Ticket Touts as a positive influence on society

I asked for arguments against ticket touting on this post and received some good responses - including arguments I hadn't heard before.

Firstly, let's dismiss one absurd argument:

The argument that motivated me to talk about this topic was a truly malign comment I heard on XFM last week. The DJ was referring to the fact that tickets for their "Winter Wonderland" event had sold out and were available on eBay at "inflated" prices. Because some of the ticket price goes to charity, the DJ claimed that these touts were "stealing" money from the charity.

That statement, clearly, is a vicious lie: it matters not one jot who buys the ticket; the donation is paid from the initial ticket price and would be made whether the purchaser was a "tout" or a "fan" (whatever those terms mean).

However, there are some better arguments.

Jon writes:

"if touts didn't bulk-buy tickets in the first place, they wouldn't sell out so quickly in the first place and normal human beings could buy tickets for reasonable prices instead. I.E., the market for touts is created by the touts."

This is really an argument that we shouldn't allocate on price but should allocate based on people's willingness to queue in line for a ticket.  In cases where more people want tickets than there are tickets available, it's the same as saying that those who can't get in the queue at the right time or jump through some other hoop will have to do without.

In other words, it's an argument that says that they way you demonstrate your desire for a ticket is by being willing to give up lots of time or incur inconvenience rather than by the more usual method of paying more for it. I'm not sure the lesson of history is that scarcity, queues and rationing is a desirable goal.

trp (Is that you, Tim?) makes several arguments.

His first is that touts don't pay tax or otherwise act as good businessmen. I think that argument can be dismissed out of hand as irrelevant. If somebody fails to pay tax or breaks the law, they're being naughty regardless of the line of business they're in.  If, on the other hand, they are forced to run their businesses because of the questionable legitimacy of their enterprises then we're getting into a dangerously circular argument.

trp's next good point is one about consumer protection: you pay market price to a tout but any rights you have (e.g. to a refund if the concert is cancelled) are restricted to face value.

It's a good point but I think there are two good counter-arguments

Firstly, this is an argument for promoters to start pricing more realistically (i.e. by underpricing and hence incenting the activities of touts, they are exposing their ultimate customers to uncertainty and risk)

Secondly, as a purchaser, you know this is the case when you purchase the ticket and so should take it into account when considering how much to pay. (i.e. the small but non-zero risk of losing the difference between market- and face- value should influence how much you're willing to spend)

trp then goes on to make another good point.

To understand it, you must first endure one of my pro-touts arguments.  My claim is that touts provide a valuable service to promoters by buying tickets early and in bulk. The latter service lowers transaction costs and the former lowers the risk for promoters (the risk of selling huge swathes of tickets has been transferred from the promoter to the touts).

trp's point is that this transfer of risk results in the problem that information is lost: the promoter doesn't know how many tickets have been sold to people genuinely intending to come (and hence intending to spend money on drinks and merchandise).

I think this problem is easy to dismiss: the market price for tickets could very easily be used to infer how many tickets have ultimately been sold.

Finally, trp closes the loop and raises the "problem" of social engineering. Often, promoters want to exercise control over who attends their event: perhaps they only want "home" supporters in one stand and "away" supporters in another. Alternatively, perhaps the BBC wants to ensure only "poor" people attend a screening of a new show.

In the first case, I agree that public safety may be a valid reason in some cases for restricting the secondary market. However, I think the problems are overplayed and are actually a smokescreen for those who want to benefit from preventing tickets selling for their true value.

The second case has no merit whatsoever (in my very humble opinion). Polly has the best rebuttal to it.

She says:

"Sometimes a benevolent impressario, such as the BBC, puts on a show with a limited audience and it hopes to give the most deserving in society the opportunity to benefit. It feels resentful when the most deserving in society decide that they prefer money to the well-intentioned show, and sell the tickets to those who are less deserving, but value the show more. In a sense the impressario feels that it still owns the tickets, though they have been given away freely."

In other words, if you claim to know better than somebody else what is good for them then you deserve what you get. Paternalism is a nasty little habit and I resent any attempt to tell "the poor" or any other group of society what they can or cannot do with their life or their assets.

