Mark Staples

A new brew on the last weekend of my short summer holidays - trying a Cooper’s Mexican Cerveza, with their Brew Enhancer Type 1. OG surprisingly high at 1.054! Sweet, light wort.

The discussion earlier this year about the death of the blogosphere is surely exaggerated.  OK, my blog was “resting” for most of this year. My excuse is general busy-ness - moving house, moving office, and changing roles at NICTA. But recently I had the enthusiasm and time to write a flurry of blog entries. (I’ve had more time during my newly extended train commute, but notwithstanding that, I can see my blogging enthusiasm comes in bursts…)

Isn’t this how most of the blogosphere works? Most bloggers are amateurs, writing about their family, pets, or hobbies. The glamorous fantasy of blogging driving democratic journalism and incisive public commentary is true, but it’s only ever been true for only a tiny part of the whole.

It takes a certain perverse commitment to blog regularly if you’re not being paid for it. Of course increasingly, some bloggers do get paid for it - either as journalists, company employees or, for an elite influential few, through significant online ad revenue. But the fact that some people are paid for it doesn’t significantly affect the cost or value of blogging for the mass of amateurs.

So Nic Carr’s wrong to say that blogging “outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone” - the blogosphere is not dead. Yes, as the Economist says “Blogging has entered the mainstream” – blogging is now accepted a part of the spectrum of modern media. But non-mainstream blogging hasn’t died. There are still plenty of blogs about family, pets, hobbies, and there are still individuals reporting and providing independent social commentary.

Ironically, at the same time as blogging technology is becoming accepted by the mainstream media, it’s also becoming accepted for other more industrial purposes. Blogging technology is no longer just for blogging - the formats that support blogs (RSS, Atom, etc) are used as a REST representation for representing  time-series content, including mundane things such as home loan product announcements.

It’s certainly not dead, but both socially and technically, blogging is growing and adapting. It used to be the message, now increasingly it’s the medium.

I had to miss the second day of ICSOC, but was back for the morning of the third, and another great keynote, on Web-Scale Computing, from Peter Vosshall – a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon. Amazon needs a highly reliable and scalable infrastructure internally to run its retail business, but has also been selling web services infrastructure to third parties. Peter spoke about EC2 (compute), SQS (messaging), S3 (storage of blobs with metadata), SimpleDB (storage of lightly-structured data with indexed queries), and EBS (storage for EC2 when you need a traditional filesystem or database).

As an example of how companies are using and benefitting from these services, he talked about a company called Animoto.  On their website you can upload a song and some photos, and they automatically build a video montage, matching transitions to beats.  They started with around 5000 customers in total, but after they built a facebook app and got some viral awareness, they shot up to 5000 to 10000 users per hour. They had deployed on EC2 and ramped up to 3500 - 5000 instances.  It looked like a neat story.

The business benefits of using the web services are having a capability for fast incremental infrastructure growth, and turning what would have been fixed capital expenses into variable operating expenses.  (Coincidentally I had also mentioned this latter benefit of web services in a podcasted interview I was in on Monday.)

As well as supplying web services, Amazon’s using them internally too.  Peter briefly reviewed how Amazon started as what looked like a 2-tier+web client-server web-application, but then refactored that incrementally (and painfully over 2002-2003) into a collection of services. They’ve seen reliability benefits – he said they can lose an entire data centre with no impact on the customer experience.  They’ve also had product management benefits – each service maintains its own data and operating responsibility, which lets them each evolve at their own pace. Amazon’s key NFPs are security, incremental scalability, availability (systems fail not by stopping, and failures aren’t independent), performance (not just mean performance but also performance in outlying cases), and cost-effectiveness.

Intriguingly, despite the claimed product management benefits, he said that 70% of development time was spent on “undifferentiated heavy lifting” delivering updated services – dealing with non-functional, administrative service management issues.  So only 30% of their effort is spent improving the customer experience. I think their delivered experience could certainly use some extra work, especially for their non-US customers!

