Object Management Group Update

Cross-posting from my RTI blog:

Perhaps the most important milestone for DDS followers was the recommendation for adoption of the new specification Extensible and Dynamic Topic Types for DDS (sometimes abbreviated “DDS-XTypes”). I wrote about DDS-XTypes late last year; it will make it much easier for DDS users to upgrade and evolve their systems over time. It will also enable whole new categories of plug-and-play tools and integration components — such as database connectors, recorders, and bridging/routing services — to be developed in a way that’s portable and interoperable across DDS implementations, increasing the size and diversity of the DDS marketplace and increasing competition. RTI was a lead author of this specification, and a number of the capabilities defined in it are available in pre-standard form in RTI Data Distribution Service today.

Read the whole post here.

On Fate and Time Traveling

I just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife. It was hard to read but harder to put down; it is so beautiful and so sad. Perhaps to one but recently married this story of endlessly (no, not endlessly) losing and finding and losing love hits too close to home.

This passage especially caught my attention  (pages 76-77 in my edition):

"The choices we're working with here are a block universe, where past, present, and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted...; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it's all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway. ... And what do you vote for?"

Clare is silent. Her pragmatism and her romantic feelings about Jesus and Mary are, at thirteen, almost equally balanced. A year ago she would have said God without hesitation. In ten years she will vote for determinism, and ten years after that Clare will believe that the universe is arbitrary, that if God exists he does not hear our prayers, that cause and effect are inescapable and brutal, but meaningless. ... She shakes her head. "I don't know. I want God. Is that okay?"

I feel like an asshole. "Of course it's okay. That's what you believe."

"But I don't want to just believe it, I want it to be true."

Our world is very like Henry's and Clare's, and I have often had these same thoughts. When I was a teenager, I voted for determinism myself. And one day when I was 20, I enjoyed a beautiful morning full of sunshine and an afternoon of good conversation with my friends before learning that hours before, before I had even awoken that morning, someone close to me had been killed in an accident, and I knew indeed that cause and effect are brutal and are meaningless.

Yes, our worlds are very alike, but by grace we do not know it, because unlike poor Henry, we live our lives in one direction only, one moment following the next like pearls on a string, each one fresh and new and bright. Our wills to us seem free, for not knowing what the next moment will bring, we cannot tell the difference.

So rejoice in every borrowed choice; it is a gift. Take it gladly and with reverence as if the future really were yours to make how you would. For a story is not less true for being fictional nor less real when it is finished.

Oklahoma City: a Reminder

Today is the 15th anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, a Irish-American security guard. McVeigh was white, Christian, a natural-born U.S. citizen, and a veteran. He committed what is still the second-deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. His personal history is a solemn reminder that the struggle against terrorism is not a struggle against a particular country or a particular people or a particular religion. It is a struggle against violent extremism of any stripe, a struggle between those who believe in the rule of law and those who believe in vigilantism.

Getting in Touch with My Feminine Side

I have a dark and humiliating secret: I convinced myself to start reading the "Twilight" books -- and now I can't put them down.

In my favor, I do get a subtle urge to vomit whenever Bella refers to Edward as her "marble Adonis" or when she moons about how he's so dangerous but makes her feel so safe. (All my fellow nerds who have ever watched the perfect girl go off with Leather Jacket Guy, who's totally wrong for her, know where this feeling comes from.)

Unfortunately, that small point in my favor is utterly overthrown by this much greater and more emasculating one: I read the first two books in the series this past week. That's 1,000 pages of Twilight from Monday morning through late Friday night, or 12 and a half pages per waking hour.

...And this morning, I started book three.