Moving

I think I will move to angelic quotes

Google is taking over your couch.

It dawned to me that it is not M$oft vs Google really, this is a side effect or better yet a very well studied distraction so we do not focus our attention on the real issue. Google is talking over your couch !

The era of the might of the TV network is coming to an end slowly but steadily and irrevocably. It has become apparent that TV networks will or rather do follow the newspapers in an ever receding spiral. The Internet is taking over as the major couch pass time and that means who controls the net, controls the couch, controls the money and ultimately controls policy and decision making. But don't believe me, read Shirky's Here comes everybody to get a better grip of this momentous shift in habits.

What is all boils down to is that Google is gunning for the planet, all of it including all media , press , Net, TV and finally control of the flow of money. My guess is that AFTER they manage to control it, they will be broken down much like AT&T. Until then I think that I will switch to wordpress.

Pacmanization of the Internet users

Some time ago in a linkedin.com conversation I predicted that ISPs will be giving away PCs as long as their users will be paying their line charges. And it came to pass that Mobile ISPs are doing just that, at least here in Greece. Now Google trumped me. They are coming out with their own version of a net operating system.

Let's sit back for a moment and think of Google's offerings. Free email as long as they can process it. Free applications, as long as your data is within the Google cloud. Free browser, god knows how much data it is sending back to the cloud, and now an operating system. And Google is buying ISPs and fibers left and right. So they are swallowing the Internet and the people using it much like Pacman is swallowing the pretty dots.

In other words all, I repeat, ALL of your digital activity, be it searching, browsing, using applications, downloading, being on the internet what have you, will be controlled by a single company. But wait is it control we are talking about? No it is processing that we are talking about. The wealth of information gathered for each and every one of us is staggeringly valuable. I know of companies that would willingly kow tow to Google's management just to be privy to these figures. Marketing is just so much more efficient and effective with the aforementioned analytics, it is akin to reading our minds, or mails, pun intended.

I am just waiting for the first leak of misuse of this information , then the fireworks will be seen aplenty. Gawd they even swallowed this blogger.com site :-(

Οδηγίες προς Ναυτιλευομένους Γονείς

Εχω μια ιδέα για μιά νέα υπηρεσία και θα ήθελα τη γνώμη κάποιων απο εσάς που θα θέλατε να συμμετάσχετε. Ως γνωστόν έχω βγάλει το rautor σαν open source. Αυτό όμως δεν διευκολύνει καθόλου ενα μή τεχνογνώστη γονέα να προστατεύσει και να παρακολουθήσει τα παιδιά του απο την κακή χρήση του Internet.

Σκέφτηκα λοιπόν, στήνει κάποιος με resources (χρήμα κυρίως) ενα server όπου ο rautor μπορεί να αποστέλλει και αποθηκεύει τα screenshots κ.λ.π. Στο τέλος κάθε μήνα ή όποτε επιλέγει ο εκάστοτε γονέας, μπορεί να του αποστέλλεται ένα CD όπου να είναι καταγεγραμμένη η εν λόγω χρήση μαζί με τον RautorViewer. Υπάρχουν διάφορα νομικά ζητήματα αλλά πιστεύω πως ξεπερνώνται.

Επιπροσθέτως έχω και άλλο ένα μικρό προγραμματάκι που προηγείται του opendns ενός ή δύο ετών. Το kidmon που μπορείτε να το βρείτε στο site μου, κλειδώνει τον υπολογιστή να χρησιμοποιεί ένα συγκεκριμένο proxy. Το proxy αυτό λοιπόν μπορεί να κάνει και φιλτράρισμα περιεχομένου ώστε να περιοριστεί τα downloads των κακόβουλων σελίδων.

Ιδέες / σχόλια ;

Προσοχή: ο rautor αυτή τη στιγμή έχει ήδη τη δυνατότητα session upload αλλά μόνο μέσω FTP που δέν είναι πρωτόκολλο ασφαλές για χρήση WAN. Αναπτύχθηκε για ενδοεταιρική χρήση όπου η πρόσβαση στο καλώδιο είναι περιορισμένη. Τη στιγμή που υπάρχει επικοινωνία μέσω WAN (adsl) η ασφάλεια παύει.

