Category: Computing

The U of M discovers Jabber


Mike A. just brought to my attention the fact that the U of M has set up an all-U IM server using the Jabber protocol. Their reason for this move?

Jabber is an open, XML-based instant messaging (IM) technology. By hosting our own Jabber servers, the University can provide safer and more flexible instant messaging for its users.

The ability to host IM traffic on University servers allows us to protect our users against sophisticated virus and worm attacks, such as the ones that spread over AIM in Spring 2005.

All this seems quite sensible, and I really like Jabber (my Spring, 2004, Software Design class wrote Jabber based chat clients), but I’m not real convinced that this is going to fly. So far they’ve done pretty much nothing to inform the university community that they’ve done this, and I’m totally not sure that they’ll be able to convince the students, who have IM contacts all over the universe (most of which use either AIM or MSN), to switch over and use this. I wish them luck, but I’m not putting money down.

And what is up with the U’s continued schizo attitude towards Open Source tools? Last year they adopted Oracle’s on-line calendar system (internally called UMCal) without even considering an open source alternative. And they continue to promote the use of WebCT despite the existence of several plausible open source alternatives (some of which the U is even helping support, at least on paper).

Yet, when they wanted to set up an IM server, they go with the open source Jabber option. Hmmm… Why is that? Maybe because there were no good proprietary options?!? Arghhhh…

And while I’m ranting, I’ll express my concern about what I perceive to be a growing trend both within the larger U and here at UMM to build this type of closed, inwarding looking solution (“We support IM, but you can only talk to U of M people.”) in response to real and perceived security issues. A vibrant, successful university is almost certainly an outward looking institution, aware of and part of conversations and activities that span the entire globe. This move to closed, internal communications networks is inherently inconsistent with the mission and goals of the institution.

PeeZed manages to handle the many security issues surrounding his highly successful (and wonderfully “controversial”) blog all on his lonesome while still inviting and encouraging the participation of a large and active community. You’d think that the massive resources of the U could do better than running around locking all the doors.

Maybe I should ask them to disallow phone calls to my office from off campus. Then I wouldn’t have to talk to those pesky colleagues, alums, employers seeking a reference for a student, and that woman who wanted to interview me two weeks ago about a security clearance for a recent graduate.

Think of all the blogging I could do … uh … work I could get done without all those tedious interruptions…

Tags: technology

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Laid low by a single equals sign

Way out, man!
Tonight was Round 3 of the TopCoder Open, and I came this close to making the top 100 to go on to Round 4, in fact missing it by a single equals sign… As it is, I placed 138th, so I’m on my way out of this year’s Open, having gotten a round farther than I ever had before, which is very cool.

The first problem wasn’t too bad, but the second problem was a complete bloodbath. It wasn’t terribly hard (some fairly straightforward algebra), but there were quite a few tricky cases. I submitted it in fairly reasonable time, but then went back to check it over because I was nervous about a problem with that many cases to sort out. A good thing, too, because I did find a pair of cases that I’d overlooked. I repaired those and resubmitted, and was pretty confident about my solution at that point.

My confidence was misplaced, however, and I (and about half the known universe) was successfully challenged on that problem, which was a definite bummer. So many people lost their second problem in the challenge and system test phases (less than a third survived), though, that I actually moved up from 155th to finally place 138th out of 191. The stinker is that it turns out that the only mistake in my solution was a single equals sign. Removing that, changing a less than or equal to a less than, fixed it. If I had gotten that problem correct then I would have placed in the low 60’s, qualifying for Round 4 and earning a few more bucks. Or if I’d been faster with a challenge and gotten 50 points for that I would have been in the 90’s and still qualifying.

Sigh.

All that said, there are no doubt dozens of people kicking themselves right now for little things, and in the end what counts is what you do, not what you could have done.

Tonight was a great example of how incredibly careful and precise one has to be about the details in programming. Programs tend to not fail gracefully – they either work or they don’t. My program returned 100 on the test case in question when it should have return -1, and I can construct a (literally) infinite set of cases it will fail on, with the differences from the expected value being as large as you’d like. It may have only been a single character, but it was still absolutely wrong and I (rightly) got no points for it. And that’s big part of what I love about computing – it’s a kind of problem solving that requires both creativity and precision, and which has real consequences.

I’d told WeatherGirl before I went off to compete that, on the assumption that I wasn’t going to make the top 100 and qualify for Round 4, I was hopingfor something like 150th; not too close to 200 to feel totally incompetent, but not so close to 100 that I’d kick myself for every little thing that might have been. 138 is pretty good, then, and I’ll just have to put that equals sign behind me :-).

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