Author: koen (Page 9 of 123)

Autentikasi Kartu Memori

Flash drive dan kartu memori lain: siapa sih yang nggak punya sekarang? Mereka berkembang sangat cepat, kerana sifatnya yang praktis. Tinggal colok, langsung dikenali, baik di komputer, di handphone, di kamera, dan entah mau di mana lagi. Masalah yang mulai timbul kemudian adalah masalah keamanan. Siapa pun yang main tancap flash drive, MMC, SD, xD, dst, langsung diakui valid untuk melakukan transaksi data. A.l. untuk mengatasi masalah ini, IEEE menyusun standar baru, bernama IEEE P1667™. Judulnya “Standard Protocol for Authentication in Host Attachments of Transient Storage Devices”. Di dalamnya dibahas validasi identifier dan langkah2 pengamanan lainnya, untuk digunakan baik oleh para pembuat media simpan maupun terminal komputasi (yang mungkin tidak terbatas pada komputer). Diharapkan, standar ini akan mencegah masalah2 keamanan yang dapat timbul di kemudian hari. Sponsornya tak lain adalah IEEE Computer Society.
Kalau memang yang bikin standar udah sekelas IEEE, kenapa nggak sekalian bikin standar untuk kartu memorinya ya. Lagi rada ribet juga. Soalnya kamera Olympus cuma mengenali xD, sementara notebook (HP) dan smartphone (Xphone) mengenali SD dan MMC. Nggak bisa langsung motret langsung dikirim via mail tanpa kabel.

Noni dan Kukuh

Hmmmh, menurut bioritme sih (yang sebenernya nggak aku percayai, gara2 frekuensinya yang dianggap invariabel), tingkat intelektual mencapai -99% dan fisik -99% serta emosi 0%. Wajar kalau terjadi dekandensi, baik di ruang kerja maupun di website ini.

Daripada baca2 site yang lagi dekaden ini, kunjungilah weblog baru dari Noni dan Kukuh. Nggak sekelas Tristan und Isolde (di mana Tristan harus mati) atau Rama dan Shinta (di mana Shinta harus mati) atau Romeo dan Juliet (di mana pembaca harus mati bosan); tapi gabungan antara keluguan dan sarkasme pasti membawa warna tersendiri. Kita doakan kesuksesan bagi mereka.

*hik*

Wortel Mencegah Kanker

Wortel mengurangi resiko kanker sampai sepertiga — gitu kata SciAm. Pada wortel terdapat senyawa falcarinol, yang diketahui bisa melindungi sang wortel dari serangan jamur. Kirsten Brandt dari University of Newcastle upon Tyne mencobai pestisida alami ini pada tikus yang tena tumor pra-kanker. Tikus dikelompokkan atas kelompok yang tidak menerima falcarinol, kelompok yang menerima wortel, dan kelompok yang menerima falcarinol sebagai senyawa yang dipisah dari wortel. Dalam laporan yang diterbitkan di Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry bulan ini, disebutkan bahwa kelompok kedua dan ketiga mengalami penurunan dalam pengembangan kanker sebesar sepertiga. Tapi memang, dalam jumlah besar, falcarinol bisa jadi racun. Memakan 400kg wortel dipercaya dapat mematikan.

Oh ya, wortel dalam riset ini adalah wortel mentah. Belum jelas apa yang terjadi pada wortel yang sudah dimasak. Dan apa ada perbedaan dengan berbagai varietas wortel yummie yummie itu.

Linux di Mata Ritchie

Yang ini versi Dennis Ritchie, yang diwawancarai oleh Unix.se, tahun 2003. Ritchie menciptakan C, dan menciptakan Unix bersama Thompson.

What do you think about the development of Linux and the BSD variants? Do you think they’ll eventually replace all the proprietary Unix systems?

Dennis Ritchie: As a general phenomenon, I think they’re great, but they suffer from much the same struggles and competition that the proprietary ones did and do. Sun and HP, SGI , IBM, Digital others all have (or had) variants of the same thing– so too do Linux and the BSDs. Their proprietors may have different motivations for producing the variants, of course. And of course each does have its own attractions. There is a kind of brand differentiation, and this is one of the reasons why portability is hard.

Any thoughts about the GNU project? How did you first learn about it?

Dennis Ritchie: I can’t remember when I first learned about it, but a long time ago. The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software. The interesting thing is the way that free-software ideas have begun to influence major existing commercial players. At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas? But still, it’s a great satisfaction that so much of it has built on top of a basis we helped to establish.

