Human Computation

Just learn about this great idea from Dr. Luis von Ahn presentation here. The presentation is based on his PhD theses. I want to try to describe here, briefly, what he is doing. His idea has turn on lots of bulbs in my brain.

He start by telling the story of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart). We all should by now probably know about CAPTCHA, and how does it help preventing spammers to get millions of free email account.

CAPTCHA is a computer-generated product that currently only human can solve but not other computer program. See the paradox? This is the basic idea of Human Computation. There are still areas where humans do better job than computers. And we do it well, way better than computers currently capable of.

What some of us may not know is that spammers have found a way to solve CAPTCHA. There are 2 basic ways (I myself knows about the first way, but only learn the second way from Luis' presentation).

First, spammers pay people to actually solve CAPTCHAs. But this has turn out costly for them. Second clever thing they done, is by using p*rn-sites. Spammers create p*rn sites that when visitors want to see more, they would have to enters words of a CAPTCHA (which behind the screen will then be submitted to Yahoo's email registration form). Being passionated p&rn lover, more often than not, those visitors will as fast as the can typed in the CAPTCHA :-)

The second example taught us a very interesting idea (in my words): We can use human computational power to solve computer-unsolved problems in a way that's actually "fun" for them, plus we don't need to spent a lot of money to pay them :-) And to know just how many wasted cycles of human computation is, Luis gave a figure: In 2003 estimated that there are > 30 billion man-hours wasted on playing the game Solitaire.

So what kind of problems that we may solve? Turn out there are a lot of them. Luis gave example of giving better descriptions to images on the web, so that a search for images could give better results.

To solve that problem Luis created (not another p*rn site, no!) 2 kinds of game he called symmetric and asymmetric game. One of the game he has created basically just ask people to put on words that describe images. The results are then used by google images search to help them provide correct images to people when they are searching for, say, 'cat'.

But that would take long time, right? you may ask. Well, you gotta see Luis' presentation to learn much about interesting statistics, shortly I can only say it does worked!

You can see, and try, the games at www.espgame.org and www.peekaboom.org. I just checked espgame site, and there it shows that they have been giving > 33 million image labels since October 2003. Wow.

Luis himself seems doesn't just stop there. He continued to do research on how to solve more interesting problems.

I noted one interesting question in the video: Would it be possible that for every boring job we do, we could create fun ways to do it? Of which Luis answered, I don't know, it would be great if we could figure out how to do this for every problem. But yes, this is an open problem.

An interesting open-problem,
So let's use up those wasted computation cycles :-)

Google Android

Just watched this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg.

What... can... I ... say... ?

a Good Software?

Joel (the on-software guy) has been doing marketing tours of his company's FogBugz version 6, a project management with all kinds of "thingamajiggies" software.

I noted two things:
First, his marketing strategy is very good. By giving free product demo and presentation all over the world.

Second, FogBugz 6 is a _very-very_ good software. That's what I would think how all software with user-interfaces should behave. Four thumbs up for Joel and team.

Info: You could watch a video recording of Joel presentation in Austin here: http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/24austindemo.html

If you have slow internet connections or some crazy proxy that won't let you enjoy the video (it's 265 MB big), I've found out that you could wget the flash video here: http://media.fogcreek.com/Joel-Austin07.flv

Admittedly, I've learned a lot.

Update: I should have said I've learned at least 3 things, the other one is the Evidence Based Scheduling system FogBugz have. Always have wondered about tracking and estimating time on my projects (by projects I really mean those are all the things/stuffs that require me to actually DO them).

Back to Fitrah :-)

Please... forgive us.

Happy Ied Mubarak 1428 H.

may Allah always be in our path.
Here and after.

Arief - Rizka - Aga - Nadia - Ghifa
... and all the rest of the team...

64 (virtual) Processors on your desktop?

Taken from a great article by Ulrich Drepper on http://lwn.net:

"... Red Hat, as of 2007, expects that for future products, the “standard building blocks” for most data centers will be a computer with up to four sockets, each filled with a quad core CPU that, in the case of Intel CPUs, will be hyper-threaded. {Hyper-threading enables a single processor core to be used for two or more concurrent executions with just a little extra hardware.} This means the standard system in the data center will have up to 64 virtual processors. ..."

