Thinking Inside a Bigger Box

This Norwegian language post describes my response to the report from a task force exploring a common IT-architecture for the public sector in Norway.

Den norske regjeringen har besluttet at en felles IKT-arkitektur for offentlig sektor ville være fint. Jeg fikk greie på arbeidet på tirsdag, og har lest rapport til den store gullmedalje. Jeg er fortsatt ikke helt sikker på hva som menes med “felles IKT-arkitekt”, men jeg kan se omrisset av mange store evighetsprosjekter i dokumentet.

Jeg har forfattet et svar på rapporten.

Spesielt er jeg bekymret for at dette skal bli en unnskyldning for store SOA-prosjekter uten veldefinerte formål. Rapporten beskriver en god del ønskede effektmål, men disse beskrives i såpass runde former at man aldri kommer til å etterprøve om prosjekter faktisk oppfyller dem. Formålene er ting som økt grad av interoperabilitet.

Frykt nummer to ligger i hvordan SOA-krigen går om dagen. Rapporten nevner veldig lite konkret på teknologier, så jeg slapp unna å gå inn i dette minefeltet. I stedet må jeg ligge våken og frykte effekten av de usagte ordene i rapporten.

Jeg har startet å høre om dogmatiske SOA-prosjekter som ikke lykkes, til tross for store investeringer. REST starter å bli mer akseptabelt å snakke om i høflig selskap. Men fremdeles virker det som om at “SOA prosjekt” er et kodeord for “vi skal kjøpe dyr WS-* programvare fra Oracle, IBM eller Microsoft”.

Jeg skulle ønske jeg hadde mer erfaring innen offentlig sektor før jeg skulle uttale meg om dette, men dersom det er som noe annet jeg har sett, handler interoperabilitet grunnleggende sett om å sende eller motta informasjon på et standardisert format. Det betyr tre ting: En aksjon (les, oppdater, lever), noe som identifiserer et objekt (søknad, personopplysning) og et innhold (“Jeg ønsker med dette herved å søke om bla bla bla”).

Og her har WS-* skadet oss mye. Når man bygde standarden SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol, som verken er enkel eller handler om “object access”), skrellet man vekk to fine deler av HTTP standarden: Verb (GET, POST, PUT – det vil si “aksjoner”) og URL’er (det vil si den nøkkelen som representerer et objekt). Det betyr at vi ikke lenger kan si “legg til” (POST) en “søknad” (http://etat.no/tjeneste/soknad/) som inneholder noe data (ikke en del av standarden). I stedet må vi si “send en melding som inneholder informasjon om noe vi tenker å gjøre” (ikke en del av standarden).

I en rimelig verden burde interoperabilitet betydd at å utveksle informasjon om objekter burde være en del av en universell standard som er akseptert rundt hele verden. En standard basert på å sende meldinger om å utføre én eller annen oppgave (som for eksempel å utveksle et objekt) virker sørgelig utilstrekkelig. Og offentlig sektor i lille Norge kan vel ikke være den som brøyter vei her.

Så lenge SOA-krigen pågår er jeg ikke optimistisk for sjansene til at en rimelig standard dukker opp.

I would like to start by apologizing from having a political entry in my blog. I believe that politics is intertwined with other intellectual endeavour. As scientist and engineers, we have a duty of social awareness, to see that our creations are being used for the benefit of humanity.

I was saddened by tuesday’s election results. Up until the eve of November 2nd (Central European Time), I was hoping that the Unites States would wake up from the state of collective insanity it has been suffering from for the last four years, and join the civilized world.

Dubya is arguably the worst president in US history. He is bad for world security. He is bad for the world economy. He is bad for the environment. He is bad for the U.N. From the exit polls after the US election, I think he was only elected because he is willing to let the government regulate behaviour that does not affect others, but that the religious right considers immoral (abortion and gay marriage). And because of that, the American people choose to ignore his horrible track record on foreign relations, economy, world security, and civil liberties (not to say plain ol’ stupidity). How can you guys be that stupid?

How will this affect the future of technology? Here are a few of my predictions for the next four years:

• Off-shoring will continue, probably at an increased rate
• American software development effort will grow in the area of data mining/profiling of citizens. The 1984-vision started by the USA PATRIOT act will continue
• In addition to data profiling, the only other software area that will be groving is defence contracting
• Bioinformatic research, especially that involving stem cell research, will move to Europe and India
• Migration of value production to India and China will make the US extremely succeptible to competition from these regions. You’re outsouring your workers (and to some extent middle-management) now. What stops Indian executives from competing for the same work force and keeping the profit for themselves?

Unless you’re a fan of big-brother-type government, I expect most Americans will be increasingly disturbed with the development of their nation.

I’d like to end this entry with an excellent statement I saw on a bumper sticker in Pennsylvania this summer:

If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention

… and it is getting worse.

