Pomme::TAB

Some online sports betting services are now taking bets on release date for rumoured future Apple products:

Business and Financial Betting, Macworld Odds at Bodog Sportsbook

Looks like you’d better stay away from the game system of from the owners for that matter:

• Store robbed of five PS3s
• Violence ensues during PS3 launch
• US$89m for a PS3 on ebay
• Man shot in PS3 queue

Don’t forget to read Bruce Sterling’s comment attached to the article.
It’s a good read.

UK RFID passports cracked: “Cory Doctorow:
UK security experts have cracked the sooper sekure new UK biometric passports. It took 48 hours. With £174 worth of sniffer hardware, attackers can read all the personal information off of any of the three million new UK passports in circulation — and if combined with demonstrated hacks for reading RFIDs at a distance, this could happen from across the room, or even farther. You can then clone the RFID and stick it in another passport (surprise! your identity is now owned by a terrorist!).

Ok. Remember my post about 2 IT companies in London victim of robbery?

It happened again.
This time the victim is the First tier Internet services provider Level 3 (supposed to be a top dog in term of security given the criticality of its clients applications).

If I count correctly, this is the third time in the same city during a period of 2 weeks.

It’s either a gang as mentioned in the article or a new IT startup who tries to equip itself for free

It could also be a big one who tries to eliminate the competition.

It reminds me an episode of Spooks in which an oil company try to nuke a rival’s head quarter in the City and blame arab terrorists.

In related news, Boing Boing, Digg and Slashdot are reporting that a bomb has been detonated at PayPal/eBay head quarters in California.

The first time I was presented Selenium I had the wrong understanding of it.

Few months ago, a group of client side developers organized a talk in our department about testing javascript code. The focus was mainly on jsUnit, but it was also the first time I heard of Selenium. It was presented as an alternative to jsUnit to test client side javascript in a cross-browser way.
For that purpose Selenium acts as a browser plugin that allows one to record his actions on the browser on a particular site and play them back later.
You can also finetune the generated scripts.

In the same time I was starting to think about acceptance testing and automation testing.

Until the Continuous Integration and Testing conference in London, I didn’t realise there was a link between the two.

During that Open Space conference, there was a talk by a guy from Germany.
He was sharing his experience with Selenium for acceptance testing.
Obviously the product he was developing is a web application.
It means that most of features (or business value) are accessible from a web GUI.

This how it became really clear to me that Selenium can work in two way: in addition of the plugin mode for manual record/playback, there’s a driven mode that allow a programmatic control of Selenium. Now we are getting closer to automation
Before going that way, I’ll dwell a bit more on the acceptance testing part of it.
The acceptance tests are the tests that prove the product owner/customer that the software is doing what he has specified. For a web applications, most of the business features are visible on a web interface. Even if for some reasons the business value is invisible (backend features of some sort) it’s often possible to make it exposed on a web interface:

• On an earlier project one of the requirement was that the system should process data within a ceration amount of time. We build a small web application to expose the cycle duration on a web interface. We used Nagios to monitor this value but we could easily imagine that this information can also be captured for acceptance tests.
• Let’s say that you’ve been asked to syndicate your data as RSS feeds. You can use Firefox as an RSS aggregator and test the feeds from there.
• On another project the feature was to import a continuing feed of complex XML documents in a database. The team setup a smart logging and exposed import successes and failure on a web interface.

Now, we can go back to automation.
Selenium can be driven programmatically through a number of platform (java, python, ruby and perl). It uses a component called Selenium Remote Control which is a java server that run on the same platform where a web browser is available.

There’s also a platform dependent API that sensd command to the Remote control using the language of choice.

In perl you can use a CPAN module called Test::WWW::Selenium.

The whole thing becomes really interesting when you combine that approach with the use of FIT (Framework for Integration Testing, which is more than a framework actually), but that’s another story.

Within an interval of 3 days, The Register has reported two robberies targeted at high profile Telecom/Network companies. Oddity of our time or trend-setter?

• Mystery surrounds Easynet ‘robbery’
• Vodafone outage caused by robbery

Yesterday I’ve been attending the Continuous Integration Testing conference.

It was held in London within the classy Copthorne Tara Hotel in Kensington.

It was a great 2 days and my brain is still full of things: new ideas, wise words from many smart people, …

It will take me quite a few posts to report about it, so I’ll start by getting the simple details out of my way:

• It’s an Open Space conference, first time for me: I’m buying it completely as it as a great way to learn and share
• The food was great
• I came to the conference to see what people are doing in this area and was pleased to see that what I was doing in my team appears to be common good practices (more on that later)
• It’s quite Java-centric

definitely more later when my ideas and thoughts are sorted

to change a bit, I’ve got a positive thing to say about MySpace.
Few months ago I’ve been to the 606 club (a well known Jazz club in Chelsea) to listen to a band centered around the lead female singer.
It was a great moment.
The singer was advertising her album, and she gave the audience the url to here website on MySpace. Her name was Juliet Kelly.

