On The Margins

Friday July 30, 2004

[ Personal ] From Salzburg w/ an Unknown Browser

I'm posting this log from the Jugend und Familien Gasthaus in Salzburg. The internet connection is quite fast. The price is prohibitive: 2.65 Euros for 35 minutes ! ! ! It's shocking but it seems to include a home-grown browser (?). As usual, for me, the most important problem is the European key-board althought with a bit of practice, it is easy to get over the change of place between y and z and a few other kezs. The day after tomorrow, I leave my daughter at a language camp and depart for the U.S.

2004-07-30 15:14:14.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday July 17, 2004

[ Personal ] A visit to 'Half the World'

"Isfahan is half the world," says an Isfahani proverb.

On July 12th, we set out to see what that meant. We had been to Isfahan before when Yasmine, my oldest daughter was one year old. Now, nine years later, we wondered if anything had changed. The city was certainly much more crowded, there were many more freeways into and out of the city and several more hotels. (See the last paragraph of this note on what is lacking in terms of hotels and other facilities.)

I drove my father's old BMW from Tehran to Qom to Kashan to Natanz to Isfahan to Mahallat to Abe Gharm to Saveh, and back to Tehran.

With the exception of the Abe Gharm hot water springs and spa, much of the roads between these cities and towns consisted of 3-lane freeways. None of these freeways were around 10 years ago when Liana and I took a similar excursion with our one-year-old.

Many of the 3-lane roads charge a toll of about $0.25 for sedans. Most of them are funded by companies incorporated for the construction of the freeways or by banks such as Mellat Bank, not to be confused with a Turkish bank of the same name. In many sections, several miles long, we were the only car on the freeway.

In Qom, we visited the shrine of Ma'sumeh, the sister of Imam Reza. The shrine quarters have vastly improved in the last 10 years. Qom is currently the premier center of Shiite learning.

In Kashan, which is famous for its rugs but also has a medical school, we visited the Aga Bozorg school, built during the Qajar period for studies in Islamic jurisprudence. We stayed in Kashan Monday night and had a chance to visit the Bagheh Fin (Fin Garden) before departing for Isfahan. It is in the baths of these gardens that one of Iran's most effective prime ministers, Amir Kabir, was put to death by his erstwhile friend and brother-in-law Naser-edin Shah. Amir Kabir had started sending Iranian students to Germany before his Japanese counterparts thought of the idea. It is said that the Shah's mother, her confidants and the British embassador had something to do with Amir Kabir's murder.

The children, Yasmine and Negin, liked the Fin Gardens in particular. Most of the garden was built between 500 to 200 years ago with some maintenance work continuing. It has flowing waters and fountains from an opulent natural spring on the premises. The waterworks help produce a cool breeze in several sections of the garden, particularly one built by the Safavid about 400 years ago.

Natanz had a beautiful, old masjid going back to the time of the Buyid Dynasty, a fantastically active period in intellectual history of Persia. We had a very nice break there. We were the only ones visiting this old monument. The care taker opened the door of a sufi khanegah built on the side of the masjid. Old, simply decorated Quranic verses in Kufi surrounded the dome.

Isfahan, requires no explanation given the saying of the Isfahanis: "Isfahan, Nisfeh Jahan" (Isfahan is half the world). The proud history of Isfahanis has to do with the influence of the rulers of this city on lands as far away as India, Iraq, Uzbakistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.

The high points for us were the visits to the Naghsheh Jahan square (Meydaneh Imam) and the Khajoo Bridge (Poleh Khajoo).

During the Safavids, Polo was played in the square while the Shah watched or participated. One can still see the polo goal posts on one end of the square.

Wednesday night, many Isfahanis had gathered on that absolutely beautiful bridge, Poleh Khajoo, listening to improvised lyrics song in traditional Persian rythms. Others were taking a stroll through the delicately built caverns of this multi-level bridge. Poleh Khajoo is a bridge built for people to enjoy. Wednesday night, on the way back to the hotel, we had tea on the Choobi Bridge, less than 200 meters away from Khajoo.

