http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/03/gaza-flotilla-attack-henning-mankell
White House correspondent since 1960 Helen Thomas ordered to retire for telling Jewish to leave Palestine and go home in Poland & Germany
June 13th, 2010Raid on Aid Ship: The Israeli Miscalculation
May 31st, 2010A country’s long term security primarily depends on it’s good relationship with it’s neighbors. Failing that, such a country has to ensure that it has enough deterrence to prevent any hostile action from it’s enemies. Since the state of Israel has been unwilling or at least unable to improve it’s relationship with neighboring states and has particularly kept the public opinion of these countries hostile to Israel, the only option left is deterrence via the threat of nuclear weapons and the reliance on powerful allies such as the U.S., the U.K. and France to name a few. For this strategy to be effective, Israel has to ensure that:
- no regional power in the middle east will ever aquire any type of mass destruction weapon
- Israel retains a significant military advantage in terms of technology and firepower
- the western powers will always intervene to protect Israel against any attack
The problem that arises in the long term is the difficulty to ensure a monopoly on nuclear weapons’ technology that has been developed more than 50 years ago. Eventually the neighboring countries will acquire such technology. Moreover, as shown in the Vietnam and Korean war, an inferior conventional firepower and technological disadvantage can be made up through expending more manpower. The long term demographic situation in the region makes this option more than likely. Lastly, will the western powers always be willing to sacrifice to save Israel? The answer to this last question cannot be necessarily affirmative due to the shift of economic and military power towards the far east and China in particular which might cause new challenges to keep western powers busy to retain their geostrategic position.
In view of this, Israel has been and is still arogantly wasting precious opportunities for peace. The latest developments will definitely damage Turkey’s relatively neutral stance towards Israel as the killings of Turkish nationals will likely inflame nationalistic feelings among the Turkish population. Israel may have gotten rid of 10 enemies and made millions more in a single miscalculated step.
Oil spills that do not make the news
May 25th, 2010The media coverage of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is yet another example of media bias that only accounts for western countries’ lives and interest. Multinational oil companies pollute and destroy the environment of poor countries and all of that goes almost unnoticed. Human rights seem to apply only to white skin humans, the rest of humanity being somehow excluded. Read the following article for some facts: Pollution at foreign sites can be traced to U.S. oil demand.
Ubuntu 10.04 – Old bugs back and new useless “features”
May 19th, 2010I recently upgraded from a stable Ubuntu 9.10 to the newly released 10.04. In my early adoption of Ubuntu 9.10, I faced problems with my Wireless USB dongle (LightWave LW-UWNC) that were subsequently fixed through patches that made my Wireless interface reliable. Upon my automated upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10, the old illness was back again. No way to get the wireless working again. Failing to find any solution to the problem, I finally decided to revert back to version 9.10 (at the cost of several hours of work in order to reinstall back all needed software).
Now, as a developer, I am puzzled by the kind of methodology the Ubuntu team is following to keep track of bugs and their fixes. How is it possible to fix a bug and get it back again in an “upgrade”? Moreover, I still do not comprehend the purpose of moving the minimize, maximize and close window buttons to the left and smaller than before. What’s the added value? This is the kind of decisions that may deter potential users from adopting Linux. People want a system that works out of the box and bug free! New features and eye candies although seemingly appealing do not add much value. Those who are after these changes may stay on Windows or Mac and pay the price. I do not believe Linux should strive to beat Microsoft on its own ground. Linux should shoot for stability and providing bug free solid software with good support for all drivers. Offering a good free alternative to Windows away from the consumer driven market is the way to go for a wider adoption of Linux by the average user.
Chagos Islands aka Diego Garcia – How people got expelled from their land to make room for the U.K. & U.S. military bases
May 1st, 2010This shocking story is about the terrible actions of the British government in the 1960′s that has been unheard of to most people over the years. Two thousand innocent people were made to leave their homes to make way for an American air base. Read more… Also read Diego Garcia islanders battle to return and Man vs marine in the Chagos Islands.
