You know an idea has reached critical mass when it’s the subject of an article in the Observer colour magazine.

Via Danny, a map of the WS-* universe. The navigation isn’t very Firefox friendly, but all the same, it’s a nice piece of work and has motivated me to revisit my own pet project to visualise the relationships between WS-* specifications and the people behind them.

Possibly inspired by the hat i brought back from Melbourne, Jed entered a picture of himself AKA “Aus Boy” to a painting competition.

We simply love the new VW GTI advert in which Gene Kelly break-dances in the rain. There’s a copy of the video here, if you haven’t seen it yet.

Stefan outs the analogy of the distinction between Choreography and Orchestration. I first heard this along with another analogy relating to a musical score from Steve Ross-Talbot in his lightning talk “I’ll name that tune in ..”. I came up with another analogy, which i’m not sure is any better, but here goes:

Orchestration is akin to traffic lights where events are controlled centrally, whereas Choreography is more like a roundabout, where each participant is following a prearranged set of rules.

Update:
#1 it’s Stefan, not ‘Steve’, d’oh!
#2 Jacek points out that a choreography is far more open ended than orchestration. Participants are encouraged to improvise, if you will.

The Kyoto Accord came into being today. Shame that the world’s biggest polluter is too busy chasing other windmills to bother joining.

Google Maps is without doubt very kwel and it’s amazing that it survived being slashdotted and OK it’s a beta, but you know it’s really hard to get excited when you’re not even on it ..

Update: Joel Webber reveals how it works.

Happy Pancake Day!

Radovan cites a suggestion that BPEL is infact WSIL - Web Services Implementation Language, fine except WSIL has already been taken. It seems we need someone to act as ICANN for Web services specs, so I nominate Robin.

In my perceived role as master of stating the bleeding obvious, I’d just like to point out that a URI is for “identifying an abstract or physical resource”, and doesn’t mandate the actual location or means of reaching said resource:

• When a browser does a GET on http://blog.whatfettle.com, does it open a socket to port 80 on the IP address resolved by the DNS address blog.whatfettle.com. Probably not if you’re behind a firewall.
• If your browser requests http://google.co.uk from http://google.com, will it get the page it expected? Possibly.
• If I “telnet localhost 80″ and type “POST mailto:santa@northpole.org HTTP/1.0^M”, will my message get through? Maybe, or at least according to Mark
• Oh, and when I give Amazon my home address, do I care which courier they use? Not really.

Of course all that ignores how you know where and how to switch protocols or locations. Let’s just say that’s a simple matter of configuration.

Note that I’ve also neatly ignored the whole “what is a resource” debate: a dog or a picture of a dog? As everyone on the WS-Addr WG now knows, a URI points to a Resource, and a resource is something identified by a URI, right?

Update: i composed this during the WS-Addressing telcon last night, about the same time Noah raised this new TAG issue.