Is she one of these “3 millions” ?
(*cough*, see my previous post for why I’d rather take this number with caution)

I think if her tunes were downloadable, I could be attracted, not because they are MP3 or lacks of DRM, but because they come straight from the artist.
(it’s comparable to the Fair Trade for third world food producers)

This will give a kick in all of this stinky music distribution business.
I think the problem is more the Music industry rather than DRMs.

But, I’d be honest and say that right now, buying it on the iTunes Music Store (her songs are also available there doesn’t bother me at all as it is more convenient for me:

• I use iTunes to play my songs on various computers (which iTunes DRM allows, even in different country!),
• I’m on the verge of owning an iPod that read itunes DRMed songs natively (I keep saying that for the last 3 months),
• burning the songs on CD is enough to strip out the DRM layer which I do anyway to backup the song (and the limitation of 10 burnings is not one as changing the playlist reset the counter)
• For the same bitrate, the AAC format is still better than MP3

Oh and by the way, any artist can submit songs directly to the iTunes Music Store without having to be signed in a label.

Myspace to Sell MP3s From Unsigned Bands: “soldrinero writes ‘Yahoo! news is hosting a story about a new competitor to Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Nearly all the other iTunes competitors have been strongly controlled by the music industry, shackled in DRM, and giving little back to artists. The new MySpace music store will feature vanilla MP3 downloads at prices set by the individual bands (3 million of them!), all or nearly all of whom are unsigned musicians with no industry affiliation. Is this the example we have all been waiting for of how the Internet will obviate the business model of the recording industry?’

,

Technorati Tags:
internet, myspace, music, musicindustry, itunes, julietkelly, DRM, mp3, download, legal

After my earlier post about Net neutrality, I’d like to follow up with an example that I’ve seen in real life around me:

It’s a flat-share where 4 IT savvy people live.
Everyone has a computer and there’s a local wireless network setup to allow them to share the internet broadband connection (ADSL).

They were all foreigners, staying in the country for a year or two.
They used Internet primarily for web, email and Instant Messaging.
The 1 Mbits internet connection was fast enough for everyone to share.

Then, they progressively made use of P2P technologies, and the usability of the Internet degraded dramatically for normal web, email and IM use.
It has been easy to prove that the degradation was a direct consequence of the use of P2P.

When one of them wanted to do voice conference with relatives abroad, he had to announce it to all his flat-mate and warn them not to use P2P at the scheduled time of the Internet voice calls.

After moans, discussions and unhappy Internet life they did capsized the bandwidth used by their P2P software.

Soon after they decided to centralize P2P use to one central server and to limit its availability to daytime when nobody is at home.

Occasionally, they received emails from their ISP, telling them to reduce their consumption, mentioning port blocking if no progress made.

So, what’s the moral of the story?

• All Data are not equal
• According to some ISPs, 20% of customer uses 80% of the network resources
• action to fix the issue has been implemented both on the local network and at ISP level

With traditional medias joining webcasters to distribute video and audio on Internet, using P2P technologies like Kontiki, and the growing population of audio and video podcasters, the situation is not looking good.

Effectively, from a standard user (who does web, email, IM), the Internet will look more and more like it’s dying.

What’s the solution then?

• I think the originators of the increase in resource consumption should pay for the traffic they are monopolizing:
  • ISPs should ask for a higher monthly rate from their P2P users
  • New Media companies should be required to paid a premium for media distribution
• Priority of routing could be introduced and could be like that
  • higher priority to communication oriented data transfer
  • lowest priority (and usage limit) to generic P2P usage (BitTorrent, eDonkey, …)
  • fee based increase of priority for webcasters

That will allow ISPs to buy more pipes (I’ve got that strange feeling of being over-naive here )

The trouble with that model is that community originated media maybe be unfairly treated.
New media companies can afford QoS Internet service.
Podcasters and creative individuals can’t.

In other hand, guaranteeing Quality of Service really matters if money is at stake.
It’s then more relevant to new media companies.

So, as long as podcasts and distribution of individual creations are not de-prioritized as if they were generic P2P, the model could work.

Having to pay higher for your Internet connection if you are a P2P users may not be the best thing you’ve wished for.
Capsizing the bandwidth used and avoiding rush hour might be an alternative.
But as for the model described above, everybody has to play the same rules for the whole thing to work.

Technorati Tags:
internet, connection, broadband, wireless, adsl, cable, bandwidth, p2p, netneutrality

“Net neutrality” has been a hot topic in the blogosphere for many weeks now.
I’ve always managed to avoid all of the related articles.
But I’ve come across this interesting interview from The Register about Net Neutrality.

How ‘Saving The Net’ may kill it: ”

The engineer’s case against Net Neutrality

Interview If you’ve followed the occasionally surreal, and often hysterical debate around ‘Net Neutrality’ on US blogs and discussion forums, you may have encountered Richard Bennett. The veteran engineer played a role in the design of the internet we use today, and helped shaped Wi-Fi. He’s also been blogging for a decade. And he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.…

“

(Via The Register.)