 Tuesday, December 2, 2003
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Here's a question that I've been wondering about since President Bush's visit to Baghdad:
So how do you fly a Boeing 747-200B, over five stories high and more than 200 feet long, carrying a gaggle of reporters and the U.S. president and his staff, halfway across the world's airspace, without anybody noticing?
In fact, apparently somebody did notice:
...during the flight, the pilot of a British Airways jet spotted the plane with its distinctive blue-and-gold livery, and asked over the radio, "Did I just see Air Force One?" After a pause, the president's pilot, Col. Mark Tillman, responded, "Gulfstream five." The British Airways pilot seemed to sense that he was in on a secret, The New York Times reported, and replied simply, "Oh."
Great article. (Via Loosely Coupled)
UPDATE: Pity it might not be true (thanks, adamg). Although the White House comment here might be disinformation...
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Phil Wainewright has a great summary on his blog of the current controversy regarding the applicability of the Pi-Calculus to business processes.
Are workflow, and by extension all business processes, simply pi-processes? Yes, say evangelists Peter Fingar and Howard Smith. And no, say workflow experts Jon Pike and Roger Whitehead.
The idea behind the pi-calculus, invented by Robin Milner, (note: document is PostScript) is to describe how concurrent, independently executing, mobile processes can interoperate: Milner's canonical example models the cell phone handoff problem. As a car with a cell phone moves it must switch base stations according to a formal protocol ("station X disconnect from phone 123-4567; station Y resume connection with phone 123-4567").
More generally, the notion is to model how very complex systems can asynchronously send messages with enough information in the message such that the receiver can do something intelligent, including routing the message to another process.
Hence the applicability, at least at some level, to business processes, where to handle an order for example you have to check the buyer's credit, check inventory, update accounts receivable, ship and so on. Each of these steps typically involves interacting with some very complex, independent system.
Now, I'm a big believer in the pi-calculus, especially as it relates to biologic systems. While I think it is relevant to business processes as it relates to coordinating concurrent systems, however, I'm wary of overhyping it, particularly as it blurs with traditional data-driven metaphors. (Indeed, business processes in the real world are anything but mobile!)
For example, Fingar and Smith note that pi-calculus can be used to model arithmetic: have 1 and 2 participate in the "addition" process, and listen on the "=" channel for the result. That's fine, but who would ever do that? (Object-orientation zealots would claim you send 1 and 2 to the "add" method in the "arithmetic" object...but nobody in their right mind does that, either.)
The point is that for real-world problems you choose the best tool to do the job. Even Milner himself is not sure of how pi relates to business processes.
For me, pi-calculus represents a fascinating way to think about these things. Yet I am skeptical of any attempt to completely and formally model human behavior mathematically.
Still, Fingar and Smith are most assuredly right when they say business process software can, and will, revolutionize how we conduct business. But ultimately the goal should be making businesses and people more agile, able to respond to changing market conditions rapidly, able to take advantage of new opportunities. Advances like Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) and semantic integration make that more immediately possible.
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North Korea, according to this strange report, has email. Secure, even.
Sort of interesting considering all of North Korea's web sites (yes, both of them) that I know of are hosted in Japan.
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Slashdot carries a story about how some hackers have figured out how to use the Windows ntfs.sys driver on Linux, thereby enabling Linux access to files hosted on an NTFS-formatted file system.
OK, so clearly this isn't particularly legal, but let's ignore that small point for the moment.
The larger point is: if you really like all these Windows features, why not use Windows? Or maybe we should put it a different way: if you're rehosting Windows capabilities under Linux, aren't you ... recreating Windows?
Reading this thread on Slashdot provides convincing evidence that Linux guys are clueless. One writer even suggests how nifty it would be if someone were to write/hack a Linux version of WinFS! (which isn't even baked yet).
Hey, I got an idea: how about if you guys innovate for a change? Lead, instead of follow?
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The Marmot comments on a KCNA (North Korean news agency) story about US "damage" to South Korea -- read the whole thing, it's wonderful. He also retranslates one paragraph slightly diluted in the KCNA's English version:
Moreover, countless South Korean women were brutally violated and made into sexual playthings, and by making hundreds of thousands of "foreigners' princesses" (i.e. prostitutes frequented by the evil big nosers) and mixed-raced children, they [the Americans] have made impure the thousands-of-years-old blood lines of the [Korean] race and sullied the purity of the [Korean] race.
Wow, haven't heard stuff like this since the Third Reich!
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Nov Jan
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