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Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.
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2005-05-14Service Research: Focusing on Requirements for Technology, not the TechnologyACM News Service: Research in Development. A possible new angle on addressing the problem-space vs. solution-space situation comes to mind as I look at the the discussion of service economies and exploration of services science described in this blurb. Michael Fitzgerald's May 2005 Technology Review article may not remain on-line for long, so it is worth snagging for its deeper and important context. IBM provides mammoth research investments and there is a shift expected in the subject matter, reflecting changes in the business of IBM and other major corporations shifts strongly to a service orientation:
It is becoming startling for me to see how much of what I dig into around trustworthiness of computing systems lies in the delivery of services and the use of technology as instruments of the larger business operation and the mission-related services of the business. Although this article is not about trustworthiness as such, pretty much all service business has a trust dimension, and I am interested in what can be found in this area. Resources Identified in the Article:
I notice that there is a strong operations research, quantitative, and analytical component in the featured offerings, and this seems to be the foundation and point of departure into services science at IBM. This could take me pretty far afield from my developing interest in process patterns (as opposed to design patterns as they have become so narrowly construed), but I will keep one eye glancing in this direction for more concrete material. [updated 2005-05-14T22:08Z: There was just one type too many and I couldn't stand it [;<).] 2005-05-12TiddlyWiki: Ohmygosh, I'm in Love.TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook. Ted Leung just altered my life. What have I been craving, praying for, putting off, and living miserably without he just ushered into my hands, along with a dose of GTD the TiddlyWiki Way too. “All your tasks are belong to you” indeed. Here it is, a micro-content blog/wiki/hyper-thingie and my very favorite list of requirements:
OK Ted, here’s the deal. I know cats are a problem and Vicki would really like to spend time with Julie and the kids so how about we bring dinner to you? We love Bainbridge Island anyhow. I figure August. I owe you, guy. I shall now lapse into a fit of weeping incoherence. Ah, be there baby. Be there for poppa. Make my dreams come true. OK, deep breath. Right click for download, right? I wonder how it works with WebDAV or, dare I speak the incantation, FrontPage Extensions? 3I: Individualized Interactive InstructionACM News Service: Innovative Instruction. A program for real-time interaction between professors and students, connected by wireless in the classroom, is being hailed as a way of altering the reluctance of students to ask and answer questions. In the blurb, it is difficult to tell whether anonymity is crucial to the technique or not. From the account in Daniel Miller’s 2005-05-10 Daily Bruin article, it seems very clear that, how much I think learning to interact without self-consciousness is an important student skill, including willingness to make mistakes, that’s not how things work in reality. And the use of an anonymous forum, at least in “town hall” settings, not only works to elicit participation, but there is serious engagement and participation. The article does not provide any clue about the nature of 3I other than it is an open-source package similar to the Educational Testing Service’s expensive Discourse package. Greater provision for customization is claimed for 3I. In an interview on use of technology as a tool for achieving teaching goals, Electrical Engineering Professor William J. Kaiser explains how valuable the opening up of student feedback is for his own assessment of how the material is landing and what may need to be put in to convey a concept he wants to enliven and impart to the students. It is about closing gaps “between what the students understand and the instructor’s perception of that comprehension.” Here’s the dynamic that pleases Kaiser:
I would love to find out exactly what this program does, but I can’t find it anywhere. For free, open-source software, it is remarkably well hidden. (I did find D3E though, and I am holding onto that link so I don't lose it one more time [;<). 2005-05-11Three Defects We Can Do Without: Memory Leaks, Buffer Overflows, and Unclosed FilesACM News Service: Silver Bullets for Little Monsters: Making Software More Trustworthy. David Larsen and Keith Miller identify available solutions to three defects, suggesting that it is no longer necessary to tolerate these any longer. Oh, OK: These aren’t infallible, but they can improve the situation dramatically. A number of tools are mentioned, including Microsoft’s Slam, a C program static analyzer that authenticates the program against rules stated in its Specification Language for Interface Checking. Now wouldn’t that be just SLIC. The link to the article in the 2005–04 issue of IEEE IT Professional is directly to an Adobe Acrobat PDF. (I hate it when that happens. You’ll have to condition your browser and firewall security to get the kind of access you want. I only crashed my browser once before getting it to work.) You may find it easier to work from the free-article page or the table-of-contents of the publication after the free-download promotion ends. The abstract resonates for me: Despite the legions of ideas about how to improve software quality, much commercial software remains un-trustworthy. In this article, the authors make the case for at least taking small steps toward improved quality by using silver bullets “corrective actions or methods” to at least eliminate some common problems, the “little monsters” of the title. I am left wondering why these particular problems aren’t greatly reduced by disciplined structural constraints on programs, ones that are easy to confirm. This would make confirmation that memory (and pointers) are released, that buffer-filling code is properly defended, and that resources are released subject to relatively simple inspection and well-crafted dynamic testing. Edge cases must still be addressed with regard to unexpected data and resource acquisition/retention problems, but I’d think it very worthwhile to combine structural constraints with confirmation techniques. I’m also wondering what hackers use to discover those defects as prospective avenues for security exploits. With that inquiry in mind, I discovered additional gold in the article:
