Sunday Night With Jill Scott

Sunday night at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston, March 13 2005.

Jill Scott and her crack 13-piece band brought the Big Beautiful tour to Boston last Sunday night. Ostensibly this was in support of the Beautifully Human album. As it turned out though there was a whole lot of the first album, Who is Jill Scott?, on display.

As I've noted previously, I've seen her twice before, first when she was an unknown in a small club and then 9 months later at a prestigious venue where she was pleasantly surpised by the double platinum plaques and critical acclaim that had started coming her way. She took an extended break from music "to attend to her mariage" but came back in a big way in the past year. She is fresh off winning a Grammy in that category designed for left-of-center artists who won't sell the tens of millions: Cross My Mind won Best Urban/Alternative Performance.

There is no opening act; she starts with a track appropriately called Warm Up in which a dancer brings some urban ballet flavour to the proceedings. The dance was a little off especially given that the Boston Ballet is right around the corner and that we in the audience were expecting earthy soul. Sadly also, us New Englanders were not be blessed with Common appearing on the same bill, something New Yorkers had enjoyed just days earlier. Still how often does every thinking person's favourite soul sister come to your town?

They start out in church mode with Golden the first single and a welcome radio-friendly return. After the first chorus, they flip it house style (ala East Coast mix). It becomes hyperactive dance music and she wails away in the Gloria Gaynor mould to the accelerating beat. It's a canny way to make sure that the band has woken up and is ready to keep the Sunday night audience moving.

The Jill Scott aesthetic is interesting: if you've ever seen the movie Love Jones, you'll know all about it. There's an urban appeal and refreshing down-to-earth quality to her. She walks down the same gritty Philadephia streets. Her tastes are suitably proletarian. It's soul food from cheese steaks to collard greens. Her man is one step above FUBU but is not averse to the bourgeois stylings of Sean John.

When she performs live, she aims straight for the heart. The idea is that of the unassuming girl next door: Jilly From Philly. There's so much love and good will in the building reciprocating to her. She's so warm-hearted and beams at being here performing for us. She looks good and there's that sense of vulnerability that can't be faked. The Girlfriend has a keen condescension detector and even forgives Jill the "interesting" high heeled shoes she's wearing. A mistake Jill laughing acknowledged when she came out for the encore wearing slippers.

The subtitle of both her albums is Words and Sounds and as she informs those seing her for the first time, maybe two-thirds of the crowd, it's not just about the music: it's also about the talks. An integral component of a Jill Scott show is her spoken interludes. At times it's almost like a 1-woman musical theater show as she mimes performs these interludes, inhabiting the various characters - a cast that includes annoyed girlfriends, cheating men, and the breakfast disputes of the hen-pecked and their demanding significant others.

Exclusively is a spoken word song in this vein, about the early morning encounter at the grocery store with a nameless woman who is able to detect her post-coital posturings:

She sniffed [...] She sniffed... She sniffed, and sniffed and sniffed then finally, "Raheem, right?"

Gettin' In the Way is like a shot of testosterone and pure anger. Jill is prepared to take off her shoes to fight for her man. Like Pam Grier in Foxy Brown, she may even have razor blades hidden in her afro.

A Long Walk demonstrates what an inventive wordsmith she can be and how easily she can deconstruct romantic liasons. Do You Remember is about nostalgia and as befits the theme is a sing-along around a camp fire.

It's Love is a jam done go-go style. There are snatches of the bassline break from Minnie Riperton's Baby This Love, popularized and repurposed in A Tribe Called Quest's Check The Rhime. This is all just to let people know that she's down, that there's a sophisticated and funky musical sensibility at work here. The band is loose, the horns blow with abandon. The crowd is out of their seats.

The one-two punch of The Way and Love Rain framed the turbulence that was at the heart of her debut. We all know the words and we made a beautiful sound with her if I may say so. The band has fun with what have become latter-day standards. The horn section is a standout and makes everthing worthwhile. It features Jeff Bradshaw on trombone. He was more subdued than in the past, apparently he proposed to his girlfriend on stage at the previous show, one wonders if there was a touch of apprehension in the air. The trumpet and saxophonist are excellent. The latter, Steve Something-or-Other picks up a flute that is the most welcome complement to the instrumentation and heightens the musical excitement in my mind.

She's still obsessed with food, from barbecue sauce, "Put some on it even if you're vegan", to "Scrambled Eggs and Grits" which is the punchline in the former song. The latter features that all-time vivid metaphor: "Loose like bowels after collard greens."

One is the magic # proves that she can sing opera in the Latin mode. The Mexican trumpet welcomes us to a fiesta. It's two months before Cinqo de Mayo but we are transported to Latin America or is it spain. Plus there's the defiance of the chorus "There's just me / One is the magic number". It's clever and fun.

Slowly Surely is again all about uplift, about recovering from that old desperate love, the maze of love. Every one who's had their heart broken can relate.

Those were songs from the first album. Some of the best of the new songs were missing in action; teasing and feinting us with 30 seconds of Bedda At Home and 2 phrases from I'm Not Afraid are not enough. And not having Family Reunion isn't compensated by her recounting of a funny story about her cousin, a barbeque and a woman in furs choking on her food and a surprise reinvention of the Heimlich maneuver. Those who burnished the grassroots appeal for you want to go on the trip with you. Sure she talked about the making those songs, but damnit, I wanna hear them too.

Talk to Me (Break it Down / Spell it Out) is lovely soul, it starts out reminiscent of any track from Stevie Wonder's Fulfillingness' First Finale and then it goes firmly into jazz mode with cabaret swing. She's trying to show versatility, she swoons and scats like Ella Fitzgerald. The horns add accents to what becomes a big band tune.

A few comments on soul singers doing jazz: Jill Scott has an awesome vocal instrument and can do almost anything she wants with it. However:

1. When doing the jazz thing make sure your musicians can play in that idiom. The horn section was fine but the bass and drums stay in a funk pocket and don't swing. Her take on the jazz soul thing was better in last year's collaboration with Common on I am Music for his Electric Circus album. That was a dream team affair full of musical virtuosity; Nicholas Payton on trumpet, Questlove on the drums and Common's syncopation and verbal dexterity in a hip-hop cadence melding well with her superior vocal stylings.
2. Of this generation of soul singers, Bilal and Amel Larrieux have the purest jazz sensibility. Erykah Badu follows closely as a stylist who does a mean Sarah Vaughan or Nina Simone impression (see Green Eyes) and can embue her voice an emotion that is close to her core. The straight up jazz stylists, from Lizz Wright on, are more authentic. Rachelle Ferrelle would frankly embarrass Jill in a jook joint cutting contest.

The Fact Is (I Need You) is the anthem to female affirmation with the background vocalists doing a slow and classically-influenced burn. I suspect that she will point to the lyrics as the Jill Scott manifesto

I can be a congresswoman or a garbage woman or police officer or a capenter / I could be a doctor and a lawyer and a mother and a "good God what chu done to me?" kind of lover / I could be / I could be a computer analyst / The queen with the nappy hair raising the fist or / I could be much more and myriad of this

Cross my Mind is an epic song that deserved the Grammy. Its wistful mood is that of reminiscing about old flames and relationships that didn't work out. Were they good for us?

Only one song was off, Can't Explain. The musicianship was actually very good, the colourings by the horn section (especially the flute) were spot on. I suspect the fault in that particular song was the following: as a lyricist she's very wordy. It normally works well but sometimes brevity is the font of musical wisdom. Anyway it's far better on the album.

Whatever is the emotional heart of the concert. Beautifully Human was essentially a celebration of married life, of monogamy and of a deep exuberant love. Whatever is consequently a pure celebration. Live, it is the best expression of where Jill Scott's journey has taken her. She's loving every bit of married life. I'll admit that my heartstrings caught a bit as I rose to my feet for this and did my shower singing with the entire audience. To top it off, the coda reinvented the tune as a salsa escapade and her percussionist took us all to Havana.

