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  • 2 min read

Ivory Tower or Trade school?

One of the tensions that I have seen in teaching software engineering is whether something should be viewed as legitimate research or part of the craft of computer engineering.

It's a slippery slope that I myself didn't have a good articulation for.

I came across this in a newsgroup which I think is a pretty good description. The writer is referring to Researching Information Systems and Computing:

"According to the author, the major differences are that in the typical software industry is that the less that is learnt or the less that needs to be discovered the more successful the project is deemed to be. If all is going according to plan then using existing knowledge, avoiding backtracking and changing of design or avoiding having to redo analysis would be seen as a part success. Having to change your design, backtracking and redoing analysis are perceived as a negative risk which needs to be mitigated. These risks could overrun the project constraints such as time, budget etc. Therefore industrial practitioners often leave out risky or uncertain parts of a project.

A researcher on the other hand focuses on these risky and uncertain items because tackling these risks and uncertainties successfully would lead to new knowledge being created. Hence you can claim to be doing research rather than 'normal' design and creation through the risk taking of your software product or process. You can further claim justification for your design by using theoretical underpinnings such as mathematical formulas and or formal methods from the field. You should also be able to say how the knowledge aquired from your design can be applied generally to other situations.

  • 1 min read

Beautiful Outlook

I don't know why this has not gotten more press. You should take a look at Microsoft's new Gmail killer, outlook.com. It's a totally web based email client, like Gmail, but the user experience is miles and miles better than Gmail.

Screen Shot 2012 10 16 at 10 31 48 PM

Now I am a huge Gmail user, and generally I get along really well with it. It has years of my emails and I have fully mastered its tricks and hacks. It works , it's reliable and it's free.

But boy, as a user interface, isn't Gmail UGLY?

And now look at Microsoft's Outlook.com. I didn't even realize that such great, responsive UI could be built in html. It might still be missing some features, and maybe MSFT will clutter it up when they add them, but for now, it is impressive.

By the way, the world of Outlook.com is new enough that the good email addresses might still be available, so get your company@outlook.com while you still can!

  • 1 min read

Securing or attacking Industrial Control Systems

It turns out that Kaspersky Labs is developing a brand new operating system specifically designed to be used in embedded industrial systems and industrial control systems.

In this article, Eugene Kaspersky explains why his company decided to embark on the creation of an operating system designed specifically and only for embedded industrial control systems.

The obvious question:

"First I’ll answer the most obvious question: how will it be possible for KL to create a secure OS if no one at Microsoft, Apple, or the open source community has been able to fully secure their respective operating systems? It’s all quite simple really.

"First: our system is highly tailored, developed for solving a specific narrow task, and not intended for playing Half-Life on, editing your vacation videos, or blathering on social media. Second: we’re working on methods of writing software which by design won’t be able to carry out any behind-the-scenes, undeclared activity. This is the important bit: the impossibility of executing third-party code, or of breaking into the system or running unauthorized applications on our OS; and this is both provable and testable." (from Kaspersky Lab Developing Its Own Operating System? We Confirm the Rumors, and End the Speculation!)

  • 2 min read

How are the presidential debates like a Nascar race?

I am looking forward to watching the Presidential debates tonight. But for all the wrong reasons.

I believe I know pretty clearly what each side's positions are and what they points will be. So, like when I watch a car race (which is rarely) secretly I have to admit that I will enjoy the suspense of seeing the big crash : the screwup, mistake or unscripted moment.

Here's an article that pulls out a bunch of revealing details of the arrangement between the two sides and the moderator about what can and cannot be done during the debates. It's pretty revealing and interesting, for example:

  • "The candidates may not ask each other direct questions during any of the four debates."
  • "The candidates shall not address each other with proposed pledges."
  • "At no time during the October 3 First Presidential debate shall either candidate move from his designated area behing the respective podium."
  • For the October 16 town-hall-style debate, "the moderator will not ask follow-up questions or comment on either the questions asked by the audience or the answers of the candidates during the debate…."

