Minority report UI video

Pretty amazing video about the g-speak system that does the whole Minority Report gloves and computer interaction thingy. Microsoft surface - pah!

Nice graphical overview of US Spending

Via Gizmodo fantastic images on how US spending breaks down for the main categories (defense, health, etc). You can see the interactive map on wallstats. And it looks nice to boot.  Puts the 60 trillion CDO's somewhat into perspective (approx 20 years of US total tax-receipts).

Transactions, SOA and Asynchrony

Gregor Hohpe is currently thinking about conversation patterns, this is excellent news. His book Enterprise Integration Patterns is really a excellent work on categorizing the different ways we have been connecting systems together. It is one of those books that you go, "of course, why hasn't someone done that already?". EIP is reallly about the kind of ways that we pass messages between systems (message-oriented processing), for example router-patterns, queuing patterns, etc. Conversation patterns are a higher-level and represent sets of exchanged messages.

From this point of view, they should be entirely specifiable in BPEL, since BPEL can be used to specify a sequence of exchanged messages. Now BPEL is normal used to implement a Business Process which just happens to exchange messages between peer systems, but it can also be used to verify that a set of exchanged messages between peers conforms to its specification - e.g. that message A was received before message B. In fact, this is how we test our own BPEL engine, we use BPEL to implement the conformance tests for the BPEL 2.0 specification.

The conversation patterns emerge from work on "Your Coffee Shop Doesn't Use Two-phase Commit". Which makes the point that most human systems don't use two-phase commit, possibly because humans don't support a XA-Resource API :-). We should remember that ACIDity and 2-phase commit are artificial inventions which stem from a centralised planning viewpoint. The real world doesn't use them. The internet mostly doesn't use them for peer-to-peer interactions. Of course, this isn't really news, BPEL as a language is built around the notion of compensating actions, effectively dropping transactions as a concept for loosely-coupled SOA systems. And BPEL is on version 2.0.

So what kind of conversation patterns could we dream up? Well Intelligent Agents came up with quite a few:

• Dutch Auction
• Contract Net protocol

Though these are quite complex protocols, so maybe too much. Some simpler ones are:

• Subscribe to Events (subscribe, receive event, ...., eventually unsubscribe or go missing).
• Submit Job ( submit job, get job ID, poll job ID, or recieve notification or job, cancel job, etc).
  
• Submit Task (submit task, transfer task, take task, relinquish task, complete task, abandon task).
• etc, pick your favourite peer-to-peer protocol and generify it, e.g. Ask a question, expect an answer -protocol

So what do we hope to get for this. Well if we can generify some of these protocols, we can make them interoperable. Does this mean they have to be SOAP-based. Nope it doesn't. But notice that they are all services (i.e. realisable by a single entity), for example the event service, the jobs service, the task service. So they are specifiable in BPEL.

However, there are a range of conversation patterns that cannot be specified in BPEL. These are true peer-to-peer protoocols. BPEL can only specify the message exchange semantics for one peer (typically the service provider), but if we have true, peers and there is no central authority, or entity realising the service, then it cannot be specified in BPEL.

Cloud computing and iPhones/iTouch

Currently I'm often in the US for work, which is handy because work is close to an AppleStore and invariably I just have to go there and buy an iPod. In fact, given the exchange rates, I've had to go there every single time I've visited the US this year - there's a lot of people in Ireland that need cheap iPods.

So the current crop of pre-Xmas iPods arrived two weeks ago. Now I'm not sure I'm tempted - I have a 2nd-gen Nano and given that 4th gen are going back to 2nd gen form-factor and unusally for Apple kit, my 2nd-gen Nano is still going strong with battery life despite being used (and dropped) continuously.

But there is the new iTouch. It is pretty. I kinda want one - they are cheaper and slightly better than the old ones. I reason to myself that I want one for browsing the web (regardless of the fact that I'm pretty much connected to the net for at least 8 hours a day). I reason that I could have the holy grail, ubiquitous, fast, hassle-free access.

A lot of people are moving as much of their life (mail, docs, etc) onto cloud computing platforms (e.g. google/gmail/gdocs), meaning they can ditch the luggable and get a new sub-notebook / netbook. But I would go further. Why can't I pretty much do most quick tasks on an iTouch like formfactor.

• email
• banking
• government services
  
• messaging
• light web-browsing
• reading docs / pdf's.
  
• social networking

We are about to reach the point where the majority of new data generated daily will not be generated by corporations, governments and businesses, but by individuals, primarily using social-networking sites. Will there be a similar tipping point where most of this data is coming not from PC's, laptops or subnotebooks but from iTouch / blackberry devices?

If so, doesn't this mean we have a lot of work to do? In the last wave of mobilisation, when the dangerously oversold WAP technology was being pitched as the 'mobile internet'. A number of banks put some part of the banking systems online. But the limitations of the technology really hampered solutions and most were failures. The limitations nowadays are not about the protocol, the hardware or the bandwidth. They are about the screen and the input mechanism. This is where a lot of the thought of the second-wave of mobilisation needs to happen. Using the limited screen space to maximum effect. Any application that I habitually use today online in a web browser should be possible on an iTouch. Not some limited feature set. The whole thing.

