In designing a SOA based system I believe the number one concern should be latency. As I discuss in my article on RPCs and Protocols, getting latency right is extraordinarily hard. So my advice to people designing SOA systems is – worry about latency. If you manage to get past latency then you can spare a thought for re-use, this is where loose coupling and versioning come in. But in my opinion most people can safely ignore both issues. After all, even if you try to tackle them you're likely to get it wrong (and no, that's not an insult, the 'experts' who design nothing but protocols and protocol implementations screw it up all the time) so why waste time and energy when you could be focused on shipping your service?
Jose Padilla, the details matter
Jose Padilla is an American citizen arrested on American soil and accused by President Bush of being an enemy combatant. To that end he was thrown into prison three years ago where he has rotted ever since. In October of last year the Supreme Court ruled that Padilla's appeal against his status as an enemy combatant had been filed in the wrong court and ordered his case retried in a different court district (one that just happens to be much more conservative than the one that heard his original case). Nearly a full year later a decision has just come down from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The details of the situation make for interesting reading.
09/20/2005 King County, Washington, USA Elections
It's time to vote and here are my picks. Remember, the election is 9/20/2005, go out and vote!
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King County Sheriff – Sue Rahr
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Court of Appeals Judge – Susan Randolph Agid
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Port of Seattle Commissioner Position No 1 – Lawrence Molloy
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Port of Seattle Commissioner Position No 3 – Lloyd Hara
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Port of Seattle Commissioner Position No. 4 – Jack Jolley
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City of Seattle Mayor – Greg Nickels
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Seattle City Council Position No. 2 – Richard Conlin
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Seattle City Council Position No. 4 – Jan Drago
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Seattle City Council Position No. 8 – Robert Rosencrantz
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Seattle School District No. 1 – Director – District No. 5 – Mary E. Bass
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Seattle School District No. 1 – Director – District No. 7 – Linda Thompson-Black
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Seattle Popular Monorail Authority – Board Member – Position No. 8 – Beth Goldberg
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Seattle Popular Monorail Authority – Board Member – Position No. 9 – Jim Nobles
Does Anyone Know of a Good Quality USB KVM?
And now, dear readers, I ask a favor. I have a PC (for work) and a Mac (for life) in my home and they share the same keyboard, mouse and monitor. I have an old PS/2 KVM box that works really well so when I bought the Mac I wanted to hook it in to the KVM. The problem is that the Mac only uses USB peripherals. So I made the mistake of buying the Y-Mouse, an adapter that converts PS/2 connections into USB connections. As I explain here, the Y-Mouse does not work very well for me. So what I'd really like to do is buy a USB KVM. I actually don't care about the "M" (e.g. Monitor) part, I have a HP 2335 and use its built in monitor switch (which guarantees me the absolute best image possible). So what I really need is a USB Keyboard/Mouse switch.
I did some research and all I could find were complaints about USB KVMs, the main issue being switching time. It seems that switching between machines can take several seconds. Does anyone know of a good quality USB KVM that can switch really fast? If so please drop a comment on this article. Thanks!
N.B. I am aware of Synergy. But Synergy has never worked very well on Mac's and my PC is actually running a VPN which ends up meaning that the keyboard and mouse commands would have to be routed over the open Internet, this is both a security and a performance nightmare.
Price Gouging Is Good? You Betcha!
John Stossel has an excellent article explaining why 'price gouging' is a wonderful thing. It is a beautiful example of one of the more counter intuitive aspects of Capitalism. The market can work, if we would ever let it.