 Tuesday, October 28, 2003
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Wall Street Journal:
Most Koreans are well informed about the brutal realities of life in the North but prefer to look the other way. It's much pleasanter to contemplate reunification fantasies such as the one portrayed in a recent hit movie about a cross-border romance between a South Korean woman and a North Korean soldier. Last week's chilling report on the North Korean gulags made it into some South Korean papers but wasn't front-page news. Students demonstrated against Mr. Hwang's [Hwang Jang-yop, highest ranking North Korean defector] U.S. visit last week, protesting his anti-North Korea message.
Not sure about "most" Koreans but this sentiment is not uncommon; and incredibly, incredibly bizarre.
Via Marmot.
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Phil Wainewright has a great article about bringing enterprise data into desktop applications like Office.
I remember back in 1988 a Lotus 1-2-3 architect named Carl Young came up with a scheme to import relational data from any DBMS into our spreadsheet, at the time the most popular application on the planet. We codenamed the technology "Blueprint." Lotus had the foresight to bring in all the relational vendors, and Microsoft, to standardize this architecture (meeting in our brand-new auditorium on Rogers Street!) and it shortly thereafter became the now-hallowed standard ODBC.
From there we've evolved to the notion of dynamically discovered and bound interfaces to enterprise services -- a long way!
But the problems of interoperation have gotten far worse, paradoxically:
"The problem is that the data are in different locations, shapes and schemas," says [Active Software CEO Jim] Green. Some of it will be in table rows in a relational database; other elements stored in XML will probably be in a document file; if it's coming from an application system, it may be in some kind of delimited flat file format. "So now all the shapes have to be reconciled. It actually gets pretty complicated, which is why this hasn't been done before."
Ten years ago, the concept of a metadata repository seemed a wasted academic endeavor. Now, they are crucial as heterogeneous systems attempt to communicate and coordinate in a high-bandwidth semantically rich manner. They will enable the sort of dynamic service and data lookup and normalization that desktop-enterprise integration tools require.
(Carl Young, one of the unsung heroes of our industry, died a few years ago. He was a good friend, a patient mentor to me and to many others. We all miss him.)
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Sep Nov
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