Linux di Mata Thompson

Unix and Beyond: Interview with Ken Thomson, 5 years ago.

Wawancara ini ditemukan lagi gara2 lagi beberes jurnal2 dan majalah2 lama. Konon Oom Made Wiryana mau berbaik hati menyimpankan dokumen2 berharga itu di calon perpustakaan akademis non-kampus yang akan didirikannya. Para pendukung Open Source boleh keki baca pendapat Ken tentang Linux. Mudah2an pendapat beliau udah berubah dalam 5 tahun ini.

Computer:What about the development history of Unix?

Thompson: The early versions were essentially me experimenting with some Multics concepts on a PDP-7 after that project disbanded, which is about as small a team as you can imagine. I then picked up a couple of users, Doug McIlroy and Dennis Ritchie, who were interested in languages. Their criticism, which was very expert and very harsh, led to a couple of rewrites in PDP-7 assembly.

At one point, I took BCPL from Martin Richards at MIT and converted it into what I thought was a fairly straight translation, but it turned out to be a different language so I called it B, and then Dennis took it and added types and called it C.

We bought a PDP-11one of the very firstand I rewrote Unix in PDP-11 assembly and got it running. That was exported to several internal Bell telephone applications, to gather trouble reports and monitor various things like rerouted cables. Those applications, independent of what we were doing, started political pressure to get support for the operating system; they demanded service. So Bell Labs started the Unix Support Group, whose purpose was to serve as the interface to us, to take our modifications and interface them with the applications in the field, which demanded a more stable environment. They didn’t like surprises. This grew over time into the commercial version from AT&T and the more autonomous version from USL.

Independently, we went on and tried to rewrite Unix in this higher level language that was evolving simultaneously. It’s hard to say who was pushing whomwhether Unix was pushing C or C was pushing Unix. These rewrites failed twice in the space of six months, I believe, because of problems with the language. There would be a major change in the language and we’d rewrite Unix.

The third rewriteI took the OS proper, the kernel, and Dennis took the block I/O, the diskwas successful; it turned into version 5 in the labs and version 6 that got out to universities. Then there was a version 7 that was mostly a repartitioning of the system in preparation for Steve Johnson and Dennis Ritchie making the first port to an Interdata 832. Unknown to us, there was a similar port going on in Australia.

Around version 6, ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency] adopted it as the standard operating system for the Arpanet community. Berkeley was contracted to maintain and distribute the system. Their major contributions were to adapt the University of Illinois TCP/IP stack and to add virtual memory to Bell Lab’s port to the VAX.

There’s a nice history of Unix written by Dennis that’s available on his home page [ed.”The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System,” http://cm.belllabs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html].

Computer: What accounted for the success of Unix, ultimately?

Thompson: I mostly view it as serendipitous. It was a massive change in the way people used computers, from mainframes to minis; we crossed a monetary threshold where computers became cheaper. People used them in smaller groups, and it was the beginning of the demise of the monster comp center, where the bureaucracy hidden behind the guise of a multimillion-dollar machine would dictate the way computing ran. People rejected the idea of accepting the OS from the manufacturer and these machines would never talk to anything but the manufacturer’s machine.

I view the fact that we were caught up in thatwhere we were glommed onto as the only solution to maintaining open computingas the main driving force for the revolution in the way computers were used at the time.

There were other, smaller things. Unix was a very small, understandable OS, so people could change it at their will. It would run itself you could type “go” and in a few minutes it would recompile itself. You had total control over the whole system. So it was very beneficial to a lot of people, especially at universities, because it was very hard to teach computing from an IBM end-user point of view. Unix was small, and you could go through it line by line and understand exactly how it worked. That was the origin of the so-called Unix culture.

Computer: In a sense, Linux is following in this tradition. Any thoughts on this phenomenon?

Thompson: I view Linux as something that’s not Microsofta backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don’t think it will be very successful in the long run. I’ve looked at the source, and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically.

My experience and some of my friends’ experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won’t hold up. If you’re using it on a single box, that’s one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.

Wajah Seorang Engineer

IEEE memang selalu berusaha menunjukkan bahwa wajah engineer itu tidak tunggal, tidak typical, dan tidak harus dilbertian :). Bukan cuma wajah dalam arti manusianya, tapi juga gaya kerjanya. Siapa bilang engineer harus pakai baju kotak2, harus bermuka serius, harus melototi layar komputer, atau memegang penggaris?

Kayaknya memang IEEE — selain punya misi untuk membentuk jaringan antar engineer (EE dan turunannya) — juga punya misi sampingan untuk menampilkan wajah engineering yang sebenarnya kepada publik.

