Author: adamo

I am a Greek DevOps Engineer ranting about everything, from email to sports; to living in Athens, Greece.

kaizen

Έχω ξαναγράψει για το πως μπορείς με μικρά βήματα να “βρίσκεις” χρόνο. Όμως βρίσκω αυτό το quote από τον πρόεδρο της Toyota απόλυτα διαφωτιστικό:

“There’s no genius in our company. We just do whatever we believe is right, trying every day to improve every little bit and piece. But when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution.”

Όπως γράφει και ο Dan Markovitz “Done long enough and consistently enough, kaizen actually becomes kaikaku“.

Στο Ελληνικό Δημόσιο βέβαια αυτό μπορεί να δουλέψει και ανάποδα.

[via Kaizen vs. Kaikaku]

Dennis Tsichritzis on innovation

Ο Δ. Τσιχριτζής έκανε το διδακτορικό του σε Computer Science το 1968 στο Princeton (thesis: Partially solvable and almost solvable problems). Εάν δεν κάνω λάθος είναι ο πρώτος Έλληνας με διδακτορικό στο χώρο, πράγμα που μπορεί να πει κανείς πως τον κάνει τον “γεννάρχη” των Ελλήνων Πληροφορικών. Με δεδομένη τη 40χρονη (πολυσχιδή) πορεία του στο χώρο, είναι πάντα ενδιαφέρον να διαβάζει κανείς τις απόψεις του, όπως σε αυτή τη συνέντευξη που έδωσε στο ODBMS Industry Watch.

Ιδιαίτερα μου άρεσαν οι απαντήσεις του στη 13η ερώτηση:

What would you recommend to make a “location” attractive for innovation?

  1. Attract top talent around the World by giving them the best working conditions and living environment.
  2. Revamp the education system to promote free thinking instead of recipes
  3. Support financially innovations and promote them world wide

[Dionysis C Tsichritzis ACM author profile page]

TipJoy as email postage?

I have been thinking about this ever since TipJoy was announced. However, daily life stuff got on the way and the idea did not develop for quite sometime.

Although not the first to do so, reader of this blog Stazybo Horn suggested charging per email as a possible solution to spam some time ago. Systems that do this have appeared, like for example Goodmail Systems. The general idea and I copy-paste from Wikipedia is:

Certified e-mail is an e-mail whitelisting technique by which an internet service provider allows someone to bypass spam filters when sending e-mail messages to its subscribers, in return for paying a fee to the certifying service.

Today Stazybo Horn blogs about a securityfocus.com interview of Wietse Venema, where he says: “The best theoretic solution is to change the email distribution model”. Venema (author of Postfix by the way) then goes on and proposes a “pull” model where a MUA downloads email sent to the user given that certain circumstances apply.

In the same spirit, and because I believe that legitimate email marketeers are willing to pay a minimum fee per message (there are people who use Goodmail’s solution, right?) I also thought of changing the distribution model:

  • Pay the end user to read your spam message!

Even better than pay, TipJoy them so they can buy books.

Spammers thrive because it costs them next to nothing to send their messages and have some of them accepted. This has resulted in implementing a series of filters that do have false positives, where legitimate senders take the hit along with the black sheep. So why not pay a minimum fee to the end user? That would help develop whitelists that would deliver the message to the end user’s INBOX.

Unfortunately the current TipJoy API is not ready to support such an idea, but I am told that a next version might be more suitable for such things.

Update: It seems that TipJoy is shutting down :(

OneWebDay

Η 22η του Σεπτέμβρη είναι η OneWebDay, μια προσπάθεια εορτασμού του Internet και των αλλαγών που φέρνει στη ζωή μας. Δυο χρόνια πριν έγραψα τη δική μου ιστορία. Έτσι για φέτος σκέφτηκα να ξεκινήσει ένα tag game: Θα ήθελα λοιπόν να διαβάσω πως άλλαξε τη ζωή τους και τι σημαίνει το Internet για δύο ανθρώπους που ζουν από αυτό, τον apostolo και τον Vaggeli και τι σημαίνει για δύο άλλους, για τους οποίους δεν είναι το “line of business” τους, τον Ντροπαλό και τον Μπαμπάκη.

Update: Implicit invitation to HSOC :)

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on user friendliness

Interesting stuff from “How Sarah got her hack on“:

“The reason that Gov. Palin was using Yahoo mail to begin is probably because she found it inconvenient using the VPN software to logon to her office e-mail. We see that a lot in business: people use private e-mail services like Yahoo and Gmail to carry out corporate activities because they are annoyed with how their own computer staff have things set up. Yet, your computer people set things up this way precisely because there are obvious things that hackers can do to break into your data“

Aphorism

Ένας γνωστός μου καθηγητής συνηθίζει να λέει:

“Όταν βάζεις βάρη στη λύση ενός προβλήματος, δεν ξέρεις να το λύσεις.”

Συζητάγαμε την παραπάνω φράση με τον Χρήστο και τη “βελτιώσαμε” κάπως:

“Όσο νωρίτερα εμφανίζεται η XML ως λύση, τόσο πιο βέβαιο είναι πως δεν γίνει το project.”

Απλά μια αναδιατύπωση του “An expert consultant is someone from out of town”.

Greek Hackers attack CERN – What if?

By now most of the media has covered the attack over at CERN by the Greek Security Team. Ethics aside, it is an impressive hit (and carries a most interesting manifest, which I believe only a few besides the actual receivers can actually understand). However, the preamble of this post by Thanasis K. got me thinking:

Suppose that you are an organization that runs the most high profile experiment on the planet. Add to the fact that you distribute information “live” via the Internet. You know that you are begging to be attacked!

Even if you do not anticipate the attack, I think the security research community should. Which means that at least some research groups should have approached CERN in order to develop at least a honeypot (among other methods?) to observe behavior and attack patterns (and even defacement news propagation before it is captured by the media – now that could be a nice SNA dataset). Has this been the case? I do not know. Could it be? I think so. After all, this has not proved to be a PR disaster.

The above scenario being real or not, this is the most impressive defacement I have seen in years.

eBook companion

Our DBA dropped on my desk this morning yet another interesting book: “Forecasting Oracle Performance” (in a previous episode he landed “Database Design“). Wow! Using Erlang C in a database environment! I think I should mention that to my fellow student in the MSc course that I took last year who was wondering “Why the hell are we being taught queuing theory in a network class? Where are we going to use it?” Ahem…

But this is not what I want to blog about. Not even the content of the book which I briefly browsed. What I found interesting while reading the introductory pages and the backcover was this link:

http://www.apress.com/promo/tendollar/

With only $10 more you can buy the eBook companion version of the book next to the hardback one. This is very handy when you want to search for something specific in a book. I know I do not easily “grep” a dead-tree book. This way I can read the book the way I like and have the flexibility that I want in searching it.

Bravo Apress! If only more publishers followed your example!