About architecture and design optimization

from my flickr

Thinking about Frank Gehry's buildings, and how the interiors are often disappointing, and how Toronto can now brag that it has a token Gehry.
Architecture, like many living things, is an attempt to defy gravity for a while In fact Wright made the analogy with trees. They manage to combine the height with better light gathering and water moving functions, along with structural wind resistance and are beautiful to look at. I think that when a building combines what we see as balance and beauty with gravity defying functions, like the Fifth Avenue Guggenheim spiral by Wright, where the ramp supports the walls and the lighting and circulation are integrated into the gaps as the ramp expands outwards, we have something new, something natural, something that has optimized the act of creation economically like nature does.

However, when we have a steel structure that supports curved metal sheets that combine into a graceful envelope, we have a sculpture, a chimera, but we certainly don't have what I would consider good architecture. None of the formal intentions are integrated with the human functions or with the structural functions. The awkward interiors are a symptom, a flaw in what should be integral.

Beaux-arts buildings and previous baroque buildings use symmetry to create visual and circulation axes within the constraints of construction techniques of the time - stone bearing capacities, structural span possibilities and light and ventilation requirements. For example width was determined by how far light could penetrate from a window to the interior, usually about twenty feet, therefore determining the maximum width of a wing to be approximately forty feet. Within these constraints, the geometry of the building emerged, and we have the Brandenburg gate, Versailles, Chenonceau, and when windows were made higher and larger through the use of flying buttresses there were the great Gothic cathedrals. Other great architectural inventions like domes served multiple functions. These rotated arches let light in from above, allowed huge spans and could be gracefully buttressed by secondary partial domes. The majesty of the byzantine temples of Istanbul remains unsurpassed.

And so why do we glorify sculptural architecture? Because it reflects our culture well. It shows that we can use technology to make things work. Mechanical and electrical systems make these buildings livable. They are large sets, that show wealth and excess. They are celebrity reasons.

As architecture it offends me, seems a bit crass due to the lack of constraint and of restraint. Pretty, sculptural, like the huge ornaments that dot history, like the colossus of Rhodes, the Atomium at Brussels, the large Roman and Roman-inspired triumphant arches. Architecture should be more than sculpture, it must work and live, make shade, shelter while being poetic. It should reflect ingenuity and evolution, and embody discoveries and inventions, discoveries like those inherent in the slight curve of the Parthenon's base and its subtly varying column spacings, the asymmetry of Chartres towers telling the story of its construction and of its builders, the lightness of its interiors, and the balance and poetics of Fallingwater's terraces and its colours and materials that rise with the light.

Tag clouds and indexing

(Image copyright A. Barake 2009)

The tag cloud idea made popular by so many Web 2.0 sites has its origins in the humble index. It is another of Unix' achievements to have foreseen the potential for automation back in 1969. Unix contained tools for indexing, for inverted index generation and of course regular expression searching in aid of indexing. Unix is about text. Tags and tag clouds are about turning relational semantics on their head, and the tag cloud is a nice UI representation of the "index heat map", how frequent a hit occurs. Add the concept of hyperlinks and you have "Everything is Miscellaneous"

Djerassi and Houellebecq

I wrote earlier about my disappointment with Djerassi's "science-in-fiction". I would point him to the much more effective and artistic Houellebecq style, directly descended from Aldous Huxley, but done with much more panache (bien-sur). It is over the top in some of its narrative descriptions of extreme behaviours, deadpan and not suitable for every audience, but if I were to recommend some books for anyone studying human motivations (and that includes business types and techies, not just the humanities majors), it would be "The Elementary Particles", "1984" and "Brave New World". They talk of biology and power and the link to human affairs. Free will is mediated by biology and biology is the layer just below power.

Kundera talks with Houllebecq

I am tempted to write a fictional dialogue between Milan and Michel. Their world views and attitudes to sex are ripe for collision. Michel finds it challenging and Milan could not find it easier. Michel is looking for connection and so is Milan, but in such different ways. One lives in a sensual existential world, the other in a world of isolated points with possible lines. What triggered the idea was the change in the title of the English translation of Les particules elementaires from Atomized to The Elementary Particles in later editions. Kundera had written essays on how not to betray an author when translating, and he advocated simple direct non-interpretive translation to avoid adding extra semantics. And then I thought about how Kundera writes of sex and how Houllebecq does too, and how both see it as light, but in such different ways. They need to talk.

