Shadowlessness

This Friday I was coming back from Tehran on a train. This train was one I haven’t traveled by before (see, it only runs around 6 AM, and I honestly didn’t know that particular time existed before!)
Anyway, since this was a fast train, the cars didn’t have compartments and there were seats instead of beds.
The most amusing feature of this train, aside having no power outlet to keep Rincewind and Fenchurch (my portable music player, which I had forgotten to fully charge) running, were the inter-car doors. These doors were sliding doors with a button to open and close then. You wouldn’t believe how cool these were. After one pressed the button, the door would open rapidly and with a hiss. The movement speed, the acceleration at first and eventual slow-down, the hisss sound it made upon opening and closure… it was perfect. Made you feel you were in a sci-fi universe. Not like those stupid photo-sensor doors that have none of these features.
I had not slept for about 24 hours before I boarded this train, and I couldn’t sleep on-board for an unknown reason. Here I was sitting less than two meters away from this cool door, and I just watch it open and close, open and close, in an almost complete trance. I think the people sitting around me all thought I was high or something, with my staring at the door and my stupid grin and my not noticing anything that went on about.

Oh, in case you were wondering, the title refers to the doors that Sirius Cybernetics Corporation made for the starship Heart of Gold. If you don’t know what that is off the bat, get your mind in a gutter and go read the most important work of literature of all times: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Here’s an overdue congratulations to my friend Amir Hossein, whose boy is now just about 10 days old.
I raise my glass in salute to your family. Cheers!

I’ve heard rumors that IAUM-CCC is going to be held again this summer, which will be the fifth such event. For the uninitiated, IAUM-CCC is an annual computer programming competition among Iranian (~)students, held in Azad University of Mashhad.
The first round will be online, supposedly before the end of Tir (around mid-July) and the final rounds are scheduled for the end of Mordad (around mid-August.)

Fortunately for my schoolmates and friends over there in Mashhad, I don’t think I have enough time and energy to contribute in any major way this year. This is fortunate because the weakest points in past years’ contests were my contributions (mostly in the form of incomprehensible and/or wrong problem statements and flawed solutions.) I will however try to make it there as a judge, if the executive committee would want me.

Now, to whomever who reads this blog (all the 2-3 people) I invite you and your friends to participate (if you are an Iranian-resident and are or have recently been a student.) More importantly, if you think you can manage it, I invite you (implore would be a better word) to help us devise the problems for the event. Some items that might be of interest.

• We need more than 30 problems for the tournament.
• If you contribute any problems and they are accepted for the CCC, you won’t be able to qualify for or participate in the on-site rounds. You can take part in the online contests, though.
• If any of your problems are included in the CCC, you will be an Honorary Judge and will receive the certificate stating that. Depending on the number of contributors, you may be invited to help us as a judge in the on-site rounds.
• If you contribute any problems to the CCC, we ask you to consider yourself bound by your conscience not to discuss or share your contributions with anyone other than the other CCC judges.
• You are free to use problems from existing sources as “inspiration” for the ones you want to contribute to the CCC, but verbatim copying is unacceptable. You should share the source of your inspiration with us anyway.
• The printed problem sets during the contest and the published material on the website will carry the name of the problem setter, unless she requests otherwise.
• The problems should be designed in the spirit of ACM/ICPC problems, with the same conventions.
• The difficulty range of the problems will be wide, from easiest of programming tasks to difficult ICPC-grade, but the problems in the CCC are on the easy side of the scales, such that our most difficult problems can be considered around the same difficulty level as medium or medium-hard problems in the ICPC world finals.
• It would be better if the problem designers supply their own solution and even I/O data if they can, but even if you don’t want to (or don’t have the time to) do so, give us your idea or problem statement.
• Anyone interested should contact me through my email address, which is the single letter y at the domain name of this site: yaserzt.com.

As always, we hope to see all of you in Mashhad (or at least during the online contest.)

P.S. If anyone has more concrete information regarding CCC 5, please let me know!

What would you answer if I asked you what the most useless, pointless, mind-numbingly stupid three letters that people utter left and right were, what would you answer? (No, I don’t mean ‘g’, ‘o’, ‘d’!)
Of course it’s “www”. Do those people that still put these letters in front of every web address (and non-web addresses too!) they give out have any idea what they represent? Do they know that there’s nothing special or magical about the “www”? How many of them actually have different server machines on their domains that they need to specify the sub-domain name as well? Heck, even different server types on different machines does not completely justify a sub-domain specification; they have to have different web servers with different content (or the same content but with no automatic load balancing mechanism) to warrant their use of “www”. In my book, the only group of people that are as stupid as these indiscriminate users of the “www” prefix are those claustrophobic cretins that rush the airplane aisles and doorways as soon as it touches the tarmac.
Please people. Use your heads. Most of the time, it takes more time to pronounce the “www” than to say the actual address. Drop the “www”.

Besides, each time you say or write “www”, you use energy, which more accurately means you are converting energy from a more usable, less chaotic form to a less usable one with more entropy (usually heat.) Therefore, you are irreversibly increasing the entropy of the whole universe and making “the end” jump forward. Don’t do that.
(The only understandable reason for wanting the end of the universe closer would be for a chance to dine at Milliway’s, which I don’t recommend myself.)

(Should I have titled these series “Managing Your Online Life”? But there’s almost no distinction between my online life and my life, so I don’t feel the need.)