 

At its heart, the overall "touting" issue is this: promoters often deliberately underprice tickets for their events.

Their reasons are multiple:

• They may not know the demand in advance and don't want unsold tickets on their hands
• They may want to sell the tickets at a price the "fans" can afford
• They may want to attract certain kinds of attendees (e.g. students) to create the right atmostphere
• They may want to subsidise the ticket price to leave attendees with enough cash to spend on other items inside the vanue

The first is a good reason for touts (they allow the true value to be discovered at minimal risk to the promoter)

The second is an unrealistic intention: if somebody is selling something for less than it is truly worth, there is an irresistable pressure for somebody to step in and capture the difference between the true- and face- value for themselves.

The third point (desire to attract "students" or whatever) is also a good one... some bands would be aghast if their audience turned out to be hundreds of middle-aged couples rather than skinny indie kids with bad hair. However, there are other ways to ensure a majority of attendees are of a certain type: ensure facilities or other ancillary aspects of the experience are relatively less attractive to those you don't want to come

Finally, the fourth point could be resolved by including "drinks vouchers" or something of that sort with a more-expensively priced ticket.

 

So, there we have it. trp has given me pause for thought and it took me longer than I expected to rebut Jon's point (not sure I've done it justice yet) but I still think I'm on the right side of the argument :-p

Price Discrimination in action

Tim Harford finds it hard to talk about anything other than price discrimination and I'm beginning to understand why.

The basic idea is that, as a vendor, you want to maximise the amount of money you make. If you charge a lot for something, those able to afford to buy the item will pay for it but those who can't will not.  If you lower your price to attract the more price sensitive shoppers, you inadvertently give a discount to people who would have willingly paid more.

What is one to do?!

Tesco and other retailers do it through such tricks as dressing up similar products in different ways (price sensitive customers get low prices by buying unattractively labelled "value" lines and less sensitive customers willingly hand over gobs of cash for similar products in nicer boxes with "finest" written on them).

Another of Harford's examples is Starbucks: they'll sell you a cheap "short" latte if you ask for it specifically (but they don't advertise it so that only the truly price sensitive - those willing to ask "do you have anything cheaper?" - benefit) and will willingly put syrrupy liquids in your cappuccino if you ask them to - for a high price.

I realised twice this weekend that www.thetrainline.com also does something similar (I'm probably late to this party...)

I will be spending New Year with some friends at a cottage we've hired in Ludlow. I tried to book my train tickets last night. The first price you see is the easy, no hassle one:

£51  for a standard class return

£117 for a first class return

But wait.....!  Let's click on the "2 singles could be cheaper" link and see what happens...

If you're willing to sacrifice a little flexibility, look what happens: 

That's right.... not only are two singles cheaper for standard class (£42 vs £51), it's also cheaper to go first class  (£48).

So I'll be travelling to Ludlow in First Class for less than the less price-sensitive would pay for a standard class ticket.

Excellent.

Of course, for every good article, balance must be restored

John Naughton's incisive piece in today's Observer requires, of course, an imbecilic piece to balance it out.

Thankfully, Will Hutton (as usual) delivers.

Will makes an impassioned defence of the BBC (saying that it is right that we should be forced to pay ever increasing sums for it). As Tim Worstall points out, Will's argument can be distilled down to: "The poor should be hit with a regressive tax so that I, a wealthy upper middle class type, can get the TV I like."

Indeed.

Newspaper journalists as pets

There's a good piece in the Observer today about the failure of newspaper editors (and others in the media industry) to realise that the reason young people don't buy many newspapers is not the fault of the young people.

"Now look round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

And while some of our teenagers' interests coincide with ours, many do not. Here, for example, are the top blog tags on Technorati last night: Bush, careers, college, comedy, Congress, death, Democrats, elections, Flickr, gay, Halloween, Iraq, Microsoft, money, Republicans, Saddam, Ted Haggard, vote, war, breaking-news, tagshare, YouTube. Some you'll recognise. But you won't see much about many of these in the papers.

These are the future, my friends. They're here and living among us. They're not very interested in us, and I'm not sure I blame them. The best we can hope for is that one day they may keep us as pets."

Lord Mayor's Show

I popped along to the Lord Mayor's Show today (or, rather, I emerged from Bank station and found myself trapped in a crowd).