Towards the holy grail of integration

Where the machine does most of the interface and field mapping work. SOA promises to help with this, but it depends on the old chestnut of trying to "agree on a schema" which is a barrier to flexibility of semantic expression and denies potential interaction that keeps humans in the loop. Think of how angry forms make most people feel. I am increasingly beginning to believe that true automated integration is an AI problem and probably its killer app. A job for Google. They may even call it something like Ploogle-and-play.

Software engineering and hazing

Maybe the reason engineering faculties used to have such painful initiation rituals was that they (unconsciously I'm sure) wanted to drum into you that there was a culture here, you had to adhere to the body of knowledge that existed, that was developed, and that you could not "come in arrogant". This is different from computer science, where everyone is de facto arrogant and knows everything. And when you get old and wizened in the IT world, you try to maintain your influence by going into management, and the continual flow of new technologies keeps coming, almost as if to prevent experience with the details from continuing to grow, to maintain the arrogance of the new, a bubble effect really.

Ultimately it is only experience that counts :

 what you say I forget, 

what I say, I remember, 

what I do, I understand.

Palomar's Hale Telescope

Finished reading Ronald Florence's "The Perfect Machine" about the project to build the 200 inch telescope. A couple of things struck me.

1. The most interesting characters are the ones who are presented as being the most problematic, for example, Edwin Hubble and his huge ego, or Fritz Zwicky and his crazy sounding lateral thinking. Both are presented in a somewhat worse light than the "reasonable" folk like George Hale. Cooperation and cooperative people get things done but the competitive bastards are the ones who are valued more if they manage to prove something. I guess it is because the competitive route is more risky, more likely to move the culture in new directions, painful as it may be to the culture.
2. The other striking insight has to do with a line near the end of the book that mentions that charged-coupled device (CCD) sensors are so much more efficient than film for capturing light that a one meter telescope today could do what the 200 inch one did with film. This is certainly an example of disruptive technology, given the herculean efforts made to build the Hale machine, with its precision movements and optics. Of course CCD's can be used with the 200 inch mirror, but one must wonder if such efforts would have been made if CCD's had been available in the 1920's.

Science in fiction

A review of the Bourbaki Gambit I am surprised that a prestigious imprint like Penguin would accept The Bourbaki Gambit as a novel. It is an uncomfortable advertisement for its author at best and at worst an insult and a slight to the artistic process by a scientist too conceited to realize it. Djerassi, who made discoveries which led to the birth control pill is branching out into a style he calls science-in-fiction. He writes of scientists and of their egos, a bit like C.P. Snow, but with much less art. He revels in showing off his observations of fancy places, but really only manages to show his limited world view. Capri, Manhattan and cliches about vacation resorts. I guess someone who has achieved so much in science may be excused for thinking that art is something secondary, and this is exactly what writing this novel and sponsoring the arts indicates.

More on COTS vs custom software

Lausanne Flon Copyright 2002-2008 A. Barake

It has been my experience that integration and associated maintenance of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) is an expensive and difficult process due to a few factors:

• The "normal" upgrade cycle for vendors is often strategic and is driven by internal rather than external compatibility – upgrades also tend to break interfaces regardless of intent, it just does not help that the intent to play well with others is often at odds with large company policies (i.e. marketing strategy), especially when their suite of products covers many functional domains
• Integration requires glue, and glue can either be COTS or home grown. For COTS, see above objection, and add cost. Home grown defeats the argument of using COTS in the first place Q.E.D.