(God really should hurry up with that blessing of America that you all are so big on)

On JavaZone (which was an huge success, IMHO), Richard Stallman was the guest of honor. He talked about the four freedoms which free software gives you, how the Sun Java implementation is not free, and why that might concern us. Then, he talked about something that should concern all of us, even if you think Free Software is bogus: software patents.

As I understand Stallman, if software patents become law, you can violate a patent without knowing it. Also, based on an inspection of source code, he made a back-of-the-envelope estimate that Linux contained somewhere between 10,000 and 60,000 patent violations. This means that your program probably contains thousands of patent violations.

This means that any program is succeptible to patent lawsuits, and any patent-holding organisation has a way of attacking corporate rivals. This means that in the future the number of lawers in a software development organisation will exceed the number of programmers.

If this is a future you don’t want, you should oppose software patents.

More info

• Examples of software patent:My favorite “Quicksort implemented using a linked list of pointers to the objects to be sorted” [#5,175,857].


• FFII: Software Patents in Europe

I am currently reading Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham. It contains many brilliant essays, but it also has a few not so brilliant ones. In “Mind the Gap”, Graham proposes the idea “in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health”. The rationale for this is that some people have the potensial to be more productive than others and by rewarding them proportionally, everyone as a whole would be better off. “I am not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he will hire you as a waiter to your next party. I’m say that he’ll make you a tractor to replace your horse”.

At the fundamental level, I have no problem with Graham’s argument. But I see two problems undermining his argument: First, Graham says: “As [technology] seems to increase the gap in income, it seems to reduce most other gaps”. That is, we are not concerned about relative poverty, only absolute poverty. Second, Graham posits that the rewards a Henry Ford, a Wozniac, a Gates should get should be propertional to the wealth they generate.

On the subject of other gaps than income gaps closing, this is only true to some point. Modern societies seem to have an increasing problem with real poverty in the last decade. I don’t know where to find statistics for this, so I will have to go off an anectote. I live in Norway, one of the more socialist democracies in the world. We pay high taxes, we have socialized healthcare, socialized higher education, public housing, good unemployment benefits. Yet we have more poverty than we should have. Living in downtown Oslo, I occasionally witness such poverty. Yesterday was such an occasion. While walking the dog, I came across a collapsed man in a small public plaza. I called the police. “Oh, he’s still there? He’s a junkie, if you nudge him, you’ll see that he’s alive. He won’t freeze, so we can’t really priorize it. He’ll be fine”. It seems to me that here is clearly a problem of poverty that could be solved by throwing more money at it, in a “socialist” fashion. I know I would be happier if I know that more people like this were taken care of. I think the portion of people living in poverty in Norway is increasing. I think the US is even worse in this regard.

So much for the other gaps being reduced. On a whole, more wealth is generated, but I believe the level of poverty is increasing. This is obviously a bad thing for everyone.

Secondly, I agree with Graham that productive people should be rewarded handsomely. But this does not mean we must be rewarded proportionally to the wealth we generate. The more money you have, the more you are able to enjoy even a small increase. If your regular expenses are just paid off, a 10% increase in income is a 100% in disposable income. A steeply progressive tax regime could still maintain the incentive to excel. And the general rule, the more wealth you generate, the more you are dependent upon the estabilished infrastructure to produce, market, and deliver that wealth to your customers. The more customers you have, the more you are dependent upon your customers level of education, amount of spare time, and income in order for which others have paid.

I believe there is such a thing as Society with a capital S. Society’s interest is to generate maximum wealth, and distribute it in such a way to create maximum happiness (that is, the largest ratio of people being well off, not a few being exceptionally rich). In order to generate wealth, productive people have to be rewarded, as Graham describes. But in order to reduce poverty, to create good consumers and workers, to address the real cause of crime, Society should redistribute the wealth to a greater extent than what Norway or the US are doing today.

(If you want to improve the state of the world, close the tax loopholes for companies and individuals who flee a country for tax reasons, but still make their furtune on the infrastructure that country has created. This is as close as you can get to the old way of generating money that Graham describes: Stealing it.)

Note: This term is also used about mixed economies.

Central dogmas:

• The purpose of government is to work for a vision of a good society


• A good society is one where wealth is distributed in such a way that no-one suffers and everyone is given incentives to produce at their fullest capability.


• Distributed control is superior to central control


• Monopolies hurt

(Warning: Boring, personal entry)

I am writing this entry on a bus. More specifically, on the bus from the airport to the conference Sanntid 2003 (Real-time 2003), where I am scheduled to speak tomorrow. The airport in question is Kjevik airport, which is a military/civilian airport in the south of Norway.

Normally, when I ride busses, I like to read. I brought along Mary Poppendieck’s fascinating “Lean Software Development”. This time is different. I cannot concentrate.

Driving past the military base at Kjevik made me think about the last time I was here. That time I was serving in the Norwegian military forces as a conscript communcations assistant. The memory made me unable to concentrate on the book, hence this post.

