Free PDF: “A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control”

It’s a light and short 88 pages booklet PDF (have you noticed a trend on this kind of format?). Here it is: “A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control”. A fast way to get in touch with the Microsoft offering over this scenarios. All about identity management from a decentralized perspective.

Real-World Relativity: GPS

Einstein’s theory of relativity is not as abstract as we may think. An example we often use is GPS, a system that as we know uses a method called trilateration, a method that depends on the precision of the satellite internal clocks to calculate absolute positions.

The problem is that time is relative, and though we all recognize it, probably most of us imagine that we needed extreme conditions to make it happen (I was one of them). But all we need is a satellite at about 20.000 km from the ground, orbiting at about 14.000 km/h and a process requiring 20 to 30 nanoseconds precision, and there you have it, you’ll have to take the theories of relativity into account:

Because an observer on the ground sees the satellites in motion relative to them, Special Relativity predicts that we should see their clocks ticking more slowly (see the Special Relativity lecture). Special Relativity predicts that the on-board atomic clocks on the satellites should fall behind clocks on the ground by about 7 microseconds per day because of the slower ticking rate due to the time dilation effect of their relative motion.

Further, the satellites are in orbits high above the Earth, where the curvature of spacetime due to the Earth's mass is less than it is at the Earth's surface. A prediction of General Relativity is that clocks closer to a massive object will seem to tick more slowly than those located further away (see the Black Holes lecture). As such, when viewed from the surface of the Earth, the clocks on the satellites appear to be ticking faster than identical clocks on the ground. A calculation using General Relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by 45 microseconds per day.

The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day!

Cool article! But you know what’s cooler? That these theories were almost like pure creation: it’s not like Einstein developed a GPS system, failed to make it work, to finally theorize: what if time would be relative? Naturally he did start from an empty canvas and no purpose at all, but in face of the problem the scientific community had identified, his leap was so extraordinary that after 100 years we still find it hard to explain. Thank you, Albert.

Best Practices for form design

Here’s the next book I have to read: Best Practices for form design. It’s written by Luke Wroblewski, current Chief Design Architect at Yahoo, former Lead User Interface Designer of eBay and Senior Interface Designer at the NCSA, the birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic NCSA Mosaic (link corrected).

Here’s a presentation of the book.

Thanks for finding it, Tiago.

 

<update>

Sign of times…

</update>

Leap Year

Every now and then I find someone that still believes leap days come in 4 year cycles, no exception made. Some of them are even programmers that never had to implement a leap year algorithm:

    public static class DateUtils
    {
        public static bool IsLeapYear(this int year)
        {
            return (year % 400 == 0) || ((year % 4 == 0) && (year % 100 != 0));
        }
    }

 

I used to get quite nervous with the fact, but not anymore. Why? This just doesn’t impact on today’s every days life :) Let me try and prove it to you:

            foreach (
                var year in 
                    Enumerable.Range(1582, 1500)
                    .Where(d => (d % 4 == 0) && d.IsLeapYear() == false)
            )
            {
                Console.WriteLine("{0}", year);
            }

So what am I getting? On the first 1500 years since the Gregorian calendar as defined the present algorithm, which of these 4 year cycles weren’t leap years?

 

Oops, it seems like no one I know was born of probably be alive on those days, who cares? “Press any key to continue”: yeap, seems right :)

Free book of the day: Essentials of Metaheuristics

Here’s a cool free book for those like me that love messing in the metaheuristics world.

Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries

For better or for worse Portugal has its share of responsibility over the globalization we so well known today. The exploration voyages experienced from the 15th century Portuguese sailors connected the world, “discovered” continents and cultures, ended old fears and monopolies, opened the commerce to the word and laid the grounds for the world we live in.

As a Portuguese I always wanted to see an exhibit that portrayed this time of world history as told by non-europeans. Smithsonian has made it possible with a fine exhibit that made its way back home to Lisbon, at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga.

Though in my opinion this exhibit somehow lacked the needed articulated view of the so called “discoveries age”, the choice and relevance of the exposed objects was enough to make a great exposition. I’m talking about 300 objects gathered from museums in China, India, Japan, South America and Europe.

Here is the exhibit international link, the Portuguese one and some photos. Finally here’s a cool Google Earth kml file.

The coolest periodic table!

Here’s something worth printing and posting on my daughter's study:

 

Read about it here, where the blogger states:

Not just a boring list of elements and stuff, but also includes things that actually use these basic building blocks of our universe

Cool!

