Update 7/22/2008: The issue may be more complex than it first looks (of course, the media always over-simplifies things). Click HERE to read an insider’s account of the situation.

—

Okay, THIS is funny because of the glaring security mistakes made by San Francisco’s Department of Technology (or Department of Ignorance, after this one). From the New York Times:

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail…

Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology… tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored.

Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.

This is like security 101… you never give this much power to any single person. On critical systems like this, you always have check-and-balances, outside security code reviews, and strict audits. The S.F. DoT was basically driving around without insurance and got in an accident… I don’t feel sorry for them. It’s really sad how ignorant the world is about security (sigh).

Here’s another great Marcus Miller clip. You’ve gotta love the organ work. Props to Josh Brahm for the link.

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

O’Reilly has a great interview up with NASA’s Peter Gluck, project software engineer for the Mars Phoenix Lander. I always find the design and implementation of mission-critical systems interesting. In short, they’re running a radiation-hardened system (the RAD 6000 board) with a 33MHz CPU, 128 megabytes of RAM, and a PCI peripheral interface… pretty advanced stuff for space. This usually surprises people when they first hear about these systems, but the circumstances require proven technology that is hardened against the perils of outer space (for example, the Hubble Space Telescope was recently upgraded to an Intel 486 processor… the Space Shuttle still runs on hardened PDP-11s).

The software is written in C and running on the VxWorks real-time OS… Lockheed Martin (who wrote the control systems) switched from ADA to C a few years back. There are plenty more interesting details in the article. Here are a few teasers:

The RAD 6000 has built in error detection and corrections. So the hardware does RAM scrubbing. There is a RAM scrubbing that occurs on a continuous basis. And beyond that, we have internal fault protection that monitors the health and safety of the software. And if a software task, for example, fails to respond to a ping, we have pings in the system, then the fault protection task will declare that a fault has occurred and will safe the spacecraft. And what that means, by “safeing”, we mean that the spacecraft will enter into a power and communications safe mode where it will just sit and wait for the ground to respond. It’ll basically phone home and say, I’ve got a problem; somebody tell me what to do.

So if it were to completely lock-up, the hardware has to be stroked every 64 seconds. There’s a watch-stop timer. And so if that 64 second period expires, then the hardware resets and the software is rebooted, and hopefully that clears whatever error occurred. Now in the event that that doesn’t work, we have a whole second set of avionics onboard. So the hardware will try to boot to the same side, and if the same side doesn’t come up and start stroking the watch-stop timer, then it will swap to the other side and boot the first side.

Interviewer: Am I right in assuming that there’s very little process separation in the older RAD 6000 boards?

Peter: Exactly… We have strict coding guidelines that we use. We don’t allow dynamic memory allocation, for example.

These are true fail-safe systems… not the stuff we mortal engineers play with. Click HERE to read the rest of the interview.

TechUser has a great article about possible reasons Microsoft would be interested in purchasing Yahoo’s paid-search business (click HERE for the back story). For those of you new to the subject, paid-search is where advertisers bid against each other to get better/more frequent placement of their ads next to search results (think Google AdWords). This is big business. Believe it or not, it’s what drives Google… search, Gmail, Google Docs, etc all revolve around their ad business.

The afore mentioned article puts forth a compelling argument that Microsoft is only interested in the infamous ‘361 patent held by Yahoo. This is the patent on the whole idea of paid-search. Apparently, Yahoo has been dening Microsoft a good licensing deal on the patent, so Microsoft is retaliating. From the article:

Microsoft is still chafing under Yahoo’s influence and is desperate for unfettered access to the ‘361 patent. It is quite possible that the size of the royalties Microsoft is paying to Yahoo are forcing Microsoft to neglect its paid search operations in order to minimize payments to Yahoo, and to minimize the size of an eventual settlement with Yahoo.

Microsoft is completely aware of the ludicrousness of its attempts to buy Yahoo’s paid-search assets and Microsoft’s earlier acquisition bid seems to have been an attempt to soften up Yahoo’s opposition to a paid-search asset acquisition.

The entire theory is interesting. Click HERE to read the full article.

It’s been said that managing engineers is like trying to herd cats: we’re independent, suspicious, and we only do things because we want to. I was reminded this week about a great ad that aired during the SuperBowl a few years back… all about cat herding. Enjoy!

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

Some grooves just speak for themselves…

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

Click HERE to visit Marcus Miller’s website.

Systems Management News has up an interview with Ron Gorodetzky, enterprise architect for Digg. It’s an interesting look at the challenges Digg faced scaling to meet it success (over 26 million unique visitors a month). They’re using a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), with MogileFS as their backend distributed file system. To help manage their infrastructure, Digg uses Puppet.

Ron highlights a commom problem all architects face when they try to scale their software: the database.

“The first pain point we hit was just database stuff. The first thing you’ll notice is when you start to grow these queries, the database can’t commit as much time to committing a certain query as it used to,” said Gorodetzky. “You’ll find the normal things that work, suddenly don’t. You’ll find that, one day, you’ll see a spike in your graphs telling you that something’s going slower. Once you do that, you get to the point where the database part is as fast as it can be, you cache things.

You can read the full article HERE.

It’s like a scene out of the movie Madagascar… from the Associated Press:

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Amsterdam police say 15 camels, two zebras and an undetermined number of llamas and potbellied swine briefly escaped from a traveling Dutch circus after a giraffe kicked a hole in their cage.

Police spokesman Arnout Aben says the animals wandered in a group through a nearby neighborhood for several hours after their 5:30 a.m. breakout.

The animals were back at the circus later Monday after being rounded up by police and circus workers with the assistance of dogs. Aben says neighbors fed some of the animals — which he said was a bad idea — but they were tame and nobody was hurt.

I have to agree with Bruce Schneier, “Are llamas really that hard to count?”.

Well, the French saved our butts during the Revolutionary War… I’ll give them credit for that (read more on Wikipedia). However, I still like to poke fun at them. Happy 4th!!!

A group of researchers from Indiana University, Harvard Medical School, et. al have completed the first map of the outer layer of the brain. While this is cool research, I think people tend to extrapolate this stuff out too far… more on that later. Here’s a quote I found interesting:

“This is one of the first steps necessary for building large-scale computational models of the human brain to help us understand processes that are difficult to observe, such as disease states and recovery processes to injuries…” [emphasis mine]

As an engineer, I’m more interested in modeling the brain for artifical intelligence reasons (call me narrow and selfish if you want). To be clear, I don’t believe that simply cloning the brain will create a living conciousness… I’m more interested in augmenting our existing reasoning power (controversial, I know).

I tend to question the comments made by one of the researchers (maybe I’m reading too much into it):

“We can measure a significant correlation between brain anatomy and brain dynamics. This means that if we know how the brain is connected we can predict what the brain will do.”

Maybe on some generic scale, but I consider us more than just a biological computer. I’ll lay out why I believe this using inductive logic. First, I believe people are fully responsible for their own actions (using the Bible as my base). To be responsible, a person has to be able to make a choice about what actions they will take (free-will vs determinism). Now, assume we are just a biological computer, with predictable, deterministic actions. If this is true, then our behavior is dictated by our biology and we only appear to have free-will. Without free-will, we are not responsible for our actions. Thus, this can’t be true.

Okay, now some would argue that we are a biological computer but with some non-deterministic properties. If this is the case, we still have no responsibility for our actions because they are simply slaves to these random fluctuations. Thus, I hold firm to my belief that we have a soul that transends the physical.

You can read the full results of the study HERE. Or as a PDF.