Recent events made me think what is motivating me. Well of course the answer is not straight forward. There are a lot of factors, and these factors tend to change as you get older or as situations change in your life. But still, of course, there are some things deeply embedded in your character that will be always there and keep pushing forward no matter what.

First you start off with simple things. You want to be a good boy, make your parents love you, etc. I think thats the first stage, a stage that everybody goes by. And then you “evolve” into what psychologist call “reinforcement”, which can be either positive or negative. You are motivated to do (or not do) something by either rewards or a negative impact. I can remember a few occasions when growing up that this was a crucial part of my everyday thinking. Leveraging the pros and cons of doing or not doing things and picking the best possible route for myself. Also at times you are also being motivated at impressing others, namely girls (hey, there’s no shame in that. You all did it!) or your peers, but thats really not a good idea.

As you form a character of your own, with influences from your environment, fictional characters, celebrities and myths however, the above motivational schemes cease to exist, or their importance gets denominated over time. You form your own interests, you set your own targets in live and you stop caring about taking good grades in Art or Geography at school.

Unfortunately, we don’t get the change to do that many things in life. Because life is brief, and then you die. And the things you choose to do, should be really excellent. Once I realised that, during mid high-school, I understood that I must set the targets in my life no matter what repercussions they might carry and what other people think of them. That includes my parents as well.

Knowing the above, it motivates you to excel at the things you have chosen to do. You set targets, levels, acceptable parameters. Whatever you chose to do with your life, it better be damn good, and it’d better worth it. This is what pushed me forward back in school, what pushed me out of the army days, what pushed me though my University degree. What is currently pushing me during my PhD and working at the same time (at Cablenet).

Another thing, that always bothered me is that people tend to compare your achievements with others. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. Motivation is really bad when it comes from jealousy. Why worry about others? Worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The race is long, and at the end is only with yourself. Not with your colleagues, not with your friends. Your own personal goals, aspirations and targets should be the criteria for yourself. Of course, that said, whatever you do don’t congratulate yourself too much and don’t berate yourself either.

And a motivational, cheesy quote (which I think its quite nice) for closing up:

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

– Muhammad Ali

After spending almost 4 years in the UK now, I came to notice how much unappreciated is technical knowledge is in Cyprus. Watching the following short commercial from OTE, it made me realise the gap even more.

First of all, the salaries in Cyprus for Engineers of all sorts start from 1300-1400E (BSc. degree award or equivalent) vs. 2000+GBP in the UK (even more if your work-place is in a big place like London). If you compare this salary to a sales person for example, which requires no degree whatsoever, the difference is simply remarkable. It is true, that he who sucks up goes forward in Cyprus, and we, geeks, possess no such skill, so we are doomed to stay forever at the base of the pyramid.

In Cyprus, my dear reader, nobody cares about the person who is sweating to get the work done. In Cyprus always takes the credit the one that manages to sell your product that you’ve build. The management doesn’t care how much effort you’ve put in (hence, no engineer is awarded a bonus when the network is rock-solid, but sales people are awarded a bonus on top of their fat salary if they manage to sell a part of it), as long as its working and we can sell it. I am not saying that a sales person isn’t putting effort to sell something, but at the end of the day if your product receives enough marketing exposure and it is better quality and competitive priced against the competition it practically sells itself. However, if you don’t have capable engineers, people to make the best out of the budget you assign to them, people to make a living network out of a bunch of fibre patch-cords and life-less switches and routers you can’t sell anything. And if you can’t maintain it, you’ll end up loosing everything you’ve sold.

Your knowledge goes completely unappreciated. If you don’t work to build something from the bottom up, but you enjoy the end result, you just take it for granted. Who cares about the engineers that constructed the plane I am on? (But you always remember them when something goes wrong). Its like you’ve been given the knowledge to build networks, to build planes and cars, to program computers from birth. Its no lie that you have to spend a considerable portion of the best years of your life studying hard to begin scratching the surface of the science you love. Its no lie that you have to spend years studying, reading, understanding, practicing before you fully understand the complexities hidden under the hood of your car’s engine or whats going on on the other end of your computer monitor, deep inside a complex and nested computer network. It might take 1 hour and a few words in a terminal to solve your problem and it seems simple, but to get to that point you need years of hard-work. But when something goes wrong, then you magically become the king of the world. You become the centre of the universe, and they remember where your office is. Please, enough of the irony.

And lets face it, engineering is not for everyone. Not everyone can handle pressure, deadlines, an upset customer, the risk of a decision, the skill of troubleshooting and the skill of making a computer understand him. As an anonymous cleverly put it:

There are 10 types of people, those who understand binary, and those who don’t

Please, take a moment and try to imagine you, living in a world without engineers. Without technology and innovation. Start thinking what you would do without electricity, your car, planes, internet, computers, mobile phones, houses and bridges. Your dependancy on engineers can not be hidden, and lets face it, they make YOUR WORLD TICK.

