I am presently doing some intense research on services, service patterns, message exchange patterns and many other issues related to services (No surprise there). However, I can't do that without external help and since many people are reading my blog, I can just as well start asking around right here:

I would like to get in touch with companies (preferrably insurances and banks) who afford a corporate history department. The ambitious goal I have is to reconstruct a few banking or insurance or purchasing business processes of ca. 1955-1965. I have come to believe that there is a lot, a lot to be learned there that will be very useful to what we're all doing. The deal is that if you share, I share whatever I have as soon as I have it. My contact address is clemensv@newtelligence.com

The good news is that the V|@gr@ spam is getting less, but what scares me is that I start getting lots and lots of religious spam from Jesusland. 

In two hours I'll be back on the road (well, airport, to be precise). Today I will fly out to Reykjavik in Iceland where Achim and I will do the first of a series of SOA workshops with Microsoft EMEA from Monday to Wednesday, explaining principles of Service Oriented Architectures and the application of those principles in real applications with today's technologies. Other stops on the tour will be in Denmark in early December and, early next year, in Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands (AFAIK, all of these events are invite-only Microsoft customer events). A German-language, newtelligence-branded edition of that workshop will take place December 1-3 in Düsseldorf and we plan a newtelligence event in South Africa in early March 2005.

When I come back from Iceland Wednesday night, I'll stay home for less than 12 hours and will then fly out to Denver for a long weekend and when I come back from there the following Wednesday I'll go straight at our own TornadoCamp event held in Bad Ems (half way between Frankfurt and Düsseldorf). Coming back it'll be another short turnaround of likely less than a day before I will leave for the Microsoft EastMed Developer Conference in Amman. (Very much looking forward to that)

So with that schedule and a few customer engagements in between, I have plenty of days on the road and only two days left at the newtelligence office, before I'll move my office desk to Denver on December 11 for the rest of the year and into the new year so that I can spend Christmas with Jen, get some better traction with Visual Studio 2005 and do some writing. And for when I come back on January 10, the schedule looks just as busy for the following weeks and months.

I've got nothing against advertising on websites. However, there are two things that are completely annoying. The first are popup windows and my popup blocker is taking care of those. As an alternative, the advertising people have invented the Macromedia Flash-popup that pops up on the page and obscures the content for a little while. That's annoying but something I can absolutely deal with. What I cannot deal with, and that's the second annoying thing, is that some advertising twits try to entertain me with music and or other sorts of 30-second audio/video shows. You people might find that cool, but I don't. Sound effects and music are strictly an "opt-in" feature on my computer and at my work desk. I just uninstalled the Flash player. Silence has returned and websites became instantly more useful. Try it.

[Usually it's as easy as this: In Internet Explorer select "Tools/Internet Options" on the menu, then click the "Settings..." button in the "Temporary Internet Files" box on the "General" tab of the dialog that opens up. Click the "View Objects" button in the "Settings" dialog that opens up. There will be another window opening. Find "Shockwave Flash" and delete the object. Close IE. Done.]

Wenn eine Regierung soweit ist, daß sie den nationalen Feiertag aus kurzfristigen, taktischen Erwägungen abschaffen und für die eingebildete Hoffnung auf ein halbes Prozentchen Wachstum im nächsten Jahr verhökern will, dann ist das die bedingungslose Kapitulation vor der eigenen Inkompetenz. Und obwohl ich ganz sicherlich nicht dem rechten, nationalen politischen Rand zuneige, fällt mir nur ein einziges passendes Wort dazu ein: "Vaterlandsverrat".

Harald und der ARD sei Dank. Dann kann ich ja den Fernseher wieder aus dem Keller holen.

I get emails like that very frequently. I have some news.

Short story: Microsoft is still willing and working to publish the application that I presented at TechEd Europe (see Benjamin's report) and they keep telling me that it will come out. Apparently there is a lot of consensus building to be done to get a big sample application out of the door. So there's nothing to be found on msdn, yet.

Little known secret: There are 15 lucky indivduals who have already received (hand-delivered) the Proseware code as a technical preview under a non-disclosure agreement. Because we (newtelligence) designed and wrote the sample application, we have permission to distribute the complete sample to participants of our SOA workshops and seminars.

So if you want to get yours hands on it, all you need to do is to send mail to training@newtelligence.com to sign up for one of the public events [Next published date is Dec 1-3, and the event is held in German, unless we get swamped with international inquiries] or you send email to the same address asking for an on-site workshop delivery. At this time, we (and MS) bind the code sample to workshop attendance so that you really understand why the application was built like it's built and that you fully understand the guidance that the application implicitly and explicitly carries (and doesn't carry).

At a friend's company, a network hub has been dying a horrible and slow (literally) death until this morning when it got replaced. Of course, they are asking how a networking device like that, without moving parts can start to produce random errors, become gradually slower and sporadically just outright stop working for a little while and then be fine again. Given that after my mostly unsuccessful and expensive attempts to do anything with hardware, a buddy of mine once said "if there is ever a robot invasion from outer space, we'll send Clemens and he'll kill them singlehandedly", that's an excellent question for which I have no good answer, but only a theory: bit erosion!

I suspect that they (our friends) have unhealthily balanced data that has substantially more "1"s than "0"s. Now, when you look at "1" vs. "0", you'll immediately know what I mean. "1" is a lot more edgy and when you send "1"s through a data bus or through a cable, it's pretty obvious that every "1" will scratch along the sides here and there. If you have balanced data, the "0" (round and smooth) will usually polish it all out and while the data bus shows a little bit of wear and tear over time, it usually works well for many, many Exabytes. Now, if you have many more "1"s go down the data bus than "0"s, the bus gets all scratchy from the inside, actual potholes develop and subsequently "1"s start to get stuck. When they get stuck, "0"s bump into them, other "1"s slip past (probably even through a "0"!) and it's all getting really messy. And when you look at it all on a few levels higher up, you start losing packets and stuff gets slow and in the end everybody is unhappy and blames it on the software. The only cure for the problem that I can think of is to do data balancing that ensures a proper proportional flow of "1"s and "0"s. I think that's a totally plausible explanation and cries out loud for software that fixes this problem.