ETFA 2009 - Advanced Manufacturing Systems

Here’s the agenda for the WIP-5:

Chairs: Joaquín Ezpeleta and Rei Itsuki

Room A-13, 9:00 - 11:00, Friday September 25th

 

Order	ETFA Ref.	Title / Authors
1	MD-001554	Consideration for Efficient RFID Information Retrieval in Traceability System Rei Itsuki, Atsushi Fujita
2	MD-005215	RFID tuning methodology applied on airport baggage tracking Carlos Jacinto, Mário Romano, Ana Montes, Pedro Sousa, Mário Nunes
3	MD-005703	Using CloudRFID middleware for fuel supply control of vehicles fleets Leonardo A. Amaral, Fabiano P. Hessel, Eduardo A. Bezerra, Jerônimo C. Corrêa, Oliver B. Longhi, Thiago F. Dias
4	MD-005029	Exploring an Open-loop RFID Implementation in the Automotive Industry Daniel Hellström, Mathias Wiberg
5	MD-005266	Design and Control of an Intelligent Dual-Arm Manipulator for Fault-Recovery in a Production Scenario Jose de Gea Fernandez, Johannes Lemburg, Thomas M. Roehr, Malte Wirkus, Iliya Gurov, Frank Kirchner
6	MD-005096	High-accuracy automatic system to assemble vehicle headlamps Javier Gamez-Garcia, Juan Gomez-Ortega, Alejandro Sanchez-Garcia, Silvia Satorres-Martinez
7	MD-000329	The Possibilities of and Limits to Detecting Incomplete Fusion via In-Process Monitoring in the Case of Laser Welding Michael Kuhl, Paul-Michael Mickel
8	MD-005177	Business Driven Engineering for Powertrain Industry Robert Harrison, Radmehr Monfared, Les Lee
9	MD-006114	On the development of an Agent Supported e-Manufacturing environment Adriana Giret, Vicente Botti
10	MD-005576	An Agent-Based Approach for Automating The Disturbance Handling for Flexible Manufacturing Systems Iman Badr, Peter Göhner
11	MD-005851	A multiagent-based system to support the decentralized collaborative decision-making process in the automobile supply chain sector Jorge E. Hernandez, Raúl Poler, Josefa Mula, David de La Fuente
12	MD-004871	Three-View-Concept for modeling process or manufacturing plants with AutomationML Miriam Schleipen, Rainer Drath
13	MD-005711	Factory Monitoring and Control with Mixed Hardware/Software, Discrete/Continuous Models Paul Maier, Martin Sachenbacher

After the conference I’ll post the paper (probably here). A deeper article will be presented in Carlos Jacinto’s Master of Science thesis, the work that has influenced most of this WIP paper. This thesis will be presented pretty soon, and will be announced here as soon as possible.

ETFA2009 presentation - RFID tuning methodology applied on airport baggage tracking

 

RFID tuning methodology

applied on airport baggage tracking

 

Carlos Jacinto, Mário Romano Ana Montes, Pedro Sousa Link, Av. Duque Ávila 23, 1000 Lisboa carlos.jacinto@link.pt, mario.romano@link.pt ana.montes@link.pt, pedro.sousa@link.pt

Mário Serafim Nunes Instituto Superior Técnico Rua Alves Redol, 1000 Lisboa mario.nunes@ist.utl.pt

 

From Setember 22 to 26 link will be present at the international conference ETFA’2009 - Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, in Maiorca, Spain. The ETFA conference series is the prime, and largest, IEEE event dedicated to factory automation and emerging technologies in industrial automation. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the industry and academia and provide them with a platform to report on recent advances and developments in the newly emerging areas of technology, as well as actual and potential applications to industrial and factory automation.

 

Figure 1 – Flight Baggage Dashboard

Under the theme “RFID tuning methodology applied on airport baggage tracking”, I will present results taken from the Project “Dumbo” (“Demonstrador Universal de Monitorização de Bagagens e Operações” – “Operations and Baggage Monitoring Universal Demonstrator”). This project uses RFID technology to monitor in real-time baggage and operations between airports, airliners and ground operators, allowing the assessment of the SLAs (Service Level Agreements) agreed upon the intervenient players.

Figure 2 – Service Level Agreements

The project has an end-to-end travel perspective over 3 airports: at the departure airport, monitoring RFID equipment is used from check-in desks along pre-defined baggage circuits up to the airplane cargo entrance; at the arrival airport, RFID equipment is used from airplane cargo doors up to customs exit.

This paper presents an RFID equipment tuning and configuration methodology developed during the project. The lack of adequate tooling on the market presented the opportunity to build the tool used to select the best solutions and to collect the information presented on this paper.

Figure 3 – RFIDAntennaTuner output

Figure 4 – RSSI for different power combinations

Please follow this link for this post in my company’s site.