I most enjoyed seeing a DeLorean in "Back To The Future" styling drive past.  I'm not really sure what that has to do with the event but things don't always have to make sense :-)

DLR update

It is getting tedious now.

I was delayed on a Bank-bound train yesterday because a train in front was experiencing difficulties in the tunnel.

I repeat my previous questions: what on earth is going on?

How many people work for the UK's probation service

I was only giving Thursday's "Question Time" partial attention this week so I may have misheard something.

But I could swear I heard one of the panellists claim that 20,000 people work for the UK's probation service and they collectively oversee 14,000 "clients."  Her numbers were not challenged by the host or any of the other panellists.

Are those figures really true? Is there really more than one member of staff for each ex-prisoner "supervised"?  In the light of the recent revelations concerning the shocking lack of supervision, what on earth are they all doing with their time?

Why do we regard ticket "touts" as evil?

It appears to be generally accepted that ticket "touts" - those who buy tickets for events at face value and sell them on at market value - are somehow malign.

Ignoring events where tight control over who purchases a ticket is important (the Register has an example of where this may be important... not that I'm convinced), can anybody make a credible argument for why those who trade tickets to events are any more evil than those who trade fruit and vegetables or those who trade shares or those who trade anything else?

I think I have a pretty robust argument for why ticket "touting" is a good thing that should be encouraged but I'd be interested in hearing the "anti-" arguments first....

Taking WebSphere Process Servers into production

Via David Currie, I learn that Charlie Redlin has started a series of articles on how to take WPS into production.

On this subject, when Charlie talks, you should listen.

Is it wrong to post links to flash animations?

If so, I am a bad person.

If not, then take a look at this cool clock. I think I stumbled across it in the b3ta newsletter (so a hat-tip to them, if so).

Either way, it's my screensaver now. That's a big deal. I don't normally do screensavers.

http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf

The Economist Business Travel Index

I subscribe to the Economist, keep the current copy in my laptop bag and read it when travelling for work. I find it serves as a useful proxy for how much of my life I spend travelling on business.

Normally, I find that my "Economist Stress" is a weekly occurrence... I get to Thursday evening and I haven't finished it. This is a good sign: it means I haven't spent too much time travelling.

This week, thanks to multiple trips to Bedfont and Hursley, I completed reading it this morning. No wonder I'm tired!

Feeling Gloomier

We went to London club night "Feeling Gloomy" in May and went again on yesterday evening.

It was another excellent night - where else would you hear Pulp's "Babies", Tammy Wynette's "Stand by your man", Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and more Smiths songs than you could shake a stick at within thirty minutes of your arrival?

Attempting to walk home from Islington to Wapping was probably not a smart idea.... defeat was admitted and a cab hailed somewhere around Bishopsgate...

The Emperor and the Tiger

After all the furore surrounding my local council's Bonfire Night celebrations, I decided I had to go and see for myself.

In its wisdom, Tower Hamlets council decided that a bonfire and a few fireworks would not suffice and so they commissioned a light, sound and pyrotechnic extravaganza at Victoria Park.

We invited a few friends over for drinks and pizza and then walked to the park along the Thames and the Regent's Canal. The walk was beautiful - fireworks lighting up the river and the canal - and the event itself was worth the walk.

Great use of light, some larger-than-life-size animals (clearly modelled on the Sultan's Elephant) and a fantastic firework display.

I wasn't bothered that they chose to base the evening on a theme other than Guy Fawkes; it was simply an interesting vehicle around which to hang the lights, sounds and fireworks.

So, Tower Hamlets Council, you know I can't approve of your frittering away my money in such a cavalier fashion but, given that you did, I'm glad you spent it this way rather than on yet another dull bonfire and firework party. 

I am economically literate!

(Apparently)

via the ASI's Blog Review 37, we find The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis' Economic Literacy Test.

I scored 13 out of 13. Phew!

SOA Tips 'n' Tricks

Chris and Andrew have launched a new blog, SOA Tips 'n' Tricks. It is dedicated to discussion of - and advice on - how to get the best out of the products in IBM's SOA portfolio.

It's looking good already.

Great idea, guys...