The 6th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing is on in Sydney this week. NICTA is a sponsor, and I managed to score a registration to attend.  Ian Foster opened with an interesting keynote. (Preceded by a 30 minute delay fussing with Mac technology issues!)  He spoke on “Services for Science” - how SOA is being used to support knowledge creation in science. Currently there’s a surprisingly strong growth of online services providing data and analysis, in astronomy and especially in the biomedical field.  He talked about the caGrid network. Ontologies are key there for meta-data of experimental results - Ian commented that the community is very “neat” (not scruffy) in being explicit and standardised in the representation and organisation of their data.

It’s interesting that for representing scientific workflow they’ve dropped BPEL in favour of the workflow notation and supporting infrastructure in Taverna. The workflows are used not only to coordinate data and analyses, but also to communicate methods and in principle to promote reuse. But the caGrid leaders recognise that it’s hard to design for workflow reuse, and hard to achieve reuse in practice.  Ian also discussed experimental use of functional programming techniques to support provenance - to capture computations as a first class entity for scientific audit, review, and mining. He finished with some discussion of scalability and text mining of research publications.

I think there are interesting analogues of some of the issues now being explored in the e-science domain that have already been thrashed out in software engineering. They are quite similar in some ways - in the two fields of practice at an industrial scale, there are teams of knowledge workers working on complex and partly-shared electronic assets. Large scale reuse and variation has been made methodical in Software Product Line Engineering, and provenance issues are very similar to those that are well known in the established discipline of (Software) Configuration Management.

COAG met on Saturday and decided to invest to implement a national approach to conveyancing - the National Electronic Conveyancing System (NECS).  Currently each of Australia’s eight states and territories has its own different system for dealing with the transfer of real estate.  You might not think that’s a big deal - after all, wherever you are, the house you buy is only going to be in one state!  Why does it matter to have a uniform national system?

At an abstract level from the public’s point of view, when you buy a house, there’s just a buyer, a seller, and a central land registry that maintains the “golden truth” about ownership under the standard Torrens system of title.  It’s a little more complicated than that because mortgages for housing loans are also registered with land registries.  So banks and non-bank lenders are normally involved too.  It’s more complicated than that, because there’s a whole raft of other auxiliary entities involved in title exchange, such as title search companies, lawyers, property valuers, and insurers providing related services.  The whole industry (banks, non-bank lenders, and the auxiliary service organisations) operate nationally.  Currently they need to implement and maintain systems to deal with the land registry systems in each of the eight states and territories.  In the past conveyancing has been a manual process, and human processors have been able to deal with the inefficiencies of working with multiple interfaces.

However, access to land registries is starting to move online, to reduce the cost and time of buying real-estate.  When conveyancing becomes automated, there’s a large initial cost borne by everyone in the industry to integrate with the new system(s).  Companies would prefer to pay this initial overhead cost once, not eight times!

NECS is intended to address this problem.  The goal is not to create a single national land registry, but instead to create a single national interface to all of the state and territory land registries. Organisations will be able to integrate with the national interface, and gain access to the land registries in every state.

Our group at NICTA has been working with NECS, looking at issues in the definition and management of business vocabularies, business rules, and business processes.  NICTA’s research philosophy is “use-inspired research” - working on fundamental scientific advances and technology innovations in the context of, and with an understanding of, real-world problems.   The goal is to do research that has more impact, and benefits Australia.  Our work with NECS is an example of all of this.   It’s still early days, but having a deep engagement with conveyancing and e-government has already been important to motivate and direct the research we’re doing.

My University education is in Computer Science, but by professional life and renewed research career is in Software Engineering.  A lot of people (and perhaps some University departments!) probably think these are just the same thing, with different names.  But in my transition to Software Engineering I’ve discovered they’re very different, and I think their difference is not all down to the the normal arguments about science vs engineering.

In Computer Science, the “unit of analysis” is the procedure (in the sense of effective procedure, but I also mean to include non-terminating processes).  Entities of interest include algorithms and data-structures, interfaces, ADTs, types, and languages for expressing them.

In contrast, in Software Engineering, the unit of analysis is the whole software system.  Here the entities of interest include architectures, and system models. A whole software system is not just “bigger” in size than a single procedure/process.  It also has many more different kinds of functionality, many more developers, and many different users and other stakeholders.

