SOA Security Meme

The security meme says that security is a decreasing concern in SOA architecture. I'm not sure I buy it. The strength of the decentralized design is also a weakness for centralized requirements like security. The whole structure seems so porous.

Got my first login from the Pentagon today, too.

And the two Google police monitors still faithfully follow my every move, boosting my hit count. I haven't been delisted yet, so you gotta wonder...

is it half-time with a score of -

Me: 2
Malevolent Stalker: 0

?!

Branded Bandwidth

A typical movie meme which shows decreasing interactivity in successive sequels -

The audience spends more on each movie sequel for increasingly less interaction. I see a re-arrangement of standard marginal utility here. Each movie requires fewer mental transactions, so the audience is willing to pay out an equal (or greater) sum of money.

Ergo, market branding is a mechanism for reducing transaction costs. And isn't that why people pay more for a brand name? For "peace of mind", i.e. for less thinking. But what's interesting is that we can now determine explicit entry and exit points for marginal utility. We can split the "movie meme" bandwidth into two distinctly different types -

• Branded - mental bandwidth which supports existing brands and experience.


• Unbranded - mental bandwidth reserved for "new" and "exciting" experience.

The sum of the two types equals total "movie meme" bandwidth. Borrowing more methodology from stock market technical analysis (Relative Strength Indictory), we can theorize that the mix of "new" bandwidth to "branded" bandwidth will tend to vary between two extremes.

We can derive empirical values by measuring the meme counts for new versus existing products that live within the same bandwidth category.

Why do you care?

You can now build a tool that determines optimum entry points for new product introductions, and optimum points to re-inforce the marketing for existing products. Point A is the optimum point to introduce new products because a maximum of "unbranded" bandwidth is available while at point B, new product expenditures should be reduced in favor of existing products.

Wives and Wiccans and Those Search Engines

Wives and Wiccans, argh.
No sense of humor, man, especially about each other!
It's enough to drive a sane guy crazy.
Luckily... I don't have that problem anymore.

I'm short of time this week, so tonight you get a mash-up of whatever popped into my mind.
You poor saps.

----

Perhaps y'all will find this as interesting as I do.
My search engine hits for this month so far -

It's an average month except for "esato.com".
(I assume that somebody at esato.com is referencing my site).

"Schramm" and "Communication" and "Model" are well presented, I think.
Typically, they account for about 1/3 of my search hits.

I can't get the same traction out of "Ideosphere" yet, even though it's official memetic terminology. I've been fleshing out a strategic theory and framework since 2003, but clearly, the flashy graphs of Meme Miner are more memorable.

----

There's plenty of conjecture left in the movie memes and diffusion theory. A marketing company in Santa Clara is a frequent reader here, so I tend to think of what they (and others) are seeking. The movie memes and diffusion theory have possible marketing aspects that I'll try to graphically present this week.

I'm tempted to do an analysis on "most popular music" to see if the graphs look similar.

----

You always get cross-cutting problems from that object-relational impedance mismatch. I know two basic solutions - code an object snippet which represents a cross-cutting of several objects, or create views at the database level. I've tried both and I strongly prefer views so the object model remains clean.

Legacy code is an archaeology of sorts. The history of a company is buried in its code layers and different methodologies, programming teams or trends flow in and ebb back out. And sometimes a particular thing remains past its time and space.

Company cultures do what they know, especially during a time crunch. If the company has database expertise, they tend to do everything in the database. Likewise, a programming shop will often hand-code the equivalent of database triggers and stored procedures.

At the start, I do two things. I identify the project's chain of command, and the various vested interests... and I dig into the archaeology of the existing system, if possible.

What's the #1 mistake in system analysis?

Last week, I and two British guys argued this one over Rock Bottom beers.
But they didn't like my quaint answer.

The #1 mistake is....

not understanding why the legacy system works as it does

It bites you every time, even when you're watching for it.

----

SOA security is a potential minefield.
I had thought so, but now I can see it.
And in IT technology, a minefield = $$$$
A good time investment.

A Discovery Park Sunday

I ended up in Fremont.

