G1

I got my google phone G1 @ T-Mobile.

I'll be posting my impressions as I get used this.

So far, the keyboard is a pain to use, since I'm not used to it,

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Cloud Computing: problems and potential solutions

Cloud computing is hot enough for Microsoft to get involved. However there are at least 2 big issues with CC: security and vendor lock-in.

To avoid vendor lock-in, one needs to be able to save the data locally which are sent exclusively out to the Cloud. This means that the browser has to be modified to be able to save a copy as well as send it out to Cloud. Also be able to restore it from the saved data to alternate Cloud. Note that this "saved data" can be encrypted and preserved onto yet another Cloud.

To improve security, one way is to encrypt the data at the point of the browser so that the entered data isn't directly sent: Names can be scrambled and sent as "bogus" string. Bigger challenges are numbers and dates. As long as these data belong to one person, then unique offset constant can be used to store data. The problem is with sharing the data among more than one person. One alternative method would be to use unique offset per, say, date field. (For example, birth dates are all offset by 250 days while "entry date" (or due date) is offset by 3 days and these offsets are stored and shared via a different Cloud service [and encrypted as well, of course.]) For numbers, common numbers would need same offsets, unfortunately, or else the math won't add up. (Hmm: maybe a new math is possible? Like, if one is Safesforce.com customer, using predefined algorithm to construct an encrypted processing engine?)

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Hardware DoS attacks

PDOS (permanent denial of service) attack means that hardware becomes no longer usable, usually attacking the firmware (BIOS).

As hardware becomes more flexible, especially programmable hardware like FPGA or PLA, the risks of PDOS increases. On one hand, FPGA makes it easier to fix hardware even after the product is released. On the other, permanent damage is much easier to accomplish as hardware becomes flexible.

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Parallel Programming: CUDA hope now?

/. pointed Geek's article "NVIDIA is shaking up the parallel programming world" which tried to point to EETimes. I found:

"Nvidia unleashes Cuda attack on parallel-compute challenge"

Alas, Nvidia isn't the only one working on this problem as evidenced by articles like "Intel expects dev tools to bring success in graphics market" or "Industry, Stanford hope to fix what ails parallel processing".

Parallel programming has been one of the most over promised and under delivered computer science technologies (AI is the other one). And I believe we still have long ways to go, even though multi-core systems are here on our desktops and game consoles (PS3 and Xbox 360 have multi-core CPUs).

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

FBI trying to trap innocent web surfers

Here's a scary "trap" that FBI is doing: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects. (Hat tip: Digg).

It seems that they have a web site setup to capture people who links in, even by accident (an unknown URL sent to you via spam or friends who think it's funny). Then they raid your home and sign you up with child porn charge! What an easy way to make FBI look like "they are doing something" about child pornography, when in fact, all they do is trap mostly innocent people. And until the jury becomes wise to how silly FBI is (no probable cause, no motive and no real proof), many innocent computer users will go to jail or plead guilty to something they didn't do.

It's almost as bad as the age of consent laws used to put boyfriends on a sex offender list. Talk about trapping the innocents. I personally believe that sex before marriage is immoral but that doesn't mean it should be made illegal or, even worse, brand a person for life as a sex offender. (Biblical method is to force a marriage and keep the (virtual) gun to the head of the husband by the surrounding community -- if you have sex then you are forced to be married for life (more fair than being branded a sex offender and never be able to get most normal jobs).)

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Disk Encryption not so reliable

Here's yet another (potential) security breach with encrypted hard drives: "Disk encryption may not be secure enough, new research finds."

I'm sure they'll try to do one better but there will always be "easy" cracks -- it just takes a dedicated effort in finding the weakest link.

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

XO: One laptop per child gets pwnd

"Feature: Hacking the XO laptop" has some cool examples on hacking XO. Also points to XO Wiki.

I'm looking forward to seeing it become easy to program, as well.

