Digital Feudalism

Wordle Cloud of the Internet Marketing Blog by DavidErickson

The Irish Times reports, that Eircom, one of Ireland’s major internet service providers, is to begin disconnecting users from the Internet, if they receive three unsubstantiated copyright infringement claims from the record labels.

The internet is a fantastic, inherently democratic resource, allowing freedom of speech, of assembly and of the press.  It is a conduit for civic engagement, health care, employment, education, distant family, love and life.

Disconnecting people from the Internet on the basis of an unsubstantiated accusation, without a court order, without a chance to defend yourself against your accusers, without a chance to see and challenge the evidence is nothing more than a step backwards.

Call it “digital feudalism” if you will.  You only get access to the Internet with consent of the majors.

I urge all freedom loving netizens to let the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources know how you feel.

Home Network Hard Drives.

I decided to splash out on a Home Network Hard Drive this weekend.  It was a spur of the moment decision to go with the Iomega drive, as I didn’t spend much time researching options online, as I normally would do.

I plan on using the drive primarily for backups of my music, photo and other data collections.  Since I bought my girlfriend a digital camera, she’s also needed extra drive space for storing photos, etc.

The software that ships with the drive, in a word, sucked.  It looks and works like it was knocked out by a hungover engineer, the morning after the Office Christmas Party.  Usability sucked, though it was functional, and I had the Windows XP laptop configured to connect to the drive as a network share.  The drive also sports a web based administration tool, which is also functional though suffers from the same usability issues as the desktop client driver.

While the box notes the drives support for Linux, there is very little mention of it in the help or on the support section of the Iomega site.  When you search for Linux, you end up redirected to the Mac OSX instructions.  Come on Iomega, it’s obvious the drive is based on Samba, so your not entirely unfamiliar with Linux.  It won’t take a lot to document how to mount the drive on Linux, and include it in your documentation set.

Connecting the Ubuntu desktop to the drive involved installing smbfs support using:

sudo apt-get install smbfs

Then adding the following line to /etc/fstab and issuing a “mount -a” command as root.

//192.168.1.103/PUBLIC    /media/public    cifs    auto,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000,user    0    0

That is assuming you remain with defaults. As usernames and passwords can be changed through the web based administration tool, the connection string above would have to be modified in line.  The IP may differ for your setup also.

Since then, I have registered with Iomega, to recieve notifications of software updates.  I’ve updated the drives firmware, which forced an upgrade of the Windows client driver.  It still sucks, from a usability standpoint, but at least it sucks a little less.

Once mounted under either Windows or Ubuntu, use of the drive is like any other.  Though I have had some system freezes on Ubuntu when transferring large file sets, with large volumes of data.  I have yet to diagnose the cause of this issue.

Masters Thesis

In this paper we discuss approaches to Incident and Problem management within the context of IT Service Management, and its de facto standard the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). We show how the Problem Management process attempts to diagnose problem root causes by applying various analysis techniques to historical incident data.

We propose a new categorisation mechanism. We break the data free from its hierarchical categorisation scheme through the use of a free form tagging system. By allowing all system users to categorise incidents using their own terms, we show that while individuals may differ, the aggregate meta data produced for each incident stabilises.

Further, by the application of PageRank analysis to the relationships between tags and incidents, we hope to show useful and interesting correlations. While these may or may not be indicative of a causal relationship, they are nonetheless, new facts about the system under scrutiny.

We conclude by showing the system shows some merit, assuming a certain set of minimum system requirements. If these requirements can be met, then this approach, can become another tool in the system administrators’ arsenal of system analysis approaches.

Download Thesis PDF

Why Maven doesn’t work for me.

I’ve been meaning to do a follow up post on Maven for quite a while. I received several emails regarding my previous post from people asking how we’re using it. I must admit, it looked promising initially, but as we got into the specifics, it looked less workable for building commercial software. Here I hope to outline some of the reasons I suggest that Maven may not be for you.

