Plato’s Republic

A friend suggested that I could use The Book Depository as an Amazon alternative, which was a very helpful tip especially for books over €50. As it happens to many who buy books from online bookstores, sometimes what you get is not what you ordered. In my case I had ordered “The Travelling Salesman Problem” and got “Plato’s Republic“. After some friction with their support service (Amazon is way better in this kind of issues) the order was completed and The Book Depository told me that I could keep “Plato’s Republic” too.

Now since it is highly unlikely that I will ever find time to read this version, I will gladly send it to anyone interested. If nobody shows any interest, I will donate it to a library.

This is a weekend’s work

More often than I would expect, I run into conversations about certain IT and web related projects where someone will say, with a bit of authority:

– This is not a big deal! It can be done over the weekend.

Once I was told that a certain feature that needed to be implemented was “only two hours work”! And this came from a person that had no knowledge of the software stack in use.

Another time upon protesting (and basically saying “Put your money where your mouth is!”) I got the best exit:

– I did not say that I can do it over the weekend. I said that it is possible to be done in a weekend by you!

Like I do not have better things to do in my weekends…

So if you have ever claimed that something is possible over a weekend (and can be delivered as a working beta) the weekend is not far. Shut up and prove your point. You can even use Friday afternoon as extra time.

But on Monday please call the guy that said it will take him a week, a month or more and apologize.

Practical Reusable Unix Software

(I think I bought mine sometime in 1997. The price tag says £26.50 which means that I had UrBaN buy it for me.)

Το βιβλίο γράφτηκε το 1995 και είναι ενδεικτικό των εργαλείων, αλλά και της φιλοσοφίας που επικρατούσε στην AT&T Research εκείνη την εποχή. Χάρη σε αυτό έμαθα για το graphviz (που με βοήθησε να φτιάξω ένα από τους πρώτους χάρτες του 6BONE αλλά και του irc.gr), το UWIN (οπότε και κατάφερα ένα από τα πρώτα native ports του netcat), τη vmalloc (που πάντα ήταν χρήσιμη όταν κάποιο πρόγραμμα είχε προβλήματα memory allocation – π.χ. το CLP(R) με κάποιες GLIBC της εποχής). Το σημαντικότερο όμως που μπορεί να προσφέρει αυτό το βιβλίο ακόμα και σήμερα, 14 χρόνια μετά και με μερικά από τα εργαλεία που παρουσιάζει όχι και τόσο χρήσιμα, είναι ο τρόπος σκέψης: ορισμός προβλήματος, προσέγγιση, αρχιτεκτονική και λύση. Και αυτά in a system administrator’s way.

Το βιβλίο είναι διαθέσιμο σε μορφή PDF και το software που περιγράφει (αλλά και άλλο νεώτερο) βρίσκεται στο http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools

[via]

Scale-Free Networks: A Decade and Beyond

Barry Wellman posted on SOCNET a link to “Scale-Free Networks: A Decade and Beyond” by Albert-László Barabási. I quote two excerpts that I find interesting:

“the scale-free nature of networks of key scientific interest, from protein interactions to social networks and from the network of interlinked documents that make up the WWW to the interconnected hardware behind the Internet, has been established beyond doubt“

Regarding the scale-free nature of the Internet much has been written. However lately I came across two papers that specifically refute Barabási’s opinion on the matter:

Mathematics and the Internet: A Source of Enormous Confusion and Great Potential [pdf]
The ‘‘robust yet fragile’’ nature of the Internet [pdf]

So at least for the Internet the scale-free nature has not been established beyond doubt (The links for these papers were posted on Interesting-People). If anyone wishes to dive more into Internet topology stuff (and related mathematics) go read them! They provide a wealth of references too.

However, the second excerpt that I singled out is a prediction and a fascinating one I must say:

“If I dare to make a prediction for the next decade, it this: Thanks to the proliferation of the many electronic devices that we use on a daily basis, from cell phones to the Global Positioning Systems and the Internet, that capture everything from our communications to our whereabouts, the complex system that we are most likely to tackle first in a truly quantitative fashion may not be the cell or the Internet but rather society itself.”

Hmm… I think we know what the (long term) target of the next papers by Barabási’s team will be.