And now for something completely boring

We often use KB to represent kilo bytes. By doing this, we are making the following mistakes:

1. If we want to represent it on a 10 base form, 10³, we should use kB
2. If we want to represent it on a 2 base form, 2¹⁰, we should use KiB

Here are the 10 base prefixes we learned at school:

Factor	Name	Symbol
1024	yotta	Y
1021	zetta	Z
1018	exa	E
1015	peta	P
1012	tera	T
109	giga	G
106	mega	M
103	kilo	k
102	hecto	h
101	deka	da

And here’s what our children will learn:

Factor	Name	Symbol	Origin	Derivation
210	kibi	Ki	kilobinary: (210)1	kilo: (103)1
220	mebi	Mi	megabinary: (210)2	mega: (103)2
230	gibi	Gi	gigabinary: (210)3	giga: (103)3
240	tebi	Ti	terabinary: (210)4	tera: (103)4
250	pebi	Pi	petabinary: (210)5	peta: (103)5
260	exbi	Ei	exabinary: (210)6	exa: (103)6

 

<update>

Now that I think of it, we should use SI standards to end the English speaking vs. rest of the world billion ambiguity. We should start using SI nomenclature on the financial world, stop talking about 10 billion dollars, and start talking about 10 tera dollars. Or 10 giga dollars, see what I mean? :)

</update>

Jesus evaluated by academics

As we all know, the academic community is highly paper-oriented. And this is good, this is the guarantee that scientific knowledge flows on a global scientific network, but there is more than publishing quantity, and it poses problems to those that don’t publish so often. I was discussing this with a friend, a researcher in an area other than mine, and he referenced something he read on a magazine:

What can an academic say about Jesus work? Well, definitely a great teacher, but he doesn’t have anything published, does he?

Fun !

Note to President Obama: Want to Fix the Schools? Look to Portugal!

US schools are failing a large number of young Americans. Don Tapscott suggests that the president take a look at a modest country across the Atlantic that's turning into the world leader in rethinking education for the 21st century. That country is Portugal.

Its economy in early 2005 was sagging, and it was running out of the usual economic fixes. It also scored some of the lowest educational achievement results in western Europe.

So Prime Minister Jose Socrates took a courageous step. He decided to invest heavily in a "technological shock" to jolt his country into the 21st century. This meant, among other things, that he'd make sure everyone in the workforce could handle a computer and use the Internet effectively.

This could transform Portuguese society by giving people immediate access to world. It would open up huge opportunities that could make Portugal a richer and more competitive place. But it wouldn't happen unless people had a computer in their hands.

And Don goes on:

They're also thinking of creating a new online platform to allow teachers to work together to create new lessons and course materials that take advantage of the interactive technology. Through this collaboration, the Portuguese school system will create exciting new online materials to educate children. Lots of ideas are already making their way into Portuguese classrooms, says Mario Franco, chair of the Foundation for Mobile Communication, which is managing the e-school program. There are 50 different educational programs and games inside the laptops the youngest children use. The laptops are even equipped with a control to encourage kids to finish their homework and score high marks. If they do, they get more time to play.

Naturally the success of this model will have to wait to be evaluated, but I’m pretty sure it will return many times its investment. I’d like to add one advantage more: Portugal is not only investing on raising it’s competitive capability, it’s also investing on social justice and equity.

I’ve no doubts about the kids ability to use the laptops (presently, Portugal is introducing 50€ laptops to 1st grade!), the bottleneck here is probably the teachers. Changing their mindset from the old to the new education model is the major risk this concept will experiment.

---

Don Tapscott is a Canadian business executive, author, consultant and speaker based in Toronto, Ontario, specializing in business strategy, organizational transformation and the role of technology in business and society. Tapscott is chairman of business strategy think tank New Paradigm (now nGenera Insight), which he founded in 1993. Tapscott is also Adjunct Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Parallel Computing with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1

I’ve found (to be honest not even that, I’ve received :S) this cool post with a collection of links on what’s new in Parallel Computing with Visual Studio 2010.

Here is the must from that list:

• Managed - Parallel Programming in the .NET Framework
• What’s New in Beta 1 for Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)
• What’s New in Beta 1 for the Task Parallel Library (part 1/3)
• What’s New in Beta 1 for the Task Parallel Library (part 2/3)
• What’s New in Beta 1 for the Task Parallel Library (part 3/3)
• .NET Framework 4 Cancellation Framework

And for last my favorite one:

• Samples for Parallel Programming with the .NET Framework 4

Convert a Word .docx file into PDF for IEEE Xplore

Though IEEE PDF eXpress accepts Word documents, I rather convert them to PDF so I can preview the final result. Most references out there on the web use Adobe print driver, but I prefer to use Word 2007 “Publish as PDF”. To embed the fonts please make sure to check the ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A) compliant option:

<update>

Please do it at your own risk, IEEE usually advises:

Print to a PDF Printer or PDF Distiller. Do not use any conversion wizards built into your word processor or "save as PDF" as they might add PDF bookmarks and Web links. Bookmarks and Web links are currently not allowed by IEEE library.

