Neither rhyme nor reason

I’m not quite sure of the marketing angle here. I’ve seen power pole posters used to “buy a 4 bedroom homes with quick transaction!”, “lose 30kgs in 4 weeks”, and promote “swedish tribute band – BAABAA”.

But trying to flog Windows anti-virus software from the roadside is a first. Maybe they’re trying to home in on a niche customer base that I am not aware of. I have to admit that I dubious of the integrity of software that is bought from someone who advertises with hand-painted posters as if it is a garage sale. Maybe it is all legit, though I have my doubts when the recommended retail price at Symantec is $99.99 and this can be had for a bargain at $30. I imagine Symantec don’t normally offer such deep discounts to their resellers. (And I am also assuming that this guy isn’t just selling a one-off unwanted licence).

Disclaimer: I have not contacted the seller, hence I am only giving my opinion on this advertisement. If you do follow through and make a purchase from them, don’t hold me responsible as to the software’s efficacy or otherwise.

Selling Norton Internet Security from a power pole - Victoria Rd, Ermington

Around 1993 was probably a big turning point in my career life. Up until then I had spent a lot of time involved in designing and implementing solutions around process control systems at the Port Kembla Steelworks. When I graduated (in 1985) I was doing straight electrical control work as well as some PLC (programmable logic control systems work). A few years later I was writing FORTRAN code than allowed operators to control big machines (such as plate mills and cranes). I became fascinated with communications and networking, and started doing work in that front in the late 80’s, a lot of this was around the low-level communications between process control computers, but also more general networking like DECnet. I got introduced into UNIX and C in the early 90’s, both doing some communications driver coding as well as X11 based operator interfaces. I bought my first PC for home in 1993 and made sure it could run Windows 3.1 and Linux (SLS, which later begat Slackware, on around 30 floppies was my first distro). I had BBS access and the ‘net soon enough as well. I guess, just like today, I was always reading about new things, and at least having a bit of a play at making things work.

One thing I had a little play with at the time was VRML, which is a 3D markup language. At work we also started using the Internet tools a lot. Also the new engineering projects were all being done in CAD, some in 3D, with intent on being better able to plan all the services required on such huge mechanical and civil works. I was also a big fan of raytracing, particularly POVray. Anyway, I saw all this coming together, potentially a huge aid to engineering support. I was starting to becoming more focussed on IP, ATM and other network protocols so it probably was almost farewell to process control world.

So I wrote the following short-story in 1993. The chief electrical engineer at the time loved it, and it appeared in the departmental newsletter. I think it was quite well received, though it is probably the first and only short story I have had published. I have made a few small edits from the original, mainly to make it a little clearer to non-steelworkers. I hope you like it!

The VirtEng.
Kurt abruptly woke from his doze as the ‘comm indicated that his attention was required. Despite wanting to throw a heavy object at it, he heeded the ringing.
” ‘Comm answer...Greber here, who is it?”
“It’s Max, with got a problem at the Finishing Mill again; hyper-axial gamma ray gauge it seems.”. The last thing Kurt wanted to see on the ‘comm screen was Max.
“Strike, can’t I get a moment’s peace, even out here?” He gazed solemnly at the gently swaying palm trees, and the glistening sand out of his window. “OK I’ll get on to it. Bye. ‘Comm hangup.”
Reluctantly, Kurt stepped across his room and donned the VirtEng, and waited for the retinal scan to authorise him.
“VirtEng …Goto Port Kembla Finishing Mill” he uttered to the machine. In an instant he felt the familiar experience of floating above this bane of his life. As he pointed his way down, the VirtEng displayed the detail of the 21 stand rolling mill. The physical view of the mill from above always fascinated him despite rather being someplace else. The hundreds of tonnes of metal and motors and hydraulics had to be coordinated to within a micron in microseconds in order to make the steel strip of the correct properties. As he came up level with the end of the mill, his attention was drawn to the pinkish hue of the gamma ray thickness gauge. For years now the VirtEngs had been able to diagnose equipment status, even subtle problems, and give an indicative colour to the components. “Just out of tolerance” he thought as he mused on the problem.
“VirtEng … Logical view” he instructed his helmet and the scene before him faded and a conglomeration of blocks and lines appeared. He began walking past the various schematic components of the gauge. Occasionally he would stop at an amplifier or processor and point at the various panels before him. Charts showing the equipment status immediately appeared before him as he pursued a prognosis of the fault. He could also access a history of this component; not just in this gauge, but of course the database was continually fed by input from all the installations in the world. “It must be this proton accumulator” he thought, “I’ll get the Auto-Tric”. After issuing the dispatch, he investigated the software problem that caused the overload. Again each instruction could be removed, visually displaying a history of past values and execution sequences. After tuning a parameter down with a downward wipe of his finger and satisfied with his work, Kurt thought he’d call it a day.
Just after he issued the “VirtEng …Physical view” command he made out the shape of the “Auto-tric” trundling down the mill floor. With a PA-481F in the manipulator, the ‘droid electrician approached the gauge and within a minute had the component replaced and tested. Without as much as a nod the robot returned to the Parts Dispatch Terminal from whence it came. As the mill commenced rolling again, Kurt felt comfortable with the soft blue emanating from the gamma gauge, indicating it’s sound health.
Just as Kurt turned to depart, his virtual image bumped into the virtual image of the Mill Superintendent.
“Thanks for that Kurt, I thought you were on R&R, but I knew you would help us out”.
“Sure, It’s only Fiji, I’ve been there before anyhow.” As the stereo headset filled with sound of metal meeting metal, Kurt issued his “Log out” to the machine and returned to the pleasant scenery and sounds at his window of a few minutes before the call-out. He returned to his couch for another snooze, in readiness for a late afternoon surf. As sleep drifted back, a thought entered his head – “I wonder what people did before VirtHoliday?”

