Graham Glass, etc.

Rummikub

I'm a big fan of games, and the latest one I tried is called Rummikub. Each player starts with 14 tiles, and each tile has a color and a number. The colors are red, green, blue and orange, and the numbers range from 1 to 13. The objective is to discard your tiles by organizing them into groups that are either all the same number (but different color) or ascending numbers (all the same color). So far, it sounds a lot like the card game Rummy. The big difference is that you can refactor the groups that have been created in order to create new opportunities. For example, if there is a sequence of blue tiles numbered 1..6, you could break it into the sequence 1..3 and the sequence 4..6 and the discard another 4 on the end of the new 1..3 sequence. It isn't as hard as it sounds, but once you start getting the hang of it, you're always wondering whether there are complex rearrangements of the existing patterns from which to discard your last remaining tiles. Highly recommended!

 

How to produce Good Software, Part 2

In part 1, I listed the main things that I plan to write about in this series. In this part, I thought I'd present a little bit of my software writing background to provide some context for future parts.

Over the years, I've written quite a lot of code, most of which has been systems-level software targeted at the developer community. Here's a list of the main products I've been involved with, starting with the first software product I wrote:

• Compuclinic: medical analysis
• COMAL Compiler: a compiler for the COMAL language
• Pascal Environment: interactive Pascal system
• ObjectSystems: C++ toolkit for systems programmers
• STL<Toolkit>, portable C++ collections library
• Systems<Toolkit>: portable C++ systems library
• JGL: Java collections library
• Voyager: Multi-protocol Java object request broker
• Electric XML: Toolkit for parsing and manipulating XML
• Glue: Web services platform for Java developers
• Gaia: Grid services platform

Compuclinic and the COMAL Compiler were written while I was at the University of Southampton, England, and helped pay for my early addiction to Synthesizers and Drum Machines. The interactive Pascal system was written at the University of Texas at Dallas while I was earning my Masters Degree. The C++ toolkits, JGL and Voyager were written while I was CTO of ObjectSpace, and are now owned by Recursion Software. The Electric XML, Glue and Gaia products were written while I was CTO of The Mind Electric and are now owned by webMethods.

In general, these products received favorable reviews, were well received by the developer community, and some of them (like JGL and Voyager) won several awards. The development of the products had several common characteristics that I will write about in detail in future parts of this series. In the meantime, here are some of the highlights:

• Small teams, ranging from 1 to 10 people
• Top-notch developers
• Highly iterative development cycle
• High quality code and documentation
• Small, compact code
• Easy to use
• First versions were available as beta code quite early in the development cycle

In the next part of this series, I'll describe how each of these products was conceived and initially prototyped. If there are particular aspects you'd like me to cover, please let me know.

Parisian Sushi Surprise

Right now I'm in Paris, one of the cities in the webMethods Business Integration Forum tour. During one of the breaks, a tremendous selection of finger-foods was served, including duck-pate bites and chocolate prunes. It might sound odd, but it was delicious! The funniest thing I saw looked more like drug paraphanelia than a piece of food; a bulb filled with grapefruit juice with an extruded plastic straw that pierced through a piece of pineapple and sushi. The idea is that you hold the bulb, put the food on the straw into your mouth, and then squeeze the bulb to get a jolt of juice as you start chewing. What will the French think of next?

Union Jack

The flag of the United Kingdom is the Union Jack, and there's some interesting history behind its making. The United Kingdom is the unification of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The English flag is the flag of St. George, a red cross on a white background. The Scottish flag is the flag of St. Andrew, a diagonal white cross on a blue background. The Irish flag is the flag of St. Patrick, a diagonal red cross on a white background. Wales was already part of England at the time of the formation of the United Kingdom, so there was no Welsh flag to incorporate. If you look at the Union Jack, you'll see all three crosses superimposed on each other. It was definitely one of the most fun flags to paint when I was a kid!

Now You See It

While traveling in the UK, I read a great book called Now You See It. It's about a man whose wife mysteriously disappears from their house without a trace after three years of relatively happy marriage and how he deals with the situation. It's a thought-provoking story, and makes you wonder how you might deal with a similar disappearance. How long would you mourn for? How long would you search for? Would you ever give up hope? Would you end up feeling sadness, anger, or another emotion? One of the reasons that the book was such a page-turner is that I badly wanted to learn what actually happened to the wife. Is the answer revealed? You'll have to read the book to find out!

