MisterMeta

Comments on Coetzee and the books Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year and Summertime

2012-02-11T11:55:00.002-05:00

J.M. Coetzee’s work is more often about himself than not, in subtle reflections that achieve the necessary universality. Yet I feel a great unease about it. The undertone of self-criticism and mockery is subverted by the very fact that he is writing about himself. In effect saying that that is what is important. I know that it is deeper than that, that he uses himself consciously as a device, one that is central to his approach to fiction, but I also know that sadness and depression come from loneliness.

However, Coetzee has succeeded in reaching others, he has two Bookers, a Nobel and is loved by readers and writers, including me. He says things that need to be said, with courage and balance.

But, and this is what gnaws at me, there is the self-centredness, the one he is aware of, that he digs into all the time, the fatal flaw.

Maybe I can talk about the novels I mention in the title, to give examples. Elizabeth Costello reads like a crotchety set of essays by someone who does not care how they are perceived, because they are gone, above criticism. Costello is dead at the end, in a sort of purgatory, and this gives closure to all the ranting. It is good ranting though, holds your attention, and despite the characterization, shows balance. This is the tour de force. The hard foundations of Coetzee’s writing are a) humanism, probably more accurate to say animalism, avoiding pain, b) guilt about colonialism, and anger about the guilt, since he is not directly guilty, he is constantly trying to extricate himself from it c) self and others, connection, sex as a mystery.

Elizabeth Costello contains a casual sexual encounter in a hotel, between business travellers that is masterful in showing how a we inhabit our bodies when close to one another, how strange, beautiful and limiting awareness of sexual contact is. Sex and loneliness in Coetzee’s work are bound tightly. He does not really understand the other, despite all the voices.

This brings me to Summertime, where he reflects on his middle years through women that have known him. This is masterfully written, but the uneasiness I feel about it relates to the above, he cannot get out of himself. He realizes it, since his characters allude to his “autism”. Realizing it and trying to exorcise it and ultimately failing in my view is what makes the work so strong, but also so flawed. He can go on telling us he knows this, and there are two possible conclusions: i) he is truly failing - case closed ii) he is using this mechanism to drive his creativity, it is a shtick. I refuse to believe the second.

In Diary of a Bad Year, he tries again to bring out Coetzee from his shell. Two and a half points of view. Himself, as always, a young woman who becomes his typist, and the views of her boyfriend, an foil to the humanist/animalism/anarchist Coetzee character. Archetype does not mean one-dimensional here. He is fully fleshed, but a bit distant, a bit vague, a bit too consistent. Coetzee is getting revenge it seems on that type. I know these types well, I dislike them too, but again, I almost want to not believe that Coetzee is exercising a form of petty literary revenge. Not petty I guess, the themes are broad enough, but in all three books there is a sort of accounts settling smell, things that his “autism” may have prevented him from doing in real time may be coming out.

So in conclusion, I must admire the man and admit that I enjoy the work, but some of it seems to evade complete control, which to me is a criterion of classic art. This is the mystery of Coetzee’s work.

Theroux, Hemingway and Stendhal

2011-11-23T18:06:00.000-05:00

I sometimes wonder if attribution of inspiration is required for authors. Most art derives or is inspired from previous work, and the role of critics is to know that other work enough to goad or at least constrain the temptation and therefore promote originality in a semi-Darwinian sense. The problem is that the greater the corpus the harder it gets, and the Internet may or may not always help since it is also loaded with Everything.

So here is my little contribution.

Stendhal claims to have bought at great expense some family stories from which he derived The Italian Chronicles. He felt that Italian history was too formalized, censored, under the influence of power to be truthful, and since he had lived in Italy he felt he was in a position to comment on this, so he undertook to translate and interpret some stories that presented the other side of history, the secrets and betrayals that he felt would balance the official stories. His chronicles (although he did not use that word) were presented in the form of short stories, some quite troubling and violent.

I read them recently and the style reminded me of Hemingway. It was direct, unemotional, not flowery in the least and very clear. I went back and read the war-related books "The Charterhouse of Parma" and "The Red and the Black" and found the battle scenes and landscape descriptions to be very similar to the ones in "A Farewell to Arms", in style and theme.