For the triumphant encore she brought out Not Like Crazy, a new song that is simply virtuosic and full of flourishes including a great saxophone solo to punctuate things. She finishes with He Loves Me, and mimes the ingenue flashes of the first flashes of love. This was written when she found her man and we all sing along recognizing as we all do that emotion she well captured. We're all hopeful we've found our soul-mates.

My only criticism of the concert is that she keept to a similar framework as the last album and tour. Having been there in the small clubs at the start when she wasn't known and evangelizing and spreading the word-of-mouth, there wasn't enough of the new album for my liking. A more adventurous artist would have changed the show. I can't imagine someone like Erykah Badu being that conservative, indeed Badu had to be forced to sing her old tunes. The patter of the old show serves as intimate and seductive introductions for mainstream newcomers to her vibe but I want to get a sense of where Jill Scott is at today on her trip. And we only got a partial sense of that in Whatever and Not Like Crazy.

There are few appeals as direct and disarming as Jill Scott, someone who loves performing, an authentic wordsmith and perhaps soul music's warmest and most endearing and expressive voice. She aims for different vocal colourings, the keen sensibility of the horn section and now the flute augment things nicely. The production values though don't take her out of her comfort zone of traditional soul with a little gospel and spoken word thrown in for good measure. Labelmates and poetry auteurs Floetry are in much the same mould. I wish the Hidden Beach label would press for more experimentation but they seem to have a formula that works and gets broad appeal.

Back when I was awarding the Toli Music Awards last year, I gave Amel Larrieux the nod over Jill Scott, noting then that my inclinations were for a more angular musicianship even though singers like Scott were sure to sell more records. That's still mostly the case but it's like the difference between Bill Cosby, America's sweater-wearing dad whose universal humour is that of the irascible curmudgeon, and Richard Pryor who fearlessly, and in his very personal way, reminds us of the pimps, hookers and drug dysfunction that are an integral part of the American dream.

Last Sunday night, the dynamic artistry of Jill Scott was a very appealing contender and almost made me want to join the mainstream. She has settled on something that will continue to have great success and has grown in a laudable way. In a very canny way also, she seems to have groomed a very loyal female cohort. Of course, in matters of consumerism, where the women go, the men will follow.

As the show ends, the genuine warmth and humour show again and she reminds us why there's so much to love in Jilly from Philly. Instead of filing off triumphant and exhausted, she disarms us and stays on stage for a few minutes signing autographs and simply chatting and cracking jokes. She's just a girl from the neighbourhood after all, you may pass her as you walk the streets as you make your way to the grocery store.

And for the final note, picking up a flier handed to her from the crowd, she announces the after-party.

File under: music, soul, neosoul, jazz, hip-hop, funk, culture, concert, review, Jill Scott, Philadelphia, Philly, food, toli

A REST Intervention

Responding to James Snell's article, Resource-oriented vs. activity-oriented Web services, a dissent in 4 parts and a contribution to the ongoing (never-ending?) debate on REST (Representational State Transfer), web services and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

1. A Snap Judgment
2. Changing The Frame
3. Internalizing the REST style - A case study: WebSphere Portal
4. An Argument by Analogy

1. A Snap Judgment

Sometimes you read or hear something that immediately strikes you as wrong-headed and sets you off. In the real world, if say you were in the same conference room, you might cross your arms, prepare to raise your voice a little as you ready a sharp retort. If you were on a mailing list, this is the kind of thing that will start you writing a lovely flame, complete with point-by-point rebuttals. I've learned dear lessons about the social cost and inadvisability of rushed (and rash) reactions in the online world, so I confined my dissent to bookmarking the article and tagging it with the following inchoate comment:

Completely missing the point about REST and what it means to "be on the web."

A knee-jerk response or snide and unfair commentary perhaps, but at least his piece didn't leave me indifferent like much of what I read on the web.

I've cooled somewhat in the intervening weeks, also I've re-read what Snell wrote and realized that I'd missed much of his point. It's a well-meaning and well-reasoned exposition; it's hard to argue with the form if not the substance. There are lots of caveats and "don't get me wrong"-s, cues that suggest a more nuanced picture than I obviously gave it credit. He's one of the good guys, a colleague with whose group I've often worked with, and this is very far from the typical (and occasionally disingenous) posturing of the REST/SOAP debate.

I'll start my considered dissent then by modifying my assessment: Snell does understand REST, he gets the point but is just cautious about its application and, like all of us, is struggling with the issues it raises. To him, it's just another approach in his toolchest, there's a sense of "different stokes for different folks" in his manner. Engineers are all about evaluating tradeoffs and pragmatism like his is often just sound engineering.

I think my initial reaction was coloured by having read too many journalists who cover the world of technology adoption and often cast things in the winner-takes-all mold. At ground level in the technical trenches where Snell and I live, the calculus of profits is less important; it is rather a marketplace of competing ideas and we're picky and conservative buyers on the whole.

Still in my dissent, I need to explain the second part of my statement which relates to the importance of "being on the web". There has to be a response in writing, if not in code. Ideas don't exist in a vacuum and I shouldn't take to some ivory tower, with Fielding's bible on hand, Prescod and Baker as prophets in the wilderness, and Bray as curmudgeon and loyal oppositionist-in-chief all the while pointing to Apache, Amazon, Yahoo, flickr, del.icio.us and others as favoured offspring and self-evident existence proofs. That's not a sufficient response.

2. Changing the Frame

Fair enough then, how best to articulate this lingering sense I have that Snell short-changes or side-steps the value proposition of the REST architectural style?

The following tidbit from another context seems strangely relevant here:

Oliver Hass, a 28 year-old chemist and graduate student from Oldenberg, Germany, wrote me recently about what the President's trip looked like to him. In introducing himself, Hass commented on "how necessary it can be for a chemist to forget about molecules and think about real problems."

In terms of technical advocacy, others far more experienced than I and have written eloquently and at length wonderful treatises about the virtues of REST and why wire protocols matter. Bray has a very good writeup on recent thoughts. There have been lots of attempts at articulating best practices even prominently featured in wikis. In recent months, Joe Gregorio has been embarking on the show me the code path, doing some of the most effective advocacy by plain example.

My gut feel is that the disposition of the debate will be ultimately be determined by running code and one engineer at a time, hence I won't add to the heated rhetoric. So then I'll make the advocacy argument by changing the frame, and casting the REST value proposition almost in economic terms, in terms of systemic leverage, pragmatism and ubiquity.

Positing, like Snell does, that is about a resource-oriented view rather than an activity-oriented view belies a significant question. Surely benefits would accrue if "activity-oriented" items were exposed on the web? Indeed, these days if you don't expose your offering or activity on the web, you hardly matter. If you're ultimately going to derive much of your value from web exposure, why accentuate the impedance mismatches between your technology stack and the prevailing architecture? For indeed there is an architecture to the web. This is evident when one considers the differences between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1. The REST style simply elucidates the philosophy of the underlying architecture.

For some reason, REST is much misunderstood; the handwaving description "the best of the lessons learned in developing the web" needs much elaboration, as does the elevator pitch version:

REST is defined by four interface constraints:

• identification of resources
• manipulation of resources through representations
• self-descriptive messages
• hypermedia as the engine of application state

Adopting the REST style is not a technology prescription or panacea; after all, an architectural style is not a programming toolkit. But there's a complexity and layering argument that naturally falls out of the REST viewpoint which should guide the applications that one builds.

The web is about identifying important resources and exchanging representational state. There are certain constraints that are made to enable global scope and evolution. Being on the web, is being an active participant in this scheme of things. Identifiers lead almost to having the location field as the command line. Resource modeling as your starting point sets you in direct consonance with this notion and exposes you to ease of composition. An information architecture that starts with hypermedia lends itself to the construction of simple interaction designs for both humans and machines, and there are huge amounts of tools readily available for this.