Some general notes first. When it comes to online life (or even life in general,) the most important thing you have is data, period. So you have to think about data accessibility, portability and protection.
Let me give you an example. If you use Yahoo! mail as your primary email, you are not OK. Your email is held hostage on Yahoo! servers. You have no way of reaching it. Even if you pay for premium services, you only get lousy POP3 service and the ability to download all your email as an archive. The keyword here is “all”. You can’t chop it up and the download is not restartable or resumable. Imagine downloading a 3GiB file in those situations! If you forward your email to another account, you won’t get a local copy anymore and you can’t forward the mail already in your inbox. It doesn’t support IMAP so you can’t remotely manage and move your email around in your mailbox. Both the web-based interfaces are so brain-dead that any form of bulk operation is tremendously hard or virtually impossible. So you tell me whether my almost 90000 email messages in my Yahoo! mailbox are accessible or not? Can I get a backup copy of my email so that if someone malevolently accessed my account and deleted all my email, I won’t be left high and dry? Can I be sure that Yahoo! will not start enforcing its own brand of sanctions against Iran and blocking my access to my email from tonight? Can I be sure that my email is not read by Yahoo itself, or not forwarded to Michael Chertoff’s or Jack Valenti’s desks as a result of something similar to the Patriot Act?
So, accessibility, portability and security are important!

Don’t trust anyone! Don’t trust corporations. Don’t trust governments. However, keep in mind that both keeping security and breaking security cost money and time (usually.) Weigh the trade offs and then make decisions. If your data is not worth anything to you, then it may not be cost-effective for you to protect it. If it’s not worth anything to anybody, then it may not be cost-effective for an adversary to try and gain access to you data.

Also remember that I live in Iran. My whole life I’ve been struggling with unreliable and lacking technological infrastructure, services and options. The situation is unlikely to improve in near or even far future. Therefore, I cannot download 3GiB from a webserver in a single connection. My connection will get interrupted. I cannot be sure that I’ll have Internet connectivity in my home for 12 hours straight without disruption because I have no grounds to sue my ISP when I get disconnected for 1 to 5 minutes every 2 to 3 hours (or 5 hours of no connectivity every once in a while.) Actually, I can’t even trust my cellphone, hard-line phone or even electricity to be available all the time (they almost always are, but I can’t expect them to, and no one will be accountable if they are not, and there are few or no alternatives to switch to in that case, and the providers know that.)

Unfortunately, I have to use Windows for all my current work and therefor I use it most of the time (who am I kidding? I use Windows almost exclusively.) But I hate Windows. Although I have to admit it was getting better and better with Windows XP and Windows 2000. It sucked a lot less than it used to. But then Microsoft went and just did it; yo and behold a beast straight from the Dungeon Dimensions: (Do I really have to name it? I’m afraid that there might be a “Taboo” on it so they can track me if I use the name!) It starts with a ‘V’ and ends with an ‘ista’! I’m not hopeless though. It’s not the OS you use, it’s how you use it and what you use it for! I count myself a proponent of free software and opensource software, and crossplatformity is a real concern for me.

One more piece of advice. Sam (no last name) never walks into a place he doesn’t know how to walk out of. You should never ever put your data somewhere you don’t know how to take it out of. This point is more important that anything else to remember and utilize. Avoid vendor lock-ins like the black plague and tomato juice mixed together! If your email or hosting provider can’t secure your data, or your day-to-day access is hard, but you can export your data in a usable manner, then you have no problems. You can pack up and move anytime you want. So, always devise an escape route before you put your data in. (Hey, that’s good “Hitman” and “Commandos” advice too!)

The above factors affect the choices I make and opinions I have.

*Expect the next parts at a time indeterminately far away.*

(Of course I mean on the line!)
A few days back, a friend asked me about my opinions on the online services I use. I think he mentioned hosting services, etc. While I can’t tell exactly, I’m pretty sure he was asking a subquestion of the question: How does one manages her online life?
Now that’s a question to ponder about! Of course, my friend only wanted to know my opinion. He doesn’t want or need a shrink wrapped answer, which I can’t provide anyway. Since when do I have a life, to advise other people about it?!

Anyways, this is a huge subject to begin with, and I have not solved the problems myself. I have some guidelines and opinions that have worked out for me, but no definite answers.
First off, one’s online life concerns at least the following areas, in no particular order:

• Email
• Passwords and Keys
• Bookmarks/Browsing History
• Files
• Calendar and Schedule
• Code
• Contacts
• Online Profile/Social Networking
• Web Presence/Weblog/Journal
• Realtime Communication (Chat/VoIP/Video/Collaborative Text Editing/etc.)

In the course of the rant that will ensue, you will find any and every useless piece of (mis)information that I couldn’t find a more suitable place to deliver. Don’t expect me to stay on-topic and don’t expect composed and well-thought-out literature here!

Let me start with this: It was Roman emperor Nero who burned Rome down (in the 1st century A.D.) and now, it’s the software Nero that is burning ROMs ((almost) Read-Only Memories.) You see how useless and irrelevant it was! Don’t expect it to get any better!

OK, now I’m being serious. What I write about this subject is what I believe to be good and sound ways to lead an online life. Please, correct me if I’m wrong. Help me if I’m mistaken. Guide me if there’s a better (or equally bad) way.