Logos of Crafts

In the last few years I have been involved, to a certain extent, in digital service ecosystems and e-contracting frameworks. In other words, automated Service Level Agreement (SLA) management. In this sense, management includes things such as planning, optimization, negotiation, provisioning, discovery, monitoring, reacting on exceptions, re-planning/re-negotiation/re-provisioning, and so on, and so forth.

Although in general this seems to be feasible from a technical point of view (despite all the theoretical problems, which are always affected by the business reality as well), it is clear that human intervention and ratification will always be needed. It is not possible for managers to accept that a machine is making decisions that have a direct financial impact (good or bad), even if theory says these decisions have solid footing. Another problem has to do with the very definition of rules to express what is binding to the parties involved and what are the penalties depending on the exceptions. Coming up with the sheer terminology for a task like this is a huge thing by itself. The real-world (i.e. non-digital) legal system took hundreds of years to establish the relevant nomenclature for business law, and I guess there are still significant gaps (becoming larger as the world and business itself changes). Forming digital representations of real-world terminology and metrics which sometimes are abstract enough to require arbitration in court, is a very challenging task; Persuading managers to accept systems that make use of them, is probably impossible.

Then comes the issue of trust and (trusted) 3rd parties. A non-automated, static (i.e. manually managed) SLA for digital services is easier, in the sense that the parties involved agree a priori on the tools, metrics and exact numbers to use for the specific use case. Although it might be possible to define a one-fits-all referee for generic SLA compliance monitoring, it still looks like the average manager does not accept the jurisdiction of an external monitoring entity for making financial decisions that affect his/her business.

Then there are also the reflections of (technical) negotiation issues onto automated, dynamic SLAs. The network is an unreliable medium for transferring information. Message queues are useful, but they only guarantee delivery of a message; they cannot do anything about totally dumb agents which assume that sending a message means the other end received it immediately or almost immediately. Truth is, the message might be received with a significant delay; by that time, the agreement offer or the agreement document itself may be useless for the receiving party. After all, automated SLAs are build for a highly dynamic world of services, where the landscape changes from one minute to the next. Timestamping is not a solution, but we do have GPS after all, so it can be mitigated to some extent.

The above are only some of the problems, just to point out that direct application of real-world contracts on the digital world is not straight-forward. The last word must always belong to a manager, just like the real world. At least for the time being, noone accepts that this last word belongs to a computer system. It makes sense, but it is still a pity.

This week I travelled for the first time with the Deutsche Bahn’s InterCity Express, going from Dortmund to Karlsruhe. The experience was excellent.

Starting from the tickets (ok, this does not have to do with the ICE, but it’s an indication of the German Railway efficiency), when booked we were given a number which represented them uniquely. We went to a random ticket machine next to the university train station (i.e. a random station also :-)), where we entered the number and were given the printed tickets. No need to wait at the central station for them. Cool.

The train left right on time. It was going through the fast route between Cologne and Frankfurt airport, so I actually saw the 300 Kmh (or a bit less than that actually). Even at that speed, there was minimal noise and bumping. It was extremely clean, with many automations and facilities such as power outlets for your laptop etc. The 340 Km (or so) of the route were covered in a total travel time of 3 hours, including the connection at Mannheim and the somewhat long stops at each of the 6 or 7 stations in between. Additionally to the above, the views to the German countryside are so nice; it’s a great opportunity to actually relax and get away from work for a while.

When traveling within Germany, taking the airplane (or even your car) really seems to be suboptimal.

…this blog is now accessible as http://costas.gr and http://www.costas.gr.

Today I returned to Dortmund, being officially an employ of the University. As my flat is still totally empty and sleeping on a bench is not an option, I booked a room at a local hotel. The building is clearly quite old and the hotel is a nothing-special 3-star I-guess-ok-for-the-price place. In any case, the funniest thing happened today:

I’m returning from some shopping, get into the elevator, press the button from my floor, button light goes on, doors close, but nothing else happens. I’m waiting for a while, before I realize that for the first time in my life I am trapped in an elevator. Thankfully, it was just for a minute; the girl at the reception somehow opened the door from outside. Then we realized that the elevator’s control would not respond any more to pressing buttons — it had just died. I’m getting out and start climbing up the stairs, when I see the reception girl running them up, steps three by three, up to the last floor as I found out later on. At the time I guessed she was just checking that people are not waiting in vain, as it had probably broken and they would need to call a technician.