Mean Scores

MOS or Mean Opinion Score is the measure by which a VOIP call is categorized as good, bad, or all Greek to me, local pun intended. There are many good companies offering devices to measure this score and once upon a time they used to publish their algorithms too. I was budget strapped as always in this wonderful historic gutter I currently inhabit, so I went prowling the wires for an API or two.

I came across probably the most promising VOIP API ever , project pjsip. PJsip is extremely well documented and provides samples of working code too, and compatible with asterisk to boot. So I spent a fortnight toying with the sample apps and test coding and this and that and following diff booted itself to life.

So now one can make a test call against an Asterisk server, have the server playback some or any recorded message and at the end of this conversation you get various metrics and the MOS score. The exact mechanics of this approach I leave to the interested students. A nice way to see if the application calculates meaningful scores is to freeze it ( on unix via ctrl-Z). This will effectively create an artificial UDP packet loss in the conversation between the two end points. Restart the application again and watch what happens to the MOS score !


To give credit where credit is due, the following code is an adaptation of Telchemy's algorithm which they used to have publicly available on their site.

Καταγραφή χρήσης του Internet απο τα παιδιά.

Το πρώτο μου blog post στα Ελληνικά !

Τον τελευταίο καιρό τα ΜΜΕ έχουν δημιουργήσει αρκετό πανικό για την παιδική πορνογραφία και παιδοφιλία μέσω Internet. Το αποτέλεσμα είναι οι περισσότεροι γονείς, και ειδικά οι μή τεχνογνώστες, να είναι πλέον παρανοϊκοί για την χρήση του Internet από τα παιδία τους.

Κάθισα λοιπόν και σκέφτηκα: τι θα ήθελαν τα MME και η Κα. Μαρία να έχουν για να κοιμούνται ήσυχοι πως τα παιδιά τους δεν κάνουν κάτι ανησυχητικό στο διαδίκτυο ? Το αποτέλεσμα ήταν να γράψω το πρόγραμμα project rautor. Το rautor κρατάει τις οθόνες (screen dumps) των λειτουργιών που έχει κάνει ο χρήστης του υπολογιστή, τι πλήκτρα έχει πατήσει καθώς και ότι δυνατόν περιεχόμενο έχουν τα παράθυρα της οθόνης. Ο γονέας μπορεί μετά να ξαναπαίξει σε μορφή video όλη τη συνεδρία (session) του χρήστη/παιδιού.

Πώς όμως να με εμπιστευτεί η Κα. Μαρία ή ο εκάστοτε δημοσιογράφος, πως δεν παρακολουθώ εγώ κρυφά αυτά που καταγράφει το πρόγραμμά μου; Ο rautor είναι πλέον πρόγραμμα ανοιχτού λογισμικού. Μπορεί ο καθένας με τις ανάλογες γνώσεις να το πάρει και να διαβάσει τι κάνει, και αυτό ελπίζω να είναι αρκετό...

Toot toot: that's my own horn!

Allow me the vanity to toot my own horn for a post. I live in Greece among denizens who are mostly paranoid about the use of the internet. There has been a lot of hullaballoo on the local media of child porn and child abuse cases that have happened with the aid of the internet. So parents, rightfully to a point, are suspicious.

So I started thinking, what would Mme. Maria like to have so she could sleep with the knowledge that her kid is not accosted online ? I came up with the auditor solution, i.e. save a full copy of the kid's session including screen copies, key strokes and quite everything I could get of the PC. So I sat down and wrote rautor. It will save all of the above info and the parent can then replay like a video the user's/child's session.

Now being that Mme. Maria is paranoid, why would she trust me that I am not eavesdropping with my code ? So I have made it available on line on project rautor. I hope this will be enough to quell the paranoid streak in the average home keeper.

