"When you blow something up by a factor of one hundred, it gets weaker by a factor of one hundred. If you try to build a cathedral that way, it just collapses into a pile of rubble." - Alan Kay

Having spent time as both a "Software Engineer" and a Structural Engineer, I am always interested when key industry figures start comparing the two disciplines. Alan Kay's insight into one of the fundamental problems with software reminded me of the arguments over the use of the word "Engineering" for software.

"'Software Engineering' is something of an oxymoron. It's very difficult to have real engineering before you have physics, and there isn't anything even close to a physics for software" - L. Peter Deutsch

The more I think about it, the more I can see what these guys are saying. Within the idiom, software isn't subject to the physical laws that govern structures.

For instance, about a decade ago, I was tasked with building the structural analysis model of the London Eye. As you can imagine, this included a very thorough consideration of the different combinations of force and load acting on the structure in order to calculate how much material was required for it to stand up. We considered over 200 different loadcases for self-weight, wind, people, motion, etc. but in all of them the major force was due to the self-weight of the structure. On average, about 90% of the material in that big wheel is only there to hold itself up.

This introduces some interesting approaches to the engineering solution. In these circumstances, if you have a large force to resist, you cannot just throw more material at it because you are just worsening the problem. Eventually the whole thing will fall down. One wonders what kind of software we would produce if, like London Eye steelwork, 90% of the code written did nothing apart from retain the structural integrity of the software. Without the constraints of gravity, won't we just keep on building and building?

I guess we apply some constraints to ourselves by using application frameworks such as Rails or Django, but the only real physical constraint on sheer volume of code I can see is factors such as disk space, processor speed, RAM, etc. And how many of us push our servers to that extent? Hmmmm.

Last week, I decided I needed some earphones that blocked out a bit more external noise than the ear buds that came with my iPod. A swift scoot through Amazon found some reasonable-looking Sennheisers. They are described as an "Eco" product because the packaging is 100% recyclable, and when they arrived, they were in a nice old-fashioned brown cardboard box with the product contained within a clever set of punched cardboard leaves. All well and good, gives you a nice warm glow as you toss the packaging into the recycle bin, etc.

However, while I was there, I thought I would stock up on a few seasons of "The Wire". So my order was two DVDs and one pair of "Eco" headphones. All to be sent from Amazon's Jersey warehouse. I didn't tick the "fast delivery" option. Yet they were all sent in separate packages, on the same day, and all arrived, in separate packages, two days later. What's the point of cutting down on product packaging if you're going to send everything individually? I applaud the initial effort, but didn't Amazon used to be able to put more than one thing in each box?

Integration with Active Directory and the client's own photo library produces comprehensive staff lists with minimal authoring. Extensive personalization features allow users to tag their favourite pages and subscribe to internal company blogs. Employees can even see the latest press coverage about the company, listed on the intranet homepage.

To meet the client's timescales, we specified, built, installed and tested the application within an intense two-month period. We are very pleased with the results, and look forward to seeing how the system is used and extended in the future.

It was cool to see the Bordeaux Law Courts were presented. I was lucky enough to do some work on this one and being inside the court rooms themselves remains one of the most incredible architectural experiences of my life. I particularly enjoyed some of the documents in the exhibition - it's really weird looking at concept and scheme design proposals for iconic buildings like the Pompidou Centre or Lloyd's of London.

It also reminded me of something that I used to take for granted in building design, but I rarely come across in the web. The thing about buildings this big is that they are complicated. Luckily, architects and engineers quickly become very adept at explaining pretty involved ideas with sketches. It was really nice to see some high-quality visual communication.

However, for me the real star of the show was actually a presentation method that I have never seen before. It was essentially an animated plan diagram of an urban planning scheme that was animated to show building usage, travel links, services, sun shading, etc. What really set it out was it being presented on a horizontal flat display, with the buildings being represented in 3d by transparent glass blocks. When these things light up or seem to cast shadows, it really is very impressive stuff. I shot a grainy video of it, but it really doesn't do it any justice at all. I would recommend anyone making a trip to see this superb exhibition.

It has been very interesting to compare usage with coverage - while most of our referrals come from last.fm itself, this article in Read Write Web, a link from Tom Coates and the launch of last.fm's directory of external applications all provided some welcome spikes in traffic.

