Hope

Hope is destructive.

Like belief in god, hope works. That is to say that hope makes us feel good short term or better than that feeling of despair and nothing will work. Like belief in god, a larger perspective, however, is needed.

Far better than hope is the thought that there is no need to hope, that the table has been set and the banquet awaits. This thought, if true, is far better than hope. This thought, I believe, is the basic provision of a religion.

Passion

Truth is outside language and is carried within the vessel of passion. This is what communication is about ultimately.

Dr. King did not have a plan, he had a dream. 1 Corinthians 13 ejects the stalwarts of faith and hope in favor of love because faith and hope do not "abide" and love does. Do not try to sell what we do or how we do it. They are trivial. Why we do it is important.

Our passion. That is what is important. Hire someone who believes as we believe. Do not hire someone who does what we do or how we do it.

So, what about communication itself. Why do we care about it? We love to create communication devices that add something to the mix of communication. Something unexpected. Something novel. A shift in what is possible in communication. What we do and how we do it is interesting for this reason and only for this reason - the why of communication ideas.

Multiple Independent Levels of Security

Security like most other things in life has its common sense, its practical, and its theoretical requirements. Do not hire people with bad character is important. The ingenious features of a MILS architecture as being advanced by the Air Force Research Labs and Dr. John Rushby of SRI International are also important. One of the nice things about SOA and cloud improvements in enterprise architectures is the toolset they give to understanding how to more intelligently allocate resources and policies. The discussions of MILS are a prime example.

SOA and Cloud Computing

SOA is an architecture based on the idea of binding services together as the basic unit to create and to compose business solutions. Cloud computing is a set of enabling technologies that can be used for a SOA. Each is independent of the other.

Eerie Thoughts

The meaning of what I am saying here is decoupled from any order imposed by the physical or chemical medium upon which these words you are reading appear. This is what is essential to the meaning existing.

Likewise, when you look at DNA there is meaning for us in there only to the extent that the structure of the molecule is not due to its chemical constituents. The DNA molecule is not like ordinary molecules, where the structure is due to maximizing stability. That is why the DNA can be code.

Code in the natural order has a meaning that itself is an emergent property beyond the impositions of the physical universe.

Network Architecting is Not Network Engineering

Network architecting is not network engineering. Network architecture is not network design. The network architect must be the representative of the owner of the network. This is so even if the architect is the employee of the builder.

The architecture is presented as a set of documents, the so-called "architecture description" or "AD". But the architecture is not the documents.

IEEE 1471P-2000 is worth careful study. Here we see that the architect must know the stakeholders and their concerns. The AD needs to contain viewpoints and views that address the concerns of all such stakeholders. And, the architecture must contain models that are directly related to the views.

No matter how adept the engineer, this is not engineering. There is no pride of place in this. Architecture is just a different process than engineering, an art and one that demands a perspective that just cannot exist in engineering per se. A good network architect has to be adept in some aspects of engineering too. And, a good network engineer must, I think, also know quite a lot in the architectural realm.

Architects are not visionaries, even though they can be very deep in concept and be called "visionary". Certainly the SOA architecture is visionary but not the product of a visionary.

If you do not have an architect directing your projects, you are, I would suggest, either blessed with an engineer who in fact can do architecture or you are on the road to ruin.

Graphing Things

A graph with one axis going from passive to reactive to proactive and another going from predictable to unexpected is interesting.  Ant colonies become married to Coo Coo Clocks on one axis and divorced on the other.