Of course it is not plagiarism or even close. Hemingway went as far as saying publicly that he wanted to beat Stendhal in the ring. The stories were different, it was the tone that was the same.

This brings us to Theroux and his "Stranger At The Palazzo D'Oro". I stumbled upon an excerpt in Granta magazine and then read the full novel later. It is a typical Theroux story (bear with me, there can be such a thing), in that it is beautifully set, beautifully written, but at its core has a very maudlin unsatisfying plot.

I know, it sounds harsh, but that is how I feel.

His protagonist meets a fine-boned countess, completely of another world and he seduces her, fucks her silly, and describes the power games that ensue.

It is titillating in strange ways, confusing in others, cliche in most, and yet it is good writing, because it sounds so real, and there are many unexpected turns, although in the end it does not close or satisfy beyond what a good soap opera can do.

So back to the link with Stendhal. The chronicles have a story that could well be the inspiration for the Theroux tale. It almost seems that like Stendhal, he adapted the plot to his contemporary purposes and then went into the bedroom.

I don't think there is anything false about this. It is just interesting that here are two authors that took something from Stendhal, one took the style and themes, the other just the plot.

There are may ways to mine the classics I guess.

Success

2009-12-23T01:20:00.001-05:00

Elvis at the fair, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

Can be simply measured as the width of your circle of influence. Not money, not fame, but influence. Who will follow.

Toronto Museum of Science and Tech

2009-03-31T17:50:00.001-04:00

Toronto Museum of Science and Tech, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

Truth is an average of the prevalent beliefs.

About architecture and design optimization

2008-12-14T11:07:00.007-05:00

eisenman house X model, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

Thinking about Frank Gehry's buildings, and how the interiors are often disappointing, and how Toronto can now brag that it has a token Gehry.
Architecture, like many living things, is an attempt to defy gravity for a while In fact Wright made the analogy with trees. They manage to combine the height with better light gathering and water moving functions, along with structural wind resistance and are beautiful to look at. I think that when a building combines what we see as balance and beauty with gravity defying functions, like the Fifth Avenue Guggenheim spiral by Wright, where the ramp supports the walls and the lighting and circulation are integrated into the gaps as the ramp expands outwards, we have something new, something natural, something that has optimized the act of creation economically like nature does.

However, when we have a steel structure that supports curved metal sheets that combine into a graceful envelope, we have a sculpture, a chimera, but we certainly don't have what I would consider good architecture. None of the formal intentions are integrated with the human functions or with the structural functions. The awkward interiors are a symptom, a flaw in what should be integral.

Beaux-arts buildings and previous baroque buildings use symmetry to create visual and circulation axes within the constraints of construction techniques of the time - stone bearing capacities, structural span possibilities and light and ventilation requirements. For example width was determined by how far light could penetrate from a window to the interior, usually about twenty feet, therefore determining the maximum width of a wing to be approximately forty feet. Within these constraints, the geometry of the building emerged, and we have the Brandenburg gate, Versailles, Chenonceau, and when windows were made higher and larger through the use of flying buttresses there were the great Gothic cathedrals. Other great architectural inventions like domes served multiple functions. These rotated arches let light in from above, allowed huge spans and could be gracefully buttressed by secondary partial domes. The majesty of the byzantine temples of Istanbul remains unsurpassed.

And so why do we glorify sculptural architecture? Because it reflects our culture well. It shows that we can use technology to make things work. Mechanical and electrical systems make these buildings livable. They are large sets, that show wealth and excess. They are celebrity reasons.

As architecture it offends me, seems a bit crass due to the lack of constraint and of restraint. Pretty, sculptural, like the huge ornaments that dot history, like the colossus of Rhodes, the Atomium at Brussels, the large Roman and Roman-inspired triumphant arches. Architecture should be more than sculpture, it must work and live, make shade, shelter while being poetic. It should reflect ingenuity and evolution, and embody discoveries and inventions, discoveries like those inherent in the slight curve of the Parthenon's base and its subtly varying column spacings, the asymmetry of Chartres towers telling the story of its construction and of its builders, the lightness of its interiors, and the balance and poetics of Fallingwater's terraces and its colours and materials that rise with the light.