The question is then one of leverage; leverage in economic terms is all about making externalities work for you. The endpoint of this approach to system design is what I call a virtuous cycle of managed serendipity.

3. Internalizing the REST style - A case study: WebSphere Portal

At a certain point there were (at least) 8 different groups at IBM developing portal software. Incidentally, this is par-for-the-course in large companies; executives are often willing to allow this kind of competition as a kind of macabre survival of the fittest game - for a while at least. Two groups managed to ship products to customers, first Lotus K-station and then what was eventually the winner, WebSphere Portal. K-station was a product which, almost to a fault, embraced and leveraged the full range of web technologies. It demoed well, made pervasive use of CSS, DOM scripting, XML etc: web to the core in other words. Although it was a J2EE application, its fatal failing was that it shipped initially on top of Lotus Domino's servlet engine and database rather than on top of WebSphere Application Server and DB2. What became WebSphere Portal started by building on the right platform, its front end had what we euphemistically termed teething problems but it had a reasonable backend and the virtue of an architecture that looked like it could eventually evolve into the "one true portal".

As we consolidated all the efforts under the rubric of WebSphere Portal, there was of course a kind of triaging of the expertise and feature sets from the various groups. The Lotus folks emphasized collaboration and mostly owned that side of things but we also had a laundry list of technologies that we wanted to endow the platform with (from basic ideas about the way one used stylesheets for skinning, all the way up to a repartitioning of the architecture to allow more intelligence in browser clients and leverage of client side technologies that are now increasingly common). Call it youthful exuberance or perhaps in my case personal temperament, I argued each and every feature tenaciously and energetically. When it comes to technical argument, I'm not afraid to offend senior architects, product managers, or even distinguished engineers far beyond my station. In hindsight, we perhaps should have been more judicious in picking our battles because even though we managed to win many of the arguments, we lost one that we really shouldn't have. Mostly through sharp-elbowed bureaucratic maneuvering, the feature was accepted as a line-item but was marked as a nice-to-have, and then was deferred because "we didn't have the time in the schedule".

What feature was it, you might ask? There was no way to bookmark anything in WebSphere Portal.

The portal at that point bore the vestiges of an idiosyncratic framework (Jetspeed) that in my opinion actively fought against being bookmarked. No one at Lotus could fathom that a web application could ship without bookmarking. We couldn't even do the simplest use-case from K-station: when creating a place, you couldn't send an email to new members inviting them to it. An email could only direct them to the home page, once they logged in, they'd then have to navigate to the item in question and as we'd made it flexible to skin navigation, there was no easy way to describe how one would navigate to that item. The immediacy of collaboration, of "people, places and things" was irrevocably lost. I argued almost to disgust: "This is the web! Resource identification is a key tenet, almost the most important principle. It's a fundamental flaw" etc. to no avail.

It took 3 releases for this feature to be implemented and enabled in the default installation of the portal. Throughout, we continued to lobby, until the chorus grew too loud and it wasn't just "those Lotus folks" making the argument. Being able to bookmark places, pages and portlets is fundamental for many reasons beyond simple usabilty. At a first order, you were now able to paste a url in an instant message to co-workers so they could join you and see what you were looking at, at that moment. But also, almost overnight with this feature, many layers of complexity were shed in the portal framework.

Programmability in the web sense was immediately enabled, the portal became a composable platform and we were able to layer the Lotus Workplace offering on top of it. URIs give visibility to intermediaries and so things like caching (where we had cool technologies like Dynacache) were far more easily enabled. Similarly for logging and profiling the portal, we could use the same tools for processing logs as exist for regular web servers like Apache. We had new opportunities for pipelining and filter chains (to do transcoding if needed). We had more options for load balancing, we could decide to deal with remote portlets through iframe invocation rather than through immature and complex protocols like WSRP. And so on...

My biggest regret is that we hadn't been bloody-minded enough to do a stealthy check-in of the hacked prototype code for enabling a modicum of url addressability that we had developed. Instead, by being consensus-minded corporate citizens, we had allowed our platform (and users) to suffer for 3 years because it hadn't internalized this most basic aspect of being a web application framework. WebSphere Portal only acknowledged the web in its name once it embraced this part of the REST ethos and it hasn't looked back since. Indeed after internalizing resource identification, the product has taken to heart most of the other tenets of the web style. It still has some ways to go but, from that point on, it was no longer odds with the web.

As an aside: where there is friction and impedance mismatches, there inevitably will develop an ecosystem of consultants with palliating bromides and band-aids on hand. All companies claim to be "focused on the customer", my own company has the virtue (or some would say the failing) of encompassing the widest range of products and services and is apt to make money whether one buys hardware, software, or services from it. If the choice is between profitable software that internalizes the lessons of a platform and rank consultant-ware, I opt firmly for the former. Maybe I'll change my mind if I become one at some stage, but consultants, though often necessary, are mostly irksome from my standpoint.

4. An Argument by Analogy

The supposed or acknowledged (PPT) deficiencies of the REST architectural style (reliability, asynchronous event notification etc.) are to my mind good problems to have. It strikes me though that these criticisms of REST system design, while fair, are mostly concerned with boundary cases; in other words, the balance of optimization that the web style has gone for makes these mere irritants not failings. The response should be much like that typically given to those who discounted the 'best effort' internetworking or to the bellheads who harp on quality of service and see the internet as a toy. I don't see the quality of calls preventing the ubiquity of cell phones. In that case, the virtues of mobility long trumped reliability. Network standards like ethernet and TCP/IP that are the core of the Internet have succeeded and scaled because they used abstractions that embraced simplicity, transparency and existing systems. The web was able to co-opt everything in sight (from ftp to gopher to whatever newfangled scheme we'll come up with next) with only minimal constraints for the sake of scaling and composition (like the concessions to, and explicit recognition of, the interplay with intemediaries - caches and so forth). Google (pdf), Yahoo, eBay and Amazon have interesting takes on addressing these deficiencies and already operate on a global scale.

Martin Geddes, discussing a different problem, ever-quotably and far more concisely than I'll ever be, works himself to the same fundamental conclusion:

Solutions based on URLs tend to be less "efficient" than custom-designed solutions, but more resilient in the face of change. (Sound familiar?) I casually note the rapid rise of URL-friendly blogs and wikis, and the relative obscurity of vertically integrated collaboration tools like Groove.

I saw a good example of "URLization" from Joi Ito the other day. Product managers at various companies are being encouraged to use Technorati to track commentary on their products. If your product doesn’t have a clear, unique URI, then you’re in trouble...

This all brings me to my big question: on the Internet, if something doesn’t have a URL, does it really exist? Or has it just disappeared into the analog memory hole, only existing as a memory in the brains of the humans it passed through?

That's the heart of the matter, debates about "programming models" aside, this is an argument about systems design and technology adoption. If your nascent technology stack doesn't leverage, or as I think is the case in many of the WS-* protocols, actively fights against integration with the web, you're guiding yourself towards obsolesence. The REST orientation is about acknowledging the "good enough" factor implicit in the web architecture. Choosing to embrace the ethos of that layered style is arguing for leverage and simplicity. The value of ubiquity and managed serendipity that are often the outcomes of this approach should speak for itself.

Returning to what provoked this outburst, I write to James Snell: thanks for getting me thinking enough to put these thoughts together, my arms are uncrossed and there's even a smile on my face.