</update>

Wolfram|Alpha: making the world's knowledge computable

Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing.

Take a look at the samples. But beware if you don’t have much time on your hands (I’ve been wasting all of my Sunday afternoon here!)

What I wouldn’t give to have access to this back on school days…

“Hacking and Securing RFID” Presentation

Last week me and my good friend Manuel Fonseca presented a session on Instituto Superior Técnico’s XVI Semana Informática. The title of the presentation was “Hacking and Securing RFID”, but it ended up being a little frustrating for us and for the audience as we stripped most of the more sensitive stuff that we originally intended to expose.

We started with a disclaimer where we explained our interest: our company has over 10 years of experience on the radio frequency space, a lot of projects out there, most of them exposed on open loop, so we have to assess the security of these projects.

Then we listed a series of RFID scenarios we use daily and corresponding threats, identified as advantages the remote identification and process automation, and concluded that these are also the same disadvantages.

We presented the threats on the personal and system level, putting them into perspective compared to low tech security, like the one used on classic door keys and document since man can write. We concluded that RFID is different because:

• reading / writing doesn’t need physical access to the resource – on a classic door key we have to access it in order to clone it; this broadens the exposed security surface
• collection and consolidation automation capability

Then we listed some typical class of attacks:

• Skimming
• Eavesdropping
• Tampering
• Man in the Middle
• DoS

Basically nothing new here, just a sub-set of the standard security attacks.

We finally entered the “touchy” zone, describing some tooling and hacking case-studies. Not too deep, I’m afraid…

On to the approaches: from paranoiac to relaxed, we ended up concluding that we have to quantify the security risk, the business value and the impact upon security breach, and architect security accordingly, always keeping in mind how often we have to choose from commodity or security.

Then we set for more social waters, stating that:

lower security => lower privacy => lower liberty

On to how to secure, where we’ve covered:

• architecting security
• standard cryto
  • key management, chip distribution
  • keys and algorithms
  • security live spawn
• hardware limitations
  • processing limitations
  • most tags can’t carry a clock, and little context
  • secure tag are costly
  • on passive RFID, higher processing => lower range
  • blocking tags & DoS

From the user view, we’ve defended:

• users should prefer secure items & services
• if possible, users should kill the tags
• if not, users should be able to enable / disable tag reading / writing

And we ended up concluding that RFID technology is not always mature enough to assure the best security standards, and that is an issue we have to address. If not for other reasons, because the perception of insecure RFID poses a serious risk to the adoption of this technology.

History of the internet

Watch this cool 8 min video:

"History of the internet" is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from
time-sharing to file-sharing, from arpanet to internet. The clip shows a brief overview
of this history and shall animate to go on discovering the history of the internet.

 

LinFu: Language INdependent Features Underneath [.NET]

The LinFu Framework is a collection of things that Philip Laureano felt lacked in .NET. Though most of them are present on other frameworks, LinFu is interesting because of it's minimalist approach and above all because of the educational value of their terrible effective presentations. Here they are:

• Part I: LinFu.DynamicProxy: A Lightweight Proxy Generator - A fast dynamic proxy library with support for .NET Generics
• Part II: LinFu.DynamicObject – Adding Dynamic Language Features to Statically Typed Languages. Using LinFu.DynamicObject to add mixins, duck typing and multiple dispatch to your favorite .NET languages
• Part III: LinFu.Delegates-Lambda Arguments & Universal Event Handling. A library for currying delegates and for handling any event fired from any object instance
• Part IV: Simple.IOC – The Five Minute Inversion of Control Container. A minimalistic inversion of control container.
• Part V: LinFu.DesignByContract2 – Adding Transparent Design by Contract Features to Any .NET Language. A library that adds transparent DbC support to any .NET language. No Eiffel.NET or Spec# required.
• Part VI: LinFu.AOP – Pervasive Method Interception and Replacement for Sealed Types in Any .NET Language. Using MSBuild and Mono.Cecil to dynamically intercept static and final methods of nearly any type, including sealed types. No proxies required.

Heard about it at P&PGuidance. Thanks for the link, Cab_Ux.

Microsoft Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance

Here’s a cool guidance document to help you get start your TFS branching approaches. Only 37 pages. Readable!

<update>

And here’s the v2 for TFS 2008.

</update>

patterns & practices: App Arch Guide Pocket Guides

Here’s the Pocket Guides available so far:

• Agile Architecture Method Pocket Guide
• Web Architecture Pocket Guide
• Mobile Architecture Pocket Guide
• RIA Architecture Pocket Guide
• Rich Client Architecture Pocket Guide
• Service Architecture Pocket Guide

Thanks for the tip, Cab_ux.