Djerassi and Houellebecq

2008-10-26T16:00:00.003-04:00

I wrote earlier about my disappointment with Djerassi's "science-in-fiction". I would point him to the much more effective and artistic Houellebecq style, directly descended from Aldous Huxley, but done with much more panache (bien-sur). It is over the top in some of its narrative descriptions of extreme behaviours, deadpan and not suitable for every audience, but if I were to recommend some books for anyone studying human motivations (and that includes business types and techies, not just the humanities majors), it would be "The Elementary Particles", "1984" and "Brave New World". They talk of biology and power and the link to human affairs. Free will is mediated by biology and biology is the layer just below power.

Kundera talks with Houllebecq

2008-10-05T07:48:00.003-04:00

I am tempted to write a fictional dialogue between Milan and Michel. Their world views and attitudes to sex are ripe for collision. Michel finds it challenging and Milan could not find it easier. Michel is looking for connection and so is Milan, but in such different ways. One lives in a sensual existential world, the other in a world of isolated points with possible lines. What triggered the idea was the change in the title of the English translation of Les particules elementataires from Atomized to The Elementary Particles. Kundera had written essays on how not to betray an author when translating, and he advocated simple direct non-interpretive translation to avoid adding extra semantics. And then I thought about how Kundera writes of sex and how Houllebecq does too, and how both see it as light, but in such different ways. They need to talk.

Towards the holy grail of integration

2008-10-02T00:16:00.004-04:00

Where the machine does most of the interface and field mapping work. SOA promises to help with this, but it depends on the old chestnut of trying to "agree on a schema" which is a barrier to flexibility of semantic expression and denies potential interaction that keeps humans in the loop. Think of how angry forms make most people feel. I am increasingly beginning to believe that true automated integration is an AI problem and probably its killer app. A job for Google. They may even call it something like Ploogle-and-play.

Software engineering and hazing

2008-10-02T00:09:00.002-04:00

Maybe the reason engineering faculties used to have such painful initiation rituals was that they (unconsciously I'm sure) wanted to drum into you that there was a culture here, you had to adhere to the body of knowledge that existed, that was developed, and that you could not "come in arrogant". This is different from computer science, where everyone is de facto arrogant and knows everything. And when you get old and wizened in the IT world, you try to maintain your influence by going into management, and the continual flow of new technologies keeps coming, almost as if to prevent experience wiht the details (the only experience that counts - what you say I forget, what I say I remember, what I do I understand) from ever building, to maintain the arrogance of the new, a bubble effect really.

Palomar's Hale Telescope

2008-09-30T11:02:00.003-04:00

Finished reading Ronald Florence's "The Perfect Machine" about the project to build the 200 inch telescope. A couple of things struck me.

The most interesting characters are the ones who are presented as being the most problematic, for example, Edwin Hubble and his huge ego, or Fritz Zwicky and his crazy sounding lateral thinking. Both are presented in a somewhat worse light than the "reasonable" folk like George Hale. Cooperation and cooperative people get things done but the competitive bastards are the ones who are valued more if they manage to prove something. I guess it is because the competitive route is more risky, more likely to move the culture in new directions, painful as it may be to the culture.
The other striking insight has to do with a line near the end of the book that mentions that charged-coupled device (CCD) sensors are so much more efficient than film for capturing light that a one meter telescope today could do what the 200 inch one did with film. This is certainly an example of disruptive technology, given the herculean efforts made to build the Hale machine, with its precision movements and optics. Of course CCD's can be used with the 200 inch mirror, but one must wonder if such efforts would have been made if CCD's had been available in the 1920's.

Science in fiction

2008-09-29T17:59:00.001-04:00

A review of the Bourbaki Gambit

I am surprised that a prestigious imprint like Penguin would accept The Bourbaki Gambit as a novel. It is an uncomfortable advertisement for its author at best and at worst an insult and a slight to the artistic process by a scientist too conceited to realize it. Djerassi, who made discoveries which led to the birth control pill is branching out into a style he calls science-in-fiction. He writes of scientists and of their egos, a bit like C.P. Snow, but with much less art. He revels in showing off his observations of fancy places, but really only manages to show his limited world view. Capri, Manhattan and cliches about vacation resorts.