See also: my other REST writings. File under: REST, web, design, software, programming, architecture, Lotus, IBM, WebSphere, SOAP, technology, uri, identification, addressability, programmability, url, networks, standards, Portal, toli

Inamorata

(a portrait of Miles Davis)

Inamorata.
Mission: Music, Masculinity.
Master Of The Art, Music.
Who Is This Music
That Which Description May Never Justify?
Can The Ocean Be Described?
Fathomless Music,
Body Of All That Is.
Live Everlastingly.
Man Initiate Inamorata:
Your Music Art Tomorrow's Unknown Known Life.
I Love Tomorrow.

by Robert Conrad
From Miles Davis - Live-Evil (1970)

See also: Miles Ahead

File under: poetry, literature, music, jazz, portrait, Miles Davis, toli

The Long Tail of Software

It's always gratifying when people independently grapple with the same ideas as you and come up with different perspectives. Even better is when this becomes a conversation such as the blogosphere can serve up and aggregators can monitor...

I've recently been ruminating about People, Processes and Things and so, I was immediately drawn to Joe Kraus, erstwhile of Excite and Jotspot founder, who delivers a wonderful essay and insightful presentation (PPT) about The Long Tail of Software. Read it for the concentrated insight and great care with which he makes his argument - borne of the practice he's gained pitching his company for the past few months.

Handwaving a bit here, he essentially takes on Barry Briggs' notion of The Decade of Process - anointing the primacy of processes in business, and adds the key insight of the necessity of lots of customization (since no two businesses do things the same way) and also that processes continually evolve. Then he melds it with one of the most successful memes in technology of the past year, The Long Tail concept, lovingly detailed in Wired, pondered in a blog and due, for a book, and triumphant tour ala Malcolm Gladwell or Jared Diamond real soon now.

Having seen great demos of Jotspot and the way it handles schema evolution, about the only thing missing in the product is an explicit addition of tagging and metadata ala del.icio.us for it to be buzzword nirvana. It's almost there. I'll try not to be too flippant nor indeed, something of an echo chamber, since I obviously think there's the kernel of a very powerful notion here. Annotating and customizing business processes seems to be an interesting space in today's software world.

Suffice to say that this bears attention especially since the venture capitalists haven't drenched this sector as yet. I'd hazard though, that a pitch like Kraus's could well be the spark that makes things combust, especially when there are so many memes to mine. The big integrators and consulting firms have long been in this space as have any of the platform vendors and they will be tenacious competitors. I'd hazard that Jotspot or SocialText are already keenly watched by those who do strategy and marketing, if only so that sales teams have a response ready for competitive bids.

For larger businesses, it has always been ease of integration with existing infrastructure that matters when it comes to purchasing decisions. The insight of the Long Tail though is that there are huge opportunities in targeting small and medium businesses, the kind that the big guys only pay lip service to. It's more than enough of a market even if you don't get the WalMarts. Incidentally, Paul Graham touches on this almost in passing recently.

All this of course is predicated on accepting the primacy of the "process" view of things, I've argued that the "people" view (communication and group-forming) might be another lucrative area to focus on, and a viewpoint potentially more exciting or motivating for developers. Tradeoffs like these are the stuff of engineers or historians, entrepreneurs or CEOs, however, have to bet on something.

Lastly, wearing my prediction cap, leverage will be everything in this oncoming scramble. Web-native software (i.e. software that is easily addressible and customized) will be the fastest mover in the space. The usabilty issues in evolving schemas and handling annotations are going to be the key differentiator. There should be lots of give-and-take in the software that ensues because real world processes are forgiving. There's always someone who knows how the process is meant to work no matter what the rulebook says. Our research folks and product development teams are going to be burning the midnight oil and that's a good thing. Kudos to Krause and others for the exhilarating glimpse of what is to come. Like Miles Davis said, "I love tomorrow".

File under: software, economics, long-tail, jotspot, process, people, technology, wiki, customization, toli

Groove Musings

I suppose I should comment on Microsoft's acquisition of Groove Networks and Ray Ozzie's ascension to the post of Chief Technical Officer. Certainly there was a little buzz in the corridors of Lotus yesterday (virtual corridors of email, discussion forums and Sametime chats for me since I was working from home). I'm sure there'll be "official" responses in due course but some ground-level musings are in order.

First there was a surprise factor: Microsoft hasn't made significant acquistions of late (or perhaps they have but nothing significant has manifested itself recently). Their previous investment in Groove notwithstanding, an acquisition goes far beyond hedging once's bets.

Second was the overwhelming human interest angle and that sense of wonderment that occurs when dramatic things happen to people you know or are vaguely related to. "Bought? Bought!" For me it was remembering the period a few years ago when friends and acquaintances were interviewing at Groove - back when it was a startup in stealth mode, and even the vague soundings-out about any potential interest on my part. Perhaps they would now be Microsoft employees.

Sidenote: hearing reports that the interviewers at Groove wouldn't even discuss the product that they were developing put paid to any incipient wisps of enthusiasm from me. Engineers, especially curious technologists like me, like to discuss platforms, designs and architecture. I'd be beyond handicapped without that kind of stimulation in an interview. Also, if I remember correctly, at the time I was on the most interesting project I'd worked on in my professional life. IBM was quite good at weathering those dot-com seductions with lots of challenging technology.

Third is a strategic angle. There's a sense of cousinry in the offerings that Groove, Microsoft and the Lotus/IBM portfolio straddle. Vague concepts like productivity, collaboration, 'groupware', shared spaces, presence, messaging, replication and offline-use abound, whether in marketing theory or in product practice. These are ideas that Lotus folks live, breathe and hopefully develop in software. Consequently there's a little curiousity as to how things will pan out in the future. The C.T.O. position seems somehow significant in this respect.

Lastly, and most important to me, is the technology angle. In the speculative marketplace of ideas that the technology world is, a track record is about the greatest currency there is. Ozzie can mint his own currency on Lotus Notes alone. Also he, along perhaps with Joel Spolksy and Tim Bray's Technology Predictor Success Matrix, has written definitive treatments about software platforms and ecosystems and how to husband them. I tend to evaluate all the software platforms and frameworks I encounter or create with these words in mind. It would serve everyone well to read (or re-read) Ozzie every now and then. How does your technology or framework-du-jour stack up in this light? And if it doesn't, what are your plans for getting it there, and how long will it take? I suspect that such questions will be asked a lot in Redmond in coming months. In grasping at answers, I have only one clear hint: this web thing begs to be internalized and, more to the point, duly leveraged.

File under: software, Groove, Lotus, IBM, Microsoft, folklore, collaboration, socialsoftware, technology, Ray Ozzie, toli

Inside Lotus

I've been asked to moonlight at the Inside Lotus blog. Ostensibly, my presence in that corporate blog is to give a human face to the corporation and also because it's more fun to mix development perspectives among the marketing that tends to go on in "corporate" items. I still have to get my bio posted on the site and to find an appropriate photo but I thought I'd get started. The format is meant to be short and snappy but as you might know, I tend to pontificate, so I'll likely write expanded entries here at the Toli. Anyway here's the first post.

Explaining Software Designs

The ever-incisive writer, Malcolm Gladwell, has been on a whirlwind promotional tour in support of his new novel, Blink which is about snap judgments and unconscious decisions. In a recent interview, he spread his focus to sports

JM: Talk a little about tennis coach Vic Braden, the subject of one of your anecdotes. He says, "We haven't found a single (tennis) player who is consistent in knowing and explaining exactly what he does."

MG: Braden's experience is really interesting. He would ask, say, a world-class tennis player to describe precisely how they would hit a topspin forehand, and they would invariably say that they rolled their wrist at the moment of impact with the ball. And then he'd do a digital analysis of videotape of them actually hitting a topspin forehand and find out that at the moment of impact with the ball their wrist was rock solid. They didn't roll it at all. The expertise of a world-class tennis player, in other words, is instinctive, which means that the knowledge behind their actions is buried in the corners of their brain. They hit a ball unconsciously.

JM: Is that why, quite often, great players don't make such great coaches?