I must take issue with the name, however. As English is a living language, we should respect de facto punctuation rules. As Guns N' Roses taught us all those years ago, the correct name for the blog should be Tips N' Tricks.  Tut.

So, lose the initial apostrophe and capitalise the 'n', guys. Forget what you were taught at school and feel the ROCK!

Crossing a busy railway concourse

I described how to avoid crashing into strangers without slowing down several months ago. Although I have yet to receive any international prizes for contributions to conurbial efficiency, I think it is just a matter of time.

However, my technique involves a large amount of lurching and corner turning. Could, I wondered, there be a solution to the problem that does not involve such gymnastics?

I was given reason to consider this problem when I was at London Waterloo earlier this week.

The problem at Waterloo is that the underlying assumption in my earlier solution does not hold. In my previous solution, the assumption was that you are fighting against a crowd that is walking in a uniform direction (directly at you, in fact)

At Waterloo, by contrast, people act as if they are acting out a random walk (indeed, I'm fairly sure that most of them are there solely to get in the way of others). People are milling around by the departure boards, people are walking to and from the stairs to the underground, people are walking to and from the platforms and between the platforms and the ticket machines and the shops. Other people are carrying precariously balanced cups of coffee as they massage their ticket out of their wallets to avoid stopping as they approach a ticket inspector.   And while all this chaos is unfolding, the incessant beep, beep, beep of electric buggies and clank of rubbish carts is pervasive.

What, readers, is one to do?

The solution, counter-intuitively, may be to disregard the advice of my earlier result and, instead, resolve never, ever, to change direction. Instead, modulate your speed. That is: as you see the other station users inconsiderately embark on paths that will cross yours, make no attempt to divert. Instead, slow down (or speed up) in order to ensure your paths do not cross.

I have tried it (once) and it almost worked.

Therefore, I'm pretty sure I'm on to a winner here.

Mine your own business

I was in Westminster last night to view an IEA-organised screening of a new documentary on the "dark side of the environmentalist movement", called "Mine your own business".

It has been described (as Tim Worstall points out) as "using a style reminiscent of Michael Moore, whose film Fahrenheit 9/11 lampooned the Bush administration"

The Telegraph reported that the film-maker, Mr McAleer, "lured environmentalists into making statements that were false or patently ridiculous."

I think that's a little unfair. These people were not tricked; they were jaw-droppingly, outrageously dismissive of the desires, hopes and needs of those they were claiming to speak for and were unashamedly brazen in doing so: they really did believe that they knew best, that they knew better than the locals. In other words, they were acting as imperialists of the worst kind.

I thought the documentary would have benefitted from slightly tighter editing (a few minutes could have been cut out), some of the subtitling needed proof-reading and I think the film-makers made a mistake making their biases so clear so early in the film.

But none of this detracts from the valuable purpose this film served: regardless of which side of any developmental argument one stands on, it was important to see a rebuttal (however flawed) of the core arguments rolled out whenever a major project (such as a mine) is proposed.  I suggest supporters of WWF or other environmental charities watch this film: it may challenge some of your beliefs but, even if it doesn't, you will at least be equipped with better ideas on how your leaders should present themselves in public :-)

Richard's Economic Beliefs Questionnaire

I've long wondered why it is possible for people to hold utterly opposite views on matters that are resolvable by examination of evidence.

A classic example is whether top-down, centralised, redistributive economies are better than decentralised, competitive free-market economies.

Without having to provide examples of "pure" examples of either, there are enough examples along the continuum to tell us which works best.

And then it dawned on me... perhaps the anti-free-marketeers are actually arguing about another point.

So here's my thought experiment.

Imagine two possible countries (not based on real ones; please don't debate whether such places exist!):

• Country one: everybody earns £2,000 per year - total equality
• Country two: the poorest earn £10,000 per year and there is a range of incomes up to mind-bogglingly large salaries - great inequality but even the poorest are better off than those in country one.

Which would you rather live in?

My suspicion is that free-marketeers would vote for country two because everybody is richer than in country one and that those opposed to economic liberalism would vote for country one because of the gross inequality in country two.

Have I characterised this correctly?