The next day, we tried quickly to traverse the road back from Isfahan to Tehran. We had a short dinner stop at Mahallat and spent a night at the Abeh Gharm hot water springs. The private baths there cost $1.25.

The hot water spring baths were wonderful. Of course, the quality of service has a lot to go to reach the Japanese onsans of Izu Hanto but the quality of the mineral water and the heat was superb.

We rushed back through Saveh, where Liana bought a Russian non-alcoholic beer for me at one of our stops. It was absolutely delicious in the hot day. I will write more about this wonderful non-alcoholic beer later.

The trip in and out of Tehran megapolis was by far the most difficult part of the journey. Other than that, I'm happy we returned safe and sound. Now, we need to see whether we can make it to Sabalan Mountain for this weekend.

Before I finish, I should note the down sides of traveling in Iran. With the exception of the Abbasi Hotel in Isfahan and a few others in major cities such as Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz and Tabriz, there are very few really good hotels in Iran. For example, the hotel in Abeh Gharm hot water springs is in need of new carpeting and the chiller kept me awake until 2 am. The management said they are trying to fix it but they also have to change carpets, install new wall papers and do something about an elevator. The Kowsar Hotel in Kashan had huge, beautifully furnished apartments for a very reasonable price but the location of the hotel, its surroundings and office facilities are wanting. While DSL is already available in Tehran and possibly a few other cities, with the exception of one or two hotels in Tehran, my guess is that almost no hotel has fast internet connection today. So, there is a lot of room for improvements in this area. The other downside is traffic within the downtown area of large cities. (Even Abbasi Hotel is really difficult to get to through the traffic on the Chahar-Bagh Blvd.) Despite all this, one thing is guaranteed no matter where you are: good food.

2004-07-17 10:22:42.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Sunday July 11, 2004

[ Personal ] A "cold" summer day

Today was a "cold" summer day in Tehran, where I'm vacationing with my family.

According to the evening news, this was the coldest July 11th in 35 years. My mother believes the precedence must be even farther away in time.

Liana and I were planning to drive the kids in my Dad's old BMW from Tehran to Isfahan through Qom.

We may need to put off that adventure for later when the flood rains subside.

2004-07-11 11:50:42.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Economics ] Tehran Stock Exchange

According to Iranian financial news reports I have read in the last few days, real estate grew by only 19% across Iran while stocks grew by more than 130% in 2003. It may be possible to confirm this by a look at the Tehran Stock Exchange although I have not tried it myself in any depth. Volume of exchange has grown by more than %250. More and more companies are being listed. CEO of the TSE recently called for listing of news media companies to give them greater vitality.

2004-07-11 11:44:17.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday July 10, 2004

[ Personal ] Darband, a much easier climb

Compared to the climb to Tochal two days ago, which probably took us up to some 4,960 meters, our climb to Pas-Qalleh today was a very easy hike from Darband.

2004-07-10 11:48:19.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Economics ] Chester Barnard

I have started reading Chester Barnard's The Functions of the Executive.

It has been recommended by professor Oliver Williamson (Economics, Law School and School of Business at UC Berkeley) as an important work. Professor Williamson has reviewed Bernard's influence in Mechanisms of Governance.

The volume I have in my hand is published by the Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is the thirty-ninth printing (2002) of the book, originally published in 1938.

What sort of book is it that gets to have so many printings?

Apparently, Barnard never completed Harvard, but he wrote one of the most influential books there is when it comes to management, executive functions and organizational theory.

2004-07-10 11:20:24.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday July 08, 2004

[ Personal ] Climbing Tochal

Well, Thursday July 8, 2004, was my first day of vacation.

My wife, Liana, and my daughters, Negin (6) and Yasmine (10), went on a hike up mount Tochal, north of Tehran. The view from the peak was absolutely beautiful as Tochal is one of the highest peaks near Tehran. There are other peaks, much higher, but at some significant distance from the capital.

