It's all about experience

It's not just the programming.
It's not just the music.
It's not just the message.

It's all about experience. And the desire for it.

People are looking for a new experience through technologies.

Concurrency will surely help giving a smooth experience; and even more good things.

(I will not quote Jimi Hendrix here)

Twitter in Japan after 3-11 or 11-MAR-2011

I'm really thinking about restricting my tweets to tech issues only.

Tweets in Japanese have been getting too political these days, especially after the 3-11 accidents and disasters. People are less restrictive on expressing op-ed tweets, and the tweets further invoke even more harsh exchanges of discussions without careful thoughts, often lead to blackmailing.

I do understand people in Japan including myself have legitimate fears against the possible nuclear and predicted earthquake/tsunami disasters. And I accept people have rights to openly discuss those matters. Twitter, however, is not a good place to have discussions with showing sufficient clarifications and enough pieces of evidence.

My technical interests for Erlang/OTP as of April 2011

This is a list of my technical interests for Erlang/OTP as of April 2011:

• Catching up the latest cryptographic algorithms, including hash functions, shared-key cryptography, public-key cryptography, pseudo random number generators (PRNGs), while making them efficient in parallel/concurrent execution environment;
• Delay tolerance network technologies which can handle days, weeks, months of message delivery delays;
• Fundamental support functions of IPv6, especially for Distributed Erlang and epmd, and cryptographic transport support with SSL/TLS;
• DNSSEC-compatible resolver implementation for inet_res module;
• Large binary heap handling of BEAM, and the programming methodologies for the faster NIF implementation, including the performance measurement;
• PRNGs with small context/internal-state size, e.g., Wichmann-Hill 1982/2006, LShift, XOR32;
• PRNGs with large context/internal-state size, e.g., SFMT;
• TAI or leap-second handling by NIF;
• Privilege separation techniques between BEAM instances (e.g., virtualization, FreeBSD Jail); and
• the effective usage and choice of port drivers, linked-in drivers, and NIFs

And projects I'm interested in (but not limited to):

• Disco Project, a MapReduce implementation
• ZeroMQ and other general queueing systems
• UBF, BERT-RPC, and other messaging formats
• CouchDB

And don't forget I'll be hosting the ACM Erlang Workshop 2011.

(This article is a revised version of http://heikou-konton.blogspot.com/2011/02/erlangotp.html (originally written in Japanese.)

Erlang Workshop 2011 will be held as scheduled

This is a short notice that Erlang Workshop 2011 aka The Tenth ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop will be held as scheduled at National Center of Sciences, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan, on Friday, September 23, 2011.

See my presentation slides at ErlLounge of Erlang Factory SF Bay 2011 for the further details (in PDF). I should emphasize that the distance between the troubled Fukushima nuclear power plants and Tokyo is more than 200 kilometers, and also that the venue building of the workshop will not be affected by the scheduled rolling blackouts.

I also suggest you to take a look at ICFP 2011 Web site for the details of the ICFP 2011 related events.

3-FEB-2011: IPv4 address pool in IANA is used up

As of 3 February 2011, the central pool of available IPv4 addresses managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has been depleted. See ARIN's FAQ for the further details. Since July 1994 when IPv6 was first recommended by the IETF, Internet engineers are periodically warning people that IPv4 address space is finite. And the day has come. Of course this is not the end of the Internet. We need to consider, however, some new issues:

• Internet is no longer a unified network of single protocol; it will become a multi-protocol network of IPv4 and IPv6 shortly.
• While quite a new technologies have been developed and are under deployment for the migration to IPv6 (i.e., dumping the old technology of IPv4 and replace it by IPv6), we will still have to endure the fact that IPv4 will be staying around for another few years, or even more than 10 years.
• Promoting IPv6 is essential. I think, however, maintaining the inter-connectivity of the two networks and the services provided there from both networks is even more critical. We don't want two split networks; we still want one unified Internet, don't we?

Failing to import - now solved

I am trying to import some old articles from one of my old Blogger.com exported file, still failing. Stay tuned.
Update: now complete after tweaking the <author> section of the XML from the blogger.com exported file. Whew.
Contents from old Concurently Chaotic have been moved. And the contents from my old blog jj1bdx: journal of technology have also been merged.

Cloudsourcing from home

Managing the information and services which I provide has been a persistent source of headache since I set up my own Web server at home in 1997. So far I've been successfully managing the contents, such as:

• External authoritative DNS (though you still need to maintain the internal authoritative DNS and the cache servers)
• Mail receiving servers (or more formally called the message transfer agents or MTAs) and the complex forwarding schemes for my family, namely me and Kyoko
• Static web servers solely for the public contents, including this blog

I still have to pursue moving out the servers from home to the external sites, however, because managing new protocols from home such as IPv6 and other new applications is increasingly getting difficult, due to the constraints of available bandwidth, IP address space, and my own time.

Frankly speaking, I do not want to buy any more computer at home. More accurately, I do not want to install and maintain operating systems and the application software at home unless I really have to. Things have already been getting too complex, and I need to offset or outsource the complexity to external sites and services.

The problem I'm facing is that cloudsourcing or moving out services provided at my home servers adds many levels of indirection and layers of things to consider: availability and redundancy issues, association of the services, how and where to consistently collect the backup data, and the contingency plan and the recovery procedure in case of service disruption.

I know the cloudsourcing issue is a matter of business reengineering process, and to redesign the workflows of the various activities, in my family. It's not only about the computer systems. We need to change our way of living.

And I finally started to learn what kind of things you can do on Google Apps, Google AppEngine, and Amazon Web Services.