Martin Visser – copyright 1993 – 2009

Well after a few month’s deliberation, I decided to switch to Internode as my ISP last Tuesday. While I wasn’t unhappy with iinet as a service provider, it really came down to a value-for-money decision. Having 4 teenagers in the house, meant that we seemed to be every month hitting 10+10GB quota I had with iinet. And while some of them could make use of the off-peak download time by scheduling downloads, it really isn’t all that convenient. And all to often it seemed that at least once a month someone would get the time wrong to start or finish downloads so we would have inadvertant creepage into the peak quota. However for the same $70 is was spending at iinet, I could get 40GB monthly quota, with no time restrictions – so hopefully there will be no more draconian filtering by yours truly to keep us under quota.

Internode (like iinet) are very Linux friendly (in that they can provide support for Linux users if required) but more importantly they both provide good unmetered repositories/mirrors of open-source software. Internode seems to have the edge though, especially now they are a Sourceforge mirror. They also have some nice unmetered media with quite a few radio streams. Another clincher for the recent decision was that Internode now provide ABC’s iView unmetered, which all made good use of on iinet. According to my kids the gaming servers are well supported and have low “ping” times, so all should be good on that front. Actually one nice thing the Internode does is publish a very clear list of IP address ranges that are unmetered. I might try to combine this info with the netflow info I have been grabbing from my router to more accurately feedback to my family on their metered/unmetered usage profiles.

We also have made use of iinet’s bundled phone PSTN and VoIP services. However this actually proves to more costly than what it should be. With iinet to get my $70 ADSL plan I needed to bundle the phone service at around $33 (though I got free VoIP access). But with Internode, I can get the $70 ADSL (with 2x quota) and I can buy my phone service from Telstra (I’ll choose the $19 budget plan), and then I can buy a $10 VoIP service which comes with $20 phone credits. All up, I expect to save maybe $20 a month and get double the data quota. Internode by all accounts have a good service reputation, so I really have no qualms in switching.

So I am still happy to recommend iinet for their level of customer service, however despite a few calls to them indicating I was about to leave, and giving them an opportunity to keep me, they really couldn’t match Internode’s pricing.

Hopefully all goes well.

Me thinks ebay had a little slip-up tonight (wondering why I was getting a “no route to host” from my squid proxy server while checking out some cameras) :-

marty@glenstorm:~$ dig catalog.ebay.com.au

; <> DiG 9.4.2-P1 <> catalog.ebay.com.au
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24374
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;catalog.ebay.com.au.           IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
catalog.ebay.com.au.    422     IN      CNAME   catalog-test.intl.ebay.com.
catalog-test.intl.ebay.com. 1022 IN     A       10.14.90.92
catalog-test.intl.ebay.com. 1022 IN     A       10.4.90.92

;; Query time: 23 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.1#53(192.168.0.1)
;; WHEN: Thu Nov 13 23:45:03 2008
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 109

Okay, so the Great Internet Wall of China is in place, and is now of special attention during the Olympic Games. We even have heard that the IOC is sorry about the whole thing and that there is nothing they can do provide the unfettered net access that we were lead to believe was going to exist during the Games.. Well there is very simple technical solution, though I dare say that it would probably be diplomatically untenable.