Now, if we look at home-grown software, we have a few things to consider:

• Maintenance is dependent on knowledge, but unless you are writing in APL  (and even then), the pool of developers with expertise usually exists; reading code and fixing it is what they are hired for and have some training in.
• Developers in my experience much prefer to work on code where the source is available than integrate stuff using configuration and proprietary tools where the options are limited and the dependency on documentation and vendor support is limiting
• Code is now pretty much commoditized except in specialized areas (telephony switching, military stuff, embedded stuff) and even then… there are only a handful of approaches that people use to write and maintain code and most good developers can immerse themselves in a code base within days of weeks and make it their own.
• Renewal is key, and owning a system and renewing it by adding features is easier with home grown that has few integration points with COTS than with disparate COTS on different version cycles with glue in between.

The standards efforts are a sort of socialist (Stalinist really) approach to trying to control the ecological process described above, but is thwarted by vendor power struggles and the usual embrace and extend strategies, coupled with purchasing power in the hands of non-detail oriented people (i.e. not tecchies).

UNIX and other open system approaches have and are trying to tackle the problem through factoring out of common functional requirements into modular technical modules and protocols, and have had some success in advancing the state of the art – the Internet and its associated protocols and services are a direct result. The OSI stack is a manifestation of this approach and has become a pattern of understanding outside that world.

One approach is to layer the commercial stuff and isolate it from other commercial stuff through standard gateway mechanisms, off the shelf if you like, and these include queues, UNIX gateways and subsystems that use HTTP, SMTP and LDAP, xDBC as well as XML protocols where practical and where translation mechanisms are easy to obtain (message brokers, AJAX, browsers, SAML…) At another level we should be writing our own application code to use these underlying systems and the glue should be at the application level – i.e. SOA – services are COTS with standardized interfaces, applications are not.

Les mots

A Baja beach, bay side, Copyright 1988-2008 A. Barake

I was asked by my son about the meaning of the word "load". The context was "load the car". As I explained, by giving an example ("load the bags in the car"), I realized that the example provided an instance that could be generalized, but that was inherently ambiguous outside the continuity of experience. One has to have loaded things to understand that bags are just things, and we can extend the concept, and then we can even go further and talk about "a load" as a thing that is "loaded", without ending up in an infinite recursion.

You know where this is going...

Machines need to have exact mappings of symbols to "actions". Actions are just other symbol manipulations. So we have mappings and more mappings and rules and context and all the fodder of Minsky-type AI. Not good enough it seems. Gelernter and others have realized that one must be embedded in experience to have "knowledge". Husserl and Heidegger said it much earlier, but disciplines rarely cross. So we are realizing now that cognition is a sort of misnomer, we need a word to talk about "knowing", or better still "questioning" to get to a model of reality that is useful.

All this can lead to better and more flexible interface design for a start. Imagine a handshake that allows systems to agree on field semantics and field syntax for data exchange without all that WSDL baggage. Give me a couple of ports and go for it. Virus and spyware writers are now writing the primordial soup that will lead to these higher organisms one day.

Intel and MS

The Concorde parked on Manhattan's Intrepid Air, Space and Sea Museum.

I remember attending another launch, back in the early 1980's - it may have been 1983 - when Windows was just becoming real. It was in Seattle, and Bill Gates was talking to a relatively small audience. Many of the cooler attendees were typing on Tandy Model 100's and making annoying key clicks.

Bill said something that was surprising to me at the time, that he predicted that Intel and Microsoft would become the dominant presences on the desktop. You have to remember that back then there were lots of contenders, including the new Mac, the really advanced Amiga and many other smaller players, and Bill's statement seemed preposterous to me, since his DOS was so primitive and Intel's 8088 was nasty to program, slower than the 6502 (except in clock rate) and not at all like the PDP-11 (which was something the Motorola 6800 and later 68000's were aspiring to). Some of us were even aware of Unix and its possibilities on the desktop.

He was right of course, but I think that he made the prediction come true, rather than actually saying something that made sense. His tactics and acumen forced the issue, and the contenders mostly disappeared, except for Apple. Despite being technologically inferior both the CPU and the UI he promoted became dominant. He saw that business decisions were not made by techies, even in the emerging micro world, but by risk-averse non-techies who prefer a brand name to any technological advantage.

I guess that is why he then started to draw huge audiences.