Negin did quite well although her mother and I had to carry her on our backs for part of the way. Yasmine climbed the whole distance by herself.

We did cheat quite a bit because we took the telecabin all the way to the 7th station, which was just about under 1000 meters below the peak.

The telecabin costs about $6 a person. It is quick way to the top if one is interested not in intense exercise but in height training.

The views and the height of the telecabin is also quite impressive. I've been on it four times in the last 12 years and this was the first time when I felt comfortable looking down into the valleys over which it rises.

I heard someone at the peak say it was 3960 meters high. "Only if they would build a 40 meter edifice here that I could climb," he said. "Then I could claim a 4000 meter summit climb."

2004-07-08 23:16:10.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday July 06, 2004

[ Philosophy ] Free Culture

In the very beginning of his book, Free Culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford Law Professor and reknowned Internet intellectual seems to be taking a rather narrow approach when describing the sense of the word "free" in the title of his book: Free Culture.

Although I may be mistaken, in the following passage from the preface, Lessig seems to be confusing "free" with the freedom to put the past behind, to become free of its control over us.

A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture"--a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

Let us first attend to the question of "permission" and then to "freedom".

It is hard to see how creators of the past could give any "permission" one way or the other. It appears as if Lessig is taking some poetic license with the word "permission". So, perhaps my whole enterprise of interpreting his definitions in any serious way is just off the course … but I have to assume he is somewhat serious about his definitions … and go on giving my own interpretation of them …

Turning to freedom "from" the control the past exercises on us, I would like to observe that we don't have any such freedom. We only imagine we do.

The freedom we do have is a freedom to review, interpret, re-mix and learn from the past and move towards a possible future, disclosing its various aspects and possible realizations. I think later on in his book, Lessig is really focusing on that type of interpretive and creative freedom. So, it is a pity that he defines "free" as he does in the first few pages of Free Culture. I find that definition at best unnecessarily narrow and at worst inconsistent with the force of the rest of his argument.

As Heidegger has pointed out in his Was heißt Denken?, rootedness is the very essence of meditative thought. Without rootedness it is impossible to grasp the past, the present or the future in a context that relates to our being. So, to state that "free culture" is about freedom from the "control of the past" is to confuse the very meaning of the past and of culture.

A rooted culture, e.g. the Shiite Muslim culture, is not to be confused with a culture where only what the old version of that culture has permitted receives expression. On the contrary, a free culture has a capability to re-interpret what has gone on up to the present moment. In fact, elsewhere in his book, Lessig gives expression to this understanding of what "free" means.

Lessig should have defined "free culture" as one where:

… follow-on creaters and innovators remain as free as possible to re-interpret the past, and do so for all of the past, not just a selected portion of it that is perpetuated by commercial activity protected by copyrights …

Furthermore, the opposite of "free culture" is not a "permission culture" but a "shackled culture," where the past is shackled either by neglect (or otherwise by purposeful forgetfulness) from being re-interpreted in creative ways. A "shackled culture" or a "culture of slavery" only allows certain interpretations and ideas to survive. All other ideas are banished into the abyss of silence and fall forever out of reach. In a free culture, all ideas have an opportunity to florish and be interpreted anew.

It is that sense of "freedom" that the rest of Lessig's book is about.

Finally, to what extent big media is involved in purposefully using "technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity," as Lessig's book title suggests, is open to question. While big media's use of technology and the law in pursuit and protection of their commercial interests may lead to such lock-down and control, it is the job of policy-makers and the government to set the rules of the game to strike a sustainable balance between private property and free culture. If the giants of media business care little about Free Culture, that lack of care is more a by-product, not flowing from their direct intent, but a derivative consequence of their calculative, profit maximizing mode of being. One may still argue, from an economic point of view, that a shackled culture is bad for profit in the marketplace of ideas but that requires a separate, more in-depth consideration.

