Category Archives: Uncategorized

URL Compression

Many useful URLs are way too long to memorize or even type. I’ve known and used TinyURL for many years to compress long URLs. A recent conversation reminded me of this service. It turns out that several other options are … Continue reading

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Patterns for Fault Tolerant Software

My fellow Hillsider Robert S. Hanmer has just finished his book on fault tolerant patterns (to be available from John Wiley & Sons, October-November 2007). Here’s the book’s descritiption, in Bob’s words: This book presents proven techniques to achieve highly … Continue reading

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The Emerging Phenotropic Identity

Robert Lucky’s column brings up the question of identity on the Internet. In contrasting the old identity with the new, Google/Flickr/YouTube/MySpace/FaceBook one he points out that “Now you’re at the mercy of what other people and what various computer algorithms … Continue reading

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Software Engineering Radio Interview

At JAOO 2006 I gave an interview for Software Engineering Radio. Markus Voelter asked me questions about architecture evaluation, the topic of the talk I gave in the architecture quality track. Here are some of the questions that we covered: … Continue reading

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Architecture Evaluation in Practice

The slides from my talk on employing state of the art methods to validate software architectures are available (I just didn’t get to it earlier). I gave this talk at the 10th JAOO in Denmark, and then at the patterns … Continue reading

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Correlation and Causality

As we wrapped up a group discussion I was reminded about the wonderful discussion of correlation and causality from Freakonomics. How do they differ? When is it one, and when is it the other? Why do people confuse them? The … Continue reading

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The Blog-Tag Game

Wojtek blog-tagged me so let’s continue this 21st century pyramid scheme. Here are 5 things you’re not likely to know about me: I have 8 years of classical piano training; I haven’t played the piano in a very long time … Continue reading

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Software Patterns Exhibit Positive Network Effects

I’ve just wrapped up work on a patterns article. While doing the analysis with my co-authors (an co-workers) Ade Miller and Wojtek Kozaczynski I wondered about the connection between software patterns and Metcalfe’s Law. By the way, if you’re interested … Continue reading

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Process Models for the Masses

A decade ago few people dealing with code were interested in business processes. That’s no longer the case. Due to a variety of reasons many developers discuss processes in one form or another. Some want to understand the business process … Continue reading

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Feature Extraction Revisited

A visit to pandora.com prompted me to revisit the topic of feature extraction. Tim Westergren’s Music Genome Project is probably one of the coolest ways of exploring feature extraction and relevance feedback: The feature extraction part extracts the “phenotypes” from … Continue reading

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