I have also another little 'stein in the works. A little tray application that forces browsers to use a certain proxy for browsing. This way one can deploy a content filtering proxy like dansguardian and with the aid of "kidmon" can sleep easy that the kids will not browse offending content.

Now all I need is someone to finance deployment.

Yourstruly was truly prescient ?

Hark ye all seekers of IT's wisdom and listen to the sequel of the true story I have recounted so far for you.

After the ghastly daemon mysqld (d for daemon) was thwarted back to subservience, Yourstruly had some free time to cast about his star charts and do some cthonic calculations. Lo and behold the abacus revealed a well hidden bottomless pit. The red ink lined pit of corporate terror. The almost cabalistic numbers showed that the castle was losing approximately one Eyr per prepaid card sold. Yourstruly knew that the chief of crooks and manhandlers wanted to enter the market so he was selling at almost cost. Unfortunately he had not foreseen the counter-allied castle that was collecting our calls and receiving monies for that aforementioned collection. That fee was never drawn with red ink , but the total was drawn to the red ink pit.

Yourstruly raised his considerable brow in disbelief and fired off an imp with a warning eee-mail to the chief of crooks and manhandlers as well as the castle treasurer. Time went by and cards were sold and Yourstruly kept reminding people of the numbers to no effect at all.

Suddenly one cold and harshly lit morning the inquisition was illuminated. They slithered down to Yourstruly's officium collecting the treasurer within their mass and in a single chorus announced a full inquisition on why the castle was grossing big , yet losing Eyrs. We have lost nearly two lakh of Eyrs this past month they chanted in unison. Upon hearing that Yourstruly took upon himself the semblance of an innocent child and asked: Perchance has our castle shipped twenty myriads of far talking cards within this period? Perplexed was the Inquisition that Yourstruly had such insightful knowledge of the daemonic ways of the treasury.

Undaunted and full of its status and powers to twist hands, the inquisition started to ask for charts and reports, so Yourstrully started to script scriptures on bashed shells and talk the arcane language of See and QueL. The deamon mysqld (d for daemon) upon hearing his native language of See and QueL responded gladly. Reports were presented, drawn and redrawn , and pressed and imp-mailed. And Yourstruly was discovered to have an red ink drawing insect in his code and was chastised. Yet the small insect was not enough to blanket the elephant of losses. Report after report , chart after chart, incantation after incantation it became clear that the loss was about one Eyr per card. Upon realizing that, the inquisition unrolled into a fog and vanished into thin air, leaving yourstruly's abacus reset, just in case.

Vocabulary
==========
Eee-mail: Imp delivered mail, imps go eee while traveling through the twists of the castle's metal wires.
Infernal/cthonic calculations: Mostly multiplication and addition, simple stuff really.
Eyr: oh come on !
The chief of crooks and manhandlers: The manager of the sales team.
The treasurer: The CFO
Yourstruly: Yours Truly
Myriad: Greek for One Hundred hundreds
Lakh: Hindu for ten myriads.
Bashed shells: a wink at the unix wizards.

supercalifragilisticexpialidociouly fried disk controller

No modern IT is not supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, most definitely not.

As I write theses words all hell has broken lose in the data center. A SUN cluster lost a filesystem; again! So here I am stuck at one o'clock in the morning babysitting a failed disk controller, waiting for replacement parts. There has to be a better way to store data than arrays of spinning metallic plates with magnetic overlays. What the hay, it is the 21st century! Where is my holographic optical storage prisms? Where are the brilliant inquiring kids with the diamond sharp minds to think and built such finery?

Why is it that we drive our kids to an MBA or law degree ? It is just for the money, so they can have a "good" life. So after thirty (30 !) or more years of studying a "successful" medical student ends up injecting toxins into hags' eyebrows to make them look like facsimiles of frozen nymphs' statues. If that is the culmination of a successful life path then we certainly deserve what we live through day in and day out.

Come on, let us educate more scientists so they can cerebrate the cool things that would make our lives and jobs fun again. Let's train engineers to built them and humanists to keep a tight leash on us all before we go completely bonkers.