This evening, returning from dinner, I got in the elevator again (I just never learn…) and saw three button lights on — but the elevator was at the ground floor. I asked the guy at the reception about it. The answer was “oh yes, I must go to the 6th floor and restart it, will do”. As it turns out, switching equipment on and off to make it work, is not a privilege of IT as I used to think. I would expect that elevator controllers would have solved such problems ages ago, but clearly this is not the case. Except if the elevator is controlled by some PC-based software

I spent the previous week in Barcelona for the 23rd Open Grid Forum meeting. Many interesting discussions and a lot of controversy (see: Cloud Computing and its relation or not to Grid Computing). Other than the technical part of this trip, I should say that Barcelona is on the Pareto front of European cities: Good weather, amazing nightlife, beautiful city, humane enough (for Southern Europe standards :-)), excellent food, what else can someone ask for. I totally fell in love with it. Don’t miss the opportunity to go, when you get it!

I am not into marketing or advertising, but I can’t help being impressed every now and then, by the ideas and creativity of some people working in that arena. This is just a very short post to say how much I liked the slogan of Euro 2008, i.e. “Expect Emotions“. It is so accurate (judging from what many Greeks felt 4 years ago), though so short and direct. I could have almost sworn that it’s an idea produced by an skilled engineer

The enrollment to my new employer’s facilities was hiding a small surprise for me. While in Dortmund this last week, I did all the paperwork with the University, and eventually signed my contract. Then, I asked about my new email address etc, to which I received the reply “it will be done automatically; you’ll be notified“. And I was.

This morning, my email address was made available to me, after a very short/quick process for the registration of my new account. But it wasn’t only the email address I was receiving (which, by the way, is valid FOR LIFE). I automatically also got authorization to access all the services that the University’s “IT and Media Centre” offers:

• A host of mail services: Web mail, mailing lists, aliases
• Access to the university-wide wireless network
• VPN
• Dialup access
• Access to library data
• Access to the university’s videoconferencing facilities
• If requested with an additional application, backup/archiving of my servers and desktops
• Personal firewall for MS Windows (I’m using a Mac but it would be there if I needed it)
• Virus protection for MS Windows (see above)
• Spam filtering
• Access to the Centre’s computing facilities for HPC — its latest addition is the D-Grid Resource Center Ruhr (DGRZR) with 2048 cores and 108 TB of storage space
• Access to ARBS
• DFN roaming

…and too many others to mention (just look here if you can read German, or try this machine translation). This level of integration is something I have not witnessed before. The University where I studied is known to be a pioneer in Greece in offering such services to its community, but having everything or almost everything work automatically just after enrolling with a single application, is simply awesome.

So I’m here in Dortmund for the third day now, and I can tell you that if I didn’t have the help from my local colleagues, it would be totally impossible to get by without speaking German — at least for this first batch of paperwork and house hunting. In the process of looking for a flat to rent, I have been searching in newspapers and web sites, all of which are in German. How to deal with that?

Enters Google Translate. Very efficient and quite correct, as it turns out. But then again, opening a browser and clicking on a bookmark etc all the time is a bit of a hassle.

Enters Python My bias towards this language is well known to those who have been working with me in the recent years. I haven’t really written any real code for a long time now, more than 4 years actually, but in less than 30 minutes (also putting WebScarab in use, I managed to have a simple but fully functional command-line client for Google Translate in place.

Clearly, Python is like cycling; Once you learn it, you never forget it.

…or, “Moving to Germany” if Google Translate is correct. Some personal news:

I recently had a collaboration proposal from the University of Dortmund, Germany, to move there and work on a new research project. I have worked with these people in the past, and appreciated a lot their style and expertise; furthermore, this project is highly relevant to what I’m dealing with in my PhD, so the challenge was grand. I decided it’s just too good an opportunity to pass, also due to my unfulfilled wish to live abroad for a while.

This last Friday was the last day at my previous job. I liked it there a lot — great place to work. Now I’m implementing project Moving and it’s damn hard. Too many details to take care off. I’ll try to post experience here in another post, in case other fellow Greeks find any use to it in similar circumstances.

Following this link from friend George’s blog post, I couldn’t help noticing the copyright notice:

© 1761-2008 Faber-Castell

Three letters: WOW. I’m wondering how it could be to work for a company which is in business for almost 250 years. One could always assume that this holds for all public sector employes in countries which exist for such a period of time but clearly, the parallel is somewhat far-fetched.

I was also wondering whether it is realistic to assume that there are still ideas floating around, which can spin off a company and make it last this long.