Suspend-Resume in OLPC Laptop

Jim Gettys of X windows fame, share a story how he and OLPC team (CMIIW) got the laptop doing suspend and resume on hundred-thousand cycles.

Read about it here.

To C or To C++

This one from Linus, surely is my kind of comment :-)

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C."

Indonesia Earthquake Informations

Just got this done 2 weeks ago, but only roughly. Then I've improve it by showing historical data also.

It's accessible on my website (http://arief-mulya.com/gempa.php).

All data are taken directly from BMG EWS server. I use wireshark to help me find out what are the protocols used to get the data. I don't think my implementation to have the data is yet the best way. And it doesn't currently handle warning cancelations informations (such as tsunami warning cancelations, etc).

Don't have the time to improve it again for now, but I've plan to put a "latest-only" link and rss feed also there. If anyone knows a free web-to-sms services, please let me know, I'd love to put the ability of giving sms warning there also.

Linux Power Consumption

Intel has created powertop [www.linuxpowertop.org], a power consumption watch utilitiy that work very similar to `top` program but this is to watch processes that takes much of your laptop battery life.

In Debian unstable I could just apt-get install powertop to use it. It also has the ability to give many (useful?) suggestions how to save my power. After implement some of them, I get to save a few watts and extends my battery life.

What's also interesting to me, I've learn that accessing gmail from firefox seems to contribute a lot to my laptop power consumption. Heavy javascripts? Don't know, but this may results of me not standing by gmail all the time from now on.

GNOME Online Desktop Project

An interesting project.
I think it suits me quite well.

Considering that I spent most of my computing time nowadays through a Web Browser (for all my application needs) and a Terminal (for programming and quick and dirty work).

Next Step Plan

Your list of things TODO, is actually a list of things you _cannot_ / _will-not_ do.

Not until you actually plan what needs to be done for each of the mumble-mumble you identify as "TODO".

Apatar, F/OSS Visual Data Integration

About 5 years ago I turned my lazy brain on its wheels around to help me create decent parsers to processes GSM switches configuration and traffic data. Anyone has ever deal with those data must have known the fun we could have in interacting with them.

I was a fool back then (now is not any better, I've become more foolish then ever), not knowing how things worked and fueled by young-man's passsion, I decided to create them by myself, hand-written using C, the "best programming language" ever created by mankind. :-)

I didn't just jump to pure C, though, I remember that I had first thought to create them using bison and flex (UNIX techies: they are free-software implementation of yacc and lex). For this, I studied those wonderful things about language grammars, stomata, recursive descent, right-recursive, left-recursive, the Backus-Naur Form, and many other things that I've now -ofcourse- forgotten about :-)

Apparently my learning was not enough or I was just simply to stupid to grasp the whole concepts or both. I manage to create some parsers, but they turn out to be so complex for me that I couldn't easily debug and adjust them everytime there are errors or updates.

So I turn to C. Just C this time. I even bought Peter van der Linden Deep C Secrets book. A really great and recommended book for learning C. I have some good laughs from there, too. (This reminds me, where is that book now? Hello?)

From the book, I got valuable lessons about finite-state machines. I use this knowledge to create my parsers using C, and succeeded in doing so. I could even understands the code at the time, although since it has never failed me yet, I've also forgotten about it :-)

I do remember that those experiences was while thrilling and enjoyable at the same time also hair-pulling and nightmarish. Something that I'm not sure I wanted to do again if the fish is not worth it.

Nowadays, I learn that people use these things called ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools for the kind of work. And so many software vendors has it now. ETL tools that can, at least in theory, read any data in any format and transform it to any format you wanted.

Remembering my past experiences, I'm amazed and thrilled to know that there is also such a tool in F/OSS world called Apatar (http://www.apatar.com). Apatar even has a visual-drag-and-drop-touch-and-go-you-name-it ability to create ETLs that they called DataMap. Many DataMap are already available in their http://www.apatarforge.org forge-site.

If only I have known about these tools back then. May have saved me some sleepless night.

Or not.

