on the road to coloured scenarios

I’ve spent the last two days finally following up an idea that was around my research since the early ideas of my PhD thesis: to equip the scenario notion that I developed (I call them oclets) with data, so a system designer could specify how data is exchanged among components of a distributed system. As [...]

It’s the speech, not the slide

There is no such thing as a slide presentation. Slides only support the presentation; they should never be confused for the presentation itself. If you ever feel that what you are showing is becoming more important than what you are saying, delete the slides, tear up your speech, and start over again. Philip Yaffe on [...]

noise canceling, or: what Beethoven has to do with your business

You know the problem. You are on your local commute, in a train, on the plane and all you want to do to kill the time is listen to your most favorite album, audio book, radio program, or latest TV episode. And while all this audio is there, coming to you via your headphones, you [...]

Self-organizing systems illustrated

This video shows a physical, self-organizing system. These days a lot of people talk about such kinds of systems for information technology, called self-X systems. Self-X like self-healing, self-organizing, self-stabilizing. The self-X paradigm envisions software systems that come with some inherent dynamics to automatically keep a complex system in a “good” state while it is [...]

Anatomy of the Skype network

This is a follow-up to my earlier post on “Skype Network Problems“. I’ve just remembered an analysis of the Skype P2P Protocol from the Columbia University that might give some insight on what’s wrong. The subsequent quotes are taken from: “An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony Protocol“, Salman A.Baset, Henning Schulzrinne, 2004, Columbia [...]

the gap in between

Roughly five weeks have passed since I officially started the work on my PhD. In between I attended a summer school on the convergence of some quite-hype technologies like wireless sensor networks, RFID and peer-to-peer techologies, organized by people from the TU Darmstadt (DVS and KOM). I’m working on a paper about this with a [...]

ahead of the technology hype cycle

The market research group Gartner just published its most recent “Technology Hype Cycle” analysis on emerging technologies that will determine and shape the future of business and applications. We all know that everyone has to conceive Web2.0 as the next big thing in making money so that’s why it’s in that report I guess. Gartner [...]