Note: I wrote this note on July 5th while waiting in the Mumbai International Airport for my flight to Frankfurt. I had just flown in from Bangalore and had to wait until 2:55 am, July 6th, to get on my flight to Frankfurt. It would be 19 hours in total before I can make it from Bangalore to Frankfurt. I entered it as a blog while sitting at 54f offices in Darmstadt. 54f is an architecture company my brother and three others from Darmstadt University founded some time ago . . . More on 54f to come later.

2004-07-06 03:06:54.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday July 05, 2004

[ Telecommunications ] SIP capabilities, a good introduction

If you are looking for a good introduction to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), you can find one titled "The Future of Communication using SIP" in the Ericsson Review, No. 1, 2002.

You might want to start by reading the section titled "Capabilities supported by SIP." These are on pages 31 - 32 and give you an ideal perspective on (the technical) environments where SIP would be useful.

2004-07-05 02:25:27.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Personal ] Last day at the India Engineering Center

This is my last day at Sun Microsystems' India Engineering Center (IEC).

The IEC was first established in 1998 but it is still expanding. There's a new first floor addition in the Divyasree Chambers complex, where it is located next to Cisco's offices in Bangalore.

It has been a great visit, and I have met many bright and professional engineers and managers working on all kinds of cool technologies. Of course, my focus has been on the application server and the web server teams. We talked extensively about clustering (including failure detection and replication techniques) and also quite a bit about telecommunications market and applications. It has been a wonderful experience and visit.

During this past weekend in Bangalore, I had a chance to visit the market in city center and also some malls. Of course, there's a great contrast between the two, the main being the distribution and business model. On the one side you have very small businesses and on the other, you have the smoothed-out businesses depending on international distribution channels. I believe, for a long time to come, both will survive and propser.

And yes, last night, as many others, I did watch the Greek victory over Portugal in Euro 2004 final ! ! !

This evening, I leave for Mumbai and then later for Frankfurt, where I'll begin my family vacation.

2004-07-05 01:53:05.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Sunday July 04, 2004

[ Science ] Structural Analysis of Proteins

In a recent paper, computer science professor Yuan-Fang Wang of UC Santa Barbara, describes a tool based on 3-D Java for fast protein visualization.

The 3-D structure of proteins determines their biochemical operation.

For example, a great deal of effort was used to map the 3-D structure of Hemoglobin, the main ingredient of our red blood cells, in order to discover and explain how it fixes oxygen.

Computer visualization is only one aspect of structural analysis. In fact, it is one of the last steps in the the geometric analysis of a protein. (The ultimate goal being the actual biochemical function and relationships.)

Another important (and more fundamental) aspect is the actual determination of the geometric structure given a protein's amino acid sequence.

Such determination involves an optimization problem which searches for geometric positioning of protein backbone such that the lowest potential energy state is attained.

This procedure follows from the basic physical principle that all structures prefer the geometry that leads to the lowest potential energy.

The potential engergy can be determined by adding all potential energies due to interactions among the amino acid molecules that have been strung together in a protein.

There is a whole separate art in writing the potential energy equation as a function of molecular positioning and solving it for its lowest value in the hyperdimensional space of the molecular distances. The optimization problem can be solved in a number of ways. Since this is a large-dimension problem, it is important to use some heuristics to start the problem with the protein geometry in a realistic initial state. Following this initial state, the computation searches for neighboring states that have lower potential energy. This sequence is repeated until lowest potential energy "neighborhood" in the hyper-dimensional space of molecular distance vectors is found.

2004-07-04 00:25:27.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday July 03, 2004

[ Telecommunications ] Mobility and Single Sign-On

For mobile telecommunications operators, single sign-on (SSO) is not just a cool technology. It is increasingly an economic necessity.

One may argue that mobile telecommunications operators already have a form of single sign-on operating under the covers.

As the "mobile station" (the technical, GSM term for the mobile phone) moves, it needs constantly to access distinct resources (or services).

