Panos' Blog

Blog has moved again

2009-04-07T21:32:00.000+01:00

Six Sense

2009-03-19T13:06:00.002Z

Great application of tehcnology. Check it

2009-03-06T07:23:00.002Z

I found this an excellent read. not at teh same level as W.Gibson but certainly the best cyberpunk novel I have read in a lng while. Check it out...

p

2009-02-18T18:28:00.003Z

I am in Seattle,WA taking some training classes related to my new Role. I haven't been active in blogging and e-socialising in general, because of my work commitments. It is nice spending a few days in the states. I 'd missed the malls, the unecessarily big cars, the newss and the US TV informatials.

We visited with my colleagues Fall City last Saturday, a small place south of Seattle. We went on a small trek along a river to a waterfall. It was good fun. I took some great pics and I will post them soon.

It was nice catching up with Savas too and hear what he had to say about his new responsibilities.

I am visiting NCL again soon.. I should be back to Seattle in a couple of months.

best
p

Final week of the year...

2008-12-19T17:42:00.002Z

..not for me but for most of my colleagues who start holiday this week...I spent most of the week learning about .NET and the new tools I am going to be working with. I have enjoyed it so far and things have been picking up. I stopped losing my keys and the way home, and i feel more confortable in the car after the first 2 small bumps. :)

I have been tempted since I arrived here, to visit the Lindt and Lambert outlets that are almost next door. I see bus loads every day with 'tourists' visiting them. I was curious to see what the deal was...turns out not big...

I am off to Greece on the 24th and back here on the 2nd...

happy hols to everyone that starts their break this week. Congrats to my colleague John C. for getting his Ph.D.

Greek Riots

2008-12-17T10:51:00.001Z

A set of photos I found on a US online mag, tells the story of the recent riots.

New Adventure

2008-12-15T17:25:00.005Z

I studied hard throughout my adult life believing like many of us that education and prosperity are somewhat interlinked. Ironically in my new role I can neither read nor write. German that is.

I have moved to Aachen to start as a Program manager for Microsoft working largely in the areas of Security, Privacy and their application on Embedded systems. The EMIC centre which I will be based is the first Windows embedded R&D in Europe. It is lead by John Lefor and a number of research engineers working on the embedded product group and various research projects.

Leaving the academic life may seem somewhat strange but I believe i am closer to what I envigased doing. It is a challenge in many respects but I look forward to it. I love that this is a new start for me. I am planning to take Germans lessons and learn to drive anew :)

If you want to email me try my name.surname at Microsoft.com
I will write more soon.

Driving

2008-12-04T20:39:00.002Z

I discovered this week that the worst thing about driving at the 'wrong' side of the road is lack of roundabouts...I miss them. You could make a wrong turn and you knew that couple of hudrend yards later you'd find a roundabout to get you back...I am driving a Lancia Delta for which i am grateful but I find it so difficult to control. I miss my little car...
:)

p

Gallifrey 1, the BBC archives

2008-11-19T21:09:00.001Z

Great read. Strictly for fans.

Colleague in the News

2008-11-14T19:02:00.004Z

My colleague -and neighbor in the office- Lakshmi was on ITV news to talk about her project which has received worldwide recognition. You can see the news item with Lakshmi presenting her project here. Well done Lakshmi, finally an academic project doing something useful. :)

LN part 2

2008-11-14T18:49:00.004Z

After I submitted my Ph.D. I was immediately employed as a Research Associate to work on the DSoS project. We investigated the notion of Systems of Systems and build some distributed apps mad up of autonomous systems to demonstrate our points. All the heavyweights of NCL were involved. It was great experience working with Brian R., Cliff J., John F., and JED again. I learned a lot I did quite a lot of programming and we wrote a number of papers. The Project was carried out in collaboration with a number of European Universities and as such I got to travel around Europe quite a lot. We did manage to publish a significant number of papers and wrote a lot of reports for E.U. JED retired at the end of the project which was sometime around 2003-4

That's it...

2008-11-13T17:29:00.004Z

I just find out today that the final member of the development team of the Carmen project at Newcastle decided to call it a day.

Paper submission

2008-11-10T20:22:00.003Z

I just submitted the paper I have been writing all day (and developing forever) to the IEEE security and privacy conference. I have only managed once in the past to get a paper accepted there. It is quite hard to get in. There are no parallel sessions and all accepted papers are presented to the full audience over a 2 day period. They usually have about 150-200 papers submitted oute of which they accept about 20 for publication. There is a 'best practical paper' award this year and since I submitted code and a tool I ticked my paper as a potential candidate. Long shot but, fingers crossed ..

I am writing one final paper before I become unaffiliated ( :) not really...)