I set out for Discovery Park with a late start.
Forgot my map.
Saw the Lenin statute.

A creepy dream last night. I usually don't remember them, but in this I was with people of ambiguous & candid sexual natures; I drank too much and passed out. Two effeminate men were laughing and pointing at me when I woke up.

I looked down and my pants were missing.

I quickly patted myself down, checking for bruises and mishandling, but I seemed okay and it may have been a practical joke. I might hang out in Fremont or the University district for awhile until my sexuality recovers.

The Restaurant at the End of the LenaVerse

I have another stalker on mobile IP points. Almost 50% of my Los Angeles traffic comes from a five-mile radius, but on different IP addresses.

Hmmm.
That's a statistical anomaly, I do believe.

I could be wrong, though.

---

Dang. I don't care what those Mono guys imply, the Vogue has the most interesting people (including women! *especially* women!) in Seattle. If you've got a better place, then SEND it to me!

---

Okay. So, we know from biological systems that homogeneous systems are fairly easy to crash. Viruses do it often through a trial and error process, which is why the predominant biological model is heterogenuity.

"Heterogenuity"

Doesn't the word just put all sorts of distracting thoughts into your head?

Ahem. {Whew} Okay. So, suppose you want to crash a heterogeneous system. Viruses do manage it on rare occasions, i.e. the Black Plague. You'd almost certainly need something like AIDS, something that morphs itself into new forms and re-attacks previously immune hosts.

What would that look like in a meme environment?

--

Billy Beck is probably one of the few, true, honest people left in the country. I suppose that's one reason I like him so much. And... like my pet snapper turtle, I just like poking my finger into his mouth to see how fast and sharp his teeth are.

Random thoughts on an early Sunday morning.

The Lena-Inspired Duet

Back to the IdeoSphere

The Monoliths may curse my name, but they bumped me up into the #137,000 spot at Alexa.com. That's not bad for a one-man hobby site, although I did break into the top 100,000 last year for a couple of weeks.

Back to the Ideosphere. Let's lay out a basic theory in pictorial form. Total information is growing faster than human population and it's easily duplicated, so the finite space of each human skull is receiving a greater diversity of information than ever before. Cultural diffusion occurs. Mainstream culture becomes harder to maintain, while fringe cultures appear and grow.

The net (yuk, yuk) result should be escalating costs in terms of information problems - miscommunication, cultural conflicts, etc. Eventually, the net benefit of diversity should exceed its societal benefits and produce a big drop in the price of information as demand falls off.

Information is the cuisine of memes.
More information means more memes.
What might the Ideosphere look like on a high-fat feast of information?

More memes in finite space means less bandwidth for each meme, generally.

My goal with the movie memes was to validate the theory, and also see if the current movie sales slump was predictable by unconventional means. The mainstream movies (I choose the ten movies with highest sales gross) should have had a declining share of the total "movie" meme bandwidth. This is true from 1997 to 2004, but it should have been true for the preceding period, too.

But there are always counterbalancing forces in any stable system.

And now I got to get out of here, I'm already later than I planned.
The kinky, chunky blonde awaits!

I'll work on this tomorrow as I walk from Bellevue to Discovery Park.

Billy And the Monotones

Those poor Mononaughts. Their young, naive eyes have been exposed to worlds they never dreamed of... like... "value", "pragmatic programming" and the leather-topped mini-Cooper!

And here's "Beck in the USSR" spouting off again. I read his site almost every day. He's so angry and vocal, but somehow he can't find a gram of ironic humor in any of it. I mean, heck, the shrieking Mono guys gave me chuckles for the past two days.... all the complexity and dependencies of Windows, but without the reliability or support!

I'll probably post some new Ideosphere material tonight, it's about half-done, but I have some real work today.

Trans-Mutations of the Monosphere

So I'm sitting at the Rock Bottom digging on the Popoffs.

And the Monobots are hot.
They annoyed.
They're smoking, even.
But they should get their facts "straight".

Yes, The Vogue hosts some transvestites, but I am the "trans-action cost" guy, not the trans-vestite guy. If y'all must dish dirt, at least read my site (to boost my hit count) and get the facts right. My taste runs more along these lines.