Kali-sthenics

Recently a business partner asked me how on Earth I make time to do so many things like writing applications in languages like Java, running my shop, caring for the security , etc.

My answer is today's post: "I spent three years training my team of engineers to be my eight right hands. That gives me ample time to freely use my corporeal own two hands."

Spread the knowledge. Giving pays back handsomely.

Bubble bobble economics

Anyone knows of the bubble bobble game? Two sugary cute dinosaurians hurl colored bubbles to a multi-hued sky comprised almost totally by blocks and impositions or other pretty bubbles. The aim is to bust ( note the word ) , coalesced groups of same colored balloons. If you miss too many times to match colors the sky falls down upon you and Game Over.

Now lets do a gedanken experiment. Replace in your mind's eye the dinosaurs with government functionaries or central bankers if you feel like going extreme. Replace the colored bubbles that are being hurled to the sky with measures to increase trade, safeguard jobs, business incentives etc. Replace finally the bubbly sky with your view of the global economy, say one bubble for the internet boom, one for the real estate, one for the e-security bubble, one for the telecoms bubble and so forth and so on. Add a few roadblocks to spice things up, say protectionism, racketeering, cronyism what have you. Now do you get the picture of the global economy? It is in a trully bubbly state and I am not talking about champagnial effervescence.

The dinosaurians together with various other orders of the reptilian phylum, are hard at work tossing up as many pearly textured balloons as they can, trying to bust bubbles at a controlled rate. The multi-billion dollar question is: do they have what it takes not to bring the firmament down on us all ?

Since I am on the subject, allow me to finish with this note. This current crisis that we are living, in the year two thousand and nine, is yet another bubble. This particular one is a nasty one. As it inflates and travels towards the cutesy bubbly sky, it pushes away people's livelihoods and rights . It compresses adjacent bubbles of income and squeezes people out of breath and stamina. It crushes patience and humanity out of us and makes us all afraid , very afraid. It's ultimate function as a fear inducer has exceeded its expectations by far, and as the Bene Gesserit say: Fear is the mind killer, fear is the little death ...

LDAPsearch no more

I am impressed, no I really am, I mean it, really. I downloaded the Apache Directory Studio and was struck dumb. To understand why that was I have to take you to a drive down memory lane.

I have designed,developed and supported much of the structure of modern Greek e-mail systems. While at HOL, I designed at least three different customer e-mail subsystems all around an LDAP cluster, one for corporate customers, one for retail and a few for Virtual ISPs utilizing HOL as a platform. Currently at my work in Vivodi I have migrated the aging stand stand alone vpopmail system to a dynamic parallel system around an LDAP infrastructure. I even discovered that the way I created user accounts is now called two-stage commit.

All of the above work was done mostly by paper and pencil and typing at the command line of linux consoles. Anyone who has used a command like the following will appreciate my chagrin.
ldapsearch -x -h ldapserver -W -D cn=root,o=top -b o=top objectClass=qmailUser
No I am not a masochist, I did not enjoy this kind of work a single bit.Yet I learned so much from it that now I can use an ADS to do single sign on across all my data centers, but that is another story. I tried using some ready made tools like phpmyadmin and such , but they needed more hand holding than I did. Still the work was done and all was quiet once more.

Recently I was thinking along re-visiting the ldap designer issue when a colleague mentioned the Apache Directory Studio. One download later and I was dumbstruck. These people at the Apache Foundation deserve all the kudos they get. The application is seamless, transparent, easy to use and powerful. It has a bit too flamboyant an interface but beats the socks out of scrolling back your terminal to review base64 encoded ldap entries. I was so impressed that I have decided to review even my dislike for java. The application is written in java and it's great. Who knows I just might sit down and learn that old language.

Kudos, congratulations, salutations and three cheers. Keep up the good work people.

Tireless Innovation sprach

There is so much hullaballoo about innovation, innovative approaches, innovation coaching, inno this , inno that, so much so that I get dizzy. PHD candidates and managers alike are trying to quantify and categorize what is this property called innovation.