I guess someone who has achieved so much in science may be excused for thinking that art is something secondary, and this is exactly what writing this novel and sponsoring the arts indicates. Unfortunately, he did manage to publish and by doing so denature and insult the art of writing. There is no depth, no reflection, no insight, only ego here. Detailed cataloging observations, cardboard characters, embarrassing eroticism and pompous lecturing.

More on COTS vs custom software

2008-05-16T06:53:00.007-04:00

It has been my experience that integration and associated maintenance of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) is an expensive and difficult process due to a few factors:

The "normal" upgrade cycle for vendors is often strategic and is driven by internal rather than external compatibility – upgrades also tend to break interfaces regardless of intent, it just does not help that the intent to play well with others is often at odds with large company policies (i.e. marketing strategy), especially when their suite of products covers many functional domains
Integration requires glue, and glue can either be COTS or home grown. For COTS, see above objection, and add cost. Home grown defeats the argument of using COTS in the first place Q.E.D.

Now, if we look at home-grown software, we have a few things to consider:

Maintenance is dependent on knowledge, but unless you are writing in APL or COBOL, (and even then), the pool of developers with expertise usually exists; reading code and fixing it is what they are hired for and have some training in.
Developers in my experience much prefer to work on code where the source is available than integrate stuff using configuration and proprietary tools where the options are limited and the dependency on documentation and vendor support is limiting
Code is now pretty much commoditized except in specialized areas (telephony switching, military stuff, embedded stuff) and even then… there are only a handful of approaches that people use to write and maintain code and most good developers can immerse themselves in a code base within days of weeks and make it their own.
Renewal is key, and owning a system and renewing it by adding features is easier with home grown that has few integration points with COTS than with disparate COTS on different version cycles with glue in between.

The standards efforts are a sort of socialist (Stalinist really) approach to trying to control the ecological process described above, but is thwarted by vendor power struggles and the usual embrace and extend strategies, coupled with purchasing power in the hands of non-detail oriented people (i.e. not tecchies).

UNIX and other open system approaches have and are trying to tackle the problem through factoring out of common functional requirements into modular technical modules and protocols, and have had some success in advancing the state of the art – the Internet and its associated protocols and services are a direct result. The OSI stack is a manifestation of this approach and has become a pattern of understanding outside that world.

One approach is to layer the commercial stuff and isolate it from other commercial stuff through standard gateway mechanisms, off the shelf if you like, and these include queues, UNIX gateways and subsystems that use HTTP, SMTP and LDAP, xDBC as well as XML protocols where practical and where translation mechanisms are easy to obtain (message brokers, AJAX, browsers, SAML…) At another level we should be writing our own application code to use these underlying systems and the glue should be at the application level – i.e. SOA – services are COTS with standardized interfaces, applications are not.

Les mots

2008-04-14T19:05:00.005-04:00

I was asked by my son about the meaning of the word "load". The context was "load the car". As I explained, by giving an example ("load the bags in the car"), I realized that the example provided an instance that could be generalized, but that was inherently ambiguous outside the continuity of experience. One has to have loaded things to understand that bags are just things, and we can extend the concept, and then we can even go further and talk about "a load" as a thing that is "loaded", without ending up in an infinite recursion.

You know where this is going...

Machines need to have exact mappings of symbols to "actions". Actions are just other symbol manipulations. So we have mappings and more mappings and rules and context and all the fodder of Minsky-type AI. Not good enough it seems. Gelernter and others have realized that one must be embedded in experience to have "knowledge". Husserl and Heidegger said it much earlier, but disciplines rarely cross. So we are realizing now that cognition is a sort of misnomer, we need a word to talk about "knowing", or better still "questioning" to get to a model of reality that is useful.

All this can lead to better and more flexible interface design for a start. Imagine a handshake that allows systems to agree on field semantics and field syntax for data exchange without all that WSDL baggage. Give me a couple of ports and go for it. Virus and spyware writers are now writing the primordial soup that will lead to these higher organisms one day.