NO, not that damn Mini-Cooper, the chick in leather, you geeks!

From my perspective, transvestites and Mono developers are similar. Their strange obsessions are beyond me, but they don't affect me much so I don't care much.

Now last week the Vogue had several cute leather/goth-style chicks, one slender dark-haired chick with that "Waterworld" tattoo pattern and her somewhat stubby blond friend. Like most men, my eyes were visually drawn to the slender chick. But after two hours of covert surveillance, I concluded that the blond chick is probably the more interesting, attractive one.

Maybe I'll chase after her this weekend.

Now get back on that Mono Death March!

La-da-di-dup-dup die dy
On the stereo

Pepperoni Punishment

I got started late.

All the good restaurants are closed now and my punishment is pepperoni pizza at The Parlor, a fancy new billiards hall in the fancy new Lincoln Square.

There's a desperate battle in front of me. On one side, there's an army of Service-Oriented Architecture documents and diagrams. Against them stands "Rose McGowan", a full-figure, dark-haired twenty-something chick playing pool in tight jeans and black knit belly shirt. The sort of shirt that draws your eyes downward. Over and over again.

GoodMe: I really need to read this stuff.
BadMe: No, you don't.

GoodMe: Yes, I do.
BadMe: Just watch the chick and eat.

GoodMe: I am, but I should do something constructive.
BadMe: Hey, look! She's bending over to make a shot!

GoodMe: Yeah, yeah, nice. Must think about SOA now.
BadMe: Yo! Now she's flirting, sideways glances, flipping the hair!

GoodMe: SOA! SOA! Must... focus... on... SOA!
BadMe: The boyfriend is totally oblivious. It's an easy meal!

GoodMe: We've already got the pizza.
BadMe: You need to respond back, man. She's losing patience.

GoodMe: Dude, she's freaking twenty, that's just so wrong.
BadMe: YEAH, BABEEE, IT IS SO WRONG!

GoodMe: I probably could do some SOA this weekend.
BadMe: Too late. She's turned her back, now she's annoyed.

Fine. Then we'll finish the original mission. In the 1980s, we got PCMCIA cards that crashed your Windows OS when you did a hot-swap. Later, Novell gave us hot-swappable server disks. And I realized tonight, between unrealized imaginings about Rose, that IBM has given us the hot-swappable server in SOA.

I haven't worked with the pieces enough to know how close reality is to theory, but it doesn't matter. Even if it's glitchy now, it will eventually all work. You just know that about technology and IBM in general.

Speaking of hot-and-swappable, I've got to get back to the scenery here!

Mono Y Mono

This is Broward Horne, reporting to you from Bellevue, Washington, on this, the third day of the Mono Project riots. The streets around me lay strewn with rubble while sporadic fires smolder in empty houses and vehicles.

Even the police have abandoned the area as bands of wild-eyed Mono programmers roam about seeking victims and vindication. Just hours ago, I narrowly escaped from my burning apartment building, but thanks to my new Verizon cellular broadband card, I'm able to continuing broadcasting from anywhere in the city.

Three days ago, these riots were sparked by an Internet posting of this innocent-looking graph....

Up ahead, I see a distant light. My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim! No, it's just more smoke and a band of Monotheists! Wait... hold on...

I think they've spotted me!

{pant}{pant}{pant}

ARRRRGHHHH!!!

{pant}{pant}{pant}

AAAHEEHHHHEEEEHHHHEEE!!!!

{pant}{pant}{pant}
{pant}{pant}{pant}

That was a close call. Two red-eyed Monodroids spotted me and gave chase, but as we passed by a hapless geek in a Microsoft t-shirt, they leapt on him like two rabid Romero zombies.

MY GOD! HIS FACE! IT'S GONE!

The entire area here is in chaos. How could mere programming geeks have wrought so much damage? I can only imagine that this is how Pioneer Square will look after a Seahawks SuperBowl victory!

This is Broward Horne, signing off and heading for safe harbor at a nearby pub!

Stalk Options

I have a stalker.

