I went to see Gaddafi last night. Sadly, it was a bit of a disappointment. Poor production values certainly conspired against it: sloppy stagecraft, unadventurous lighting and props, and sound quality that one wouldn’t expect from a theatre like the ENO. It appears it’s their first foray into something so modern and experimental, and it shows. Flaky choreography and a cluttered stage layout didn’t help either.

But the greater problems were in the recreation of the al-Gaddafi story. The script was badly developed, jumping around and never really deciding who Gaddafi was or what the story was about. The historical context was never clear, despite obvious attempts to convey it - apart from when it involved the west, when reliance on pre-recorded TV footage seemed to be the only way the director could sell his message. Apart from some vague sense that I probably wouldn’t like him, I learnt little about Gaddafi or Libya that I didn’t already know (and I’m hardly an expert). Some self-conscious statements about an actor playing Gaddafi, breaking the fourth wall, were arrogant and out-of-place.

I’ve long thought (I’m aware this will make me sound like a young fogey) that most concerts are way too loud. This is why I tend to avoid them - I’ve seen both the rock music of the Foo Fighters and the delicacy and dynamic range of Sigur Rós spoilt on stage. The only times I tend to attend gigs are when the venue is small and the artist is unknown to me (which helps built the sense of atmosphere and overcome the poorer sound quality). There’s a long discussion on Edward Tufte’s website about the technical aspects of this over-amplification issue.

One of the things I’ve felt IBM’s been strong at in recent years is the way we embrace open-source as a development model, and as a model for providing software to our customers. Eclipse, which has a lot of support from IBM, is a well-known example, but there are plenty of others. I honestly believe that the provision of open-source software gives us a competitive edge over IT organisations of comparable size. Sure, we don’t do it for all our products, but for toolchains like Eclipse it has delivered real benefits - the number of plugins developed for it is testament to that.

I’ve written before about how useless the downtown Sainsbury’s in Winchester is. I’ve noticed, however, they have recently put up a cunning sign, which, paraphrased, reads:

‘We are currently experiencing a shortage of organic milk. [And indeed they were, the shelf was empty]. However, Sainsbury’s XYZ milk is available, and 5p from each pint goes to farmers to help them convert over to organic production.’

Sainsbury’s, here’s a hint: I’m not interested in voluntarily subsidising farmers’ investment in their own production and helping you and them to solve logistical and production problems. Yes, I’m happy to buy organic milk at a price premium, and, yes, I’m aware that most of the difference goes to Sainsbury’s, not the farmers. But asking me to voluntarily pay extra to you and the farmers for no tangible benefit is taking things a bit too far - I’m going to fall on the tight-fisted side of your price targeting.

Joe McKendrick discusses SOA and reuse in a recent blog entry, essentially drawing on some comments from David Chappell that reuse didn’t do as well as predicted in the era of object-orientation, and that SOA isn’t faring well in this department either. Dave Linthicum, in his latest podcast, also discusses this topic.

I’m not sure I can comment that widely on the state of current SOA projects, and I would agree that SOA may suffer from similar management problems to that of object-orientation: if developers of SOA systems aren’t rewarded for saving time with a reuse strategy, they won’t be enthused to do so. This is an important part of any software project, and encouraging reuse is a best practice that shouldn’t be restricted to object-orientation or SOA.

I spent last Thursday and Friday in London at the Google offices in Victoria for the first Google Test Automation Conference. The presentation topics ranged widely, considering the relatively narrow scope of the conference, but most were well developed and interesting, even if some retrod familiar topics. Some of the highlights included:

• Steve Loughran and Julio Guijarro, HP Labs. This presentation was about Smartfrog, a system deployment framework, which Steve and Julio were working on as part of a strategy for system testing. They demonstrated several examples of how the system might work in practice. Smartfrog looks pretty flexible, and I plan to spend some time looking into it. Frameworks for deployment have an inherent problem in catering to the wide variety of platforms, configuration mechanisms, deployment combinations and so on that are necessary in practice. Anything that gets closer to this is therefore welcome. Smartfrog also has the interesting property that the XHTML it produces as output is sufficiently well-formed that, although it has an embedded CSS stylesheet for presentation in a web browser, it can also be parsed as XML data without much effort, and thus act as a machine-readable data source as well. This might seem obvious to some folks, and I’m willing to bet it’s not the first time it’s been done, but it seemed novel to me.

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I’m very impressed. A few days ago I wrote about how 82ASK had screwed up the answer to a question. This evening, totally unprompted, I get an email:

‘I have been passed details of your unsatisfactory response from 82ASK…’

‘We have given you two free credits in the hope that you will continue to use the 82ASK service, and to apologise again for your unsatisfactory response.’

‘It appears in this instance our usually reliable sources have let us down, and we will endeavour to find a better source for questions of this nature in the future.’

_Why Copenhagen Is a Bit Like London _

• English is spoken fluently.

• It has its own wacky money.

• Lots of public infrastructure is just a little bit more run-down than you’d like.

• Nothing is particularly efficient.

• It has a mix of modernity and cuteness in its architecure.

• It is tolerant and multi-cultural.

Why Copenhagen Isn’t That Much Like London

• It’s much smaller.

• Food is nicer but more expensive.

• Very few things, beyond tourist material, are written in English.

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Henrique’s recent comment reminded me of another interesting bunch of people I met at euroGel 2006: the incoming class of the Kaospilots, ‘The most unusual school in the world’. They sound like an indie band, but Kaospilots is actually a private university, teaching business and related creative subjects. They are partly self-funding, and the concept seems novel - all teachers are external consultants. The most striking thing I found in the students I met was their drive - it’s obviously not a university course you drift onto. I think this university model is worth keeping an eye on.

I’ve just received my IBM special edition of Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies. It’s shorter than the regular book, but is free - so you can use this link and order one yourself. It only covers the basics of SOA, and doesn’t dive into depth on ESBs, SCA, or any particular product, but despite being so general, it’s nevertheless worth a read if you’re looking for a good introduction to what SOA is all about.