Well it follows some of the footsteps of decades past in the quest for what quality is. Anyone of the old timers who has read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig, will probably understand what I am referring to.

There are elusive qualities in the software running between our ears. Sometimes we can box them up and sell them, so we become entrepreneurs or coaches. Sometimes we can just point at the way in which case we are termed gurus and teachers. One such teacher is Marvin Minsky of the famed MIT A.I. lab. I believe that he has captured the essence of innovation in an interview in a greek Magazine about twenty years ago.

Dr Misky said something like: "I enjoy surprising myself by the way I think of old problems". And as far as I am concerned that is the true essence of innovation.

No rooting for tooting one's own horn

Eric S. Raymond is a legend in both the Unix and the open source worlds, and published author of hacker fame. Actually I am the proud owner of first edition of The new hacker's dictionary. Sometime ago Eric published the Art of Unix Programming which I promptly bought and shelved.

Recently having found myself in a nostalgic mood , I started reading it in the twilight hours of the morning. This is the only quiet time that I have when the family is sound asleep, the time right before I have to don my battle suit and tie and head of to work.

I must admit that I am disappointed not by the prose or the data or even the advice embedded in this book. It is an exquisite work in its own right, full of facts and sage advice. Alas I am put off by Eric's constant not so subtle tooting of his own horn. In more that half a dozen places in the book the case studies contain parts or design concepts of fetchmail. Fetchmail is a "robust" to quote its author batch mail retrieval program which incidentally has been authored by Eric himself. Don't get me wrong, fetchmail is nice and dandy and it works, but come on dude, it appears so often in the book that my head started spinning. After a while it really put me off from reading any further a book that I almost enjoyed.

Another major miss of the book is the audience that it is supposed to attract. Quite frankly I find no audience for it. I, like old time unix hackers are mostly privy to the information in this book, so theoriticaly I did not have to buy it, yet I did in the fashion of a must have cultural/religious object. After reading through it for a number of days I asked myself, is this book of use to more people than our cabal ? As much as I hate to admit it I had to give a negative answer. It reads like a missionary statement of the church of unix, and as everybody knows missionary vocalizations are not easily digestible. That prevalent us vs them attitude that suffuses the book will drive away even users that have been badly singed by the devil, you know that Seattle corporation.

Eric if you happen to read this blog, you have done great work but this falls short of my expectations , and I expect of others as well.

Slowdown's UpBeat Rythm not Blues

This economic downturn cum recession is absolutely horrendous, yet there are ways a creative mind can use this slowdown to one's advantage in a simple upbeat fashion.

Every IT department that I have worked in has a number of servers and services that were set up in hurry and then abandoned to fester. This slow decay inexorably leads to outdated services and constant moaning of what the company would prefer to have as weapons against the competition. Since the department now has ample time due to lack of fresh projects, it is a fine time to do the laundry , finally!

Re-install a fresh OS, re-install new versions of spam checkers, virus checkers, etc. Consolidate services and servers, eliminate sprawl and save on hardware. Use the hardware you saved to create new services. Eliminate unnecessary trials that have failed and no one seems to care enough to take down. etc. etc. etc. The staff will be kept happy, busy and creative, and who knows, they might even come up with an idea for a service that out leaps the competition while thinking hard how to redo more with less.

Or you can sit on your ever expanding rears and berate your luck and bemoan your fate and await for the unavoidable which of course will come since you have precipitated its visitation by your inaction.

The absolute Leadership handbook

Not everybody can read ancient Greek, although I hear that it is becoming fashionable of late. For the rest of you barbarians* here is a link to an English translation from .

Now before spending your hard earned money to a leadership coach or an excellence mentor**, read the aforementioned text, unless of course your company is footing the bill in which case hit the buffet before digging into Plutarch's verses. Pay particular attention to Alexander's way of living,fighting, operating. He was respected by his troops because he shared hardships, yet he had the vision and drive. He was everyone's inspiration without being overly crass. He had a large retinue of that times scientist's. He punished ostentatious displays of wealth from his generals. The people he conquered he then respected enough not to brutalize and rewarded his troops enough to be comfortable but not lax. There is really so much there that I cannot even presume to elucidate a single paragraph of it, read it and that is an order.