Intel and MS

2008-04-13T15:40:00.006-04:00

The Concorde parked on Manhattan's Intrepid Air, Space and Sea Museum.

I remember attending another launch, back in the early 1980's - it may have been 1983 - when Windows was just becoming real. It was in Seattle, and Bill Gates was talking to a relatively small audience. Many of the cooler attendees were typing on Tandy Model 100's and making annoying key clicks.

Bill said something that was surprising to me at the time, that he predicted that Intel and Microsoft would become the dominant presences on the desktop. You have to remember that back then there were lots of contenders, including the new Mac, the really advanced Amiga and many other smaller players, and Bill's statement seemed preposterous to me, since his DOS was so primitive and Intel's 8088 was nasty to program, slower than the 6502 (except in clock rate) and not at all like the PDP-11 (which was something the Motorola 6800 and later 68000's were aspiring to). Some of us were even aware of Unix and its possibilities on the desktop.

He was right of course, but I think that he made the prediction come true, rather than actually saying something that made sense. His tactics and acumen forced the issue, and the contenders mostly disappeared, except for Apple. Despite being technologically inferior both the CPU and the UI he promoted became dominant. He saw that business decisions were not made by techies, even in the emerging micro world, but by risk-averse non-techies who prefer a brand name to any technological advantage.

I guess that is why he then started to draw huge audiences.

The Guardian and Harry Potter

2008-04-13T12:41:00.008-04:00

I wrote earlier about a Nick Lezard Guardian posting that strongly criticises JK Rowling's prose. Recently, there has been another Guardian article about the prevalence of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in English public life. There may be a link between the two. JK Rowling did not attend these prestigious schools, yet she writes about them in the Potter books - in fact King's College at Oxford was used as a setting in some of the earlier films. So is Lezard unconsciously chaffing at the gall of it all? She is successful, very successful, and yet she does not come from the rank of the elite, she did not attend Oxbridge.

I like the Guardian, I think they are very balanced and fair, but there is a snobbery factor there, which, I am guessing, comes from this elitist attitude that is probably part of the legacy of such a prestigious education. The few graduates (less than 10) of these schools that I have met have been overly dismissive and difficult when their opinions and statements have been challenged in a social context such as a meeting or workshop. A lot of clever sophistry has been put on display to discredit their interlocutors during such occasions. Debating skill is a good thing, but taken to excess can be quite offputting. So I will probably remain prejudiced until I gain further experience in the matter.

The Network is NOT the Computer?

2008-04-13T12:33:00.007-04:00

A hurdy-gurdie at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

I’ve recently attended Microsoft's launch of their 2008 suite of products, including Visual Studio. It was held in a movie theatre where there were two presentation streams, one for IT Professionals and one for Developers. I attended the developer stream. Very little PowerPoint and lots of live demos with code snippets being included in the examples. Visual Studio now supports Javascript as a first class citizen. This drew applause. I guess it was a sorely needed gap in IDE’s. I wonder if Javascript will become (more) fragmented as a result.

The integration of desktop presentation with the network, with attendant DRM-enforcing security as well as extensions to browser functionality is overwhelming and integration of desktop with network apps is almost complete; they are ready to link their OS and .Net environments to Internet content in a seamless way - the network is NOT the computer was the loud subtext. In fact they have made it possible to decouple the presentation layer of an application from the server side so that it works either through a client-server virtual desktop (think Citrix-like), through a regular-looking window, or through a browser.

This is resistance to the Google model, where the client is as thin as possible and standards are used as they should be. The gamble with the MS approach is that users will be sufficiently attracted to the extra features of a tighter integration to the desktop to pay money for it. Makes sense given the business model.

There were also a few intro videos at the start of the various sessions, and the most humorous included a therapist and his patient discussing the relationship between a developer, his machine, the tools and the operating system. Here, the unstated subtext was that colourful computer cases, slick hardware design etc were no match for technical flexibility and ego-boosting developer learning curves (a jibe at Apple I guess). Shakespeare wrote that wisdom comes alone through suffering, which may explain why hazing works to bind a group, and may explain why people who adopt product lines like IBM’s and Microsoft’s end up defending them so strongly. I think it is a case of confusing the side effect with the cause.

