Cloud computing is the wave of the future, isn’t it? These days many voices would make you believe that only total blockheads could have doubts about it. The Cloud is touted as the ultimate outsourcing solution.

As often is the case: The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory. In my experience the weakest link is the ISP. Here is a mini case study.
Continue »

With South Korea’s new president Lee Myung-bak came a major reshuffling of the government. For those who, like me, try to follow up on Korean information technology there will certainly be a period of confusion. The reorganization is radical.
Continue »

A medieval knight wearing a clunky metal armor could hardly move if left on his own. He needed a horse to carry him around. In our age the CPU cycles of our computers are increasingly used for protection. Continue »

Every fall there is an international conference in Seoul called RFID/USN Korea. RFID is a well-known acronym for Radio Frequencey Identification, but USN is not used in Western countries. Ok, you read the title, so you already know it means Ubiquitous Sensor Networks. Ubiquitous means “found everywhere”, doesn’t it? A sensor network found everywhere? The very idea comes with a creepy feeling of someone watching you wherever you go. Fortunately there is a better interpretation.
Continue »

If you create software for a living, chances are the only important question in your workplace is, “How quick can you get it out the door?” Unlike figure skating or diving, no points are awarded for good style. But once in a while it’s refreshing to think about how we work and the tools we use, like programming languages. I enjoyed reading In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism by Ronald P. Loui (complete reference below). It’s a high quality text with a lot of perspective.
Continue »

Ubiquitous computing. If English isn’t your first language you probably scramble for a dictionary. The ubiquitous entry would say something like this:

found or seeming to be found everywhere; ever-present

So, ubiquitous computing literally means computing everywhere. The concept could have been buried in the sediment of time and forgotten, had there not been some startling development in East Asia.

Continue »

The newcomer to Korean or Japanese information and telecom technology will immediately notice the u-words. They are sprinkled all over presentations, descriptions, and reports. There is u-Korea, u-Japan to begin with. Other than that almost every aspect of life seems to have its u-version: u-city, u-home, u-tourism, u-business, u-government, to name a few.

Here is our report, a kind of linguistic introduction to this hot topic: U-Korea, U-Japan, U-Fever

You may think you know about ubiquitous computing. Find out how Korea and Japan have added a visionary touch and lots of energy to the concept. These countries are now re-exporting their u-vocabulary to baffled Westerners.

In everyday language “levels of abstraction” sounds like daydreaming or going off somewhere in a trance. In computing abstraction is our daily bread. A higher level of abstraction means doing more with less effort. Programming languages inevitably gravitate towards higher levels of abstraction. Let us see how.
Continue »