This paper is a keeper for students of this subject. From my perspective on TROSTing, I would say that declaring the absence of any sort of defect is problematic (as Knuth has famously remarked, and Edsger Dijkstra seemed to begrudge the point as well). It strikes me that it is more appropriate to assert diligence in application of current art, specifying which measures were applied to mitigate the prospect of various understood defects, and certifying that. Declaring perfection strikes me as foolhardy, especially since the user who stumbles on a defect will not care which category it falls in, if any. Demonstrating diligence I can see as do-able at the current level of art. 2005-05-09Windows Genuine Advantage: So, did I fail the test or did the test fail?Microsoft Monitor: Microsoft's Windows Genuine Clarification. What I want to know is, what do I do when the test fails, not when I fail the test? The download page for the beta-2 of the Microsoft AntiSpyware tool took me through that game in March and I never got it to work. (The beta-2 didn’t work either, but that’s a different problem.) Mostly, I could never figure out how to condition my software firewall and my browser, plus flip my running Tablet PC on its back so I could read the Windows XP OEM product key off the sticker all while watching different links, web pages, and whatnots fail to come up properly much faster than I could read the jillion pop-ups from my firewall. I also treasure this “You should practice the 3P’s every day in every way, but you don’t need it with us” treatment by Microsoft sites. (Oh great, the “1–2–3 Protect Your PC” link on the Executive E-mail page is broken. Figures.) I only entered my product key twice and I don’t think it ever took. I didn’t get a report, I just kept being bounced back to an earlier page in the sequence. Oh, and there was a polite suggestion that if I was having difficulty, maybe I’d like to fess up and take the link to the page that is ready to arrange my having a legitimate copy of Windows. That sucks. I don’t know what that’s about, but I didn’t like it. I don’t recall being taken through activation with this machine either, but all of my other experiences with Windows XP have been with clean installs from retail disks. Blocco, my Tablet PC, is my only OEM-provisioned XP machine. And if I have a counterfeit OEM install, I don’t want no freakin’ amnesty for me, I want those guys out of business. What I have to do to reinstall XP means really buy a new machine and rebuild on it, because of the lock-in of OEM drivers and whatnot and no Windows CD-ROM, just an OEM restore CD. The lost cost to me in the value of my time and attention for reworking the computer with a “legitimate” copy of Windows (I have enough of those on my MSDN Professional and Universal DVDs, guys) is way more than what the computer is worth, especially one with a counterfeit sticker, if that were the actual case. And I’m more pissed that every failure of the validation test is taken as prima facie evidence that the user is running an unlicensed system. Is there no provision for the test failing with a valid system? I should go see if it has gotten any better. Am I going to have to go through this every time I run Windows Update or download some freebie add-on? That’ll suck too. Oh, Never Mind. OK, I went back through the drill on the AntiSpyware beta-2 download page, and it went through the Genuine Advantage check without a hitch and no-questions-asked, leading me directly to the download page after some mad browser page-shifting. The download also worked fine (though I don’t know that it will install any more successfully than the last time). So, uh, I guess the last time did succeed, I just couldn’t tell. Well, uh, oh. Still, … Keywords: Microsoft® Windows Genuine Advantage Potentially Sucks Declares Indignant Geezer Geek 2005-05-08Hark, Is That a Pattern I See Before Me?ACM News Service: Conceptual Data Modeling Patterns—Representation and Validation. I am going nutty over design patterns. I keep thinking that I know what they are (a bad starting premise). What I keep running into leaves me baffled and a touch cranky. I have to dig deeper into this to understand what is really going on here, So this post is a marker for that and more to come as I puzzle my way through the pattern language about pattern language. I was hoping a view in terms of conceptual data modeling might provide the higher levels of abstraction that I find missing in other materials, so I seized on this Technews blurb and its discussion of Danesh Batra’s “Conceptual Data Modeling Patterns: Representation and Validation,” Journal of Database Management 16, 2 (April 2005), 84-106. The intriguing part for me is that the abstract on the publisher’s site is well-crafted and interesting. The Technews blurb, on the other hand, is salted with statements about patterns that inspire me to scream and throw things. Maybe the problem is that the names of the patterns, discussed in the blurb, don’t sound anywhere abstract enough in contrast with the publication abstract’s observation that “This paper teases out underlying structures that tend to occur frequently in these books and provides patterns at an abstract and more useful level of granularity.” It could all be a matter of point-of-view and the question is, am I willing to spend the $18 USD that is required for downloading the paper. Maybe. Maybe not. I will look for an academic-student source first. I’ve now looked at the paper and it is useful for my investigations:
Searching for the Paper: Well, Google Scholar lists it, but none of the academically-licensed services that I have available carry the Journal of Database Management. I’m going to try the $18 option, not speant on GreatSchools.net, and see what this is about. The Idea Group Publisher site says they are providing a one-time view in a pop-up from which I may print the article. I want an electronic copy so I can have it indexed and filed as dissertation-bibliography backup, and I think I can arrange that. What concerns me is what happens if I trip on a firewall or browser privacy/security setting. We’ll know momentarily. Slightly Later: Well, it is just a PDF download. Once I conditioned my software firewall to allow MIME-type integrated objects from this site, it was a matter of downloading rather than opening the file. I wonder what has them assert that only a printable view will be provided. Oh. Mums the word. |
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