The writing part is true, I am writing with my soon to be ex-ph.D. student another paper based on his work to be submitted at the Secureware confernce which takes place in athens this year...I never thought any Ph.D. student that I know of would beat my publication record, but it seems Pierre is getting very close...more soon...

Leaving Newcastle 1

2008-11-03T21:24:00.001Z

Given that I am to depart in a couple of weeks time, I decided to submit to this blog a small chronicle of my life here at NCL. I will submit it in parts pointing out successes and failures along the way. Consider this my public acknowledgment of some of the great people I met here. Here it goes.

I came to Newcastle in 1998 to pursue a Ph.D. in the area of distributed computing. Prof. Santosh -the local expert and head of the distributed computing group- pointed me to Prof. John E. Dobson who was looking for Ph.D. students at the time. I remember getting on very well with JED since the first time i met him. I liked the fact that he was very knowledgeable with a big reputation in the area and interested in 'actively' helping me and supervising my research studies.

I say actively because there are many supervisors these days that have just a very superficial interest in their students. I remember he had asked me to write a paper so that he could assess my writing/research skills. Upon receipt of my paper or within a day or two he informed of this decision to award me the Ph.D. scholarship. John's interests were not purely technical. He was mostly interested on how the technical side of computing affected the structural and organizational side of a domain/enterprise/company. This was interesting to me especially at that young age as it was a new window or point of view to look at things. He told me that when we design distributed computing systems the first thing we need to understand is the extend of cross-organizational links that may exist and having understood that, we need to establish an agreed 'Distribution of Responsibilities' by all stakeholders.

This was really interesting and it stills affects my judgement when I look at distributed systems. John was working at the time at Organizational Theories and he introduced me to his work on 'Responsibility Driven Analysis'. Some of my early pubs are heavily influenced by these theories. I understood that distributed computing 'like any form of business process distribution' is about management rather than infrastructure. I had a chance to see this in projects that investigated several re-incarnations of distributed computing such as Systems of Systems, Virtual Organizations, Grid and even Cloud. The core genome remains the same. I was inspired by John's zest for his work and this motivated me to work tirelessly at a high rate of speed. I submitted my Ph.D. just shy of 3 years of research.

I remember the examiner walking into the exam room holding my thesis and saying to me "There is work here for 2 or even 3 theses Why did you do that much :)" I knew I had passed then. I am glad my Ph.D. subject was not strictly technical specially since most of my jobs after the Ph.D. have been on the technical side of things. I always thought I should have studies more business along my career. I knew that I should cherish the opportunity to listen, argue and understand JED rather than delve into CORBA, Java and Web Services. It worked out well as I did quite a lot of that later on. i finished my Ph.D. with 7-8 published papers and 1 journal. I am grateful to JED.

Update

2008-10-29T19:40:00.007Z

I cannot believe it has been almost a month since my last post. A lot has happened. I have had so many things to sort out before my permanent departure out of the UK. For real this is it...not coming back....Taxes, tax forms, national insurance, forms for this and that, it has been a ride.

We had our quartely Carmen consortium meeting where we unveiled our Cloud to a small group of users. No, we are not embarrased about it we are merely trying to catch any last minute bugs before the first proper release in 2 months time. I won't be here to see it and take any credit or blame. probably blame :)

It seems i managed to find a substitute supervisor for my ph.d. student too. Te only thing i regret about leaving is that after all this effort someone else will take the credit for the student's success. This is probably the only thing i regret about leaving the University life. I tried so hard to get this ph.d. scholarship from my industrial colleagues and even harder to find the right person to award it to. The ph.d. has so far gone so well to the point where we are counting 2 IEEE publications, 2 technical reports and my student informed me recently that he is filing for a patent on this work with our industrial sponsors. Anyway there is not much i could do.

I was informed from the school that i have 12.5 days of holiday which I should take prior to leaving, so that puts my final day very close indeed.I will write about my experiences with NCL and remember some people i worked with over the years in this department...

I have also been watching with envy the PDC2008 developments and talks . Some of them are really fascinating...this is it for an update..more soon....and yes in case you are wondering I am a PC...

Cloud

2008-10-29T19:32:00.002Z

In case you are looking for answers as to what a real cloud looks like here it is.
Microsoft Cloud

Ipswich

2008-10-02T08:18:00.002+01:00

Im in Ipswich today and tomorrow attending the talk of my Ph.D. student at B.T. I hope we can impress the audience with our progress. I spent some of my time this week catching up with Visual Studio 2008. I 've been meaning to get formal training on this for about a year now but unfortunately I never found the time (or funding).....My colleague pointing out eyeOS to me earlier this week. This is how simply and easily management of grid services should be done. Check out the demo

Car on Sale

2008-09-25T15:41:00.003+01:00

Due to my departure in a couple of months time I am forced to sell my car :)
I have placed an ad on autotrader. he is a pic so that I remember it.