Read the whole article which also includes a link to the pdf of the 'contract' that both sides signed. Again, pretty revealing.

By the way, do we blame the media for promoting the "cage fight" view of the debates? No, we should blame ourselves. They are just showing us what they know we will tune in for.

(Also, this just in, commentary in Esquire "The Last Stand for Humanity for an Election in Which Bullshit Is Now the Status Quo: Your Debate Preview")

  • 1 min read

A travesty in a wealthy country

From the New York Times, an article by Nick Kristof, describing a real-life story of a friend of his and health care.

Whenever I hear, "We have the best health care in the world", I think of stories like this. It is a travesty that in a wealthy country like the USA, there are 48 million Americans uninsured. Some 27,000 Americans between the ages of 25 and 65 die prematurely every year because they don't have health insurance. From the article:

"Let’s just stipulate up front that Scott blew it. Other people are sometimes too poor to buy health insurance or unschooled about the risks. Scott had no excuse. He could have afforded insurance, and while working in the pension industry he became expert on actuarial statistics; he knew precisely what risks he was taking. He’s the first to admit that he screwed up catastrophically and may die as a result.

Yet remember also that while Scott was foolish, mostly he was unlucky. He is a bachelor, so he didn’t have a spouse whose insurance he could fall back on in his midlife crisis. In any case, we all take risks, and usually we get away with them. Scott is a usually prudent guy who took a chance, and then everything went wrong." (from The New York Times)

Read the whole article. The same could happen to someone you know.

  • 1 min read

Order in Google arguments

Does Google give a different answer if you reorder the words in the search? What? A trivial question? Have you ever tried to refine a search by reordering the words? Wouldn't it be useful if you knew for sure that it would or would not make a difference?

Experiment:

ruby rails bureaucrat gem examples


rails bureaucrat gem examples ruby

These two searches indeed did produce different results! And not just a reordering of the results. There were at least two results in the top 7 which were present in one and not the other.

Q.E.D.

  • 4 min read

Vote Buying measures and countermeasures

An interesting question, and an expert answer from a friend of mine. If you are interested in elections and voting and how they can and cannot be bought, you might find this intriguing. By the way, this scheme would never work in the US as we have many mechanisms that would prevent that, but these might apply in other countries that are not as sophisticated.

Scenario:

Say a bad guy made an offer secretly to the population that he would give each voter $100 for a vote cast for himself. Say they are using optical scan ballots. Say that cell phone cameras are easily snuck into the polling booth.

If you were the bad guy, what proof would you ask for so that people couldn't trick you and collect lots of $100 for votes that they really didn't cast. And if you were the government or an activist, what would you tell people about how to trick the bad guy and collect a bunch of $100 bills?:

Here's the analysis:

Before the Australian ballot, it was easy! Anybody can print a ballot, lots of straight party ballots printed. You go to your party boss in your polling place, he gives you a ballot, you put in the box, simple. When the party bosses were excluded, well, you had to get your ballot from him, and minions could observe you not getting a different. With some slight of hand you could trick them, but still very effective b/c most people won't attempt the slight of hand under threat of kneecapping. The almost as soon as Australian ballot was adopted (you might get a blank ballot from a government official in the polling place and mark it in the polling place), chain voting was invented.

Now, today, chain voting is too pesky and low throughput, how about we use the voter's digital camera in the polling booth! The can take a picture of the ballot that they marked as instructed by the boss. You show the boss a picture on your camera, he gives you money and/or spares your kneecaps. But wait! The digital photo can be faked? Hmmm.

I think that is the stage you've set. There are two main questions. What methods can the boss put in place to increase the difficulty of faked photos? What measures can election officials take to make it more difficult for real photos to be produced?

A separate question, new to me: if you were the government or an activist, what would you tell people about how to trick the bad guy and collect a bunch of $100 bills? You bear in mind that it is not just money. The deal might be this: you show me you voted right and I'll give you money; you don't show me, and my goons bust your kneecaps.

