The two things above are reasons for the quiet time: I’m on vacation, and it being summer I’m trying to stay as far away from all things electronic (except my camera) as possible for the upcoming couple of weeks – so don’t expect too many updates for a while.
Instead, get out enjoy the summer! (And to those who are Down Under: your winter isn’t all that bad either. In fact, it’s about as warm and sunny as our summer..)
I’m way behind in writing reviews of the things I’ve read over the past months, so let’s start with a quick review of this one. I know the topic is kind of strange when you consider what kind of books I’ve read otherwise, but being work-related and written of a fairly interesting topic I thought I’d review this also.
REST (or the abhorrent full term Representational State Transfer), in case someone doesn’t know, is a style of software architecture. As a sort of an architectural paradigm, it’s a difficult thing to really describe so I won’t even try – read the Wikipedia article and the relevant links from there for a quick tutorial.
Considering REST is, at its core, a very simple thing, one would think that coming up with a 400+ page book about it is difficult. And it appears it has been, at least if 100% of it should be relevant – while RESTful Web Services serves as an excellent introduction to the topic, it’s at times painfully broadly written (as opposed to compact and neat). So in an effort to keep this review simple also, I’ll simply list the good and bad things about the book:
The good:
The bad:
All in all, RESTful Web Services is a good book that could’ve been even better had it been cut to 300 pages or so. For the uninitiated, it provides a good overview of what REST is, what can be done with it, how it should be used and why it’s an important concept. So it’s recommended reading for anyone who either is implementing services in the Internet or is interested in knowing how these things work – or at least should work.
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Now, onto a semi-related matter – why is it that some people in the ICT industry (especially the C part) seem to crave for complexity? If an API can be described in a single page, it’s immediately dismissed as it just looks too simple. If something isn’t standardized, it’s frowned upon. If things don’t come with a 2,000-page manual and/or specification (that nobody would read anyway), they obviously cannot be good, thoroughly thought-out solutions.
Can’t we just try to live and work by these words of Einstein:
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
In Web Services, this is where REST comes in. Adding SOAP and a bunch of WS-* standards until your mouth foams is just stupid. The Internet and other networks – and, quite frankly, the world – would be a much better place if unnecessary feature creep wasn’t so omnipresent.
Recently a business trip of a couple of days took me over to another new German city; Berlin. I had never been there before – though the city is filled with a lot of history, it never was a particularly desirable travel destination in my mind.
And it still isn’t.
Not that there’s something specifically wrong with the city, but in my short stay I didn’t find anything very appealing either. At 4 million people, the city feels geographically even bigger than that – the distances are long and as one local told me, going anywhere takes one hour. The downtown is somewhat spread out and split among different “centers”, some of the on the rise and others on the decline. Below is some photographic material from the walks I had time for in the evenings. Click to enlarge. Unfortunately the weather didn’t really co-operate with cloudy skies and even rain, so in reality the city will likely look much brighter and nicer and not so gloomy as in these photos.
A beautiful old church had taken some hits (supposedly during WWII) and has since been replaced by a hideously ugly concrete hexagon – in the picture below left the bell tower is on the left, the actual new church is on the right but equally ugly. From the inside even the concrete bunker was nice, but I still prefer the look of the old one. The one below right is of some completely different church.
The Brandenburg Gate was quite neat. The surroundings have a similar feeling as much of Berlin; there’s perhaps even too much space. Like the road leading to the gate; a very wide road with even wider sidewalks with heavy buildings on the side but few people around creates a somewhat sad atmosphere.
The Holocaust memorial was really the only mandatory sight that I specifically went to see; it’s a memorial the size of a city block, constructed of various size blocks. It doesn’t look all that impressive when you first see it, but as you start walking among the deepening corridors and rising blocks of rock it’s pretty powerful:
Potsdamer Platz was the newest area of the city, resembling the CBD of any modern big city. There was some life even in the evenings but mostly in the form of restaurants and cinemas.
One thing that there are too many of in Berlin are taxis. The airport is pathetically small for a city of 4 million but there are always hundreds of taxis waiting for customers. I was told that they can wait for hours for a single ride – and then they get a customer like me who goes on a 5-kilometer ride. I would normally have taken the subway, but there was none to the airport.
I never really understood why there are so many taxis if there aren’t enough customers for them all.
Despite the trip having gone well, returning home rarely felt as good as it did now. Usually a stand arrival is an annoying thing (especially when the airport is literally empty so there really is no reason for such a thing) but it turns out it can be quite pleasant on evenings when the entire airport is bathed in the golden light of the setting sun and the temperature is +23C.
Not a bad homecoming at all.
Nature lovers, move to the city!
(Note that this post is written from a Finnish perspective; namely, Helsinki is here considered as a ‘big’ city and all that. Oh, and the photos cannot be clicked or enlarged this time around.)
People often think that cities are concrete hells with no real way to get in touch with nature. They think that us poor city-dwellers are deprived of being in touch with nature.
That is so not true.
Unless, of course, one defines being in touch with nature as being in the middle of a forest, in which case this on the right is what you get: a forest, with the added bonus of mosquitoes and mites. Now how many different things can you do there? Hiking, maybe. Picking berries. Hard-core skiing in the winter. And … well, that’s about it. If you want to exercise, you’re going to have to drive somewhere, probably far away, where the facilities are located.
But in the city, the forests come with well maintained dirt paths that you can casually stroll or run along. Plus in addition to the forest, you get lakes, rivers, the sea, islands, parks etc in Helsinki. And not only in Helsinki; Boston, San Francisco, Vancouver and many other big cities are also very good when it comes to finding nature closeby.
Just imagine the range of sports that one can do: facilities for biking, running, tennis, badminton, golf, bowling, skiing, skating, rollerskating, windsurfing, playing football, kayaking.. you name it. Okay so one thing you cannot do is surf, but that’s a problem with the whole country and ranks right up there in the list of reasons why to move away. Anyway, back to the topic: the distances between sports venues are short and easily covered by walking, biking or public transportation – all of which are vastly more ecological options than driving 20km to the next sporting venue in the countryside. And not only are things close to each other, there’s always an ice cream kiosk, store or a cafe where you can go to get something to drink or eat if you feel like it.
Let’s take swimming for example. In the countryside, you have the option of swimming in one eutrophic lake if you’re lucky – or not swimming at all. In the Helsinki area, you can swim in the sea, lake, river or in a pool (outdoors or indoors), all within a single day if you like and all within a biking distance of each other. And the beaches are nice, like the one here on the right.
As a semi-related point, cars make people lazy. Once in an American hotel I questioned the concierge whether there was a restaurant within walking distance as I felt like walking and was hungry. She replied that “oh there are a few, but they’re at least half a mile away. Nothing within walking distance I’m afraid”. I thought it was just an American thing at work there, but turns out people who are too used to driving everywhere have similar attitudes whatever the country.
I used to think that people who live in the countryside are in generally good shape, don’t mind distances and all that. That also turns out to be not true – when the long distances mandate that people must have a car, they actually tend to get very lazy. Then you hear them complain in the city that “oh it’s such a long way there!” when they have to park the car a 100m or 200m from their hotel or a store or whatever. A 10-minute walk (one kilometer) is no longer considered “walking distance”.
Wow.