Exercise for the student: Translate above snippet to MBA*** terminology.

* Barbarian: Don't be insulted, in antiquity the term referred to any non Greek. Later during Hellenistic times to non Greek speaker.
** Bill and Ted's excellent adventure is way more inspiring than any quacks out there.
***Meaningless Barbarian Annotations .

Who's your grand daddy

And now for a history lesson.

Go and get a copy of Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" and you will find out that he was not only a Roman Emperor but quite possibly the first ever blogger. The technology and medium were quite different, parchment that is, still the style and method are true to the blogger mentality.

Come to think of it blogging is not all that new. The act of jotting down notes and ideas has a very long history. It persists ever since the days of cave paintings to the modern era. The action of posting these ideas without requiring a couple of hundred copy monks is what defines modern blogging. Oh and the current ignominious simplicity of ideas and language used.

Season's mournful greetings

Happy holidays, peace and prosperity to all but most of all health for all the children of this world !

May Alex's soul rest in peace and may his murder be a beacon to all of us for the liberty we have lost.

You can't bribe an algorithm

Recently I read an interesting article on ./ called programmers are expensive. The author does have a valid point especially where he comments about the "silly optimization syndrome". This syndrome is a programmer affliction whereas a subject drills deeply down to the core of certain parts of the code while missing the trees, the avalanche about to engulf him and his idyllic brook and the mountain falling on his head just behind the afforementioned avalanche.

Still there is absolutely no way one can beat an algorithm or as us old timers call them "clever hacks". Let us have a thiniking experiment. Suppose you right code that uses SQL dbs for storage, and you use join statements often. Also suppose that the application suddenly needs near real time performance. How do you optimize your queries if one of the tables is small enough to fit in memory ? If we follow the "Throw money at the problem approach" we will definitely have some performance gain. Better disks, better CPUs, more ram. With each and every upgrade we will get a performance boost up to the abilities of hardware but no more. We still want better performance. Time to hack!

antecedent 1) Each join statement is an N*M cartesian product performed on disks.
antecedent 2) Get rid of the join and perform two sql queries instead , store the first in a large enough hash table in ram so that a search in it will be log(M), with some reservations about worst best case performance.
antecedent 3) For each row in the first query lookup the relevant data in the hash table.

Result ) The problem now is N*log(M) where log(M) is performed in ram! That is linear performance, and can be tuned further more. Congratulations you have decreased the problem by a few orders of magnitude, increased your hackness quotient and saved enough money in buying faster disk arrays that you can afford a vacation in Mykonos for next summer !

Moral of the story, money spent on an Algorithm's text book gives much more value to a programmer than the lates spiffy glitzy silicon/metal fusion.

Controlled Imbalance as method for Innovation Assimilation

It is extremely difficult to communicate innovative approaches , services, methods from the think tanks to lower echelons. The ability to assimilate change and functionality is not the same at all levels of an enterprise.There is enough inertia in things getting done a certain - even dysfunctional - way, that innovation has to fight. Only _AFTER_ one proves that the new approach is better, faster _AND_ easier, then people start to apply themselves to it. Still the assimilation inertia can be a good thing, for example one does not generally want a staunch dependable and predictable employee to start goofing off with let's say the accounting books, or the delivery routes.

Controlled imbalance seems to be the key factor in innovation management. Put people a bit out of balance in their daily work, and they will eagerly assimilate a new better way of doing things. For example, Turn off that damned mail server that works half of the time and they will find the time to be trained in the new server's settings. I could go on forever, but it is really easy if you think about it. Stability is what everyone craves for even its false sense. Innovation, especially the disruptive kind, affects operational stability. So if one removes that illusion one can direct people towards a new paradigm.