being done are all simply idempotent (Paul Downey preferred to say merely “safe”) GETs, and yet the results are powerful. I wonder what the next huge enterprise SOA would look like if it strove for SPLJ in this fashion…

• Robin Wilton, in discussing the notions of reputation vs. identity, pointed out that privacy features of a system can prevent your ability to make a determination that two digital identities correlate to the same person, which can mess up reputation systems.

• John Kemp noted that “The web of services is not just a web of servers”, on his way to demonstrating, live, how a mobile client device (Nokia, natch) could host an attribute service about you.

• Paul Madsen’s talk managed to flow seamlessly from beer, to identity services, to “plumber’s crack”. :-)

Finally, here’s a portrait of Bill Clinton that hangs in the Rhodes House, taken at one of the evening events. If you want to get a closer look at Bill Clinton and what are apparently his favorite objects, go ahead, click…you know you want to.

A variety of health challenges, and not a little August distractedness — the summers are truly spectacular here — have kept me away from the blog, but I hope to remedy the situation properly soon. As something of a warmup, let me offer my first movie review in this space, for Snakes on a Plane (no spoilers, I promise):

It was much better than Airport. I’m going to see it again and again! — XMLgrrl

Here’s the thing. I don’t think most of the movies they make these days are meant for me, since I’m not a teenaged boy. And it was a little weird to have enjoyed SoaP so much, given that the previews at the showing I went to (the dead giveaway about what demographic they think you’re in) were for The Covenant, Beerfest, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. But SoaP has been a cult thing for months, and it was hard not to get swept up in it (send a “personalized” message from Samuel L. Jackson to someone you know! check out the awesome fan-created poster!).

So, here’s my verdict: They threaded the needle with this one. The acting is way better than you’d expect, done completely deadpan. The plot is silly but overall contributes to WSD; the action is gory in spots, hilarious in spots, and sometimes both at once. (I assure you, they did it on purpose.) There are a couple of good lines, rendered with much less scene-chewing than you’d expect, that I probably won’t be able to help repeating for years to come. It actually is reminiscent of Airport and its sequels, in a post-9/11, post-modern, quick-cuts way.

I used to think Jackie Chan’s First Strike was the funniest violent action flick I’d ever seen. It is hereby knocked off that throne, with SoaP lovingly installed in its place. It’s probably too late to resurrect the role that summer movies used to have in people’s lives back when the movies didn’t suck so much (or was it just that people had fewer entertainment options?), but if you used to like disaster movies, adjust your attitude and get to a theater to see SoaP before fall kicks in.