This means no long HTML forms, but paged forms are okay. I should be able to partially save information (park it while I answer a phone call). Pre-filling / guessing information would be useful. Providing standard information from my iTouch to supply information (hint semantic tagging) as well as have my learn information I provide to my various sites, to help me when I'm filling information on other sites.

Cool printer meets waterfall

This Cool Waterfall in Japan naturally mixes dot-matrix style printing with waterfalls, to allow design messages to be scrolled onto the waterfall. The next obvious step would be to get a gamepad hooked up for some "downhill-skiing" waterfall game-action.

Lisbon Treaty - Day 3

So from an Irish perspective the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) parts of the Lisbon Treary are perhaps one of the more controversial parts. The common fear is the creation of some sort of EU-super army that will have thrilling adventures in places that most people would have difficulty spelling. Lisbon provides nothing to worry about in this regard, because the EU already created it in 2004, it's called the European Defence Agency.

My primary concern is that it would require us to actually spend money. I know, you were thinking about neutrality. Face it our health service is wonky and the Ireland's finances are a fairy story (we seem to have misplaced a billion in tax revenue somewhere, perhaps Bertie could save the day with some hot gee-gee money, but I digress) - do we really want to spend money on shiny new tanks? Here's EDA's information about how much we spend on defence-note how low we are as a % of GDP. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, Lisbon Treaty states:

"member states shall undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities".

That sounds expensive. Now Lisbon supporters say that there are no targets / requirements being set so we shouldn't worry, but that's pretty cold comfort. Once an objective like this is agreed to, targets may not too far behind. However, we can be pragmatic. we are already part of the EDA and so we have to commit to some spending (our guys walkie-talkie things need to be able to the Germans' talkie-things for instance). It seems unlikely that we can be forced to commit high-levels of GDP spending to the military, either theoretically or practically - but it is a bit unclear.

What Lisbon does is interesting. It sets out two stalls. The first is a wide brief where the EU as a whole can get involved in defence activities outside its borders, but this is subject to unanimous decisions by all states. The second more worryingly is called Structured Co-operation, basically a subset of Member States banding together to go on jolly foreign jaunts again under a pretty wide brief (UN-sanction actions, stabilisation of states, defence, etc). Within 3 months of the passing of the treaty, states can band together to create a new combined force. This is inherently a new militaristic focus to the EU, there really isn't another way to look at it. How you view this is up to you. I'm hot-n-cold on the issue. I remember Kosovo, where the EU failed to act and UN personnel failed to protect lives. So I'm suspicious, but not totally against the idea.

In any case Ireland cannot be forced to join. It would require a goverment decision, Dail approval, and UN authorisation for us to get involved.

I would prefer if this whole aspect of the Lisbon Treaty simply wasn't there. It is definitely a genuine concern. Not because it commits Ireland to any given action, but because it involves a ramping up of the militarisation of the EU (which started off as a purely economic union). I am enough of a realist to recognise that there are already a number of supra-national mechanisms by which member states can already engage together and that having such engagements inside the EU makes them to some degree more accountable.

Lisbon Treaty - Day 2

The main criticism about the EU is that it is pretty undemocratic This is mainly because

• The Commission, you know the brain-trust which controls policy and alone has the power to initiate legislation, is completely unelected. This will not change under Lisbon.
  
• The Council (of ministers) which is one of the two legislative bodies meets in secret - this will not change under Lisbon.
  

The Eurpean Parliament, the place where politicians go to die, is being cast as the big winner from Lisbon. The Parliament is the only directly elected part of the EU, but its powers aren't terribly impressive. Basically the drill is, the Commissioners, those clever, unelected people such as Charlie McCreevy, propose new legislation, then the Parliament and the Council (I know I'm losing consciousness too) which is made up of ministers from national parliaments both must agree (codecision).

So the Parliaments powers are: propose amendments and say no. Not entirely stunning, but certainly not useless - afterall by simply refusing to sign-off the EU budget (due to massive fraud allegations) they forced the Santer Commission to resign. Try getting the Senate to do that.

Under Lisbon, the main change is that codecision is extended to most policy areas. Which means you might not want to be so flippant when next voting for your MEP. Do you really want Dana voting on energy policy? However, they still cannot propose legislation - so not ushering in a new democratic dawn.

Another change is that the Parliament gets to elect the President of the Commission (where the real power lies - the ability to make new laws). This is a good thing in terms of balancing power between elected and unelected officials.

There are some sops to making the EU more democratic. For example:

• A citizens initiative where 1Million citizens (v. Austin Powers) can petition the Commission to bring forward legislation on a particular issue (such as an immediate ban on Westlife) . What the Commission has to do at this point is undefined and this smells like a populist measure that was tacked on to make the treaty more touchy-feely.
  
• A role for the National Parliaments, not content making a mess of their own legislation, they now have the right to vent their spleens at EU legislative proposals.. If enough of them are against it then the Commission must review (that doesn't actually mean anything has to happen, the Commission can re-present exactly the same legislation, but they are required to say why the National Governments should mind their own business). Seems pretty toothless.
  

So overall if you were hoping that Lisbon was going to make the EU more democratic I'm afraid I don't have entirely good news for you. It does make it a little bit more democratic by extending the areas which the Parliament has oversight on, but this should be thought of as reform (with a small 'r').