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It's All for You, My Little Technorati
 
Meme Meming and the Loneliness of the Desparate Meme Tracker
 
The Role of Architects: Confining Complexity through Form
 
Stop Lying About Surveys!
 
... Staying Afloat ...
 
Slipping Into the Water
 
Orcmid's Lair Disruption
 
Steve Wozniak on Designing and Building Apples 1 and 2.
 
It Was the Best of Webs, the Worst of Webs
 
Ignaz Semmelweis and the State of Software Reliability

It's All for You, My Little Technorati

Having now found a home that is actually called orcmid.com (and that I can call my own), I have finally gotten around to telling Technorati that I really do want to claim orcmid.com/blog as the official Orcmid’s Lair opus.  I also don’t want to give them the keys to my blogger account. 

Now all I have to do is convince Blogger that I have done something worth reposting my main page with the new claim code embedded in the HTML somewhere.  I reposted my previous post with a small change, but the change didn’t appear on the main page, just the archive page.

So this roundabout mumble is simply my occasion to get Blogger to update my blog so that Technorati can be convinced I am indeed the orcmid himself.

Meme Meming and the Loneliness of the Desparate Meme Tracker

Acephalous: Measuring The Speed of Meme: An Experiment in which You Will Participate, Or Else....  Scott Eric Kaufman is doing something amazingly superficial and scientifically unbecoming: Fabricating a nameless meme via social engineering.  Hey, Scott, when you have to beg for links to build your data, that’s not a meme.  So here’s a meme for you: “pimping memes.”

{tags: orcmid Scott Eric Kaufman memetics social meming pimping memes MLA Ichabod Crane meme-ups}

But then, thinking that punctuated equilibrium is a philosophical question is probably not the first misstep down this particular slippery slope.

Thanks to Charles Petzold, who is wearied by his latest adventures with spam (I’m with you on that, Charles), I now get to point out how stupid this seems to me.  You too can pile into the stupid space by going to Scott’s page and creating more distorted, anti-scientific data for him to present to a group of vaguely-social scientists.  I wonder what Daniel Dennett will have to say about that (apart from pointing out that he wasn’t rebutting punctuated equilibrium: read more slowly Scott).

And I wonder when Scott will tell us what the real experiment is.  Or link to the MLA panel that he has in mind (or is “Modern Language Association” really that big of a meme pretender?). 

Just remember, “I lie on phone surveys.” 

And the funniest part: There’s no meme there.  “Ichabod Crane,” now there’s a near-timely meme.

OK, that’s enough for this gig.  Meme me up Scotty.  Strike the set, we’re outa here.

This space is intentionally very tiny.  This is for Technorati’s benefit.  There’s nothing to see here.  Move along.  Oh, another meme.  Jeepers. 

The Role of Architects: Confining Complexity through Form

Understanding XML: The Role of Architects.  Thanks to a mystery citation from M. David Peterson, I was led to Kurt Cagle’s great account from April, 2006.

This is a terrific explanation for the software architect’s role in the manifestation of useful abstractions and their realization in computer software systems. 

{tags: orcmid Kurt Cagle M. David Peterson system architecture system coherence confirmable experience trustworthiness Dave Cutler}

Kurt comments on the sudden resurgence of “software architect” with the legitimization given by Bill Gates taking on the role of Chief Architect at Microsoft.   I found that to be welcome recognition of a role that had been seriously deprecated and impugned by the tide of hack-until-it-sort-of-works code-and-fix world that came along with the boom-and-bust frontier growth of computing in the past twenty years.  The “we don’t need no stinking architecture” worldview is something that we’ll be paying down for years to come.  I also agree that there is a problem when the term is taken up as a kind of sloganeering and job-title-jockeying.  But that’s not new and unlikely to change no matter what we call it.

For calibration, I put System Architect on my business card and resume in one form or another starting in 1971 (though I had started in this direction while at Sperry Univac before that). The role I practiced and pursued was as Cagle describes: the maintenance of critical invariants, separation of concerns and minimization of dependencies to confine complexity. 

You can ask Dave Cutler about the importance of the architect as a demon for the critical invariants, often in the architecture of the delivery process, not just the idealized steady-state structure of the system.  Ultimately, you end up having to take an architectural perspective on the system lifecycle itself, including the adopters and users of the system.  That’s also why system architects address deployment (and software QA) in the very first stages and also have a big hand in risk management.

I have a different perspective on the new Central Library of the Seattle Public Library System, although I had similar thoughts about design-at-the-cost-of-function until I became better acquainted with the facility. I think Kurt may have overlooked the scale of the shelving helix at the library. It addresses the difficulty of having a collection capable of holding 1.4 million books with at least 80% always on the existing open shelving. Open shelving and open- other things were a key driver in the collection storage and circulation system.

I recommend taking the architectural tour of the new Seattle Central Library if you ever have the opportunity. I think you'll find a different appreciation for the architectural considerations given to the functional use of the edifice.

I have some of my own perspective on libraries and the Seattle Central Library in rough draft,  and I never tire of recounting its part in my first witnessing programming-language architecture done on purpose.