Today on this ol' server

Station X

I was surprised at how heavy the keys were. I was at Station X in Brittan, or better know as Bletchley park. It was 2001 and I was hitting the keys on an old WWII German enigma machine. Think of the keys on an old ibm selectra, but heavier. The plug board lit up when I hit a key. There was a buzzing sound as the light was lit. Next I tumbled the rotors. Latch, catch, tick, tick . . .

One of the rare finds in computing history lore and legend is Bletchley Park. This is where Alan Turing worked after writing "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem" which introduced the Turing machine. During WWII all communications required deciphering were processed at Bletchley Park. They needed speed, lives were at stake. They needed accuracy. The perfect job for a machine, only there wasn't one. Yet.
The very man who had conceived entirely original rigorous way to determine if it was possible that any type of logical statement (that can be broken up in to mathematical grammar) would complete, needed an automated way to decrypt non-trival codes. He worked on a team to devise ways to automate the cracking. After building the Bombe the team realized a need for the machine to be able to be reprogrammed, akin to how a modern computer operating system can run more than one program. The Colossus is considered one of the worlds first programmable computers. Similar to a modern computer program the Colossus was a reprogrammable machine that would do use algorithms to decipher the messages.

The Park recently finished building a replica of the Colossus. Last year the Park had a contest to see if a developer could beat the newly rebuild Colossus. (All the machines and plans were destroyed shortly after WWII ended. Except that our NSA kept a copy of one of the plans for the Bombe and Colossus. That story is a great vignette in and of itself.)

Now we have computers in phones, cars, vacuum cleaners, in addition to the tradition servers living in datacenters. We even have self-healing features where software will recover from a set of defined hardware and software errors.

On a more somber note, last Saturday marked the 54th anniversary of Turing's death. I think if Turing were a live to day I'd like to think he'd be proud at how far we come. I'd like to think that if he visited our time he'd see amazing cities, vibrant communities, as well as places and attitudes that have far transcended his 50s Brittan. I'd hope he'd be pleased with our efforts to continually push the envelope. I'd hope we'd understand that we need to move past just tolerating people that are different to acceptance. The world lost a great mind for the pettiness of not be able to accept one different from ourselves over some superficial trait.

Posted at 12:41AM Jun 09, 2008 by saf in musing  |  Comments[0]

Looking at NGOs decentralized

Went to Long Now seminar by Paul Hawken. Was amazed how many NGOs there are, (he includes both human rights and environmental watchdog groups as ngos). Literally there are just overa hundred thousand. He says this is the first time we've had a social movement that is decentralized. Reminds me of the rise of opensource. Talked with a religious expert and he said that the Catholic church would have remote churches where the priest would be the head and they would be more or less autonomous from the rest of the org. To which I said that was a local phenomenon, and they they still had to be "under the rules" of the parent org. (centralized) Reminds me of source code management. Paraphrasing Stephen Hahn, you can have a decentralized source code management software act like a centralized one at a local level, where as a centralized scm can't act like a decentralized model.

My friend and I started to talk about why this is happening now and hasn't before, and came up with the collective community answer, near-real time communication. This is the first time a large majority of the population can communicate with each other in near-real time. (I say collective community answer because I think I've heard this before, maybe not in this exact context but certainly applied to opensource.)

Paul Hawken also likened ngos to our immune system. which is funny as most medical texts use the war/battle metephore to describe the immune systems function. The war/battle metaphore is a transaction based metaphor. I like NGOs as I can see them as a transformational metaphor -- bottoms up, grassroots orgs decentralized changing the way we see and do things. Maybe I'm just too old school to see the immune system in a transformational way, today.

Humm, brings new meaning to think globally, act locally. Sorry couldn't resist a coding joke.

Posted at 11:05AM Jun 11, 2007 by saf in musing  |  Comments[0]

make faire

Feed your inner geek
I went to the Maker faire a while back. It was fabulous. Nothing like it. I reminded me of bits of the first Linux World, the embedded section of the second Linux World, and exuberance I've haven't seen since pre-bubble bursting. I loved it. It fed my mind, and countless others around me. Can't wait till next years faire.[Read More]

Posted at 03:04PM May 22, 2006 by saf in musing  |  Comments[0]

Abstraction

I stared at some of my Czech puzzles, and was reminded when I stood in front of the Czech royal cathedral. At that instant I got what abstraction meant. Here in Prague, back in the 10th century there were many people that lived their lives dedicated to to the ultimate abstraction of the church. Look at the art, the stratified hierarchy, Mary here, Jesus up there. Look at the buttresses, each ascending beyond. Then they were left behind during the Renaissance, then came Lutheranism, along with the rest of Protestant reformation, add to it Darwinism, and Newtonian mechanics. Then finally god is dead pronounced by Nietzsche.

Wonder where software abstraction will take us? Will it finally crumble, in a diluted, distributed haze? Or we will have some new insight bringing us beyond?
Wonder how much process do we need to bring us to the next transformation?

Posted at 12:43AM May 21, 2006 by saf in musing  |  Comments[0]