Christopher Alexander Visits The Oregon Project

A resonant article in Rain magazine - well it resonates with me anyway, because it describes how a really significant breakthrough in using patterns to build architectures can break down when people bring their own agendas to the table. Christopher Alexander is a bit of a hero to me, a Gaudi for the present times - saved in pdf here.

A viking Voyage

I've finished "A Viking Voyage" by W. Hodding Carter (Ebury Press, 2000, 009 1877830 - published in the UK by Random House. I don't usually read travel books from cover to cover, but this one is memorable, particularly for the warmth and humour of the author in describing what was at times quite a painful and stressful period for him. Devising and planning the expeditions of the carefully constructed knarr was but a small part of the total experience - the bigger part was winning people around and getting them as committed to the journey as he was. And once they are committed, he finds himself having to relinquish key aspects of the journeys that he was looking forward to owning to others. On top of all this though, the book shines with a sense of fun and adventure as the boat sails for Vinland, retracing the routes described in the Viking sagas.

Social Networks

Just came across a very interesting Wikipedia article on Social Networks, which links to a startling applet that models networks. I'm more interested in social networks from the perspective of a software ecology, in other words - how does this file deployed in a running system relate to the source code held in our Version Management tool over here? What dependencies are there between one object and other, and which are weaker or stronger? Can we refactor this code without impacting that code over there? And so on, and so on.