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Monthly Archives: March 2005
Review: Why Do Buses Come in Threes?
The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life, By Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham
28 March 2005 - Please share: 
An excellent reminder about why maths is fun
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The two messages of this book are that mathematics is important to everyday life, and that it’s fun. Like the earlier books of Martin Gardener, this book aims to make mathematics relevant and accessible, but with a British rather than American slant. Have you ever wondered why flowers often have five petals, how bookies’ odds work, how you always end up in the slowest queue, or, indeed, why buses come in threes? If so, then this is the book for you. In the course of a humorous, chatty discourse on the mysteries of life the authors introduce a number of branches of mathematics, including probability, topology, statistics and queuing theory, to name just a few. |
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Why Do Buses Come in Threes?
28 March 2005 - Please share:
I’ve just posted my reviews of two excellent books by Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham. “Why Do Buses Come In Threes?” and “How Long is a Piece of String?”
The messages of these books are that mathematics is important to everyday life, and that it’s fun. Have you ever wondered why flowers often have five petals, how bookies’ odds work, how you always end up in the slowest queue, or, indeed, why buses come in threes? If so, then this is the book for you.
Whether as an introduction if you’ve never enjoyed maths before, or a reminder if you have, I thoroughly recommend both books.
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Review: How Long Is A Piece of String?
More Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life, By Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham
27 March 2005 - Please share:
Another excellent introduction to the fun of mathematics
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This is a follow-up to the earlier, excellent, "Why Do Buses Come In Threes?". While the earlier book focused on those annoying little mysteries of life, this asks a set of different questions, many related to tough decisions such as how conmen get rich, or "should I phone a friend?" |
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Enterprise Integration Patterns
25 March 2005 - Please share:
Integration, like other design activities, can benefit from sharing ideas and proven strategies in the form of patterns. An excellent starting point is Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf’s Enterprise Integration Patterns website and book.
In my recent work I’ve discovered a few patterns of my own, and I’ve started a page to document them.
First up is entitled “Change Indicator” . You may have a legacy system with an EAI adaptor, or a similar source of messages, which reports on the current state of key business objects. The messages will typically tell you when something has changed, but not necessarily what has changed, but the latter may be important to downstream systems. This pattern shows how to use EAI elements to add this information in a way which is totally transparent to the legacy system and existing users of the EAI scheme.
I Told You So
20 March 2005 - Please share:
In Extensibility Points, Gregor Hohpe describes architecture as a guessing game, trying to understand future changes to a business, and designing a system to cater for those changes. He’s written a good article on types of extensibility and where they can be applied.
But Gergor’s article doesn’t really touch on understanding the dynamics of business change, and how these should dictate the form of architectural extensibility. Neither does he discuss the problem of being an architect who understands what flexibility is required, but being unable to get either the customers, or the suppliers, to agree. I seem to spend a lot of my time saying “I told you so” when a problem I predicted occurs – this is frustrating, even if I’m being proven right.
If you want to understand more about the dynamics of change, you might look at my previous postings on the subject:
Web Service Challenges
20 March 2005 - Please share:
In a recent article, Gregor Hohpe asks “Is SOA Like Drunk Driving?” In our attempts to address the shortcomings of component-based development have we “swung too far” and introduced new problems?
One recent experience suggests to me that we may well be at risk of this. Read about my first experience of Web Service development and judge for yourself: have we thrown the baby out with the bath-water?
Blogging: What It Is and How It Works
17 March 2005 - Please share:
Another good article published in the Microsoft Architecture Journal: If you don’t fully understand what a Weblog (or “Blog”) is, how it works, or what it may mean to you and your business, then this is for you.
The first part of “DasBlog: Notes from Building a Distributed .NET Collaboration System” is an accessible review of the phenomenon of blogging, and its implications for collaboration and knowledge management. Blogs cross several traditional boundaries: diaries, content management, collaboration, and news publishing. As a result both authors and readers are changing the way they get news and opinion from the web, and the new patterns are beginning to be reflected in corporate and project communications.
The second part of the article discusses some of the underlying technologies, like RSS, and how they can lead to increasingly rich linkage between the work of many authors.
Finally, the third section discusses the challenges of building a full-function open-source blogging engine using .NET technology. It’s very interesting, but gets quite technical. However you don’t have to follow, or even read, this to get benefit from the excellent first part.
Posted in Thoughts on the World
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Enterprise Architecture Design and the Integrated Architecture Framework
8 March 2005 - Please share:
I’ve recently been catching up on the Microsoft Architecture Journal. This is an occasional MS publication, which can be downloaded from the
.NET Architecture Center. It’s got a lot of good articles, with a software architecture and process focus.
Of particular interest, there’s an article in the first edition by Cap Gemini on “Enterprise Architecture Design and the Integrated Architecture Framework”. Obviously every consultancy has their own architecture framework, and they all share some features, but what makes this one a bit different is the strong focus on the contextual (business context), conceptual (vision) and logical (solution independent capability) aspects, with technical details relegated to a bottom physical layer. It also has one of the best discussions I’ve seen on the relationship and differences between enterprise and project architectures.
Blogger Me!
7 March 2005 - Please share:
My blog is now fully live. My Thoughts on the World, and the articles in
AgileArchitect.org, are now available via an RSS feed.
For the technically inclined, I’ve built my blog using a combination of VB.NET, Active Server Pages, and a bit of XSLT. This allows me to develop my site using FrontPage and IIS, and run it under Apache. If anyone’s interested I’ll write a technical note on it.