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

World Wide Computer

"Q&A: Nicholas Carr on the big switch to utility computing" has some interesting concepts:

1. WWC: using the web as a programmable computing resource. Unfortunately, there is no universal language to program all those servers.
2. Computing resources can be treated as electricity: a pool of resource used on demand and pay per usage.

The problem with all this is that you can't guarantee security since the processing is done outside of your control. And this programming is dependent on the service provider.

I believe that the trend should be user centered (User Centered Web or UCW) rather than service provider centered: privacy, liberty and ownership. Property rights in the digital world isn't as clear as I'd like to see but I believe it is possible to gain back the rights of individuals. More on this as I put together my thoughts in a coherent structure....

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Java: not the best language to teach at schools?

"Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?" dogs Java as the one and only programming language to teach but does include it as one of 5 languages recommended languages to learn (C, C++, LISP and Ada are the other 4).

Personally, I'd wish they work on a better programming language(s) to teach the right concepts rather than trying to create a better hi-tech vocational courses based on the most desired languages by employers. It's unfortunate that people get hired based on their specific language skills rather than understanding concepts and ability solve problems. Sigh...

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Smartphones war and power to the users

"The Coming Apple-RIM Battle: Some analysts predict a brawl between iPhones and BlackBerrys; others say the real fight pits the smartphones against open-source handsets"

I'm not sure if open source handsets will have such a big upsurge, yet. The beauty of open source is for others to change the code to fit custom needs which is why we have zillion flavors of Linux distributions. We don't have zillion flavors of Firefox but I hope that will change soon. Nonetheless, to have open source phone (a real one), there needs to be openness to what can go on the phones by the users of the phone (not just programmers). Which means that infrastructures needs to be in place for the phone (OS) to handle change by the users (even if it is simply as changing the widgets like you can on google home page). However, as people get comfortable with changing things, I expect people to start programming, just like how a whole industry of Excel macros have taken off.

How about: Programming by Dummies? PBU (programming by Users)? User programmed? Dummies are in power (DAIP)? I AM IN CONTROL (IAIC)?

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Life of a Programmer

Zed Shaw's "Rails is a Ghetto" puts together his rants toward Ruby on Rails and his frustration with other programmers -- which is similar to what I've experienced in my career: too many managers and programmers who have little or no clue of what they are working on.

Unfortunately, most companies do get by with such poor understanding of their own product(s). Sad but true: there are many project failures documented at places like the Risks digest while many others that should have failed but have been released as products. I won't name names like Zed but I've seen my share, too.

How can this be improved? Good question and I certainly don't have any good answers today. Sigh.

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Virtual reality and Real World: Money and politics

There are many articles out on how the real world has ties to the virtual reality (like ads in Second Life or money going back and forth between virtual and real worlds).

Here's an interesting twist: WoW (War of Warcraft) gamers forming a political march in support of Ron Paul. Some object to reality intruding the fantasy world of online games but as long as real people play these games, reality will always have impacts on virtual worlds. Even if they try to ban explicit political messages (for example), you can't prevent people from getting around such restrictions like forming words via marching band like method with people forming the dots to create letters and words.

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Virtualization of Embedded Systems

Press release from Zilog about VirtualLogix caught my attention on how embedded systems are finally getting it. VirtualLogix seems to be an up and coming hypervisor provider. I'm sure there are others, but I haven't looked too hard....

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Right Reserved.

Virtualization: Sun and HP

It seems that Sun has thrown its weight behind Xen: "Sun Bids $2 Billion To Join Virtualization Gold Rush: The company will commit R&D dollars to its Xen-based hypervisor -- xVM -- for generating virtual machines and its Sun xVM Ops Center for managing them."

HP, on the other hand, has their "Virtualization and Power Management Technologies" which isn't clear from news articles what it really is. It seems that most writers (journalists?) do not have a clue what virtualization is all about....