Adapting ITIL to Distributed Web Applications

Introduction to ITIL

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library version 1 (ITIL) was initially published by the Office of Government Commerce in the year 2000. ITIL is a broad framework of best practices which enterprises are using to manage their IT operations. This quickly grew to over 30 volumes within the library, so when ITIL version 2 came to be released a concerted effort to consolidate the processes described into logical sets was attempted. ITIL v3 continues in this vein by consolidating into five core titles:

• Service Strategy
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operation
• Continual Service Improvement.

Current Trends in SOA

Introducing Middleware.

In many ways, humans have been integral to the operation of computer networks, since the dawn of the computer age. In the early 1980′s computers had moved beyond governmental, military and research institutions, and were becoming more common among corporations.

At this stage of their evolution, computer applications were stand-alone. The finance applications of the world lived inside mainframes, and interacted with humans via green screen terminals. The order management systems of the world interacted likewise. Humans were the network, as information could only flow between systems through human intermediaries. For example, a clerk would run a report on one system and re-key the results into the other.

Humans being intelligent, could enforce policies on the flow of information. They could decide what information was appropriate to flow between systems, how quickly it should flow, and how the flow should be achieved.

On the other hand, humans, being error prone, caused this flow of information to be slow, laborious and costly. One day while typing yet another report, a clerk dreamed of letting the computers talk to each other directly. Suddenly, the network revolution had begun.

While the idea was sound, the reality of facilitating this was difficult. Henning (2006) notes, that “persuading programs on different machines to talk to each other was a nightmare, especially if different hardware, operating systems, and programming languages were involved: programmers either used sockets and wrote an entire protocol stack themselves or their programs didn’t talk at all”. What was needed was some sort of automated intermediary between systems.

Maven != Productivity

Maven + Hudson = Three days of configuration hell!

Maven, what can I say about it? It seems to have been developed by someone who finds playing 64 simultaneous games of chess while blindfolded too easy, and was looking for a challenge…

Rise of the robots.

Wired, and others, are reporting that a malfunctioning robotic cannon has killed 9 and injured 14.

That sparked a thought. If lives are going to be on the line as we increasingly produce robotic weapons, then surely there must be some set of standards for software validation which should apply.

For example, a while back I met an engineer who worked for a company who produce medical ventilators, and he told me the lengths of software testing and validation they had to go through. Their devices could never be brought to market without FDA approval, so it was in their interest to prove that the device operated correctly, and failed safely. I’m sure the same standards apply for other medical devices.

Perhaps it’s time we applied the same rigour, if we’re not already, to robotic weapon development. After all, lives are at stake on the correct, or incorrect operation of both types of devices.

Alternatively, we could try to stop killing each other. But that’s an argument for another day.

Flash-Be-Gone

I was a little upset last week when I tried to install flash on Ubuntu, only to find that my AMD64 CPU isn’t supported (yet).

Since then, I have to say that using the web has become a pleasure again, now that all those annoying, flashing and moving adverts are no longer present.

So much so, that I’m considering adding flash to my list of “software not worth it”. That list currently includes RealPlayer and Lotus Notes, i.e. software that’s so annoying, or unusable that the benefit gained by it’s use is more than offset by it’s ability to annoy you.

Mashups

ZDNet’s Dion Hinchcliffe asserts that mashups represent “The Next Major Software Development Model”. I’m not sure I agree that they represent a software development model.

While I agree that they are popular, I think they fall into two categories. I guess I’ll call them ‘data aggregation’ and ‘data representation’.

The ‘data aggregation’ category represents those mashups made by users who, rather than visit ten news sites to see the headlines, aggregate the feeds from those sites into one page.

The second sort of mashup is more interesting. For example a manager may request a report of yearly sales, getting the result in a spreadsheet. While this represents the data requested, it’s in a rather dry and unengaging format. What if the sales results could be overlaid on a map, so that zooming into the map showed the sales results by country, region, city, store, etc. Suddenly you have a mashup which adds interaction and value to the data you’re representing.

If we can learn anything from mashups is that the current state of software user interfaces isn’t meeting the needs of users. The best user interfaces are those which represent data in a meaningful and increasingly interactive way to the user. Perhaps soon we’ll see the death of the grid control for tables, the list box and the combo, in favour of these more interesting interfaces.

So with regard to the new software development model, I don’t thing mashups are going to replace good software engineering, though they may force software developers to think outside the dialog.