There are a lot of common themes across Computer Science and Software Engineering.  For example, both are concerned with issues such as specification, construction, distribution, performance analysis, and verification.

The challenges for Software Engineering are not just dealing with the scale of the system, but also dealing with the scale of the development of the system. The challenges are not just technical, they’re also socio-technical.  So although Computer Science and Software Engineering both deal with software and have many common themes, their technologies and methodologies are usually quite different because they’re dealing with different kinds of entities in different contexts.

Computer Science and Software Engineering Software are very different disciplines.

Last weekend was bottling day for the full malt chilli lager.  Normally when bottling, you add some “priming sugar” to each bottle.  This is a small amount of extra food that the residual yeast will consume.  Yeast produces two important by-products in fermentation - alcohol and carbon dioxide.  The former is the goal during primary fermentation, but the latter is the goal when adding priming sugar to the bottle. That’s what makes homebrew fizzy!

However, I have a fantastic homebrew book from CAMRA which contains an intriguing suggestion. It says (p142) that “the priming of beers made from the 3kg kits is optional”, because there will be more residual dextrins than a brew made with cane sugar. It notes that there is a tradeoff - “the best beers, particularly bottled beers, are usually not primed”, but that to bring the beer “into drinkale condition in the shortest possible time” priming sugar is required.

I am using a 3kg kit this time, so it’s an interesting idea not to add priming sugar.  But if I tried it and didn’t pan out, I’d be left with 20 litres of flat lager!  So I’ve tried an experiment - some bottles with priming sugar, and some without.  I’ll let you know how it goes…

The NICTA lab where I work finally moved offices into a newly constructed building in September.

The new building’s great - it’s such a nice change to have some natural light, and they’ve also installed a world-class coffee machine in the lunch room. The “designer rust” panels on the side of the building tend to polarise people, but I love them.

There were a few teething problems. For example the “green” automatic office lighting switches were insensitive and on a short timer. That caused plenty of comedy moments with people having to regularly stand up and wave their arms around to escape from the darkness into which they’d been plunged while they working. But that’s all being sorted out now. Some of the finishing decorative touches are being applied internally.

All we need now is a grand opening!

Now I’ve settled in a little to my new place, I’ve had time to put on a new brew. On the train every day I pass a homebrew shop at Thornleigh, and recently I managed to visit.  A homebrew shop is a different experience to buying homebrew kits at the supermarket. There’s all sorts of specialist paraphernalia and ingredients. For example I finally managed to buy a test tube for my hydrometer, and a bottle filler.

I also bought a “full malt” kit - a 3kg tin, to which you just add water (and yeast) The result is supposed to be a richer more rounded taste than the more common 1.5kg kits which require the addition of sugar and/or “brew enhancers”.

It’s a lager kit from a local company called X-tract Brewing which I’d never heard of before. I threw in a half dozen small hot chillis, split lengthwise. Original Gravity was 1.041 to 1.043 on 2nd November. (Adjusted for temperature.) It was transferred to a secondary container (”racked”) a week later, with the specific gravity 1.011. I also removed the chillis then. Tasting showed a nice heat - noticeably tingly, but not overwhelming.

We moved house mid-year, away from convenient-but-noisy Leichhardt off to green-but-distant Thornleigh.

We were first home buyers. The increasing rental prices and soft purchase prices had been slowly changing the economics of rent-vs-buy decisions in Sydney. It might still not have been wholly rational to buy, but non-monetary issues tipped us over the line - issues like control over our own space, and slack landlords. That made it hard to deal with quality of life problems like rampant peeling paint, recurring mold, and increasing plane noise.

The subsequent financial crisis has put us in an interesting situation. Inflation is high (good in principle for home value) and interest rates are falling (good for repayments), but in practice home values are falling (bad) and unemployment/job security is worsening overall (bad). What will happen next? The only certain thing is that things will change! Still, the macro-economic issues aren’t as important as our individual circumstances, which seem to be fine at the moment (touch-wood).

As a place to live it seems to be working out fine. It’s great to have a back yard and a leafy environment. We can (and have begun to) do massive amounts of work inside and in the garden! But now we have the satisfaction of knowing we’re improving our own home value and not someone else’s.