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

BIOS to Hypervisor: Pheonix's transformation

I guess I missed this article: "BIOS maker Phoenix Reinvents Itself As Virtualization Vendor."

Phoenix have been working on HyperCore hypervisor and Linux platform called HyperSpace. Only time will tell but one advantage they have over other hypervisor vendor is that they have huge market presence as BIOS vendor. Probably better than Intel Inside since the BIOS works with all chip vendors.

Overall, my impression is that Phoenix is competing with VMware but the Phoenix CEO is quoted:

"VMware is building 18-wheelers; we're just building a little motor scooter"

We'll see...

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Hypervisor is hot: Oracle and Microsoft

"Oracle takes on VMware, others, with its own hypervisor: Oracle VM introduced at Oracle OpenWorld event" and "Microsoft to offer standalone hypervisor".

Seems that VMware is getting more competition these days. And I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop: IBM, the granddaddy of hypervisors!

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

HD-DVD: for sale at Wal-Mart

It seems that Wal-Mart is putting out Toshiba's HD-DVD player on fire sale. This Friday (Nov 2), they are going to sell HD-A2 player for $98.87 (cheapest I can find today is for $180). What a deal!

If the next-gen DVD was a toss up until now, HD-DVD may have found the killer-app (or at least the killer distributor) via Wal-Mart. I realize the PS3 provides a discounted Blu-Ray player, but that's still not going to come down below $100. If Toshiba fails with HD-DVD, they really have themselves to blame, since there will be tons of players out in the market place with this sale....

Post Web-2.0

I saw the article "Gartner touts Web 2.0, scoffs at sequel: Web 3.0 just a marketing ploy, but collaborative tools are here to stay" and thought: well, I've been thinking what's next too.

I don't think the trend is more of Web xyz. Web 1.0 started off as server centered services. And Web 2.0 became more user centered and interactive. So call "social networking" is really giving control to the users of the servers.

I believe the next step is user driven web view. Just as current mashups allows many things to come together in one page (i.e., one server), the next step is giving tools to the users to let the mashups take place at per browser level: I will connect up the web sites I want to see and this "view" I can share with my friends but there may not be a central place to get this "view." This will decentralize the Web perspective and take many views off line (or not easily available by tools like web spiders or search engine "seekers"). In fact, from the web spiders' view, the web will become defragmented and harder to ferret out what's hot or not. Maybe domain name resolution or IP traffic would have to be monitored to see what is really hot since these per user views may be completely private.

I'm starting to look at open source browsers and see what I can use to make steps towards this new world order. I've looked at Webkit (and related Adobe's AIR) but I think I'll stick with Firefox for now. Firefox has its set of problems but seems to be supported by most web sites such that people can use it painlessly. Plus it works on Windows and Linux and even OS X. [Don't expect much progress since I'm busy at work and home, unfortunately.]

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Virtualization at home and at work

"Virtualization homes in on desktops" points out how virtualization can have a place at home, like having a secure partition for online banking applications. They do point out one weakness of virtualization: requirements for lots of memory (each partition need to have independent set of memory, which can add up when you have more than 2 partitions -- there are ways to make the read only memories to be sharable (like same copy of the OS), but it's all easier said than done since current crop of OS wasn't written for virtualization).

And slightly older news: "VMware dangles next-gen virtualization goodies." Ideas for fault-tolerance would be a great usage for virtualiztaion.

So, there are few areas of virtualization which can use some work: Unfortunately, I don't have the energy to give it much thought, these days (you can see that I haven't been posting much recently).

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Virtualization week: VMware and more

This week, VMware hosted a conference this week and much news came out. Things that stood out for me:

1. Hypervisor in the hardware: Companies are now looking to have their hypervisor (virtualization software) be part of the hardware. Unfortunately, IBM already has a leg up on them all since their hypervisor is found in their various PowerPC hardware [and probably any new x86 hardware, if they are still making any more of such servers].
   
