Posts filed under 'Standardization'
So I was instant messaging my wife the other night. We were both in the living room, with a laptop in each lap, and we could just talk, but we used IM instead. Now, Mrs. Code of Contact is a great at multi-tasking - she is known to have two IM conversations going on while she is talking on the phone and watching TV (Happy Birthday dear). So sending her an IM is the best way for me to get
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | August 15th, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
In my previous post, I discussed the problems firewalls and NATs have with VoIP communications, and I touched briefly on the ways to get around them. I will go into more details in this post. I will treat NATs and firewalls as mostly the same thing, and use one term or another as convenient. Although there are problems associated specifically with one or the other, the general solutions are similar. The proposed solutions are very different from each other both
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | August 13th, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
The answer to this question is obvious: VoIP is an element of Communication, and firewalls and network address translators (NATs) are elements of Separation (NAT tends towards Obfuscation, but it amounts to the same thing). These are opposing forces: Separation constricts Communication and Communication pierces Separation. It’s like yin and yang, day and night, law and chaos. Can a leopard change his spots? Can a firewall be welcoming? Oh, you mean at the technical level? Right. None shall pass There’s
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | August 6th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. For protocols, the intentions are usually: to “make it simple” to “integrate it into the existing system” or to “allow it to work independently” Where the “hells” are, respectively: under-defined standards inconsistencies ambiguities It’s very hard to write a standard that avoids all these. In fact, if I took the time, I could prove that from the theorem “any
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | July 30th, 2008 | Filed under Development, Standardization
After the last post about text and binary protocols, Sagee sent me a link to Google’s protocol buffers, which is a protocol used to send structured data over the network, which also provides backwards compatibility between versions. From the announcement: “XML? No, that wouldn’t work. As nice as XML is, it isn’t going to be efficient enough for this scale. When all of your machines and network links are running at capacity, XML is an extremely expensive proposition. Not to
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | July 23rd, 2008 | Filed under Development, Interoperability, Standardization
A while ago, Paul E. Jones, the prophet of AMS, mentioned that AMS would use XML encoding: “We just finished a meeting yesterday. During the meeting we reached agreement to use XML for this new system. Personally, I think that’s going to be very cool. There is a huge amount of tool support for XML. We also had a person from the W3C attend who shared information on the Efficient XML Interchange (http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/). In theory, this allows one to create
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | July 16th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
Jeff Atwood for Coding Horror already mentioned the better looks of Guitar Hero 3, and concluded that presentation matters. Reading it, I concluded that he has not played the game for more than half an hour, since after half an hour you hardly see the presentation, except for when it annoys you. My favorite game at the time was the first Guitar Hero, since it was easier (I actually felt abused by GH3). Then came Rock Band. This time, a
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | June 2nd, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
There is a huge difference between compiled languages and scripting languages: the former are first entirely compiled and then executed, the latter are interpreted as they progress. I will use this terminology to discuss two types of protocols: the more common is made up of readymade messages or methods; each message type indicates a predetermined course of action. The less common type, and one I think deserves more attention, sends messages made up of many simple commands that do very
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | May 27th, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
In the standardized human behavior series, I discuss human behavior, compare it to a protocol and see what we can alter or learn from it. Previously I considered whether people want to be standardized at all and concluded that they do not. Nobody wants to think of himself as a puppet manipulated by external forces or to act just as is expected of him. It’s possible to take the “Soup Nazi” episode from the Seinfeld sitcom as an example. The
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | May 14th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
In my previous post, I mentioned the “wicked son,” the vendors who want to give their customers a sense of security, but do not actually want to implement any cumbersome security algorithms. I had a customer using H.323 who sent me specifications for a security implementation for H.323 where the password wasn’t known in advance, and asked us to support it. When I mentioned to them that they were showing the password in the open, where anyone who wants can
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | April 30th, 2008 | Filed under SDKs, Standardization