MG: Yes, that's precisely why top athletes so often make bad coaches or general managers. They often don't really know why they were as good as they were. They can't describe it, which means that they can't teach it and they quickly become frustrated at their inability to lift others up to their own level. Mediocre players -- or non-athletes -- tend to make better coaches because their knowledge isn't unconscious. It's the same thing with writing. I know very little about science. But I think I write about science more clearly than many scientists, because I have to go over every step, carefully and deliberately.

Gladwell's words were echoing in my ears when viewing a talk given by Bram Cohen at Stanford. Cohen is the programming wizard behind BitTorrent which is responsible for something like 35% of the traffic on the internet these days and which has gained a life of its own. Listening to him explain the intricacies of his software, I was struck by the number of times he freely admitted that he wasn't sure why things worked the way they did or how he came about to make certain design decisions. He was only able in retrospect to give a hint as to the why and how and oftentimes it was a case of hand-waving or of "magic numbers".

A big part of my job is trying to clearly articulate sofware design and architecture to fellow developers, UI designers, the documentation writers or even to the users of the software. Engineering is all about tradeoffs and pragmatism in the face of complexity. When you have spent time struggling with some coding or design problem and come to some sort of solution, it's often the case that you find it a little difficult to describe the core of your design. I envy those who are able to consistently present great and clear technical rationales for their work and to get at the heart of the matter. Maybe there is a kernel of truth to Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

File under: software, sports, decisions, language, technology, comprehension, Bittorrent, Inside Lotus, toli

Zingers

Wherein I feature a few nuggets I came across in my reading - ala Flaubert's Dictionnaire des Idées Reçus (Dictionary of Received Ideas). This time an Anglo-Saxon edition:

As a counterpoint to Malcolm Bradbury's witty turn that I previously pointed out:

I like the English, They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

I found this earlier and more caustic outburst from Evelyn Waugh at the height of his powers in Brideshead Revisited:

You must remember that I am not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals.

Even bleaker from the same source:

"My dear, of course I'm right. I was right years ago when I warned you... I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail... Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love, it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."

---

From Martin Amis who, in the past couple of years, has returned to the kind of groove that made his reputation as one of the most interesting writers alive.

Xan would not publicly agree, but women naturally like to prolong routine departures. It is the obverse of their fondness for keeping people waiting. Men shouldn't mind this. Being kept waiting is a moderate reparation for their five million years in power.

Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Amis continues to dabble in non-fiction and occasionally a similar incisiveness can be seen. From a column on football (the association kind):

The days when an England player's first touch could often be mistaken for an attempted clearance or a wild shot on goal - those days are over. The deficit is not in individual skill, it is in collective skill; it is in the apparently cultural indifference to possession.

Martin Amis - We have to face it: English football is just no good

See other toli zingers File under: literature, satire, irony, humour, Evelyn Waugh, Martin Amis, zingers, toli

Best Left Unread

I am cursed with the need to always finish any novel that I start. It's a strange twist on the completist syndrome. Thus it was that midway through reading Iris Murdoch's novel, The Bell, I found myself writing the following:

It's not as if there was no "there" there - for indeed there was. It's rather that what was there was neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowl, as it were.

Now that was a kind of impressionistic response to what had been increasingly irking me as I turned the pages. Also the style of those sentences was very much in line with the kind of inbred, literary writing that I was reading.

So how did it come to that? I've read some Iris Murdoch before and liked it all, she normally writes perceptive comedies of manners and the like, irony is her thing. Also The Bell came highly recommended to me - by whom I can't remember.

Serious literature was the advertisement but limpid cleverness was all I got.

I should have seen the warning signs when it turned out that the introduction was by A.S. Byatt. Now there's another author who's hit-and-miss. I loved Angels and Insects but what about Possession? That was chock-full with literary in-jokes and mysteries that amounted to a cup of tea. Unbelievably it won the Booker Prize and a Hollywood flick on top of that.

So what then are the ingredients of The Bell?

A lay community is attached to an Abbey. Proximity to the order of enclosed nuns is meant to heighten the titillation quotient. There are errant wives possibly returning to pre-occupied husbands, love triangles, twins, adolescent confusion about the first steps of love, a swirl of homosexuality is in the mix. There are failed priests and schoolboy misunderstandings. Everyone is off balance. People can't decide where they stand or if they stand. I guess it's meant to be unnerving and that you're not supposed to like the characters.

All this sounds vaguely promising but there is neither comedy nor manners, nor much of anything.

Normally this would be a recipe for something akin to a farce. In a different medium and era, this could be like Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. But no. The denouement when it comes is worth half a smile but not even a chuckle. The inevitable "tragedy" is not tragic. The lessons learned are lost. So what was the point? Or was all this a meta-point about the human condition?

Later on I checked and read that Murdoch was an authority on Sartre and existentialism. That explains something about on why she treats her topics of sex and religion so programmatically. But someone should have warned me. Anyway why go on about it? I finished the novel after all.

Most worrying to me is that I've just gone through a trifecta of books best left unread. This got me thinking: I write a lot about things that I like and occasionally about things that I hate, but what about those things that leave me mostly indifferent? What about the "why did they bother" factor? Shouldn't I be getting bilious about them? After all I invest a fair amount of time in my constant reading. I've got a day job and more worries than I can help.

Consider this post then, an attempt to work myself into a frenzy and remind myself to pick more judiciously in the future. It's fair enough if you dislike, but don't end up indifferent.

Here, to conclude, are a couple more wet socks that should have remained on the unread pile: you won't hate them, but trust me, you won't love them.

The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier

Self-absorbed musicologist and vain opera singer retreating into the Amazon jungle to discover the sounds of lost tribes... Very clever, I suppose. And musical erudition is on display. Also something of a travel journal, Latin American coups and sundry dysfunction abound - a Conrad-like effect is what he's aiming for. It's probably a parable about a return to innocence lost or Eden or something. But did I care? High concept but nigh unreadable. The great cuban writer loses himself... in himself.

Original Bliss by A.L. Kennedy

I felt strangely empty after reading this novel. True, there are blighted and diseased souls and, a priori, they should make for interesting subjects. But just because you write well about deviants and their unlikely relationships with bored housewives doesn't make things meaningful... I wish I could hate it but all I can say is overrated.

Or did I miss the point? Was there actually some "there" there?

File under: literature, obsession, eccentricity, books, hatchet job, reading, Completist Syndrome, toli

A Soul Jazz Thing

The great organist Jimmy Smith left us on February 8th at the age of 79. I was especially saddened to hear of his passing because I had started an appreciation piece on him last December but never completed it as these things are wont to go. He truly was the heart of soul jazz.

The various obituaries were universally respectful and admiring of his talent, noting his considerable influence; but it struck me that many were damning him with faint praise:

He blended jazz, blues, R&B, bebop and even gospel into an exciting stew - an idiom that produced many imitators, followers and fans.

Fair enough, I suppose, but when you say blended, I think of tepid purée not the kind of propulsive music that sprung from Smith's hands. This is a man, in a category of his own, who was dubbed the "Emperor of the Hammond Organ". He featured, like the Kings, Dukes and Counts, among the royalty of the jazz tradition.

Pardon me, if you will, while I set the record straight:

Soul Jazz is ecstatic music.

It's about the blowing sessions that happen after the main show, long past the midnight hour, when the lights are low and the musicians are loose and playing for keeps. At the after-party jam, it's all about earthly delights, loosened ties and unbuttoned collars. You'll hear complex grooves and humourous exchanges in the music: Can you top this? they're asking.

There'll be virtuosity that will make you stand up, thump your feet and rumble with someone close. The laughs are heartier and the flirtations are more intense. It's a celebration of the sensual and the sacred. Musically, it's the funky, greasy blues of back-alley jook joints with the prospect of the Good Lord the next day.