The last few years, I have had an increasingly ambivalent feeling towards the millitary, even including the Norwegian armed forces. The more I learn about politics and history, the more I am convinced that war, or any form of forceful confrontation, extremely rarely improves the state of the world. This realization is made stronger when I look at my own reaction to physical (historically) or emotional bullying. In general, forceful techniques rarely make me change my mind, other than becoming more negative towards the bully. I believe groups of people act the same way. In short, spending money on military is counter-productive (plus it means you can’t spend money on sensible stuff). I guess I would classify myself as a political pacifist.

Yet, I have always been attracted to something abouit the military. Perhaps it is the seriousness of it all. Perhaps it is the undertone (with the Norwegian armed forces, anyhow) of violence. Even though I consider violence to work against its intent, I appreciate the use of violence in the entertainment industry. I enjoy violent movies and violent computer games. I probably enjoy them more because of the violence. I guess I am contradicting myself, at least on an emotional level.

Now for the hard part: When writing a blog-entry, we are supposed to say something profound. This entry is mostly just written because I cannot concentrate on anything else. I guess if there is something to be leaned from all this, it is the following:

• People can hold contradictory views. That is just a part of being human. Recognizing it in my own views makes it easier to accept contradictory beliefs in others.


• The forceful approach probably doesn’t work so well. You catch more of the proverbial flies with honey than with vinegar.

I hope that is profound enough for you, gentle reader.

Bush ‘not mad’ at France

I am so sick of reading about the poor economics behind arguments when it comes to tax cut. Being a Norwegian citizen, I am used to taxation levels that would make an American faint. And I don’t know if it really hurts us at all.

What I miss in the discussion goes back to the basics of economy: I am not an economist, but this is how I understand it:

Money ain’t real! Money is only a representation for the right to a certain share of the resources in society. What then happens if everyone gives half of their money to the government? Will you have to work harder to afford a house? Will you have to work harder to afford food? How can redistributing money within society result in there being less resources to go around? How can redistributing money result in there being less work performed by people (all other things being equal)?

Paying more taxes will not result in people as a whole having less. The only result can be that the relative distribution between people change. If you’re asking for a tax cut, you are saying that you feel everyone else should pay more. Of course, I would not object if it happened to me, but it is not “fair”. If you give a tax cut to the rich, all you are saying is that everyone else should shoulder a bigger burden.

Can redistribution lead to a macroeconomic improvement?

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Composed with Newz Crawler 1.4 http://www.newzcrawler.com/

A view on the conflict from the standpoint of cognitive science/social science

• Steven Pinker (“How the mind works”): People may use “doomsday machines” (strategies that are both harmful to themselves and an agressor) to deter agressors.


• Hernando de Soto (“The Mystery of Capital”) An important reason a society with big differences are more prone to violence is that the underprivileged do not have any bargaining power.


• Personal opinion: In a conflict with two countries that are dramatically unevenly matched, we should expect the underprivileged to resort to “doomsday machine” strategies.


• Extending the argument from psychology to global politics is not supported by these data, but




• Iraq is controlled by a small number of people, which makes it more likely to act in accordance with the personal feelings of these people.


• The “doomsday machine” strategy was first used to analyse global politics and was there called “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD). (Pinker)

In the war, this is some practical predictions:

• Saddam’s forces will set the oil fields on fire


• Saddam’s forces will draw fighting into residential areas to cause massive civilian casualties


• Saddam’s forces will attempt to use civilians as human shields


• Saddam will attempt to enrage his neighbours to escalate the war


• Saddam will attempt any dirty trick to get back at the US (like terrorism)

At this point, Saddam is a man with nothing at the bargaining table. And as the saying goes: “If you have got nothing, you have got nothing to lose”.

Disclaimer: Modern “Darwinian ethics” are very clear on separating between explaining and defending behaviour. The stance of “Darwinian ethics” is that if we want as people to behave better, we need to have an understanding of the darker impulses within us all.

What does it really mean when they say stuff like “the fighting in order to capture Umm Qasr is heavier than expected”. What does it mean when the fighting is heavier? Do more people die on either side? Do any people die on either side? After almost three days of war, I have still to hear of any casualties in the fighting. Are we supposed to believe there are none?

The hawks in Washinton, and Blair, claim this is a “just war”. How is the public supposed to believe that claim when we don’t know

• how many people are being killed now


• how many people they expect will be killed (UN estimates 100,000 civilians killed in the war, and 400,000 from the humanitarian effects afterwards, Pentagon estimated 10,000 civilians killed – I have not found good confirmation of these figures)


• how long they expect the war to last


• how long they expect the aftermath to last until Iraq gets a lawful interim government.


• how many civilians must be killed for the agressors to declare their “just war” as unsuccessful?

The press also seem to have avoided these questions. Or maybe it is just the fog-of-war.