It might be architecture, but is it art?

At work today I remarked to a friend that the name "Architecture" can apply to some software in the same way that "Building" can apply to a beaver dam.

Both seem to have been thrown together by animals, subject to the forces of nature, inherited by a long line of animals with differrent ideas on how building should be done, do the job they are intended to do with results that depend on the weather or the phase of the moon and are often adversely affected by rot.

The only good thing is that you can get rid of bad software without dynamite and without upsetting a bunch of bleeding-heart ecologists.

Wonderful internet again.

Here's how the Internet is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to the human race.

I've been married for over 25 years to a fantastic lady who I met one afternoon in a farmyard on the Isle of wight. Just before I met her she had been involved with a not incredibly famous progressive rock band called The Enid. This band played all manner of pieces ranging from classical composers to covers of The Troggs Wild Thing and The Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant as well as their own compositions which are pretty good too.

They did a gig in 1978 in Farnborough England where a Swedish fellow by the name of Hans recorded the only recording of some of their music. My wife who was 16 years old at the time was in the audience making noise.

Thirty years later, Chrissy has a MySpace page, contact with the ex band members and through the power of the Internet, Hans. This means that the one and only recording of that gig, made on a handheld tape recorder and never heard elsewhere can live on and enrich the human experience.

You may not imagine that this is important in any great scheme but that data is digital. Ok, the original recording sucked but it was real and it existed for couple of hours. It made memories for a bunch of people that have lasted for thirty years so far and now will be available amongst the petabytes of other data that the human experience has created. Maybe someone a thousand years from now will hear a bit of music that has my wife singing in the background when she was a kid. Maybe someone a million years from now will still be able to hear it.

When all human experience becomes digital and storeable and transferrable and copyable and shareable maybe we will all become immortal.

http://www.myspace.com/theenidsociety

Web idiocy

Please enter your e-mail address...

Please confirm your e-mail address...

How idiotic can you get? If someone enters the wrong address it's their fault and why should you care?

This has become an annoying habit with many webmasters and i bet they do it just because everyone else does.

Vista 64 and performance.

After upgrading to a new graphics card and more memory I get a performance report of 5.0 on my Vista ultimate 32 bit install.


At the same time, I bought a new hard-disk upon which I decided to install Vista 64 bit but this gives me a lower performance rating of 4.3 and crashes every few seconds with a display driver freeze.

I am interested in using Vista46 because I want to take advanage of the 4 gigabytes of memory that is now in my system. My experience so-far however shows that it's buggy, unstable and has serious compatibility and driver issues. It took me five attempts to install a version that even boots without a bluescreen. I accomplished this with the latest vista install with integral service pack one direct from MSDN.

As an MVP I get access to software for free but I can say unequivocally that had I bought Vista64 ultimate I would be a very unhappy customer.

Growing up with technology

The first computer I ever had, I built myself. It had a Zilog Z80 processor and 2K of static RAM. I understood it at a fundamental level and when I learned to program I did it in pure machine code. It was some time before I used even an assembler let alone a high-level language like C.

This gave me a very machine oriented view of the computer. I understood that integers were stored as binary ones and zeros in a specific order in a register. I understood that a mathemtical operation was different from a bitwise logical operation and even today, when I think of an integer or a byte I see a little shoebox with a certain number of pebbles ranged in sub-divided partitions for the bits. Consequently, I find myself surprised when programmers go through their working lives without ever understanding this.

Now, a university student or technical college student immediately sees the high-level language view of the system and may not undertand the implications of the circuitry that carries the signals back and forth along the busses.

I find this to be both interesting from an anthropological viewpoint and disquieting from a professional one. From the first viewpoint its interesting that we don't fundamentally need the deep-down knowledge of the systems we work with anymore. We can work at such a high level that there is no need to understand the mechanism of an interrupt or consider an integer like an array of bits. It's disquieting because there is still a lot of code that relies on these principles so when a new-age programmer sees these techniques in use, they may not immediately understand what the implications are and so make an adjustment that is completely at odds with the architecture.

I wonder how long it will be before even the discipline of logical problem solving and algorithm creation is obsolete? I bet it's less than twenty years.