Dear reader, don’t get me wrong. We are not doing it for money or fame. We are engineers because we like challenges. We are engineers because we enjoy lifting the world on our shoulders and push it forward, even if we end up being the invisible force that magically does it for the rest of you. We are engineers and we won’t tolerate any more abuse, verbal or otherwise. We are engineers because knowledge is power.

Disclaimer: The above post has no relation with any real person or work environment.

PS: There is no place like ::1

I started my PhD about 6 months ago, and during this short period I had to read a ton of papers, books, attend meetings etc. All these produce an immerse amount of notes, and its really difficult to keep track of them all in an organised way.

At first, I tried to tackle the problem by using a Wiki. This worked pretty well for a period: I could categorise my data, relate the data with an academic paper so I could build my library and create meeting minutes notes. However, it proved difficult (if not impossible) to have all this data offline and searchable. Not be able to use Mac OS X’s Spotlight is simply put: painful.

So I tried to move to document-oriented notes taken on Pages, but it wasn’t practical: no way to associate that with PDF papers. I also tried Papers, but then again it was not exactly what I was looking for. It was possible to add tags & notes on Papers, but what happens with the rest of the data I needed to keep in a library?

After some Googling around, I stumbled across Evernote. To sum-up it gives you 3 amazing features:

• Store anything: From PDFs to Images, Text, Webpages, Voice clips. ANYTHING
• Search on anything: Even on hard-written notes (apparently they run some OCR on the server-side, pretty neat). Spotlight works too!
• Organization: Organize everything into notebooks, tag them. Every word is indexed
• Available anywhere: On my iPhone, on my Mac, online and the best thing is that everything is in Sync. No more worries how to synchronise data or how to backup them efficiently

Its pretty easy to organise everything the way you have them in your mind. A few tips if you’re wondering how exactly I’m using Evernote for research:

• Notebooks for different tasks: I differentiate different tasks or projects and I group them on a notebook together. For example: I have a notebook for my PhD-related reading, a different one for a side-project and a different one for a topic I am reading on (e.g. Systems).
• When reading a new academic Paper, I just click the Safari’s link, and the PDF is magically copied into Evernote with its URL source. After reading the paper, and I want to append any notes on it (like a summary or crucial points) I just append them on the top. Of course, I always tag the paper: “Paper”, “Autonomic Management”, “Policies”. So when I want to get all papers on Autonomic Management it is easy as 2 clicks. Extremely handy!
• If I have a task or project notebook, I always have a principal Note marked as “To-do”. It lists all the pending tasks that need to be completed, per project readily available

If someone from Evernote reads this (thanks for a great product!), I have a wishlist:

• Collaborative notes!
• Ability to draw or take notes on PDFs and/or Images. This would be really handy
• Reminders or notifications attached somehow on notes (or the ability to sync with iCal do add a reminder)

And the BEST of ALL is that its Free!

Well, same as last year, my final exam period is upon me. After this exam period I would be hopefully (fingers crossed) named a Bachelor of Science.

My schedule is as follows:

• 27/04 – C.Sc 241 – Operating Systems – Done!
• 29/04 – C.Sc 242 – Software Engineering
• 01/05 – C.Sc 243 – Databases
• 04/05 – C.Sc 246 – Scientific Methods in Computer Science
• 06/05 – C.Sc 355 – Artificial Intelligence

Wish me luck!

I had the chance to be attending an ANA meeting, at Mulhouse, France. Apart from having difficulties with the language, I had the chance not only to meet some very interesting people, but have a glimpse at Central European culture.

While it was not the first time I visited Central European countries and cities, I never had the chance to see deeper than the tourist wrap. I guess I was either too young, or there with the wrong purpose. I was also lucky to have some amazing people with me, and that’s what made the difference.

Perhaps one of the most difficult time of the year, for students at least, is the final exams. Full of studying, stress and anxiety. Fortunately my girlfriend was around for a few days, and things had a bright sight as well.

So, until 9th of May, not much will be going around here!

My exam schedule is:

• Monday – 28/4 – C.SC 251 – Networking – Done!
• Friday – 2/5 – C.SC 252 – Human Computer Interaction – Done!
• Monday – 5/5 – C.SC 253 – Distributed Systems – Done!
• Wednesday – 7/5 C.SC 353 – Advanced Networking – Done!
• Friday – 9/5 C.SC 254 – Languages & Compilation – Done!

Good luck to me, and see you after the 9th!

As part of my degree scheme (Computer Science Innovation @ Lancaster University), I had to work on a research project.

The subject was Functional Composition (I’ll blog later to elaborate), as part of the Autonomic Network Architecture project, which resulted a paper titled “A Functional Composition Framework for Autonomic Network Architectures” at the IEEE ACNM 2008: workshop on autonomic communications and network management.