Car Accident, Haradh road, Saudi Arabia, April 27, 2010
April 28th, 2010This accident occurred on Haradh Road. Luckily, the driver only suffered minor injuries, the worst being a cut on his forehead that required eight stitches.
Traffic Study in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, February 2010
April 28th, 2010This is a nice study conducted by Safar, Zaki in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia illustrating with hard facts and figures the extent to which drivers fail to obey traffic signals. Although this is a limited study, it draws a dark and scary image of driving habits in Saudi Arabia. Follow this link to get the PowerPoint presentation. Please, save the file with .pptx as extension. This is until I get the MIME type added on my web site.
The Dilemma of Constraint Programming
April 26th, 2010Constraint Programming is yet another application of the concept of Declarative Programming which is about describing a problem rather than devising an algorithm to solve it. Other examples of Declarative Programming include SQL, Linear Programming, HTML, XAML, SVG, and Regular Expressions. The idea is to let the user concentrate on formulating the problem rather than wasting a lot of efforts solving it. It opens the door for non-technical people to exploit the relatively cheap computing resources to solve real life problems that in the past would have required the cooperation of a team of subject experts and IT specialists to solve.
CP follows the same philosophy as LP but allows for a much greater expressive power. This means that problems that would be relatively difficult and tedious to formulate using LP are relatively straightforward when using CP. Example: Solving classic puzzles such as Sudoku or Zebra is relatively easy in CP but would require a complex Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulation, MIP being an extension of LP where some or all variables are assumed to be integers.
So, CP seems to be extremely exciting, until you tackle relatively simple problems such as Kuromasu and have a hard time formulating them in CP, for the simple reason that the required built-in constraints that would concisely describe the problem do not exist within any provided CP toolkit. As such you are left with two options:
- Formulate the problem using built-in constraints which proves to be quite convoluted loosing the theoretical ease of formulation, and inefficient because of the hundreds of constraints that have to be generated and ultimately managed by the solver at run time which may result in prohibitively long run times.
- Create user-defined constraints specifically tailored to the problem at hand: This requires understanding the internals of a specific solver such as Choco and implementing the new constraint using imperative programming, which in my opinion completely defeats the purpose of using CP as the declarative paradigm is mostly lost.
One might argue that it is still worth using CP as we may benefit from solvers that can transparently exploit prevalent multi-core CPU architectures. That argument might lose its strength as powerful API’s such as Java 7 Fork-Join and .Net Framework 4.0 Task Parallel Library (TPL) completely shield developers from the complexities of multithreaded programming.
Another aspect that hurts CP is the lack of a standard language and set of constraints so as to allow for portability and decoupling the API/Language from the solver. In LP, standard file formats such .MPS, and .LP allows feeding a problem to different solvers both proprietary and open-source. Moreover, high level languages such as AIMMS and AMPL can be used to model complex problems and use various solvers API’s to solve them. CP is badly in need of such mechanisms if it is to become as widely used as LP. Maybe, high level languages such as AIMMS and AMPL would gain into targeting CP solvers for particular classes of problems that are not well adapted to LP.
This article does not intend to be a CP bashing session. In fact, it stems from some good and bad experiences I had using CP and LP as I was so attracted by the Declarative Programming paradigm that I oversaw the obvious necessity to use the right tool for the right problem. For example, I tried to use LP to solve a scheduling problem and failed miserably as the solver was doing a completely blind search on a large computer generated MIP model (as no heuristics could be provided to guide the search). The other bad experience I had was solving Kuromasu using Choco CP API. It proved complex, inefficient and more difficult to implement than implementing a depth first search algorithm using Plain Old Java. Although I found a CP solution for Kuromasu, the “declarative” formulation was less than obvious and the run-time poor.
Conclusion: Do not use a hammer as a substitute for a screwdriver.