Balance

2008-02-17T23:04:00.001-05:00

museo, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

Just read Brad Warner on Buddhism (Hard Core Zen was his first book) . Funny. A bridge to Zen via an American's sensibilities. The balance thing emerges. Trying to achieve balance. Balance in a world of specialists and of extremes. Made me think of things that happened this week in a different light, like seeing street people sleeping on warm air grates in the big city in winter, and wondering why these grates are not made into some architectural shelters - probably because the insurance companies would complain or some other reason, so the loose end remains, the grates are there are used and we ignore the imbalance. Animals strive for balance, there is little megalomania visible in the animal world, probably held in check by the tension of competition. So collaboration and competition can be in balance until some sort of thing breaks and we get collaborating cancer cells, or monopolies or the competition of nuclear nations. Unleasing the balance of the atom through very highly specialized knowledge, genius. No wonder most everyone hates eggheads. One of the scientists that caused the most imbalance in the world was Teller (a.k.a. Dr. Strangelove). He is the Milton Friedman of physics. Unbound mistrust of any collaboration, all is competition.

Brad Warner

2008-01-15T22:09:00.000-05:00

I have been reading Brad Warner's book Sit Down and Shut Up! about Zen. His writing makes me think he is a kindred spirit. The book is engaging, very funny, and down-to-earth and it somehow manages to transcend the words and project the deep essence of the Buddhist meanings he wants to convey.

Brad is a Buddhist monk and a teacher. He also plays bass and writes columns on the Web. He writes about how his Buddhism allows him to react in a balanced way to situations and to people that may be frustrating or annoying. However, I get the feeling that he is still fighting the demons that assail us many of us, the ones having to do with pride and with having the last word. I guess that one aspect of enlightenment is the destruction of that urge, or at least its domestication.

What got me thinking about this was one of his Web columns, responding to a label he acquired for his association with the Suicide Girls site. That he responded at all was indicative. I often feel the same, some energy has to dissipate when one feels wronged. The state I am trying to attain is one where I don't feel wronged in the first place.

The other coincidental event that got me going along this train of thought was a funny excerpt from a diary-joke-agenda that suggested ways to "annoy the Dalai Lama". I don't think any of those methods would work, but they are so funny that they contain their own flaw; and the solution to this little problem: humour.

I think Brad knows this, and that is why his books are so great, the jokes are part of the religion. What other religions have jokes so deeply embedded (I know of only one joke in the Bible - about Peter being a rock to found the church on, and that one is really a pun that only works in Latin and its derivative languages)?

The question of evil

2007-12-16T08:18:00.001-05:00

not japan, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

The shot above was taken at the Montreal botanical gardens, in the Japan section, next to a memorial to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I have been reading one of Brad Warner's books on Zen and how it sees morality as a consequence of cause and effect, and how that contrasts with some religions that postulate absolute codes, let's describe the difference as the axiomatic view versus the existential one.

Then I stumbled on this wonderful article about Terry Eagleton in the Guardian, and his currently unpopular views. In a nutshell, he is fighting Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens' polarizing views with arguments based on cultural studies: Cultures defend themselves and the definition of good and bad is relative to the values that help of hurt their survival.

Of course there is the layer of good and evil that can be overlaid on this, based on humanism in a broader sense, but cultures are inherently divisive, us and them, and religion is a derivative of this thinking.

There are many ways to slice this pie, but Eagleton is interesting in that he somehow reconciles his religious beliefs and upbringing as a Catholic with this broader understanding of conflict between cultures.

The hard part is that this can be seen as appeasement, and in times of cultural stress polarization is the natural reaction instead. Good versus evil.

