Month: October 2006

Categories
technology

Snake-oil sales increase

Just read a compelling article from Grady Booch about the perils of believing the hyperbole surrounding Service Oriented Architecture. Personally I think SOA is a great idea but I’m struck by how similiar to the OMG’s CORBA it is and how, in effect, the real evolution is using a arbitrarily firewall traversing port and protocol for messaging. That semi-solved the messaging problem, delegated the security problem and the rest, as they say, is history… Thinking about Steven Vinoski’s comments about a service oriented approach I’m a little dissatisfied. The temptation to want blueprints and cookbooks for all problems is great but there’s a large inherent value in having these. Not to mention the peace of mind that comes with applying an industrially accepted architecture to a thorny issue like service meta-data. I’m too jaded to want to roll my own 🙂
To this end SOA standardisation is being seriously advanced by Steve himself and the other participants in the OpenSOA Collaboration which promises greater standardisation and hopefully industrial acceptance for SOA data layer and service composition technologies. Principally SDO and SCA. The value of service composition and the possibilities for workflow automation are compelling but what as Grady so eloquently puts it, what works so well in the powerpoint sandbox doesn’t yet translate to real world software systems.

Categories
humour

Thought for the day

My mind is like an old rusty sieve at the moment so I thought the following quotation was apt.
“Blessed are the forgetful; for they get the better even of their blunders..” – Friedrich Nietszche.

Categories
This Blog

my whereabouts

I’ve had a few comments over the past few weeks about my whereabouts and the future of Gaisan Technologies. Well, I’ve been working the past few months as a contractor within a WIT campus company focusing on next generation telecoms services (what else ? :)).
I’m happy to say that I’m now working with TSSG most days. Gaisan is still running, still open for business and still doing consulting on telecoms and contract software development. However, there will be many changes over the next few months and I’ll keep you abreast of these on my blog. I guess an interesting opportunity came about and I felt compelled to take it.

Categories
art

State of our Art

Some readers may be aware that R & I are opening an art gallery/retail-emporium (tongue in cheek) in Waterford City. We’re calling our little venture Manifesto which dictionary.com informs me means
“a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization.”.
So that’s sorted then! It’s very exciting to meet new artists, peruse the generally amazing collection of work they’ve got stashed away and then talk them into letting us sell it in Manifesto. By and large the feedback has been very positive. Last night we attended an exhibition in Waterford by Mercedes Helnwein in Eric Theze’s absolutely stunning new restaraunt, La Boheme. La Boheme is based in the same 18th century listed building as Manifesto and I can strongly recommend both the ambience and the food. Stylish, scrumptious and reasonably priced. You really must visit.
Mercedes is the daughter of iconic 70s painter & all-round visual artist Gottried Helnwein. He of the boulevard and broken dreams fame 🙂 Meeting the child of a personal hero can often be an uncomfortable experience, doubly so when the progeny have embarked on a similiar career path. Mercedes has nothing to fear in any comparison. While her father’s work is often provocative, hers has a warm intimacy and youthful vibrancy that shows a stunning technique to good effect. R & I were suitably impressed as we read her long list of accomplishments so you can expect some Mercedes Helnwein originals to appear in Manifesto in the near future. It’s so exciting to be opening Manifesto. I’ll keep readers up to date with happenings but provisionally, we’re hoping to open at the start of November. I can’t wait!