A glimpse at Christos H. Papadimitriou

Via Machinations we learn that the current issue (Volume 3, Issue 2, May 2009) of Computer Science Review is devoted to celebrating the research contributions of Christos H. Papadimitriou. The first article “A glimpse at Christos H. Papadimitriou” (by Marios Mavronicolas and Paul G. Spirakis) has a lot of information not only on Papadimitriou’s path, but also on how CS evolved in Greece and how it was influenced by Papadimitriou^*. This is a must read, especially if you are a NTUA student which means that there are at least two people that you can go to and ask for more (or better yet work with them). UoA students can ask Elias Koutsoupias.

As the authors say, there is stuff missing from the paper, since a 30+ years fruitful career cannot be covered in a few pages. But since both the fact that the TSP is a recurring theme in his research and the late Kanellakis are mentioned, I think their work on the ATSP should have been mentioned. What can I say, I’ve grown to a TSP junkie the last few years.

Also, for those interested, in the same issue Costis Daskalakis surveys their recent joint work on Nash Equilibria and complexity.

P.S. Elsevier told me that a hardcopy of this issue costs €66.50 for Greece, so it is best to go to your University’s library and access it online.

[*] – For example when two guys asked him right after graduation (~1982) on what to do, his advice was to work with databases (and I know this first hand).

ksh script template

Dave Taylor (author of elm) asked:

need to write my Linux Journal shell script programming column and am sitting here without a topic/script in mind. Suggestions?

My suggestion was to write about scriptt.sh which I first encountered in this BigAdmin article:

Writing a script template with the most frequently used functions one time and reusing it for your scripts makes life easier. Doing this as shell script instead of, for example, perl, ensures that you can just copy the script to a new machine and have it work.

twitterless for a week

Last week I went mostly twitterless. I meant to do so ever since I had read Tom Limoncelli’s piece. There had been twitterless weekends but hey the stream that I am following is small enough to read on a Monday morning.

This time it was a little over a week: 8 days. And you know what? I did not miss it. Twitter bankruptcy is like INBOX bankruptcy without feeling any regret. For if I missed a good tweet or link to information I am sure it will pop up again sometime in the near future.

GReaderless for a week

Google Reader is showing 1000+ items waiting to be dealt with. Yet I do not feel ready to declare GReader bankruptcy even though most of the unread stuff comes from the Theory of Computing Blog Aggregator (and most stuff from it comes from the arXiv). It seems that I view my RSS feeds more like email.

Update 2012/12/05: I press “mark all as read” with no regret.

No FriendFeed for a week

I use my FriendFeed account mostly for interconnecting my twitter account, my blog and the items that I share through Google Reader. Nothing to worry about then.

Update 2012/12/05: FriendFeed?

Staff and Stuff

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Acer Aspire One BIOS Recovery

My A110L stopped booting the other day. It went blank. Totally. Not even the BIOS. Searching I came along these two links that showed that I was not alone having this problem. I copy the solution displayed there because there is a minor issue with it that I want to point out:

Aspire One powers on but the screen remains blank

Updating the BIOS will require a USB flash drive to store the BIOS information on during the update. To perform the update to the BIOS:

Go here and download and extract the latest BIOS for the netbook. ← Do not go now, it is not there!
Rename the BIOS file from 3310.fd to zg5ia32.fd.
Copy zg5ia32.fd and Flashit.exe to USB flash drive
Ensure that the AC adapter is plugged in.
Insert the USB flash drive into a USB port.
Press and Hold down the Fn and the Esc keys together and press the power button.
When the unit’s power light comes on wait a few seconds and release the Fn and Esc keys.
After the keys have been released the power light will start to blink.
During the BIOS update process the display will be blank.
Let the unit run and after approximately 1 to 7 minutes, the unit should reboot and the BIOS will be updated.

If the unit fails to reboot, or the BIOS was not updated sucessfully, try the steps again.

Note: These instructions are only for the Acer Aspire One AOA-110 and the AOA-150 netbook series and should not be performed on any other model Acer Aspire One.

So what is the issue?

The problem is that by going here (as suggested) it is currently impossible to grab a BIOS update for the A110L. However, we are not at loss. Acer’s European support site distributes BIOS updates from:

ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/netbook/aspire_one_110/bios/

The second problem is that BIOS version 3310 is not available. However, I performed the very same steps using BIOS version 3309 and my A110L happily runs Ubuntu Netbook Remix once again.

10th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day

Για να μη ξεχνιόμαστε: Χρόνια μας πολλά!