The Guardian and Harry Potter

The Alps at New Year seen from the northwest Swiss side - Copyright 2003-2008 A. Barake

I wrote earlier about a Nick Lezard Guardian posting that strongly criticises JK Rowling's prose. Recently, there has been another Guardian article about the prevalence of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in English public life. There may be a link between the two. JK Rowling did not attend these prestigious schools, yet she writes about them in the Potter books - in fact King's College at Oxford was used as a setting in some of the earlier films. So is Lezard unconsciously chaffing at the gall of it all? She is successful, very successful, and yet she does not come from the rank of the elite, she did not attend Oxbridge.

I like the Guardian, I think they are very balanced and fair, but there is a snobbery factor there, which, I am guessing, comes from this elitist attitude that is probably part of the legacy of such a prestigious education. The few graduates (less than 10) of these schools that I have met have been overly dismissive and difficult when their opinions and statements have been challenged in a social context such as a meeting or workshop. A lot of clever sophistry has been put on display to discredit their interlocutors during such occasions. Debating skill is a good thing, but taken to excess can be quite offputting. So I will probably remain prejudiced until I gain further experience in the matter.

The Network is NOT the Computer?

A hurdy-gurdie at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

I’ve recently attended Microsoft's launch of their 2008 suite of products, including Visual Studio. It was held in a movie theatre where there were two presentation streams, one for IT Professionals and one for Developers. I attended the developer stream. Very little PowerPoint and lots of live demos with code snippets being included in the examples. Visual Studio now supports Javascript as a first class citizen. This drew applause. I guess it was a sorely needed gap in IDE’s. I wonder if Javascript will become (more) fragmented as a result.

The integration of desktop presentation with the network, with attendant DRM-enforcing security as well as extensions to browser functionality is overwhelming and integration of desktop with network apps is almost complete; they are ready to link their OS and .Net environments to Internet content in a seamless way - the network is NOT the computer was the loud subtext. In fact they have made it possible to decouple the presentation layer of an application from the server side so that it works either through a client-server virtual desktop (think Citrix-like), through a regular-looking window, or through a browser.

This is resistance to the Google model, where the client is as thin as possible and standards are used as they should be. The gamble with the MS approach is that users will be sufficiently attracted to the extra features of a tighter integration to the desktop to pay money for it. Makes sense given the business model.

There were also a few intro videos at the start of the various sessions, and the most humorous included a therapist and his patient discussing the relationship between a developer, his machine, the tools and the operating system. Here, the unstated subtext was that colourful computer cases, slick hardware design etc were no match for technical flexibility and ego-boosting developer learning curves (a jibe at Apple I guess). Shakespeare wrote that wisdom comes alone through suffering, which may explain why hazing works to bind a group, and may explain why people who adopt product lines like IBM’s and Microsoft’s end up defending them so strongly. I think it is a case of confusing the side effect with the cause.

Brad Warner

I have been reading Brad Warner's book Sit Down and Shut Up! about Zen. His writing makes me think he is a kindred spirit. The book is engaging, very funny, and down-to-earth and it somehow manages to transcend the words and project the deep essence of the Buddhist meanings he wants to convey.

Brad is a Buddhist monk and a teacher. He also plays bass and writes columns on the Web. He writes about how his Buddhism allows him to react in a balanced way to situations and to people that may be frustrating or annoying. However, I get the feeling that he is still fighting the demons that assail us many of us, the ones having to do with pride and with having the last word. I guess that one aspect of enlightenment is the destruction of that urge, or at least its domestication.

What got me thinking about this was one of his Web columns, responding to a label he acquired for his association with the Suicide Girls site. That he responded at all was indicative. I often feel the same, some energy has to dissipate when one feels wronged. The state I am trying to attain is one where I don't feel wronged in the first place.

The other coincidental event that got me going along this train of thought was a funny excerpt from a diary-joke-agenda that suggested ways to "annoy the Dalai Lama". I don't think any of those methods would work, but they are so funny that they contain their own flaw; and the solution to this little problem: humour.

I think Brad knows this, and that is why his books are so great, the jokes are part of the religion. What other religions have jokes so deeply embedded (I know of only one joke in the Bible - about Peter being a rock to found the church on, and that one is really a pun that only works in Latin and its derivative languages)?