Miscellaneous and funny

2007-12-12T06:27:00.001-05:00

(Cartoon by B. Kliban)

A back page from Esquire that is now on the Web: What I've Learned, by Satan. "I hung a "WELCOME KEITH RICHARDS" banner down here every day for 40 years. Eventually I just gave up."
Differences between men and women: In the locker room, men talk about three things: money, football, and women. They exaggerate about money, they don't know football nearly as well as they think they do, and they fabricate stories about women. Women talk about one thing in the locker room -- sex. And not in abstract terms, either. They are extremely graphic and technical.
B. Kliban cartoons

Joseph Conrad

2007-11-30T22:13:00.000-05:00

A wonderful article on Conrad in the Guardian, which contains this quote from the man:

"Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation. The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous - so full of hope."

An enlightened grade 10 teacher made us read Heart of Darkness - and it was way beyond us - yet how could we not feel the depth of his style, his circling of the story and the way the words were like ruminations of the subconscious. Re-read it several times since, and it never ceases to bring forth strong emotion. And this is not a sensual book, but almost a pure intellectual one - wrapped around a journey - a river trip.

And don't miss - in the same issue - an interview with Richard Ford.

That SOA thing

2007-11-23T12:44:00.000-05:00

Here is the definition from an authoritative vendor-neutral body:

The World Wide Web Consortium’s glossary defines Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as

"A set of components which can be invoked, and whose interface descriptions can be published and discovered"

Note that the definition does not talk about the type of transport, it is all about interface descriptions – Web services are therefore a subset.

As in all such interface standardization efforts discovering the service (semantics) is key.

How to make apps talk to each other meaningfully (semantics and syntax) without a human in the loop is a problem old as operating systems.

This has been and remains the “holy grail” of integration. Getting apps to talk across their boundaries has been a staple of data processing since I can remember.

We have had shared memory, files, networking, RPC, CORBA, and the now the latest idea is to re-use the Web servers connected to apps as Web services by parsing the HTML or XML to understand the context of the data across HTTP [We seem to be adding layer after layer of code to do this for some reason. Maybe with the hope of adding some sort of “intelligence”, maybe not…]. When we only use TCP/IP interfaces instead we generalize and call it SOA. This tells us that TCP/IP is now a commodity layer. It is all about commoditization moving up the stack.

In all cases we need to make the plug for the socket and make sure the voltages are OK; i.e. the syntax and semantics have to work across the boundary.

The Web has given us a new way to think about this.

Links – URI and URL’s

SOA is the idea that an app can “choose, click on, and follow a link” by itself to get a job done – and sometimes fill forms too.

There are 4 major verbs we can apply to URI’s and URL’s: GET (click), PUT (put up a resource), POST (fill-in a form mostly), and DELETE (get rid of a resource), plus a few more: This is HTTP. It is meant to stateless (except for cookies and URI-held sessions ….) because the state is supposed to be held by the user – and when the client becomes an app, that can complicate things greatly – all of a sudden you have servers talking to each other with state.

Still, we have not progressed to semantics at the app layer – this is transport and syntax.

We have always depended on humans (programmers, analysts and users). We have been doing this – imperfectly – first through command line, shell scripts, GUIs, and now Web pages and forms.

When you cut and paste, when you embed a table or a picture into a document and when you save a file to be retrieved by another app you are doing inter process communications. Windows and GUI’s allow us to do this more easily, with visuals– it may be their most obvious value proposition – the basis of the MS empire. The Web is similar, we press on links to hop among and between servers and apps.

Computers, on the other hand need to be rote taught. They can crawl web sites, but they have difficulty making them inter operate without humans writing the glue. Web 2.0 is about doing this more easily – “mashing up” service interfaces using XML and HTTP and the smarts of a browser scripting language – ECMAScript (JavaScript)

SOA ideals say that we can publish somewhat constrained specs that will allow machines to automatically selects forms and links and act on them, even when that they may never have seen before.

The more realistic approach is to say that we will need humans to guide the machines, but that the molding of sockets and plugs will get less onerous – we are attempting to standardize the interface syntax and restrict the semantics to a published, well managed, machine-discoverable set. In the interim, it helps us integrate stuff with less work.

Dysfunctional requirements and IT ideology

2007-10-29T21:00:00.001-04:00

pumps, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

There are 3 types of requirements : functional, non-functional and dysfunctional (the latter are usually not documented).

The dysfunctional ones represent the distance between the proposed system and the organizational structure.