Several, actually. Two of them, perhaps three, are probably benevolent. At least one is actively but impotently malevolent.

One of them believes that they can disguise themselves by logging in from various Internet cafes or some such, but their geographical area and login times are a fairly unique signature.

I haven't spent much time on the malevolent fellow. After all, he's my conscripted click-slave now, doomed to boost my website ratings and not much little else, I think. Certainly less than the raging Mono mob.

The overweighted skew of NYC logins indicates that three or four of my stalkers know me from my last job and that they're unaware of each other.

And Arrow remains dark and quiet ever since this post

It's all guesswork, of course.

Silence is the acoustical fingerprint of conspiracy, the lack of expected information.

Mono Finale

Fools rush in,
where wise men never go,
but wise men never trust Bill Gates,
so how are they to know?

When Miguel made his bet
I felt my life begin!
So open up your heart
And let... this fool rush in!

The Angry Mono Mob

So I'm sitting on the floor in my furnitureless apartment, digging the cool new Verizon cellular broadband card. And then I notice that my website hit count is through the roof. What's this? Is it another Google blunder?

Nope.

It's just the angry hoard of Mono Project developers.

I told you they'd be even more riled up after they figured out they probably wasted the past three years. It's gonna be a damn good page hit day for me, though.

Fight on, Monochromes, fight on for Justice!

Vogue Visitor Pattern

So I'm sitting in The Vogue, thinking about fricking design patterns, memes, goth women and rain. And I'm watching the traffic flow of the customers...and that tattooed chick... and I suddenly realize... there's a visitor design pattern!

And of course, me being me, I start analyzing the thing.

Now, in a regular bar, you'd talk to the bartender or waitress and maintain "conversational state". (HO HO HO!) State is maintained as the waitress takes an order, delivers the drink, gets the check, goes back for change, etc. She has to remember details like your face.

But you'd actually need LIGHTS to do that and this is The Vogue.

The bar queue optimizes the bartender's time because ALL operations are stateless. Nobody needs to know anybody else or remember details. Drinks get pushed out with minimal cost and interaction!

The visitor pattern is the PULL operation, which is what I first noticed, mostly because of the hot, tattooed chick. She's always polling the noisy bar area to gathering up glasses, which works well because she's operating on VISUAL, not audio, cues (the empty, abandoned glass).

Back in the bar area, we have audio signals but they're isolated from the noisy area (kinda).

So why I haven't seen this pattern before? Well, I never saw that hot tattooed chick before. But I realize later at Cheesecake Factory that it's exactly how a cafeteria works, too. And many bars operate in a split fashion, running an equivalent pattern in parallel with a "conversational state" pattern, too, but I had to think back on many other places to see that pattern.

Clearly, there are other PUSH / PULL patterns to be considered at The Vogue, but Visio doesn't have a sex toys stencil (yet).

Addendum: And here come my twin Google monitors (not google-bot addresses), here to snap down this bizarre entry and attempt a de-gaming decipherment. Get ready for a surprise!

It's Been A Good Day

Got Google riled up enough that they finally hunted down that internal positive feedback loop which was jacking my site up in ratings like a rocketship to the heavens. But what can you expect when you dominate the infrastructure like Google does? You're GONNA GET positive feedback loops.

It's inevitable.

Which got me thinking. When I design software, I shoot for the percentage case that covers 90% of the requirements. But I usually build in an exception-handling mechanism. You gotta wonder.... what DOES Google's exception-handling mechanism look like, and is there any lawsuit potential there?

Got the Mormons riled up, that always makes me smile. Lots of logins from Utah and Idaho-based companies. I've often thought of torching my diploma on the steps of the University. Maybe they'll finally blacklist me again and I won't have to answer recruiters who call me simply because I graduated from BSU, which apparently means I am "one of The Chosen" and can I please do the secret handshake using the special ring?

Egad.

Got the Mono guys riled up. Well, heck, they're gonna be even more riled up after putting in three years of effort and thousands of dollars into a platform that ain't looking so viable.

And even got the DemocraticUnderground.com riled up with the "Unfair" memegraph.

Yeah!
You GO, girl!