Semantic Web: Rise of the Machines, Part 1

I've been following the progress of the Semantic Web for the last couple of years, and plan on publishing some articles about it soon. In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to write a series of blog entries as a form of warm-up.

Most articles about the Semantic Web take a bottom-up approach and start by talking about its associated technologies such as RDF and OWL. I'm going to take a top-down approach and start by talking about the fundamental long-term objectives of the Semantic Web. Then I'm going to see how current technologies are attempting to address the goals, where they fall short, and what we might expect to see in the future.

First of all, what is the goal of the Semantic Web? Here's what I came up with:

"The Semantic Web accelerates the participation of machines in networked systems by providing them with a shared vocabulary, grammar, phrasebook and knowledge base."

Tim Berners-Lee, who is the original proponent of the Semantic Web, describes it as follows:

"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."

The bottom line is that it's about helping machines to communicate more effectively by providing them with a linguisitics framework. Distributed systems are currently built without this infrastructure, resulting in disjoint "islands of integration", the machine equivalent of the Tower of Babel.

It's reasonable to expect that the evolution of machines will follow a similar but accelerated version of our own evolution, and so the introduction of elementary language constructs is a natural next step for the web.

In the next part, I'll talk about vocabularies, grammars, phrasebooks and knowledge bases in more detail.

iPhone Design Ideas

I'm a big iPod fan and can't wait for Apple to release an iPhone that combines the functionality of a phone, camera, and iPod. It's fun to contemplate what an iPhone would look like and how it would function. Steve Jobs loves sparse elegance, so I expect a device that is sleek, has few if any moving parts, and is very intuitive to use. For example, I wouldn't expect a clam-shell case because this requires a moving part.

One great feature would be an integrated pair of Bluetooth stereo headphone buds, which would normally be stored in the left and right side of the iPhone where they would charge. A headphone bud would activate automatically when slid out of the phone. If you just wanted to answer the phone and talk/listen in mono, you could use just one bud. Each headphone would include a microphone with noise cancellation technology to reduce background noise and remove the need for a microphone boom. These Bluetooth headphone buds would also become the standard headphones that ship with an iPod, replacing the current ones that require wires.

Artificial Wombs

As we understand more and more about how our bodies work, a standalone artificial womb which can host the development of a baby becomes increasingly possible.

I visualize such a womb as being a transparent tank that is filled with the fluids that the embryo would float in, as well as an artificial umbilical cord that transports blood between the baby and the environment. The tank would be located in a safe place, with temperature, light and sound systems to create a custom environment for the baby. For example, if parents want to play Mozart to the baby for an hour a day, together with soothing heartbeat sounds and a tropical sunset, then they could do this. In addition, they could monitor the baby and talk to it from anywhere in the world. Best of all (at least in my opinion), the parents could see every detail of the developing child, which I think would be both fascinating and highly bonding. By contrast, most parents just see the occasional sonogram and feel the baby move, which just scratches the surface of what is possible.

Most women probably find this idea repulsive and would much rather carry a baby to birth "the old fashioned way". While I totally understand why this would be case, for the record I'd like to present some of the benefits of growing a baby in an external artifical womb.

• Safer, since you can control the environment.
• No chance of a premature birth.
• No possibility of a breach birth.
• Ability to see every detail of a child's development.
• The child can be given all kinds of interesting stimulus.
• You can grow many children at the same time.
• No morning sickness or other negative side-effects.

Ultimately, a person will be able to raise a child at any time in their life, whether married or not, selecting the genes from any combination of their own DNA and third party DNA sold by gene stores. Once the DNA is selected, they would grow the baby in a birthing facility. I you think about it, this is really just a more advanced form of what we already have via sperm banks, egg donors, and surrogate mothers.

Sex and the City Trivia Question

OK, here's a tricky Sex and the City trivia question: did Mr. Big ever read Carrie's book?

Snowing in Georgetown

It's snowing today in Georgetown, and M street is completely congested. For fun, I took a picture with my new Motorola RAZR and sent it straight from the phone to my email account; so here's what M street looks like right now. I'm going to investigate blogging directly from my phone soon, because it's a lot of fun to do things in real-time!