When a mobile station moves, the cellular tower giving it access to the public land mobile network (PLMN) will eventually hand off to the next cellular tower. The radio network server will use signal strength comparisons between the towers as an indication of when and where hand-off needs to occur.

However, single sign-on to network resources and services is a truly general concept in need of a more broad treatment. In fact, the Liberty Alliance, a standards organization has addressed the problem of single sign-on in its ID-FF (identity federation framework) set of specs.

So, where does the economic necessity come from?

Mobile telecommunications providers are focused in providing connectivity, access, identity and other voice and data services to their customers. From their point of view, a service is a kind of network interaction for which the subscriber is willing to pay. However, as we move to the a mobile age filled with perviously unimagined forms of voice and data communications, various "services" will need to be composed to provide the required features in a sophisticated and billable service.

A simple example may help.

Let's say you're a network operator serving 15 million people, offering them Multi-media Messaging Service (MMS) capabilities. Your subscribers are carrying mobile stations that can take pictures, which they can send to others through MMS or other means. Your subscribers also receive multi-media messages, say pictures or video clips, from friends, family or other services (e.g. sports, whether, etc.) to which they have subscribed.

What if your subscriber wants to maintain an album for all these in-coming and out-going multi-media messages? Should you be providing that service or should you be "outsourcing" it to another business that specializes in maintaining large multi-media albums and libraries? You'll probably choose the latter course because the business of providing digital albums for multi-media content is not within your core competency. The album business is a separate business. In fact, your subscribers will want to access their albums in multiple ways and will probably want to preserve a distinct identity with their album provider.

This example simply shows that the decision to host a broad SSO solution can be an economically rational decision for the mobile telecommunications operators simply because economics of sophisticated services will push them to "sub-contract" or "outsource" many of the "services" which they will have to compose into a billable service.

In the presence of sophisticated service composition, one would need a very good SSO and identity model. Hence, the advent of the Liberty Alliance.

2004-07-03 05:46:06.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday July 01, 2004

[ Web ] Liberty Alliance Interoperability Logo

Liberty Alliance has announced that nine companies (Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Netegrity, Novell, Oracle, Ping Identity, Sun, and Trustgenix) have earned the Liberty Alliance Interoperable Logo.

This follows the earlier news of Intel joining the Liberty Alliance.

2004-07-01 22:14:41.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Personal ] Jessica in Bangalore--a question of odds

What are the odds of meeting a friend with no prior planning?

Well, if you live in the same village, town, city or country, there could be some good odds.

But what are odds anyway? For example, what were the odds that you would be reading this piece of writing when the universe started or when you got up this morning? Quite slim . . . and yet it has happened . . . If life was all predictable and we could have a good handle of odds regarding everything we do, what sort of life would that be? It certainly would be a life without any true dialog, and such a life will be an unexamined life and not worth living, according to Socrates . . . but let's stop all that philosophizing.

On my first trip to India, in the first few hours in Bangalore this Wednesday, while having breakfast at the Richmond Hotel, I ran into Jessica Smith, a friend from J-School who has been working for the Marketplace news organization as the Tokyo Bureau Chief for some time. Marketplace reports are regularly broadcast by public radio stations around the U.S. You can do a search for Jessica's stories here. As a sample, I recommend a recent, wonderful story on the Honda-GE collaboration to construct new types of small jet engines.

Jessica is here, obviously, to work on some stories on the changes in India, the high-tech industry in Bangalore, not to mention the few other fun stories that she has in her plans. I joined Jessica on her dinner visit to Dr. Vasanthi Srinivasan, a professor of organizational behavior and HR management at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. What followed was a delightful conversation touching various topics. (Since Jessica has not yet filed her report, I will keep silent about the details.)

The chances of meeting Jessica in Bangalore was quite slim when I left San Francisco, and neither of us could have predicted it but it did happen . . . I wonder how any science would formulate these everyday (and yet life-significant) coincidences into neatly packaged concepts of its theories?

2004-07-01 19:32:13.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.