World's 3 Richest Men

I just got this from slashdot: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/322239_richest04.html?source=mypi.

So, now the 3 richest man of the world are the ones who have fun in these fields:

1. Telecommunication Network
2. Software Engineering
3. Investment Business

So happens, those are the fields of my current interests.
Hmm. Should not be a bad path afterall.

Just need to make it works for me :-)

Fast notes

It's been a long time, life's great but I've got many things to work on and so little time.

Classic, huh ?
Oh well, now is also only for passing by.

I need to note these important files/directory for me to handle an "unstable" Debian:

- /var/lib/apt/lists
- /var/lib/dpkg/status
- /var/lib/dpkg/available

Kept forgetting about them.

Menggambar garis miring di monitor

Perkara mudah kah?
Seperti banyak hal lainnya dalam dunia komputer, ini adalah perkara yang sepertinya mudah namun kenyataannya sulit sekali.

Untungnya sudah ada yang memikirkannya dan hasil formulanya disebut dengan Bresenham's algorithm. Hint: Go to Wikipedia for details.

Kalau liat gambar disamping itu, bisa liat kan ketika pada posisi tengah ternyata kita perlu mewarnai 3 pixel, instead of 2, untuk mencapai kemiringan yang diinginkan.

Dan ini baru bicara grafik raster. Kalau vector, wah gak kebayang dech.

Hiks.

RI-1 Gunakan 3G Video Conference

Dalam acara peresmian proyek percontohan pembangunan Rumah Susun Sederhana, Presiden Soesilo Bambang Yudhoyono yang berada di Pulo Gebang menggunakan fasilitas 3G video conference Telkomsel untuk tanya jawab dengan penanggung jawab proyek di empat titik lokasi berbeda, yakni di Cakung, Klender, Cipayung, dan Cawang.


Btw, blog ini dan blog lainnya dariku yang terkait dengan Telekomunikasi di Indonesia akan juga tersedia (mungkin lebih banyak) di http://arief.telkom.us yang keberadaannya dibantu oleh Mas Koen yang ruarrr biasa.

UNIX is Simple

... that's what Linus said in his "Just for Fun" book.

Come to think of it, I agree with him.

UNIX. Simple. Small. Beautiful.

But don't let it fools you,
Simplicity is a show-off for elegant ways in solving problems.

And you could only be elegant thru experience and wisdom.
To realise and accept that nobody's perfect, and that you _will_ made mistake.

Hmm, it reminds me of a saying:
"Nobody's perfect. I'm nobody. I'm perfect."

:-)

Dalam 1 bingkai

Gak nyangka bisa ketemu beliau.

Despite all the controversies around him, dengan santainya beliau bersama keluarga berjalan-jalan disalah satu pusat perbelanjaan terbesar di KL. Tanpa bodyguard pula. Well, paling gak, gak ada yang keliatan.

Kayaknya gak banyak orang besar atau mantan orang besar bisa berbuat seperti beliau.

Etch!

... finally released.

Congratulations to all Debian Developers and everybuddy that helps releasing another version of my most favourite OS.

Suddenly this day doesn't seem so bad afterall.

:-)

Our Boundaries

This one taken from thoughtful blog of Eric Sink [http://www.ericsink.com/]

---

Just inside the gates of heaven, St. Peter sits at a desk checking people in.

Peter: "Welcome to heaven. What religion?"

The man at the front of the line says, "Lutheran."

Glancing at his clipboard, Peter says, "Room 33. Be very quiet as you pass room 6."

The process repeats itself with the next person in line:

Peter: "Welcome to heaven. What religion?"

Person #2: "Catholic."

Peter: "Room 17. Be very quiet as you pass room 6."

The next person moves to the front of the line with a look of curiosity on her face.

Peter: "Welcome to heaven. What religion?"

Person #3: "Methodist."

Peter: "Room 54. Be very quiet as you pass room 6."

Person #3: "Why do you keep telling us to be quiet as we pass room 6?"

Peter: "Because the Baptists are in room 6, and they think they're the only ones here.

----

More on his thought about this here: [http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Boundaries.html].

So, have you been out of your boundaries?
If you never done so, how could you absolutely positively sure that you are now in the right place?