I can not thank enough the people who have worked with me, for their time, patience and the
opportunities that they gave me with this project. It was a very interesting, productive and pleasant experience, which I hope we can continue and extend next year.

I had a small discussion recently with two of my University’s lecturers on Google Mail (Gmail). They asked me if I trust Google with my email, and my reply was why wouldn’t I? After all, I am no one important, with no critical information on my email account.

Gmail user-base increases rapidly with the announcement that they can take business users now, and you can host your domain there for free. The only “catch” is the text ads they serve (which I don’t mind at all), and that we have no idea what Google do with our emails and the personal information it collects daily, and there is a good change that we’d never know.

Then I’ve started thinking why I use Gmail, and what offers that I can not change to another email client. I’ve been using Gmail for the past 4 years and since I’ve never used a “fat” email client. But what does Gmail offers that make it so unique among competition?

It’s a webmail. I can be at my girlfriend’s house, open a browser and check my emails. It doesn’t require any forms of configuration, just your username and password, and you can have access to your emails from anywhere in the world you can get internet access
The search feature is fast. Its faster than 90% of “fat” email clients out there, and most of the times 10 times smarter as well.
Fast and simple user interface. For a web-app gmail is blazing fast, and also faster than most of the “fat” clients. In addition to that its very simple and intuitive to use. The interface is not cluttered, just the basics you need.
No more folders and subfolders and trees. Just labels. Why didn’t anyone think of this before? Folders make your life miserable, and gmail has taken them away.
Gmail removes you the burden of maintaining multiple email accounts, allowing you to forward all your emails there, and even reply with a different from address.
Also removes the burden of maintaining your own e-mail server. Yes, I can use my ISP’s mail server, but then again, why trust my ISP and not trust Gmail?

I could possibly find more to list here, but these are the main reasons that I still use Gmail, and not use plain-old-mail setup. But when they asked me that question they got me thinking. Working for an ISP, I have the luxury to have my own personal server hosted in their data-center for free, so I have the resources to host a few users on my own. So I’ve looked around on what’s available on free (preferably open-source) e-mail server solutions that come with a webmail.

Well the results were disappointing. No open-source e-mail server solution can reach Gmail’s usability. Some projects were too immature for everyday use, others had a very heavy web UI. Well, I can always use Apple’s excellent Mail app, but then again I refuse to use a fat email client, since I want to have access to my mail from the web. Unfortunately, there is no drop-in replacement for what Gmail offers.

What we can do about this? Although I find the thought of developing an AJAX web-2.0ish webmail client, modeled after Gmail’s line of success, very intriguing, it would take a lot of effort and time, which unfortunately currently don’t have. Unfortunately as the situation stands right now, I can’t see myself migrating from Gmail any time now, unless somebody offers me an alternative I haven’t yet considered.

Currently, the Internet Protocol, or IP, is build upon a static, layered architecture as designed in the early 80s. With the exponential growth of the internet this one-size-fits-all design starts to fail us in certain aspects. As a result, the current trent in network research is to navigate away from static, layered architecture to networks that feature functional atomization, diffusion and sedimentation.

As part of my BSc degree at Lancaster University, I have been working on a current research project, Autonomic Network Architecture, or ANA for short. The project aim is to develop an autonomic network architecture, featuring flexible, dynamic and fully autonomous formation of network nodes as well as whole networks.

The overall target of the project is to identify fundamental autonomic networking principles, which would enable a network to scale not only in size, but also in functionality. These requirements lead to properties such as self-monitoring, self-repair, self-management, self-optimization and self-protection which through research are proven to be the building blocks of networks that are richer in functionality and scalability.

A new Autonomic Network Architecture will emerge as a result of this research. This architecture will provide a framework for network function re-composition. The design that enable flexible, dynamic and fully autonomic formation of large-scale networks in which the functionalities of each constituent network node are also composed in an autonomic fashion. This architecture will also allow dynamic adaptation and re-organisation of the network according to the working, economical and social needs of the users. Moreover, it must support mobile nodes and multiple administrative domains.

My involvement focused more on the Functional composition framework, the mechanism that would enable nodes in this architecture to communicate with-in a compartment, based on the functionality they required. Currently, in the Internet, this is done statically, by looking the destination address in the IP packet and routing it accordingly, without taking in consideration other parameters, such as the load of the destination.

Functional composition will enable the dynamic routing of messages, using the help of a classifier. A node that would request a service, it would query a classifier, in order to give it the destination where it should route that kind of messages at the present time. The classifier after taking in consideration various user defined variables, as well as dynamic conditions, such as the load of a node, the type of application or who is requesting the service, will redirect the node to next hop, and so on. This builds a dynamic path with modules, which are put together using the functional composition framework, that compromise this modular autonomic network.

This is just a small introduction of the ANA framework and functional composition, since its a rather large project. I will post a more detailed post on Functional Composition soon. For more information regarding the ANA project please visit the project homepage