Robinson Crusoe

I just finished reading Robinson Crusoe for the first time - another classic that I apparantly ignored during my formative years. Of course I knew the general story already - man gets stranded on a deserted island and struggles to survive.

A couple of things I didn't realize:

• He's stranded for about 30 years! Some of the things he accomplishes on the island are incredible, but when you realize the amount of time he spends there (and really what else is he going to do) it becomes more plausible.
• How religious the book is. One of the items Robinson Crusoe rescues from the shipwreck is a bible, and though he was not religious prior to his predicament he becomes 're-born' on the island and actually converts a cannibal he rescues to Christianity as well.

One idea espoused in the book is one of optimism. If you constantly compare yourself or your situation to those in a better situation, a feeling of jealousy and inadequacy is a natural (although undesirable) response. Instead, look on your situation as compared to those less fortuante and you will likely find yourself in a positive frame of mind. Furthermore, if you think about the number of people in each of those two camps (better off and worse off), you are almost guaranteed to find yourself better off than the majority.

Tarzan of the Apes

I'm currently reading "Tarzan of the Apes" - the original story about Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Of course I already know the mythology from various cartoons and movie adaptations, but I have never actually read the source material (embarrassing). So it turns out that this novel is in the public domain and freely available in ebook form from Project Gutenberg. So I downloaded it the other day and started reading.

I'm quite enjoying it - as my friends would say about a good movie - it's a real page turner ;).

However, something is bugging me about it (hence this post). I can suspend my disbelief about a grief stricken ape-like mother rescuing a human baby and raising it as her own child. Similarly, I can buy into the fact that Tarzan, after discovering children's books and an English dictionary, is able to teach himself to read and write English despite never encountering written language before. The author is fairly careful to point out that spoken English is completely foreign to Tarzan because he has no idea about pronounciation of any of the letters. However, in a couple of situations, Tarzan writes a note that includes his name! How could he possibly come up with the spelling for 'Tarzan' when he has no idea about the sounds of any of the letters?

David Gemmel's Rigante Series

I just finished reading a four book fantasy series by David Gemmell. These books were recommended to me by a friend and I really enjoyed the first two books. The last two books were OK, but not nearly as good as the first two. The series follows the Rigante clan of the Keltoi tribes. It is obvious to the reader that the Keltoi are analogous to the highlanders of Scotland. In the first two books, the focus is on the conflict between the Keltoi and the more 'civilized' people of 'Stone' - which is equally obvious as being the Roman empire. The second book follows the son of the main character from the first book. The third and fourth books happen much later in time - but are still focused on the Rigante but the new civilization they are up against are the Varlish - (based on the English). The overriding theme of all the books is that the more 'civilized' we become, the more we destroy nature and the 'magic' of the land. In the later books this theme was so obviously reinforced that I felt like I was being scolded by the author. In fact if there was another book in the series I probably wouldn't have read it.


Sword In The Storm: 3/4
Midnight Falcon: 4/4
Raven Heart: 2/4
Stormrider: 2/4

What Shall We Do Now?

Part of my role at work is ‘software architecture’ which is a somewhat nebulous term and often crosses in to software design. In an agile environment it can’t cross that boundary, however, because it is up to the teams delivering the feature to buy into and create the design for the software. So with the help of the book “Software Systems Architecture” we’re now defining the architecture as a process to find unwritten requirements, constraints, questions, and assumptions that will restrict the design space to only those designs that meet all the criteria and constraints.

The book is quite good, although it is written from a more ‘waterfall’ type mentality. The ideas it presents are geared towards how to effectively communicate an architecture. The authors present a set of six distinct 'views' of the system. Each view is targeted at a different set of stakeholders (which may include the end user, operators, developers, installers, third party developers, etc.) and the intent is to present only the information the stakeholder cares about in the view. The book describes a template for each view including examples of what one is to consider, a checklist, and a section of common mistakes and pitfalls which is quite useful.

The views they describe are:

• Functional: Describes the systems functional elements, their responsibilities, interfaces and primary interactions
• Information: Describes how the system stores, manipulates, manages and distributes data
• Concurrency: Maps functional elements to concurrency units to identify where parallelism can and will occur
• Development: Describes how the architecture supports the development process including building, testing, and maintaining the system
• Deployment: Describes the target environment into which the architecture will be deployed including processing nodes, network interconnections, bandwidth availability, and disk storage requirements
• Operational: Describes how the system will be operated, administered, upgraded and supported after initial deployment.

In addition to the viewpoints, the authors identified some common non-functional qualities of a system and recognized that meeting those qualities will affect more than one view. These qualities include things like performance, security, availability, and scalability. For each of these qualities there is an associated Perspective that the book outlines.

So I'm experimenting with this format by trying to describe a current feature (EPG Data Delivery) along with an upcoming required enhancement to that feature. We'll see how it goes...