(Kalau nggak kebaca: gambar di samping ini adalah iklan pengingat / reminder untuk memperpanjang keanggotaan di IEEE)

Kerja Ilmiah Ala Einstein

Sains, gitu kata Kuhn, tidak dibentuk dari akumulasi pengetahuan, tetapi oleh perubahan paradigma. Basi sih, emang. Apalagi kalau terus kita cerita tentang Newton, Einstein, Bohr, sampai Witten, yang semuanya merupakan contoh orang2 yang menggeser paradigma sains. Ya udah. Tapi aku lagi mau cerita tentang keilmuwanan Einstein.

Wheeler bercerita, bahwa Einstein sungguh mengagumi Newton. Newton berani membuat postulat bahwa ruang dan waktu itu absolut — hal yang ditentang banyak orang sezamannya. Memang ide Newton itu salah, dan Einstein adalah yang paling tahu soal itu. Tapi pendapat Newton itu telah berhasil membentuk landasan ilmiah yang kokoh, yang memungkinkan semua ilmuwan masa sesudahnya menyusun kerangka berpikir, termasuk Gauss, Maxwell, hingga Einstein sendiri.

Trus gimana dengan Einstein sendiri, yang sering dimitoskan sebagai tokoh yang seorang diri memformulasikan relativitas khusus dan kemudian relativitas umum (di samping efek fotolistrik, gerak Brown, dll), sebagai revolusi perombak zaman yang sulit terfahami* ilmuwan di masanya? Para ahli sejarah telah mempelajari buku catatan Einstein, yang membuktikan bahwa Einstein memang ilmuwan besar, bukan sekedar tukang sulap.

Seperti ilmuwan lain, formulasi Einstein tidak dimulai dengan mulus. Ia membuat kesalahan. Banyak sekali. Kalau macet, ia membuka buku, membuat kalkulasi, dan berharap menemui pencerahan. Masih macet? Ia tak ragu bertanya ke rekannya. Rekannya merujuk nama lain, hingga akhirnya Einstein menemui Grossmann. Grossmann sudah membahas tentang tensor kurvatur. Dan ini kemudian jadi landasan matematika bagi relativitas. Selesai. Nggak dink. Masih jauh. Kalkulasi diteruskan, dan masih selalu macet. Sering ada logika kacau di dalamnya. Dan waktu ia benar pun, ia tidak sadar bahwa ia lagi benar. Perlu dua tahun, plus bantuan seorang rekan, untuk melacak tempat kesalahannya, dan kembali ke posisi yang pernah dicapai sebelumnya itu. Dan akhirnya rumusan relativitas umum yang luar biasa itu pun selesai.

Gitu lah kerja ilmiah model Einstein. Nggak mirip pesulap. Dan nggak model pemain tunggal. Dia perlu referensi, dan perlu bantuan rekan2nya. Ilmuwan perlu kerja keras plus kekeraskepalaan minus ketidaksabaran.

Footnote:

* Bahasan tentang relativitas khusus dimulai dengan nama Michelson yang menemukan bahwa kecepatan cahaya sama ke semua arah, plus Lorentz dengan transformasi ruang-waktu berdasar gerak pengamat, plus Poincaré yang sudah mendalami kurva geometri non Euklid di masa itu. Namun Michelson, Lorentz, dan Poincaré tidak paham atau tidak percaya pada teori relativitas Einstein.

Nerd Score = 99

Ke site Jay, dan ter-link ke kuis yang satu ini:


I am nerdier than 99% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

Ya … gitu lah kalau nggak ada kegiatan lain abis gosokin lantai kamar mandi dan WC. Klik di Wikipedia kalau mau tau lebih banyak tentang Nerd. Tapi menurut aku, skor 99 (yang artinya aku masuk ke 1% orang/peserta paling nerd) itu agak mencurigakan. OK, ada satu lagi, dari site yang sama.


I am going to die at 78. When are you? Click here to find out!

78 tahun? Wow, aku bener2 meragukan validitas site ini. Umm … coba satu lagi deh.


What is your weird quotient? Click to find out!

Beda dengan nerdiness, weird quotient (WQ) mengukur skala mirip IQ. Jadi angka 100 itu bukan angka tinggi, tapi angka tipikal: mirip dengan sebagian besar orang / peserta. Sebenernya udah coba satu lagi, tentang chemistry. Tapi nggak ada yang bisa ditempel. Udah deh segini dulu.

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