2. JeOS (Just Enough Operating System): Canonical is releasing JeOS, a virtualization-specific Ubuntu Linux. This is a variation of KVM, but hopefully will be less painful to use than KVM (which requires specialized QEMU). Unfortunately, there are no official info about it (that I can see with Google, this morning).
   
3. Virtualization standard container proposed: Partitions (the instance of OS+apps running on the virtual machines) are saved in proprietary formats today, but Xen, VMware and Microsoft are going to standardize with one format. That's good for users of hypervisors, esp. if hypervisors becomes plug and play, or you want to move a partition from one hardware with Xen and another hardware with Viridian. Pretty soon they'll be talking about run-time version management.
   

Lots of good news coming out for the world of virtualization.

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Future of Virtualization

Now that VMware has gone IPO and XenSource bought by Citrix, virtualization has made it to the financial press. However, the future isn't so clear since there are other players like Microsoft with their Viridian and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (SCVMM07) [which will support Xen and VMware in the future] and smaller companies like Virtual Iron Software.

And don't forget the granddaddy of them all: IBM. They have released at least 2 public versions of their hypervisor: rHype and sHype (via Xen). Since they have been at it for few decades on their mainframes and workstations, you can be sure they have both the depth and the breadth in understanding virtualization.

With all that written, virtualization "out in the wild" is rather a new phenomenon. The x86 virtualization hardware like Intel's Vanderpool and AMD's Pacifica came out in large volume in 2006 and even today people are still trying to figure out what it means and how best to use virtualization.

This is like the web in 1995, when Netscape IPO'd. Internet was around before browsers but the momentum started with Netscape browser in 1994. Microsoft piled on with Internet Explorer, and many others joined the race (like Opera and Apple's Safari). Today, Netscape morphed into Mozilla with Firefox browser. And Google rules the web "world."

So, 12 years from now, it's hard to say what virtualization would look like. I believe that there will be many shakeouts along with new comers to usurp the current front runners. And as with the web winners [of 2007] (like Google, Ebay, Amazon and Myspace), I personally won't place any specific bets on where virtualization will lead to in the future...for now....

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

ABC i-caught: presenting internet videos on TV

I thought that "i-CAUGHT" might have interesting future where TV is blended with internet video. I guess do people care? There are various sites which can promote specific clips like digg, but maybe it doesn't matter since internet will become the main, central information source of our daily lives, I believe. TV will be a side show (freak show?) since it can only present one view and gives little control to the viewer. Internet on the other hand allows users to add comments or frame the context (like writing text and then embedding the video or other quotes in the middle) and eventually mash or manipulate the original video/text (like the way ClearPlay mutes or skips scenes but allow overlays to add or remove elements in the video).

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

New Level of Risks: Robotic Warfare

I read "Navy gears up for unmanned combat aircraft" and thought: as these remote controlled war machines and even autonomous robotic ones get into the battlefield, the next level of warfare is to crack into these machines either through their communications link or even directly into the machines somehow [the weak links are: manufacturing (when it is made), programming at military installation (when it is programmed before release) or while being transported from factory to battlefield].

Unlike the wars of the past (where you can individually bribe or blackmail soldiers but not en mass), it would be possible to "infect" all machines (or most of them) to attack the robotic "masters" (i.e., create essentially an electronic mutiny). A counter measure protection would be to shutdown or self destruct when probes are detected (to prevent mutiny) but then that weakness can be exploited to disable the machines at the get go. And the cop-and-robber chase would continue....

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Recycle and get paid

I read about Second Rotation and sounds like an easy way to get rid of electronic junk. You could ebay and get more money but then think of all the hassle of selling it: you have to place an ad, answer questions, package and ship and then wait until a week or two to make sure they get it and don't complain about it. Otherwise, you may have to refund partial amount or get the whole thing back and re-list it all over again!

Some things like my BeBox, I'll ebay it myself....

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.