And Jimmy Smith best illustrated this notion: after playing through the night at the grimiest of speakeasies, you would find him on the organ at the church service in the morning, energetically lacing melodies to punctuate the reverend's call. All the while, the crowd from the previous night would be nursing their hangovers in soul claps amongst the congregation.

Consider the one-two punch of Midnight Special, which is about as earthy as these things come, and the revival and church hall vibe of Prayer Meetin'. They are part and parcel of this innovative musical conception. Smith's music speaks loudly and was heavily sampled by hip-hoppers and revered by the acid jazz/rare groove crowd. The aesthetic of A Tribe called Quest sprung fully formed from this soul jazz confection. Exciting is the least of it.

Herewith then, this month's soul jazz playlist bookended by Jimmy Smith's groove.

Jimmy Smith - The Sermon

The title track, a 20 minute affair, is what is says it is: a musical sermon. It's a relaxed affair, founded on an insistent back beat of the kind that Jamerson and co. would later pepper all of Motown with. It's not overbearing; the preacher is in his prime and knows what he's doing. It ebbs and flows as the message is delivered full-throated by the choir. The soloists let their hair down and the music builds up. It's an all-star cast on the church floor. The intent is to make people start yearning for the promised land. Exclamations and outbursts proliferate and everyone has ample opportunity to shine. The solos on the rest of the album are in the same vein, demonstrating to all and sundry that, with the Hammond organ on hand, there was no one quite like Jimmy Smith.

Hallelujah. Amen.

Lou Donaldson - The Natural Soul

Mixed in with shaking works like Nice 'n' Greasy and Funky Mama are fluid and inventive approaches to old standards by Gershwin and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lou Donaldson is a wonderful musician full of humour and here everything flows easily as befits a natural soul.

Stanley Turrentine - Never Let me Go

Stanley Turrentine's artful saxophone and lazy organ courtesy of Shirley Scott makes for heavenly jazz. For those late nights...

Sonny Clark - Cool Struttin'

This is the closest to staightforward hard bop as you'll get from this playlist. But the sounds of this album speak to that transcendant "feel" that is soul. It's not a blowing session but the musicians are in a playful mood. All the ingredients combine and the core of the genre is plainly evident.

Freddie Hubbard - Ready for Freddie

Earlier albums like Hub Tones were about displaying the fireworks and technical mastery of his instrument that put him in the league of the best jazz trumpeters of all time. Ready for Freddie is Hubbard's most cohesive album and shows his virtues as a band leader and composer. Those who think that Miles Davis was the end-all on the trumpet need to consider the likes of Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown or Donald Byrd and, on the evidence of this album, Freddie Hubbard. Trading with Wayne Shorter on tenor sax and rythymn section of McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Art Davis, this is a portrait of a band in full. A decade later, firmly established as an all-star, he could go on to the much-beloved Red Clay. But in the music of this moment, the world was ready for him and Freddie was a monster.

Hank Mobley - Straight No Filter

Whereas Soul Station is his consensus masterpiece, this posthumous release of the sessions that comprise Straight No Filter is a great introduction to the rarefied sounds of Hank Mobley. For a decade, everyone worth his salt in jazz knew that a gig with Hank was just the right thing. He made no apologies with his compositions and was game for revisiting standards in interesting new ways. "Yes Indeed" could well stand in for a sermon and Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock and Philly Joe Jones turn it up a notch. The aura of these sessions is mellow crepuscule.

Cannonball Adderley Quintet - Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!

Although sub-titled "Live at 'The Club'", this was actually a studio affair. The album aimed to recapture that loose club feeling with friends showing up for a good time and free booze. And it works. There's Fun, Games, and even a Sack O' Woe as the Adderley brothers (Nat and Cannonball) do their thing. Joe Zawinul's compositions also played an important part in the way in which this group gelled.

Alternatively you can go for the Country Preacher album which was indeed recorded live at a revival for Operation Breadbasket and which features a young Jesse Jackson exhorting the appreciative audience onwards and upwards. But trust me, you can't go wrong with Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!

Grant Green - Idle Moments

Is this the greatest jazz guitar album ever? Well it's a close-run thing. Maybe Smokin' at the Half Note gets the edge, but I wouldn't be so presumptious. Idle Moments captures Grant Green and company making magic. Bobby Hutcherson is on the vibes, Joe Henderson growls on the tenor sax and Duke Pearson is all empathy on the piano. They didn't plan for the title cut to be that long but sessions like these are supposed to be unhurried affairs. Simply inspirational music that we have the great fortune to be able to listen to time and again. This is about as good as it gets.

Jimmy McGriff - The Worm

An organist who followed in Jimmy Smith's path, McGriff found his own style and took the instrument in a different direction. It's more percussive and danceable, he's aiming towards the funky edge of the continuum. The liner notes defy you to sit down through this album. I can testify to their veracity.

Jimmy Smith - Back at the Chicken Shack

And finally we're back where it begins, at the blues shack. This album is one of my favourites from Blue Note and Jimmy Smith's finest moment. Cratediggers like DJ Shadow are forever enthused by the album cover but for me it's the music inside that matters and, when it comes to that, the guns are drawn from the first note: insistent, intelligent and nasty fun ensues.

I can see Jimmy hunched over the organ. Kenny Burrell on guitar, and Stanley Turrentine on saxophone are egging him on and trading funky licks and hard-bop runs. He's sweating profusely yet he's still cool enough to wink to that sister in the corner table to seal the deal. Smiles and loaded looks are exchanged.

Later on baby. There'll be time enough afterwards. For now, just lay back and listen to this. I'm in the cut.

I miss you Jimmy. Wherever you are, stay locked into the groove.

A Soul Jazz Thing, a playlist

File under: music, Soul Jazz, soul, jazz, blues, bop, Jimmy Smith, funk, appreciation, playlist, ecstatic, virtuosity,review, appreciation, toli

People, Processes and Things

A product I worked on a few years ago had as its mantra: "people, processes and things". As a marketing message, the slogan's usefulness left a lot to be desired; the catch-all "things" seemed an imprecise cop-out at best. The product dutifully died a quiet death even if it is being reinvented these days. As a rough taxonomy of software applications however, the slogan was a serviceable description of the different areas we focused on. Software architecture is difficult to articulate in any case so fuzzy handwaving of this sort is the norm.

Two recent posts gave me cause to revisit these notions. The earlier one, from Barry Briggs, was a speech wherein he anointed this era the Decade of Process. The second was Jamie Zawinski's takedown of "groupware". Both are interesting takes on these different approaches to software.

On People

Writing in his ever quotable and blunt way, jwz packs a lot of insight into why it's a case of "Groupware BAD... Users Good".

On why people want to write software:

Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

Adam Bosworth similarly talked about the Mom factor in the design of applications.

More generally, he comes around to one of the pithiest definitions of social software.

So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?...

"Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

There's lots more in this vein: why words like workflow or enterprise make his eyes glaze over, why groupware is an albatross, how that kind of software is not sexy etc.

The wider insight however is that Zawinski's argument is about focusing on people. It's a recognition that human beings are simply very social beasts and that we place a premium on communications. That's why phone, email and instant-messaging are the big applications of the day. When designing applications in this space, it's mostly a matter of getting out of the way and letting exchanges and interactions occur. Browsers and the web servers are some of the best software incarnations of this principle.

This focus on people, on connectivity and on simple communications is all part of longstanding historical trends in transportation and communications systems. This has been covered most fully by Andrew Odlyzko you can read him on read on why Content is not King, or more exhaustively on the history of communications and its implications for the Internet (pdf).

Among the core architectural principles of the internet are things like the "end-to-end" principle and internet transparency. I like to think of these as engineering tradeoffs in network design that are premised upon the virtue of connectivity. The network "laws" that apparently grow out of these design principles are things like Metcalfe's law on network utility or Reed's law on group-forming. These ideas embody more than mere connectivity however, and the software that builds on top of them is similarly diverse.

