Quoderat

Sciveram vicipaediam linguis barbaris (exempli gratia anglice, francice, et ceteris) legi potere, sed non latine. Iam tenet super duo milia articulorum. Quid artis!

I’ve decided to switch Quoderat to a full-text feed, as I’ve already done with my other weblog, Land and Hold Short. I don’t use Google ads in my weblogs to try to earn revenue, and I’m too lazy to read my server logs very often, so there was really no point in making people click through to read my full postings.

Unfortunately, it is possible that this change will cause some aggregators to mark all of my last 10 postings as new and redisplay them. I apologize in advance for that inconvenience, and hope that the convenience of reading full postings without leaving your aggregator will outweigh it.

A close acquaintance of mine has no hearing in one ear. As disabilities go, that’s not a very serious one — most of the time it means nothing worse than appearing to ignore people who start talking on her deaf side. It did, however, make for an interesting study in personalization when she acquired an iPod Mini this week.

Stereophonic recordings are wasted on this woman. Even worse, when she uses headphones or ear buds, she completely misses the sound in one of the stereo channels. That’s an especially big problem when listening to stereo mixes from the 1960s, which tend to exaggerate the separation between channels (for example, when listening to Hit the Road, Jack by Ray Charles, she has to choose between hearing Ray and hearing the Raylettes, depending on which ear bud she puts in the good ear).

She could have looked for a pass-through plug of some kind that would convert the sound from her iPod into mono (but who wants to stick a big, ugly plug into a stylish little iPod?), she could have bought a monaural headset (so much for the stylish white ear buds), or she could have looked for a configuration option in the iPod to put out monoaural sound (does such an option exist?), but in the end, she did something much cleverer — she simply ripped songs from her CD collection into iTunes in mono. Since there is only one channel, the tracks take up only half the space (give or take compression), effectively doubling the capacity of her iPod; and along with all the extra capacity, she gets what is, for her, a much better sound quality.

With its monaural song list, her iPod is personalized in a very real sense, far more so than she could ever accomplish with custom colours and accessories. The only drawback is that the iTunes store probably doesn’t sell songs in mono (I haven’t checked), so she’ll have to rip all of her tunes herself.

Bill de hÓra has a thoughtful piece about complexity experts and simplicity mavens. As Bill points out, conventional wisdom provides an easy way to criticize things without really thinking: in the 1990’s, you could diss any project or spec simply by claiming that “it won’t scale”; this decade, you can diss any project or spec by claiming that “it’s too complex”.

I think that there’s more to the change in conventional wisdom than mindless pot-shots, though — it’s really a fundamental change in the burden of proof (in the popular sense of the obligation to defend a position). With the rise of agile development and worse is better, we’ve shifted from “required until proven unnecessary” 10 years ago to “unnecessary until proven required” today, and I think that’s a change for the better — after all, if we’re uncertain either way, we might as well pick the option that requires less time and money. So when people say “the project is too complex,” what they’re really saying is “prove to me that these features are justified.”

Burden of proof matters a lot in life: just ask someone like Schapelle Corby, who has been charged with a crime in a country whose legal system does not support the presumption of innocence.

I’ve just upgraded Quoderat to WordPress 1.5.1 and have installed the Spam Karma plugin, as recommended by Lauren Wood in a comment to my previous whining posting about comment spam. With luck, legitimate comments should now all appear immediately, while links to Online Poker should silently disappear. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

I’ve already noticed that the default WP 1.5.1 theme is too narrow for source-code/XML listings, so the formatting on some of my older postings is messed up. I’ll work on that later. In the meantime, please let me know (somehow) if Spam Karma prevents you from leaving comments.

[Update: a nice analogy from Jon Udell, and a thoughtful response from Tim Bray.] WSDL is too abstract to be useful, according to both Tim Bray and Norm Walsh (and for what it’s worth, I agree with them). Tim and Norm both propose much simpler alternatives — hardly surprising from two brilliant guys who helped design so much of what actually works in the XML world — but I think they might be going about things the wrong way this time.

How many developers do you know who complain about working nights and weekends manually entering connection information for thousands of publicly available web services? Given that there are, at most, a few dozen sites offering web services over the public web (and that’s web services in the most general sense, including REST as well as SOAP), I’ll guess that the answer is “zero”.

So here’s my suggestion: let’s hold off on designing new specifications until there’s a real problem to solve. If online services continue to grow, some day my hypothetical overworked developers will emerge. When we find them, we can go and ask them what they need to make their lives easier, and then write a specification that does the simplest thing that can possibly work to solve their problem, and no more. Perhaps they’ll need all the abstraction of WSDL (though I’m dubious); perhaps they’ll need something with a message-passing focus like Tim’s SMEX-D, or something with an RPC-focus like Norm’s NSDL; perhaps they’ll need all of those, or something that none of us has thought of yet.

Update 1: Jon Udell has an excellent footpath analogy that was passed on to him by Larry Wall. It seems to work perfectly for specification writing.

Update 2: Tim Bray has updated his posting with a well-thought-out defense of WSDL’s role (though not WSDL itself).