The Tragedy of the once-great DLR continues

The Docklands Light Railway taught me a useful lesson today: just because you think things can't get any worse, it doesn't mean they won't.

The warning signs were there this morning. I had meetings in Bedfont today so passed through Bank on my way to Waterloo (and on to Feltham). The DLR's Eastbound platform was utterly packed - far more so than normal. I chuckled to myself at all those poor people whose journey to work takes them with the flow rather than my journey which, more often than not, takes me against the flow and so makes for a more pleasant experience. Ha!

I shouldn't have been so smug. I left Bedfont earlier than normal this evening as my meetings were over and I could do the rest of my work from home. This meant I was passing through Bank at rush hour.

I walked right into Serco's latest masterpiece: somebody in their head office has discovered combinatorics.

I have previously blogged about recent DLR failures due to train failure, points failure and signal failure.

Well, they're moving onto combinations of excuses now. This evening's calamity was the result of: "signal failure caused by a previous train failure".

Genius!

How to deal with an annoying colleague...

Courtesy of HereIsTheCity.com, a warning about what can happen if you push your colleague just a little bit too far...

SOA Facts

Courtesy of Andy, a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to the basic tenets of Service Oriented Architectures......

(I think this is an example of what people sometimes call "humour"... but I'm not sure...)

Whatever next? Think Tank conferences in Second Life

Via the Stockholm Network, I learn of a forthcoming public policy institute seminar in Second Life.

"Eudoxa, a think tank dedicated to describing the effects of emerging technologies and their societal impact is therefore organizing a seminar on public policy issues. Director Waldemar Ingdahl will discuss how virtual worlds impact on economics, on entertainment and politics and how they open up for a host of new opportunities for interaction. How can public policy groups and activists use virtual world? Can virtual worlds improve local democracy? The seminar will be held on Uvvy Island in the virtual world Second Life (please read more on its webpage at http://uvvy.com/index.php/Uvvy_island_in_SL) on Friday November 3rd at 19h00 Central European Time (13h00 EST, 10h00 PST)"

London Underground Geographic Maps

Redmonk's James Governor points to this fantastic collection of maps of the London Underground that would have Harry Beck turning in his grave....

[Update 2006-11-01 15:09 My colleague, Cameron, also recommends this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-Out-Tube-Map/dp/1899743014]

Hypochondriacs of the world unite

Government intervention in a sphere of life is rarely desirable and the UK's National Health Service is an excellent example. (My take: completely separate commissioning/procurement of health services from provision. Argue about the role of the state in the former and accept the manifest obviousness of the need for private responsibility for the latter).

However, every so often, something good comes out of it. Browsing for information on something completely different, I discovered the NLH Question Answering Service.

It appears to be a beta but for the even mildly hypochondriac, there is a lifetime's worth of diseases to worry about. Excellent :-)

Firefox 2.0 backlash begins

Slashdot is reporting on problems with Firefox 2.0.

I like the new look of Firefox 2.0 but I can't say I've noticed any other noticeable improvements.

I have noticed new problems, however.

The one that is annoying me most is that, sometimes when I open a new tab the keyboard focus does not move to the address bar. Sounds trivial but is actually infuriating.

I still use Firefox as my default browser but IE7.0 is certainly going to give them a run for their money.

Oracle?

My first job at IBM was in the development organisation at the Hursley Lab. The claim back then was that if Hursley was a software company in its own right it would be the fifth or sixth biggest in the world. The story then went on that IBM Software Group was the second biggest overall (after our friends in Redmond).

I was surprised, therefore, when I read this IBM press release last week. Look at the last paragraph:

"Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company"

Yes. That quote really did appear on an IBM Press Release. I did a double-take at the time and promptly forgot about it.

Well... John Simonds in SWG Analyst Relations has just pointed out something interesting... 

"IBM Software Group Surpasses Oracle in SW sales to become Number 2"

So... perhaps the press release was right after all. Oracle may, indeed, have overtaken us at some point.

Good to know it was only a temporary aberration :-)

New Twenty Pound Note

Woo! If BBC News 24 is to be believed, Adam Smith will replace Elgar on the Twenty Pound note from the middle of next year.

