ReiserFS developer convicted: should commodities have a moral value?

Hans Reiser guilty of first-degree murder | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

It feels somewhat strange as I have a Suse 9 box with the file system developed by Hans Reiser. And this is because I chose to go with the default.

I got to know of this conviction only today - nearly two years after he was charged. The interesting question is - did people change file systems after this news?

Which brings me to a larger question: how much importance do people attach to the moralities of the originators of the software they use? Taking it even further - when people consume any commodity, is importance attached to the perceived morality of the producer/source? Should it be?

For one of the Indian perspectives on it, I now recall an anecdote from the life of a holy man (I don't recall where I got this story from and I remember it only broadly). This holy man used to deliver illuminating lectures to his disciples every day. One day, however, the holy man's lectures were not well delivered and his utterances were far from normal. A curious disciple who normally followed his teacher everywhere started investigating. Nothing had changed that day apart from the saint eating his favorite vegetable during lunch. When the cook was asked where he got that vegetable from, he mentioned the name of a person. When that vegetable vendor was asked about the source of that vegetable he confessed that he had stolen those from a garden. The disciple then warned the cook to ensure that all food came from good sources.

This perspective takes the morality of the source to be very important.

If this view were followed everywhere, we shouldn't be consuming half of what we consume nowadays (food, newspapers, television, water.. you name it).

Certain follow on questions:
Will you continue patronizing a store that sells quality stuff for really low prices but the owner of which is unscrupulous?
Will you continue patronizing a restaurant where the food is not bad but whose owner was convicted for involvement in illegal activities? (I know I stopped going to such a place)


Is the software question on the same level as these two?

I don't think so - because I believe Reiser didn't get monetary or other benefits from my use of his software (open source). But my patronizing the restaurant would have given money to that owner to indulge in further illegal activities and so I stopped.

Am I right here? Am I being needlessly fussy here? It would be pretty interesting to get some other perspectives on this.

Interview with Frances Allen: the first woman to win the Turing award

From math teacher to Turing winner Newsmakers CNET News.com

This is a good interview with Frances Allen (IBM) who is the first woman to have won the Turing Award - which is like the Nobel Prize for Computer Science.

Frances Allen received the award for her development of Parallel Processing - something that is taken for granted nowadays. She speaks about how there are not many women in Computer Science. You can read about her take on outsourcing as well.

BTW, she will be in India soon.

Plug for Performancing

I am using performancing for firefox.

Performancing is a firefox extension which is a cool WYSIWYG editor and a lot more. I see that is a really cool tool for blogging and I would ask all of you to check it out. It comes with support for various services like blogger, wordpress and technorati.

History's Worst Software Bugs and the Software engineer's code of ethics

Look at this informative and well written article here

I've always liked Wired for such articles and got to this one via news.com. Though I used to feel that programming could not be considered "real" engineering (early in my career), that distinction is blurred in applications such as the ones listed in the above link. That necessitated the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society to come up with a software engineering code of ethics which you can read here.

Because errors in programming were not causing large scale mishaps, buggy code was (and still is) mostly tolerated as a nuisance. But this article makes you rethink that notion. The code of ethics is a welcome step in that area, though I don't see that being followed religiously. (Do doctors follow the Hippocratic oath?). Yet, this code of ethics, done in 1999, is a welcome step in that area that exhorts software engineers to give their profession due importance not from just a monetary point of view but also as a responsibility they have towards their organizations and to society at large.

Is there any company/organization that kind of mandates its employees to follow the software engineering code of ethics?

Google Earth - Security concerns

This is a great piece of software. Google has again managed to do a great job. I have personally used it to scan Bangalore.

Initially I was pleasantly surprised at the detail. I was even able to locate my house. The photos are so full of detail. And that is where the problem lies.

In an ideal world with no conflicts, this would have been great. But in our very real world which is far from ideal, there are states that are enemies of each other, to put it very plainly. This is typically the kind of information that warrants sending reco planes and what not. Granted, the pictures on Google Earth are not in real time. But even then, how many airports will a city like Bangalore have ? Including the military ones? Not many. So, it becomes easy in times of war to go take a place out, especially when the exact latitude, longitude and elevations are printed right in front of you!

In these days of mindless terrorism, is this not giving them ideas?

Then I saw in a Times of India article that the US Government has managed to blank out parts of the aerial photographs of its military establishments. But India has itself exposed and naked! I haven't checked China yet but I won't be surprised if their establishments have been blanked out from Google Earth. But India - it is a soft state and a push over, right? Where is the need to blank parts of the pictures out?

The Government of India has to take it up with Google to stop streaming those pictures. But the damage has already been done with Google Earth having been out in the public eye for months now.

Or, am I being too paranoid?

Turns out that I am not. South Korea, Sri Lanka and Thailand have expressed concern and you know what? India has too! Check out this article -
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,104426,00.html?source=x73

The brains behind Apple's Rosetta: Transitive | CNET News.com

The brains behind Apple's Rosetta: Transitive | CNET News.com

The recent news of Apple on Intel took the PC world by storm. There were rumbles heard before (a few months ago) but were never serious. When CNET reported this news last week, I was skeptical. Here goes again, I thought. But on Monday this was the biggest tech news. I don't own a Mac - but if because of this the price comes down.. let's see.

But reading on this further drew me to a very interesting company - Transitive. These guys are basically from the University of Manchester and they seem to be able to run a binary of a particular architecture on a totally different architecture. This has been done before - but Transitive's uniqueness is that this - it runs at 60% of the native platform speed. That is really amazing as doing binary translation is not simple at all!

But wait, that is not all. They manage to translate OS system calls while at it too! Right now, they've just done Unix-Unix translations - but think of it, a shrink-wrapped AIX-Power5 binary running without any problem on a Linux-x86 box. This is serious stuff! They've managed to do the graphic sub-systems too!

The convenience is simply amazing. This technology is precisely what Apple will be using during its transition from G5 to Intel processors.

I'd never written tech stuff before on my blog. But this product and the possibilities really made me do it.