New Email

2008-09-19T12:59:00.005+01:00

After officially announcing my departure I think it is fair to organise a get togther with a few friends and colleagues that i worked throughout the years for a farewell meal. I will organise that for sometime in October or beginning of November. In the meantime can I ask people to send private emails to the following email address. I understand that NCL will allow me to use this email for about 3 months after I depart. I will write about my long affair with NCL some other time.

Google Chrome

2008-09-17T11:46:00.002+01:00

I was quick to download the browser when it was released and I had a look at its features. I used it for about one working day so that get a good feel for it by going around my regular business. It seems simple and straight forward enough as well as fast (although speed is relative to the technologies it handles)

I liked the initial screen where you get miniature screenshots of the mostly visited sites rather than a default page. It is also cool the way it handles tabbed windows and the way you can separate them. Aesthetically it is pleasing but there are some negatives.

I didn't find a way to do private browsing without affecting the mostly visited bookmarks.
There isn't a straight forward way to manage bookmarks.
Some technologies such as flash doesn't seem to work.
I tried using it with our own Ajax Portal but it didn't display the portal properly.
it crashed sometimes when I was streaming videos specially form youtube.

Alright it is still in Beta and the they are still developing it but i cannot see it taking over the world or disturbing the way the market is shared at the moment. The fact that is simple may seem like a benefit at first but towards the end of the day i was looking for IE7 and firefox features which I am accustomed and couldn't find them (toolbar, autofill)

Anyway I don't think I would be using it.

If you read the Chrome license information properly (it is worth doing so sometimes) it says the following

"By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. "

i.e. Google has the right to re-use your content as they wish....This is evil in disguise!

more soon.....

York Visit

2008-09-16T17:05:00.003+01:00

I spent most of the day at York installing the security infrastructure I worked on, on the York Cairn (cluster) . It seemed to go well without any major hic ups and the whole thing was over in about 2 hours. Every time I install the infrastructure I realise of the things I would have done differently so it could be mobilised quicker. Still it seems to work and in the absense of alternatives it will have to do. Mark J. informs me that he also managed to successfully compile, deploy and use the infrastructure by himself on another York cluster. So I am now officially useless to the Carmen project.:)

I plan to spend the evening with friends/football fans watching the champions league matches which start tonight.

Still Time to Buy

2008-09-12T17:01:00.003+01:00

Security Book
My publisher informs me that the book is going well and I that I should be getting a statement of the sales soon. I am very happy about this. Still Available on every reputable bookstore.

Move

2008-09-12T16:57:00.001+01:00

I moved to a commercial blog program recently. There were so many problems with the old software that I was maintaining myself that I decided instead of correcting them to move the bog all together. TheOld Blog Entries are still accessible.

LHc

2008-09-10T10:19:00.003+01:00

Big day for CERN today, as the experiemnt to re-create the big bang is underway. I tried all the live feeds but the servers have reached their pick. The website seems to update with info regularly.

In 1992 however a similar experiment to create Another World went horibly wrong! :)

Quite Week

2008-09-09T12:18:00.003+01:00

Quite here at NCL this week with the majority of my colleagues having gone to attend the AHM2008 meeting. I was looking at a couple of interesting 'new'-ish search engines that came to my attention namely Cuil and Freebase Parallex

Cuil was developed by fomer Google employees and their claims is that unlike other engines 'probably google' they do not store any private information about the users. They also claim that they have larger index than google. I tried it and i like the way they present information. Chekc it out too.

Freebase is in development but it demonstrates very well the power of 'processable' semantics or metadata associated with web content. I have processable in quotes since it is very difficult define the metadata information to be stored and to develop schemas to hold that information as well as algorithms to process them. Still it is a very interesting idea and it should be cheked out.

DKAL (is there life after SecPAL)

2008-09-08T10:49:00.000+01:00

..and as i was about to abandon the field of Grid authorisation languages, yet another grammar comes along. I was convived that there was no life after SecPAL and that the technology had pretty much covered all the Grid requirements for access control. That was up until last week when I came across DKAL (distributed knowledge authorization language)...DKAL claims to be more flexible than SecPAL by extending the number of predicates and action verbs and by adding another set of deduction rules in the way an authorization request is evaluated. I have to say as a close associate of SecPAL that it is really fascinating and as the authors claim it DKAL could be an add-on or an extension to SecPAL. A short
IEEE paper is here and a longer technical report can be found here