Nothing from Madsen and Co yet..... am sure they'll have something to say about it tomorrow :-)

I started reading Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" earlier this year. I found it pretty hard going and ground to a (temporary!) halt about half way through.

What I managed to read by that point, however, was astonishing... his insight into incentives and the nature of markets is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it.

What amazes me, however, is not how relevant he is but the extent to which people who should know better choose to ignore him.

[EDIT 2006-10-29 22:34 Report now on BBC online]

I think I may *finally* understand Comparative Advantage

As Tim Worstall points out, the principle of comparative advantage may well be the only non-obvious, non-trivial result in the social sciences.

The idea is easy to state: even if you are better than somebody else at everything, it may still be beneficial to trade with them. The reason why is explained here.

Café Hayek continues to be on the first blogs I turn to in my newsreader each day and Don Boudreaux has an enviable talent for rendering economic arguments in ways that one can readily understand.

Early Binding vs Late Binding

I was asked a good question by a reader of my recent developerWorks article today.

The question was about WebSphere Process Server's support for late binding. This is a powerful feature that allows multiple versions of a business process template to be "live" in a system at the same time.

This means that you can deploy a new version of a process (e.g. to change how you handle a special case or to reflect a new offering) without having to worry about whether this will mess up the currently executing processes; they'll continue to run according to the original definition.

The question I was asked was, in essence: "I've tried it and it doesn't work. What gives?"

If you find yourself in a similar position, the trick is to remember that sometimes you don't want late binding.  As soon as you realise this, the solution becomes clear.... if there are two alternatives, there must be a way to specify what you want!

For the sake of brevity, I will assume you are familiar with Process Server and will not explain my terms... the rule of thumb to use is: "if you wire two components together using an SCA wire, you'll get early binding. If you invoke a process using the BPC API, you'll get late binding". Easy :-)

Can you see what it is yet?!

Diamond Geezer has a fantastic quiz on his blog today.

Using the principle that tube maps distort reality, can you apply a bit of mental manipulation to determine which tube lines are represented by each of these diagrams?

The pictures are well worth a look even if you don't participate in the quiz :-)

Answers in the comments to his post.

[EDIT 2006-10-25 00:03: Diamond Geezer has pointed out in the comments to this post that including his image directly in my post is probably a little impolite. I've removed it but urge you to look at his post anyway... it's rather cool]

I've just about had it with the DLR

We have a new excuse today.....  having exhausted "train failure", "signal failure" and "points failure", the excuse for my aborted journey on the DLR this morning was "Train stuck in tunnel". Classic.

I wonder if my email to cservice@dlr.co.uk will receive a reply.

 

Dear Sir,

I have been a regular user of the DLR for several years now and have had nothing but good things to say about it. Its reliability, frequency of service, cleanliness and speed has been exemplary.

However, over the last couple of months, reliability has been appalling.  My journeys have been disrupted by points failures, signal failures, train failures and more. Today was a classic example: I understand one of the trains in front of mine got stuck in the tunnels at Bank. I had to detrain at Shadwell and use the East London Line instead.

Can you let me know what you are doing to remedy this precipitous drop in the quality of the service you offer please?

Thank you,

Richard Brown

[EDIT: 2006-10-25 22:41 - I received a reply from Serco within 24 hours. It didn't answer my points directly but  did acknowledge that there had been problems recently and that they're trying to improve things. Top marks for responsiveness]

Speaking of ideas...

The other day, Andrew was musing on the importance of patents to IBM and other technology companies.

It would appear that Amazon are about to learn more about such things...

I wish somebody had told me this before we bought the flat...

It would appear that the borough I live in (and have lived in for the last two and a half years) is the second worst place to live in the UK.

I'd love to know what criteria were used to come to this conclusion. Having one of the most breathtaking river walks in London, being home to Canary Wharf and imposing minimal journey times to central London makes this a remarkably pleasant place to live.

(Yes, yes.... I know.... not all of Tower Hamlets is as nice as the bit I live in.... but even so.... I know of some pretty unpleasant places elsewhere in the country...)

Looks like I was a day early...

It's unfortunate that this story appeared in the Evening Standard rather than a paper that supporters of the BBC would find harder to dismiss but, if its contents are true, it confirms everything I suggested only yesterday.