All that needs to happen is for the International Olympic Committee to setup a web proxy for all the Chinese resident media, or any one else in China during the Games. A farm of squid proxy servers nicely load-balanced would perform admirably. They could allow full access to purportedly banned sites such as the BBC and Amnesty International. The proxy listening on TCP port 8080 should do it – then media or even Chinese citizens could set up their web browser proxy setting to point to say http://proxy.olympics.org:8080. The servers could be anywhere in the world, and operated by anyone, as long the IOC delegates them their domain name.

Surely China would not dare to filter traffic to olympics.org would they? C’mon IOC, if you say you can’t force China to open it’s Internet access, why not dare them to filter traffic sent via your domain?

You might have read here my post on the rumours of the HP 2133 Mini-note. About a month ago I managed to coerce one of the first 5 in Australia from the hands of the HP sales team here in Sydney. Because I didn’t want to annoy them and destroy the supplied Vista installation, I was limited to how much testing I could do with Linux on this. We did setup an 2GB SD card with Ubuntu that worked quite well. Certainly the Ubuntu desktop was a lot smoother in terms of performance than Vista. I also had a go with the SuSE image that comes with the Mini-note, though didn’t want to let it install to the hard disk. Again it ran quite well.

As far as a mobile device you can actually use it is way up there. The keyboard is really as big and useful as they claim, certainly better than some of the competition. Having a full aluminium shell makes it feel very solid, and should standup to everyday knocks and just shoving it into a bag – its main target market is college and school students, so it needs to hand. The screen is very clear – but of course being only 9″ diagonal wide-screen, I’m not sure I could use it as my main screen every day – the VGA port would definitely be made use of.

I took it along to the monthly SLUG meeting and follow-on dinner to give it an informal spruik. It provoked quite an interest and envy – I expect it might make a few people’s wish list. Unfortunately I had to give this one back. I think it is quite likely this form-factor is on the rise, particular as performance actually becomes useful, and battery life allows one to work on the road (though at the moment a spare battery is a necessity to cover a full working day). There is only so much you can do with a PDA or a Smartphone – a ultra-mobile mini-notebook with good networkability and running a nicely integrated version of Linux may well “make it”.

The photo below show it running Ubuntu next to my regular laptop (with a 15.1″ 4:3 screen).

On Sunday 1st June Riverview College hosted the first OLPC Australia Techfest. Its aim to stimulate interest in supporting the OLPC project in this region from a technical point of view was well met. We had about 50 or so delegates. The two main presenters were Martin Langhoff and Joel Stanley. Martin has primary responsibility for the XS, the School Server. Joel has been an intern with OLPC in Boston last year, and has intimate knowledge of XO innards. There was a good mixture of delegates, those that have had quite a bit of exposure to the project, and those only learning. There were a few people interested in working on the content and documentation which was great to see. There is a large general open-source community in Australia, so I feel sure given a little bit of a push there is likely to be strong interest in supporting this project in the region. While the technology itself is becoming quite mature, with many 100s of 1000s of machines heading to the field as we speak, regional customisation support for local deployments is going to needed. OLPC Australia sees its “target market” as not only Australia and New Zealand, but also the large number of Pacific nations. I would certainly like to be involved in deployments, assuming I can set aside the time and money for this.

Ok, so I, for a while like Jeremy have lamented the disappearance of the URI scheme (the "http://” bit ) in URLs when seen in advertising and the like. Maybe it’s because my day job is basically a network (and security) consultant. Making communication happen through network protocols is my bread and butter. A full URL spec like http://www.abc.net.au/news is unambiguous in intent. It describes to a suitable application which host to connect to, on what port, and what protocol it should talk with. It also indicates the particular datum of interest.

But there are two aspects to review in Jeremy’s argument. Firstly, how do humans recognise that abc.net.au/triplej is a contraction of a URL? Secondly, is there really a technical need to specify the protocol?
As far as “knowing” that a string of text is a shorthand URL, we can look for the following telltales :-
1. There might still be almost deprecated URI scheme (http://) as internet jargon that they learned circa 1994 (for the average Joe Blow at least).
2. We know that www means World Wide Web.
3. Words punctuated only by “.” and “/” is normally an internet thing.
4. The letters in URLs are most always in lowercase.
5. They are familiar with the common TLDs – “.com“, “.org“, “.au” and so on – another dead giveaway.