So what's next for the normaliser? To be honest, we were half-expecting last.fm to start doing their charts this way, but that doesn't seem to be forthcoming, so I guess the normaliser has a valid role going forward. Despite being pretty consistent since just after launch, we do listen to what people are telling us and we are due to make a few tweaks over the next few months.

The database is getting pretty big, and I would like to move it over to one of those new-fangled cloud storage services. Amazon SimpleDB is an option, but the limited querying would probably mean we would have to lose a few features (for instance, the stats). Microsoft's SQL Server Data Services will probably be a better bet, but we'll have to see if Redmond has finally understood mashups and made the service responsive enough. The marketing still uses phrases like "enterprise-class technology" that send shivers down my spine.

So, on balance, a good first year and we're looking forward to more of the same. Many thanks to all of you that have used the normaliser and especially those that have got in touch with us.

PS - The Favourite Artist News Yahoo Pipe isn't doing too badly either - over 75,000 runs since the end of November 2007.

The CMS is pretty clever too, supporting unlimited hierarchical pages, granular administrator permissions, full versioning and rollback, image management, microsites and all sorts of other modern time-saving devices.

We look forward to seeing how the new system will help the site grow, and hope Northdoor's users will reap the benefits of all the team's hard work.

The new PDF statements weren't being read properly by screen reader software - instead of reading across the rows of the statement, it was reading down the columns. It is possible to tweak PDFs to ensure that they are properly accessible to screen readers, but this requires a level of skill and attention to detail that most companies do not dedicate resources for.

Hopefully, coverage in the mainstream national press will help their customers' cause, and Amex have said they will fix the problem as soon as possible. Representatives from both Adobe and the Royal National Institute of Blind People were interviewed.

It is good to see web accessibility issues being covered by the mainstream press. Apparently, there are over 400,000 people registered blind or partially-sighted in the UK alone - a hefty proportion of any web site's audience. The article did mention the Disability Discrimination Act and legal action, but it is worth noting that in the majority of cases where the RNIB acts as arbiter, website owners successfully make changes to their site without recourse to the courts.

When the compere, a fella called Matthew Crosby, stood up and asked if any of the audience kept blogs, I broke one of my own rules and raised my hand. Having spent some toe-curling nights sat at the front of comedy gigs that had friends on the bill, being forced to "interact" with those on stage isn't my cup of tea. I don't know why I felt the need to pipe up.

Anyway, he asked what I blogged about. I said "Web Standards". Dunno why I picked on that particular aspect of the melange of stuff that goes on at this URL, but there you go. Anyway, web standards aren't the kind of thing that butters the average spoken word festival-goers muffin, so he quickly moved on. Phew. I at least managed to namecheck the site, and all publicity is good publicity, I guess. Other bloggers in the audience included a sustainability champion, a lady who writes Haiku about Japan and a techie/artsy/dataviz type.

Anyway, I thought that would be that and got on with enjoying the rest of the show. Trouble is, I'd broken cover hadn't I? At the next interval, the very considerate and jovial gentleman that was filming the event decided he'd ask me a few more questions. On camera. This hasn't yet appeared on the web, and I wouldn't let anyone know if it did.

Nor did the fun and games end there. At the end of the night I was called to the stage to appear in what seemed to be a competition for ginger blokes with beards. I didn't win.

I'm not sure what this whole experience says about blogging - whether it is now acceptably mainstream or still the preserve of the type of people who are stupid enough to pipe up at comedy gigs. I'm just glad its all over.

The world is clearly too complex to structure upfront... Structure on the fly is done by people adding structure as they use the service and by engines that automatically create structure from unstructured content... Innovation has slowed in the RDBMS world - with open source at one end and Oracle at the other, there is little reason to innovate - just when Semantic Web innovation is accelerating.

This is an interesting idea, but from a technical point of view I'm really not sure if it is relevant to the promotion of the semantic web. Anything that searches through lots of data needs some kind of index (even Google) and many of these indexes are stored in RDBMS platforms because they offer the quickest way of querying the data.

I would have thought that the growth of the semantic web relies on the search spiders gathering the structured data in a more intelligent way (e.g. recognizing microformats, etc.) and recording that in the index. The technical platform used to then query that index is almost irrelevant, as long as it does it quickly and accurately.

Even on an enterprise level, I honestly cannot see a situation in the near future where network and client computer speeds are quick enough to allow on the fly querying of thousands of documents stored on hundreds of machines. I think we'll still need that central index, and that it is probably the search spiders that need to improve the quality of the information they gather before the technical platform of the index requires updating.