CASCON 2005

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Last Tuesday I attended CASCON 2005. CASCON is hosted by IBM’s Centers for Advanced Studies. I have been to many technology conferences in the past such as Internet World but this was the first academic conference I have attended. As such, I don’t have anything to compare CASCON against. The conference itself seemed to be organized well. The atmosphere was very relaxed.

The keynote speech for the day was by Rob Clyde from Symantec Corp. His speech was entertaining and had lots of good statistics on the current state of computer security. Throughout the whole speech one thought kept circling in my mind, the security industry is far more worried about managing the security problems that plague computer networks than solving them. This makes sense since it is hard to sell solutions to problems that no longer exist. The moral for this story is that computer science as a discipline shouldn’t be looking to the main stream computer security industry for solutions to basic security problems.

A key part of CASCON is the technology showcase. Interested faculty and students are given small booths where they can present their current research to anyone interested. The closest analogy may be an elementary school science fair for adults. This is a great way to get some idea of what other people are currently researching and also provided me with many ideas for my own thesis topic.

Perhaps the most memorable part of my CASCON experience came after the conference was over for the day. During diner I lucked into sitting beside Dr. Morven Gentleman. A short while into the meal I discovered that among several other distinguished positions, Morven had worked at Bell Labs during the late sixties. If you know anything about the history of computing you probably know that both Unix and C were developed at Bell labs during this time. Hearing first hand anecdotes about the formative years of Unix and C was absolutely fabulous. The rest of the diner consisted of me peppering Morven with questions about the history of computing which he seemed happy to answer. Hopefully I wasn’t too annoying.

The Collapse of Globalism

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A few days ago I finally finished reading The Collapse of Globalism by John Ralston Saul. Unfortunately, I only had time to read it at the rate of about a chapter a day so I didn’t give the book as thorough of a reading at it really deserves.

Despite the somewhat sensational title I found this book to be much more balanced than I thought it would be. At several points Saul explains some of the good that has come with globalization but make no mistake, this book is about what has went wrong.

Saul believes that the ideas which drive globalism are based more on ideology than fact. This book does great service to society by tearing apart a simple ideology that will supposedly solve all of the world’s problems. Saul does not argue that all aspects of globalism are bad. He simply argues that one economic model cannot work in all situations. Pretty common sense when you think about it.

Here are couple of links to reviews of this book that are much better than mine.

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/08/04.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368_1,00.html

Vonage

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I have been meaning to experiment with VoIP service for a while now. So when the Vonage sales droids called me the other day offering a free month of service I thought I would give it a go.

It only took a couple of days for the Motorola box to arrive. This box is basically a VoIP to POTS converter. Ethernet in and two POTS RJ-11 jacks out. Setup is simple, hookup the Ethernet port and plug-in a phone.

So far I am pretty impressed with the service. No one I have spoken to in the last week has said anything that would indicate the quality was different from my old POTS line. I have been able to make the quality bad by starting a large upload while talking on the phone but this is party due to my network topology. Instead of putting my home network behind the Vonage Motorola box so that it can do some QoS magic I have simply plugged it into my LAN. My home network configuration has some routing requirements that make it impossible for me to put their box out front. I’m pretty sure I can deal with this quality problem with the Linux QoS features on my router anyway.

What I like most about the service is that everything can be controlled from the Vonage website. Setting up call forwarding is as simple as typing in the phone number. No more *91, wait five seconds etc. What I like even more is that voice mail messages are accessible online. You can listen, save and delete your messages from the website.

Another nice feature is being able to take your VoIP to POTS box to any location with high speed Internet. This means your home number can now travel with you. Vonage also sells a soft phone service so that you can use a SIP client on a PC or laptop while traveling. This avoids carrying the converter around.

I haven’t decided yet if this is just an experiment or if I will be canceling my Bell POTS line but it is definitely looking good.

London blog

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The London Fog is a blog that is focuses on events local to London, ON, CA. I discovered this blog via the Weblogs at Western site.

London Fog is anything but unbiased. The headline reads “Documenting the continuing mismanagement of London, Ontario by its people and municipal government.” At least the author isn’t pretending to be a fair source. This is a good example of one thing I like about blogs; the bias is usually much easier to detect than it is in main stream media.

I’m not a big fan of the conservative ideas == good, liberal ideas == bad ideology that appears to frequent the posts but at least London Fog covers some local topics.