So what happens when URIs become non-obvious because some of the this distinguishing marks are missing. (I am not a linguist or semanticist so I may well have this wrong)

Jeremy has already seen the demise of point 1. The same goes for point 2. When I was a lad, domains always had separate host records, so company.com.au would always have a host www.company.com.au to provide it’s web prescence. Mail to joe@company.com.au almost invariable was steered by the MX record for the domain to mail.company.com.au, the mail host. Not so today. Maybe it was the fact that doubleyoodoubleyoodoubleyoo is hard to say (which is why some trendy geeks say stuff like dubdubdub or wahwahwah. Point 3 is interesting, again back in the 60s you always wrote abbreviations with fullstops/periods in between the capitalised letters. Like A.B.C. or C.S.I.R.O or the Man from U.N.C.L.E You just don’t do that now. So now basically those “.”s have been repurposed as domain name delimiters – and I reckon that this is actually the strongest clue we have now. With point 4, domain names are can just as easily be uppercase (DNS is case insensitive) but the file part of the URL often is not. Because UNIX systems were ruling the roost when web servers first were deployed, and we tended to write all file names in lowercase, this idiom seemed to stick. Finally for point 5, it ain’t so easy nowadays. Jeremy’s domain name is under the “.name” TLD, but what about .museum – does anyone even know that http://australian.museum is a valid domain name?

But anyway I guess us humans cope, and if the publicity gurus do misjudge when they prepare their ad copy, then they don’t get hits on their website. So I guess the URLs that aren’t real obvious get removed from the internet gene pool through natural selection.

On the second aspect, around the idea that there are protocols on the ‘net other than HTTP, does it really matter? Firstly HTTP is almost always the starting point in any case. If you do need jump from HTTP to something more private like HTTPS then the browser will do that for you. If you need to stream multimedia then the .m3u file you hit will redirect you to something more appropriate. And semantically the combination of your client application and server might be able to determine what you intended anyway. For instance if you type arnoldschicken.com.au into your phone, I reckon it should just give you the option to dial their nearest store. Or type arnoldschicken.com.au into your GPS navigator then it should by default set the nearest store as your destination. The semantic bit could either be derived from the user-agent, or possibly the device could add context either through a URL (say arnoldschicken.com.au/locations might return a list of parseable locations for the GPS or arnoldschicken.com.au/phonenumbers could return a list of numbers (that could be connected via SIP). Alternatively standard SOAP calls might be invoked to give similar information. Certainly more work can and should be done in this space. So I guess defaulting to HTTP may well make sense for when people initiate the connection – if needed the application then switches to the more appropriate protocol or scheme when it needs to.

So in conclusion, while “http://” might be dead, humans are pretty smart in recognising truncated URLs, and machines will get better (if not already) help us make better use of these. (And just for a final point – how many of just bang a few letters into the Google search bar and get what we want to find pretty quickly in any case!)

Sometime you would have to wonder whether logic totally escapes CIOs. In an article making comment on the The Australian Open Source Industry and Community Report 2008 prepared by Waugh Partners, ZDnet put out an article entitled “Open source barred from Australian government”. What I found particularly curious was a comment from the CIO of the Australian Tax Office, Bill Gibson. In it, he says that he “is concerned that open source software could not be as easily scrutinised as proprietary software”. This is probably a paraphrase from an earlier published interview by Zdnet where he is quoted as saying – “We are very, very focused on security and privacy and the obligations that we have as an agency to ensure that we protect those rights of citizens’ information in that respect. So, we’ve continued to have concerns about the security related aspects around open source products. We would probably need to make sure that we will be very comfortable — through some form of technical scrutiny — of what is inside such a product so that there was nothing unforeseen there.”

So how does he “scrutinise” proprietary software? I guess at best, you might be able to get to see the source code, but the license to see is usually going to be under a NDA, and it is unlikely one organisation is really going to have the skills and resources to examine all the code. And even then there are going to be dependendent libraries that you may not be able to have source code access. But in most cases, you will only be able see your software as a blackbox. If you do perform security analysis you will always limited in what you can test in this case. I just don’t see how with a blackbox you can successfully search out all the nooks and crannies with a high level of confidence.

Only with open source code to you, and the “many eyes” out there, do you have the opportunity to truly scrutinise the code. You also then are able to create and receive patches for any found vulnerabilities. Clearly the bad guys have a similar opportunity to review the source, but the evidence overwhelming supports the idea that open source inherently is less likely to have hidden security flaws and is able react to unforeseen attacks with greater rapidity.

I would be really interested to find out who Bill Gibbons has been taking advice from on software security.