Once you move beyond simple person-to-person communications and information sharing, you get into what is the daily bread of those folks at CUE and Many-to-Many and begin to consider the ways in which humans organize themselves. You very quickly start talking about interaction trends in families, clans, tribes, groups and more generally about communities. This "stuff", the cement of society, if you like, is something that sociologists or anthropologists have greater facility in describing and something that software developers have, on the whole, done a poor job of translating.

When you consider how organizations operate there's lots that is implicit and most software has been a blunt tool where a light touch has been required. Just as an example, in most software, things have to be explicitly stated: I'm a member of this group, so-and-so is my friend etc. And even when software can infer or recommend things, oftentimes it is inexact and requires much fine-tuning and/or constant training.

If you take a wider view, you move from the realm of sociology and begin to talk about economics, about commerce, about capital and about ultimately about power. Once business and money comes into it, you understand that are vast quantities of software that address the needs of these other entities. It's obvious that not everyone will be able to write software like Zawinski has (Netscape) that has indeed changed the world and can be strictly focused on users, connectivity and communications. What makes users happy often doesn't coincide with what makes businesses happy - and as for the matter of motivation of software developers, the most salient fact is that businesses tend to pay large and regular amounts.

On processes

I'd argue then that the picture is wider one than simply "people" and that's where I'd return to Briggs' piece on processes. I didn't know Briggs when he was at Lotus but it's clear that we've drunk from the same Kool-Aid: I've used similar examples as he in presentations in the past year, working as I am on forms technology, namely:

Five thousand years ago on Crete people wrote documents in a script we later termed Linear B. When Sir Arthur Evans at the turn of the last century unearthed the tablets at Knossos, the world wondered at them, but for decades could not read them. Then, in 1940, a British scholar named Michael Ventris announced to the world that he had, in fact, deciphered the tablets and that they were in a form of archaic Greek

The world held its breath. Were they previously unknown epic poems, like the Iliad or the Odyssey? Were they great plays by some long-forgotten ancestor of Sophocles or Aristophanes? Were they philosophical discourses by a forebear of Socrates or Plato?

No. They were lists. Lists of sheep. Cows. Horses. Slaves. What we would call today inventories, bills of lading, invoices. To our chagrin, we realized that then, at the dawn of history, these citizens of archaic Greece -- like those of Sumer in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, like those in Egypt -- lived in a rigidly bureaucratized dictatorship.

They were empires of accountants.

Why do I recount all this? Because our little tale highlights something important, which is that commerce, trade, and the documents that record them lie at the core of the human essence. We are creatures of commerce; it is innate to the very notion of humanity.

Brigg's point is that even though we have wonderful things like literature, it is likely that the invention of writing systems was prompted by mundane bureacratic concerns. He goes on from there to sketch a vision of the type of software that can be created in this area. As befits a speech, there's a little hyperbole in what he says but also an essential truth: process isn't the sexiest of things - but it's an integral and necessary component of society.

As we translate increasing amounts of processes into software, one hopes that we can learn the lessons of the most satisfying aspects of software. At its best, process should be frictionless and unobtrusive like most infrastructure. Why spend an afternoon at the registry of motor vehicles going from queue to queue, filling one form after the other when much of that you can be automated in software? What I fear is lost as we create this software are things like institutional memory and the people-component (the man who explains what that checkbox really means, being able to scribble in the margins of a form, what happens when the next person in a "workflow" is out of the office, or his mail quota has been exceeded etc). There's lots of room for innovation and improvement here.

The terms that have been used about software that aids collaboration have all been unsatisfactory. They have been mostly opaque terms (groupware, knowledge management etc) overloaded and hyped by marketing teams. Correspondingly also, lots of software in this area has been unsatisfactory even if very useful for some groups whether it's mailing lists, usenet. The flight to a quality term like "social software" that people like Clay Shirky have spurred in recent years is an exercise to escape the stigma of the reigning software. I heartily endorse that effort but when I pass the hungry salesmen in the corridor that are trying to sell software for my company, I know that that effort will be in vain. If it's between their year-end bonuses and calling something "social software", you know what's going to win. Thus I predict that our vocabulary for software that supports groups, organizations and communities will continue to be contaminated.

But what about the reality of social software? What collaboration software will be likely to be successful? For me it is clear that one has to start with the platform consideration and from that standpoint we are dealing with the internet and the web and browser clients. Web-native applications, things like wikis for example are going to be part of the picture, not necessarily because they are better but because being based on the most dominant and scaleable platform that we have is virtue enough. More generally, it is going to be applications that take into account the architecture of the web and the internet that will succeed. These will be applications that understand the proposition of identifying resources, the virtue of URIs etc. Those who ignore the lessons of Roy Fielding do so at their peril.

Software that is targeting people will live and die by usability. Those who design software that underlies processes tend to think that they are immune from this but I believe that the same basic principles of interaction design will ultimately apply. No one particularly likes the bureaucracy of process but there's a trait of subversion and resistance in human beings that will undermine any poor tools foisted on them. Paying attention to this will be an important part of success.

On Things

I'll be delphic and try to weasel out of defining what those elusive "things" are. For me, they are a convenient proxy for everything that doesn't fit within the people and process views of things. For businesses, it's relatively mundane things like "documents" that need to be "managed" or keeping track of assets or items we manufacture. Another way to think about 'things' is to consider that people are creative and exist in a culture; software can be applied to the creative process and to establish a sense of place and shared context in society. Some term it "content", more generally it's entertainment, it's the music, the movies, the books that people are interested in and want to participate in and discuss. There's also that whole segment of the software industry, games, that is highly profitable and which seems to be driving things of late - the virtue of idlenesss I suppose.

I'll end by reiterating: people need to communicate so get out of their way and let them collaborate and exchange. Groups, communities and organizations often embody processes, and when using software in support of them, aim for unobtrusiveness and, most crucially, leverage this great network architecture that we have. As for the rest, well that will sort itself out, Darwin and Adam Smith have a lot to say here.

File under: technology, software, design, architecture, social software, people, processes, process, groups, sociology, collaboration, lotus, IBM, social, toli

Udell vrs Traoré?

So Jon Udell, in the midst of demonstrating the increasing maturity of query languages (XPath and XQuery) on xml databases, generates statistics of bloggers he reads who most frequently cite books on Amazon.com.

In analyzing the data, it is clear that I'm one of those who mines the zeitgeist, peppering my posts with literary and musical references. That's not news to anyone who reads me and indeed its for that reason that I moonlight at that sinister cabal called Blogcritics.

What drew my interest however was a little technical quirk. If you look at the results for this blog you'll notice a link formatted as follows.

Cooking with Rokia Traoré

Thus Traoré begat

Traoré

I wondered: what happened here?

Now I created my post in a text editor, Notetab, on Windows. I have muscle memory so that typing Alt + 0233 for the e-acute symbol (é) is no problem. I find it faster to typing that than recalling the alternative html entity for that symbol

é

Blogger generates an Atom 0.3 xml feed encoded in UTF-8 and if I inspect the feed, I see the following:

<title mode="escaped" 
type="text/html">Cooking with Rokia Traoré</title>

In other words, the Alt + 0233 character is preserved in the feed. Good. At least Blogger is out of the loop.

The question then is how did an escaped Alt + 0233 become

é

once it reached into Jon's xml datastore and was extracted by an xquery?

Ever since I implemented the html export features in Freelance Graphics back in 1997, the bane of my existence in every project has been "special characters". It's always at the end of the project once the internationalization testing begins and there's always 3 weeks or so of trying to fix issues that ultimately boil down to how "special characters" are treated. I made the mistake of writing up some memos on my experiences and from there folks at work got the impression that I was on top of such things.