Well, if I were the gov't, I would be forbidding the use of cameras or cellphones or any kind of recording device in polling places, rather than telling people it is OK. Allowing recording devices in the voting booth is creating the opportunity for vote intimidation. You never want that.

So let me go back to the two main questions. I would suggest to election officials that ballot marking be done in three sided carrels made of translucent plastic that will mask a view of the ballot being marked, but allow a view of the use of recording devices.

There would need to be lots of training both of voters -- we really don't want you to using recording devices! -- and poll workers to intervene by asking a voter to please mark a ballot again, because this one you marked and then did some weird stuff in the carrel that looked like taking a photo.

The boss has a harder time. Clearly a photo of a properly marked ballot won't do, b/c anybody can make one of those. The photo would need to include something that showed the ballot and me, together. So probably it should include my hand as something that should be unique and distinguishing. Maybe the boss could stamp my wrist with a unique number, in ink that takes days to wear off. Even so, I could prepare a photo combining a properly marked ballot, and my hand, but not the ballot that I cast! If pre-printed ballots are freely available, then I can prepare a photo that the boss expects, but still vote a real secret ballot in the polling place. I could even make a fake picture in the voting booth, using a pre-made ballot, but then marking a real blank ballot and casting that. From there you are in a spy vs spy sort of games with more boss requirements on the photo, making it more difficult to fake, but also more difficult get away with in the real voting booth.

  • 2 min read

A philosopher defends religion

I recently subscribed to the New York Review of Books. Not sure this was a good decision as the last thing I need is more stuff to read. I came to it because I kept seeing interesting articles from the NYRB come up on various blogs and searches.

Here's quite an interesting book review of "Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism ". This sets the tone:

"One of the things atheists tend to believe is that modern science is on their side, whereas theism is in conflict with science: that, for example, belief in miracles is inconsistent with the scientific conception of natural law; faith as a basis of belief is inconsistent with the scientific conception of knowledge; belief that God created man in his own image is inconsistent with scientific explanations provided by the theory of evolution. In his absorbing new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism a distinguished analytic philosopher known for his contributions to metaphysics and theory of knowledge as well as to the philosophy of religion, turns this alleged opposition on its head. His overall claim is that “there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.” By naturalism he means the view that the world describable by the natural sciences is all that exists, and that there is no such person as God, or anything like God." (from New York Review of Books)

  • 2 min read

How much power does it take?

I remember wondering about this when I was in college -- this is before I really knew anything about computers.

I noticed that our computer center charged by theminute of processor time and it was a lot! I remember people freaking out because their random prime number generator ran overnight and the department got billed an unexpected $1,000.00. And they were in trouble!

So it must cost a lot to get these computers to do all these calculations, I thought. So, I asked the local expert, how much does it cost, then, when the computer isn't doing any calculations? He laughed. He said, it costs the same, whether it's calculating or not. How weird.

Here's an interesting article in the New York Times about the data canters of companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and many many others, use and waste a ton of electricity. Here's the hook:

"Jeff Rothschild’s machines at Facebook had a problem he knew he had to solve immediately. They were about to melt. The company had been packing a 40-by-60-foot rental space here with racks of computer servers that were needed to store and process information from members’ accounts. The electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components." (fromNew York Times)

But beware, here's something from an immediate rebuttal from Forbes, "Why The New York Times Story "Power, Pollution and the Internet" is a Sloppy Failure"

"So here’s the first problem that requires a clarification if not a correction. The utilization rates of servers in data centers is cited as between 7 and 12 percent. Nowhere is it pointed out that this statistic is derived from IT data centers, not from the state of the art data centers run by the Internet companies. Huan Liu based on an external model, estimates Amazon’s EC2 utilization at 7 to 25 percent. But Amazon, Facebook, and Google, don’t report their utilization rates. It is not accurate to make this implied association." (from Forbes)

You may read both articles and draw your own conclusion.