Saturday, September 22, 2007

INRIA PhD on Securing Coordinate Systems...











Yesterday I attended Dali's defence of a very nice thesis on securing internet coordinate systems (viz, ACM SIGCOMM 2007 paper he has on it for a good summary:-).
Meanwhile, I had some very nice food, firstly in a place in Antibes called (I think) Brulot, where I had a great Soupe de Poisson and a very nice moules farcie, and then in a place near Sophia called Le Bois Dore, where I had a really great salad (see photos) and an excellent pintardeau (argh, sp? - guinea fowl, in english)

One of the salads looked a bit like Dali's algorithm, see if you can guess which:)

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

poor excuse for online banking servie

Some pundits have explained the options for banksto avoid their service crashing under load and rightly point out that this can be done with dynamic provisioning, which is commercially available (e.g. via virtualised servers in data centers) but does take some money (which usually banks aren;t exactly short of ironically:)

I'd just point out that for all every hit the Northern Rock site took, the BBC must have taken 100 - ok so the BBC doesn't run a transaction service, but it does have a b**dy good response time - and it is a public service - so a Bank that can't be bothered to provision its online business properly deserves to lose. Frankly, even the guys selling Led Zeppelin tickets did better (and that IS a transaction service) logging 20M registrations in a day. Northern dodo doesn't haev 20M customers.

yrs, not impressed frankly. I suppose Egg and HSBC might suffer a bit if they were hit bigtime by a run, but I am guessing that (given egg especially, but also First Direct) prior experience, they might actually cope a bit better - my feeling is that in the 21st century, we have a right not only to demand money from our bank branch from our current account (sneject to suitable ID proof of course) but we ought also to be able to demand our moeny from any online bank's service to accounts with the same conditions (yes, i understand many of the northern doodad's customers had deposit accounts which don't give the same guarantees or response and thats fine as that is how stability and interest rates are meneat to operate).

Sunday, September 02, 2007

cones of intersecting sounds of silence

so we see people talking across a crowded room using cell phones or mikes - if we had phase array speaker and microphone system, one could have overlapping sets of people having conversations in the same physical volume!

that'd be cool!

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misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home