But it's not clear that that there's any real answer to encoding and character issues. Sometimes it's just a simple bug, more often though, it requires forensic investigations and following a data trail. It's all about the confusing interactions between different markup languages whether html or xml, the programming languages used whether C, Java or Javascript (ever try using Javascript data arrays as your transfer format?), the formatting rules of your resource files, the transfer and wire protocols whether http, corba/iiop, configuration issues on server software, by-fiat decisions and bugs in various browsers (I'll just sniff some characters in your data and make a best guess as to the format and silently ignore the specified encoding), operating systems and databases programs to cite just a few of the actors in this area.

There's even a more recent pattern of errors that arise when one generates fragments of markup that are then aggregated as in feeds and in portlets generating web pages. Here, you better hope that the parent or outer container has 'done the right thing' and declared the right character encoding in the right place, http header, meta tag or declaration because it's too late by the time you are generating your output.

And to think that in this case it's just an é symbol I was curious about. It wasn't even a quote or ampersand. Would it matter if I was posting in arabic or chinese? These are the types of character encoding issues that drive Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim (back when he was on the internet) to distraction.

Inquiring minds want to know: who mangled poor Rokia Traoré?

Update October 2020 I came across this ode to the journey of ó on a shipping label which is in much the same vein. Special characters deserve poems too and this one is quite the odyssey

File under: web, technology, i18n, localization, programming, forensics, Rokia Traoré, internationalization, investigation, software, udell, toli

King Leopold Haunts Congo Again

As a son of an African journalist, the BBC World Service tends to act as my alarm clock. And so on Thursday morning, I woke up to the sounds of a bizarre story:

A statue of former Belgian colonial King Leopold II has been re-erected in the centre of the Democratic Republic of Congo capital, Kinshasa.

Now it seemed clear to me that I must have been in the middle of a dream and so I thought nothing better of it. In the afternoon though, my curiosity stirred, I checked their news site and found to my amazement that indeed, it was true: Leopold's statue was back up.

King Leopold II set up the Congo Free State in 1885 as his personal possession and left arguably the worst legacy of all the European colonial regimes... He turned the country into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people.

Culture Minister Christophe Muzungu said people should not just see the negative side of the king - they should also look at the positive aspects.

"We are restoring the history of our country because a people without history is a people without a soul," he said.

I sputtered and struggled to find the appropriate historical analogue to this decision. It was as if the Chechens had decided to put up Stalin's statue in Grozny - he who had decimated their ranks 60 years ago by deporting all of them from their lands in forced marches to Siberia - or perhaps as if the mayor of Gaza took it to his head to erect Ariel Sharon's statue (or a new monument to Saddam in Kurdistan?).

Leopold's depredations were so grotesque and occurred on such a scale that even the other colonial powers had to take pause in their scramble for African loot. The Belgian behavior was the kind of thing that would queer the whole colonial enterprise and indeed the twentieth century's first significant talk about human rights was on the Congo issue. In much the same way, the images from Abu Ghraib prompted a (slight) sense of unease in the recent US empire building. More to the point, the colonial experience under Leopold set Congo on a downward path that it has never been able to escape.

Now I've read King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild's highly recommended study of that macabre period and was justifiably horrified at the historical record that he laid out: greed, megalomania mixed with atrocious labour camps, summary amputations, decapitations and outright larceny, all covered in the bromides of a missionary humanitarianism. Almost any page of that book would be a rejoinder to that Minister of culture's words. 10 million people died for God's sake, and he stole everything from you!

Perhaps the only decision Mobutu ever took that proved to be in the interest of his country was to tear that statue down early on in his reign, even though this measure did coincide with his self-interest as was the overriding norm for him.

If Mobutu's reign was to be the farcical follow-up of the Leopold's tragedy, one had hoped that whatever followed would begin to restore that country to some sense of sanity. Instead, in the Kabila interludes (first the elder, and now the hereditary son), Congo remains the site of a second Scramble for Africa (see here also).

Congo is so rich in natural resources that even normally sober Texan oilmen or South African diamond monopolists hyperventilate when they talk about it. It has copper, gold, diamonds, tin - you name it. It has uranium (if you wanna go nuclear) and even that rare tantalite that's in your cell phone.

At one point in the past decade, it was said that the armies of 13 countries were on its soil, not to mention Russian mercenaries and the usual cast of malfeasants - Africa's World War it was called. The resultant human cost of the ongoing Congo troubles, 3 million and rising, is approaching Leopoldian dimensions. The notion that a government would make such gestures says everything about the dysfunction of the country and tone-deafness of the opportunists who pass for politicians there.

The next day however, it appeared that the outcry had grown too large and the statue was removed: Leopold reigns for a day in Kinshasa

Residents of Kinshasa could be forgiven for rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

First, a statue of the late Belgian king Leopold II, whose rapacious colonial rule of Congo caused the death of millions of Africans, was reinstated in the heart of the Congolese capital.

Then, less than a day later, it was gone again, mysteriously removed by the same workmen who had erected it.

Officials were at a loss to explain the comings and goings at the end of June 30 Boulevard, the street named in honour of the date of Congo's independence from Belgium.

First indications from the government were that it might be part of a historical restoration. There are plans to erect a statue of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator who stole billions from the country during a 30-year rule that ended in 1997.

"We are restoring the history of our country, because a people without history is a people without a soul," said Christophe Muzunge, the minister of culture. He added that the six-metre (20ft) Leopold statue had been brought back to remind the people of their country's colonial past, so that "it never happens again".

But later there was no comment on why Leopold had been removed. Certainly the sudden apparition was not popular with onlookers.

"Look at what they did in Iraq," Mputu Melo said. "They destroyed the statue of Saddam Hussein. This shouldn't be in a public square."

King Leopold, who never set foot in the Congo, controlled the vast country as his personal colony from 1885 to 1908, when it was handed over to Belgian government rule.

During those decades his agents enslaved its people to harvest rubber, beating workers with a hippo-hide whip known as the chicotte and severing the hands of men, women and children who failed to meet their quotas.

As many as 10 million Congolese are estimated to have died as a result of executions, unfamiliar diseases and hunger.

While I am happy to see that this decision was reversed, do note the crucial line I emphasized above: there are plans for a Mobutu statue. Pity the poor Congolese, first King Leopold's ghost returns to haunt them, now they're going to have to endure Mobutu again! File under: Africa, Congo, irony, murder, colonialism, history, memory, toli, Leopold, Mobutu,, rogues, culture, observation, perception, Fallen Angels, Observers are worried

Quiet Return

You might have noticed that there was no toli in January. Part of the reason was that I spent a month in Ghana over the holiday period. Far from computers, it was a month of rest, good food, and quality time with family and friends alike.

As I returned, refreshed and all, I was all set to write about the 13 novels I'd read, describe a week of the worst harmattan (the dry season of winds and dust clouds blowing down from the Sahara) I'd experienced since childhood, contrasting that with the bitter cold and snow storms that Boston has supplied, give my impressions of Ghana, describe the chaos of a presidential inauguration done with Ghanaian (in)efficiency. My head was full of ideas, I was going to comment on the various memes that have been floating around this internet thing of ours and talk about the series of articles on technology that I've been pondering. I was going to write about all that and more.

But then two weeks ago, I had a terrible, terrible phone call to Ghana that included the following:

"What?... Murdered... Armed robbers... Yes, murdered... at his house... 4 of them... his 19 year old niece, the watchman and the house girl..."

The rest was a blur of shock, anger, bewilderment, denial, wrath, sorrow, frustration, impotence, sadness, hand-wringing, and finally, numbness that has stumped me since.

A few days later I would read headlines in the online papers about what had happened. But nothing really can explain a wife returning home to such a scene, or the phone calls that some children, 3,000 miles away, were to receive. Nothing can explain the four lives lost and others thrown into upheaval and the sheer arbitrary waste of it all. In short, it has been a tsunami on a personal scale.

In any case, I hope you'll understand why there's been quiet in these parts...