IM/IT systems must align against the business organization (people and processes) to work well. Management must decide who must budge before a new system is put in place in either camp. When deciding whether to build or buy a system, this effect must be considered. Neglecting to factor-in the cost of the organizational change can cancel the perceived economic benefit of using commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS).

Organizations usually have to change to fit the COTS assumptions, especially for large enterprises with large systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP). This can also apply to core business systems, since they differentiate the company from others. Think of mobile phone billing for example.

If COTS is chosen (for ERP for example), it is likely that the finance and personnel departments will have to change their processes significantly. There are many case studies that show that CEO support is required for such migrations to succeed, since it becomes a governance issue. It has become the common wisdom now.

Replacing custom-built software with COTS is a form of devolution. Size matters in this kind of decision because the “cost of re-organizing versus the benefit of saving on development costs” equation must be juggled. The bigger the org the more the cost of adopting COTS since the org usually has to change. The converse holds as well.

So where does the argument that COTS is preferable come from? Why does upper management often fear custom work? Why do they see it a a dependence on their technical staff, and why should this be preferable to a dependence on vendors? One possibility is that the pattern emerged from the computer hardware world? COTS for hardware usually makes sense for non-manufacturing sectors since the costs of custom hardware are prohibitive and it is generally ridiculous to suggest that one should build computers from scratch. Again, there are notable exceptions, Google apparently configures boxes quite heavily to suit their needs.

The COTS for software approach is not so obvious with the advent of open source and the devolution from mainframes towards lower cost systems, the proliferation of high-level development tools and the commoditization of the software stack. For example networking and OS are now mostly standardized, and much of the higher level layers are becoming standard - Mail/Web, database and application servers. Even development environment possibilities. The database-to-presentation layers are now the target of service-oriented architecture (SOA) driven commoditization, but the vendors are all looking for their own lock-in (i.e. avoiding commoditization) while claiming interoperability to get the sale.

For example vendor A’s ESB makes integration with vendor B’s apps much more difficult than with vendor A’s. Interfaces are easy to import but hard to export. Such pitfalls can be avoided by a vendor diversification strategy across the application layer that is coupled with good cost control and use of custom solutions where appropriate. Thankfully ESB’s are not a prerequisite for SOA, but this is not generally well understood.

So IT planning strategies need to revisit the seemingly popular notion that custom is always a liability. I think that if cost control is the business objective, then it should be decoupled from the “customization vs. COTS” argument. There is no direct mapping. The organizational size attribute has to be factored in, amongst other things.

Another ideology-prone minefield is standardization. Standards should really be orthogonal to this discussion, but are related in strange ways. Standards are sometimes perceived as a factoring exercise to reduce the proliferation of types of solutions and products in an IT department. This can work very well with hardware. Where standards are problematic is when they prescribe major system software COTS without taking into account organization structure (again). Why prescribe COTS through standards? Well COTS is good, right? And less COTS variety should be even better. Hummm.

Vendors claim and often try to provide the flexibility in their products to allow (some) business process mapping and legacy integration but usually at the cost of configuration complexity or alternately through costly professional service customization.

The benefits of these approaches over custom development need to be weighed carefully; there are plenty of case studies that show success with either approach and the cost-benefit is not at all straightforward, especially when you consider upgrade cycles and other dependencies.

If product/portfolio standards are adopted by an organization, then it must also adopt compatible organizational and operational standards, since software is really an extension of organizational processes and COTS will force an organization into a process relationship with the vendor. It is a form of outsourcing.

This can ultimately lead to having the hired-guns, the management change consultants and the vendor IT/IM professional services too tightly coupled, resulting in them having a profound influence on organization structure and operations. Are organizations prepared for this kind of loss of control in exchange for perceived but generally illusory cost benefits?

I think that one of the sub texts of the discussion is at root ideological - outsource development versus do it in-house. Yes, IT departments do have much influence and are complex things to manage, and require expertise, but control cannot always be gained through outsourcing or by buying COTS, unless you are very small or have very simple needs. Horror stories abound. Control and accountability concerns need to be well understood and documented and the business objective must be stated explicitly and decoupled from the implementation. There are no silver bullets, only smart management.