Flower pots

My parents were down this weekend. For such a short trip, we managed to pack a lot in

A walk along the Thames to do a spot of book buying with my father, dinner at Plateau (Andrew's customer service ranking system should know that we enjoyed it and the service was good... discreet, efficient and effortlessly professional when they corrected the only mistake they made) and a rather unplanned trip to the garden centre.

We managed to turn the previously barren patio into the early stages of a real garden: multiple silver plantpots, 450 litres of compost, jasmine, lavender, black grass, passion flower, skimmia, ivy and multiple tulip and daffodil bulbs. The extravagance even extended to my purchasing a cordless power "hammer-action" drill. Those who know me will confirm that purchasing power tools is not how I typically spend a weekend. I'll be putting up shelves next...

Downsides of SOA

Gerhard Poul makes some good points about SOA.

He mentions several things to be aware of (referential integrity, availability, governance, etc, etc).

His first two points are worth emphasising.

SOA allows powerful composite applications to be created: combining new logic with functionality provided by other systems is a compelling proposition.

But, as I've stressed to several clients, there are also challenges you need to address.

The first is availability: the availability window of a composite application is the intersection of the availabilities of the systems upon which it is critically dependent. Crucially, the intersection is not the union and it is not the average.  Take note.

The second challenge is related to Data.  Gerhard talks about referential integrity but you need to think about more than just this.

The simplest example of what you need to think about is: "how do you do a join across two web services?"

Example problem: you have one table in a database that contains all customers' account balances and another contains their addresses. How do you produce a list of all customers in London with a balance of $1000 or more?

Joining across two tables is easy in a relational database

Products like WebSphere Information Integrator let you join across different data sources (neat!)

But, if you naively "do SOA" by providing a "get customer addresses" service and a "get customer balance" service (and nothing else), you'll have a tough time solving the problem.

The consequence of this is nothing surprising: you need to expose reusable services at a suitable granularity, you need to use the right tool for the right jobs and, most importantly, you need to remember that SOA is not a magic wand that magically makes the last forty years of computer science irrelevant... all the benefits the marketing folks talk about are real but there is still a need for thoughtful architects and designers!

Viral Labyrinthitis

A relative has just come down with viral labyrinthitis.  Nightmare!

Some of the online articles suggest antiviral medication might have a role to play in improving the symptoms and lowering the risk of long-term hearing loss.

Anybody know if this is true and what antivirals the doctor should be asked about?

About Time

There is a cosy consensus in the UK that our state broadcaster (funded by a regressive tax on all television owners) is utterly, unimpeachibly, unbiased.

This is, of course, nonsense but it's often hard to prove.

The guys at Biased BBC do a good job of highlighting the "stealth edits" of BBC News online articles, the degree to which interviewers on "Today" give interviewees a hard time and much more.

However, a potentially even more interesting new service has just started up: "News Sniffer" does a couple of things but one of the most important is spotting all the times that the BBC edit an article on their website without changing the "last updated" timestamp.

From a quick glance, most of the edits are minor corrections and clarifications but the service will come into its own when a contentious issue is in the news.

IBM Bloggers

I've only just noticed this useful feed: it aggregates the blogs of all the IBMers who have identified themselves as bloggers.  I suspect the traffic will be overwhelming but it could be useful for a browse

Technorati tags: ibm, blog, feed, aggregation

Jumping cursor

Ever since I took possession of my ThinkPad T60p, it has suffered from an infuriating fault.  When I am typing, occasionally, and without warning, the cursor will jump to somewhere else in the document.  Sometimes it will even jump somewhere else and highlight a chunk of text at the same time.  This means I can be typing quickly and inadvertently delete a sentence from three paragraphs earlier in the document.

It drives me insane.

I figured out the problem today. My trackpoint (the red nipple) was configured to support "Press-to-Select".

I must have been brushing past it as I typed and making it think I had clicked the mouse. So, the insert cursor was jumping to wherever the mouse was positioned - and highlighting a section if it sensed that I was pressing for a longer period of time as I brushed over it.

The solution was simple

Control Panel -> Mouse -> Ultra-Nav Tab -> TrackPoint Settings -> Deselect "Enable Press-to-Select"

Phew!