October 24
… or, the lack of it.
A recent discussion at a customer made me having a closer look
around support for encryption in the context of XaaS cloud service
offerings as well as concerning Hadoop. In general, this can be
broken down into over-the-wire (cf. SSL/TLS)
and back-end encryption. While the former is widely used, the
latter is rather seldom to find.
Different reasons might exits why one wants to encrypt her data,
ranging from preserving a competitive advantage to end-user privacy
issues. No matter why someone wants to encrypt the data, the
question is do systems support this (transparently) or are
developers forced to code this in the application logic.
IaaS-level. Especially in this category, file
storage for app development, one would expect wide support for
built-in encryption.
On the PaaS level things look pretty much the
same: for example, AWS Elastic Beanstalk
provides no support for encryption of the data (unless you consider
S3) and concerning Google’s App Engine,
good practices for data encryption only seem to emerge.
Offerings on the SaaS level provide an equally
poor picture:
- Dropbox offers encryption via S3.
- Google Drive and Microsoft Skydrive seem to not offer any
encryption options for storage.
- Apple’s iCloud is a notable exception: not only does it provide
support but also nicely explains it.
- For many if not most of the above SaaS-level offerings there
are plug-ins that enable encryption, such as provided by Syncdocs
or CloudFlogger
In Hadoop-land things also look rather
sobering; there are few activities around making HDFS or the
likes do encryption such as ecryptfs or Gazzang’s offering.
Last but not least: for Hadoop in the cloud, encryption is
available via AWS’s EMR by using S3.
Posted at 00:06
October 06
This is the first in a short series introducing Knowledge
Graphs. It covers just the basics, showing how to write, store,
query and work with graph data using RDF (short for Resource
Description Format). I will keep it free of theory and interesting
but unnecessary digressions. Let me know in the comments if you
find […]
Posted at 23:06
For a while I’ve been trying to find a nice way to convert
project Gutenberg books to look pleasant on a BeBook One. I’ve
finally hit on the perfect combination of tools, that produces
documents ideally suited to 6″ eInk ebook readers like my BeBook.
The tool chain involves using GutenMark to convert the file
[…]
Posted at 23:06
Carlton Gardens, a set on Flickr. This was my first outing
with the Pentax K-x that I got recently. In these pictures, I’m
trying to get to grips with the camera, so I didn’t have any
particular objective other than to take pictures. The light was so
harsh it was very difficult for me to […]
Posted at 23:06
This one took me a long time to work out, and it took a
non-latin alphabet user (Russian) to point me at the right tools.
Yet again, I’m guilty of being a complacent anglophone. I was
producing a database installer project using WIX 3.5, and ran into
all sorts of inexplicable problems, which I finally […]
Posted at 23:06
Petri Nets are extremely powerful and expressive, but they are
not as widely used as state machines. That's a pity, they allow us
to solve problems beyond the reach of state machines. This post is
the first in a mini-series on software development with Petri Nets.
All of the code for a full feature-complete Petri Net library is
available online at on GitHub. You're welcome to take a copy, play
with it and use it in your own projects.
Posted at 23:06
Last year, a company called DWave Systems announced their
quantum computer (the ‘Orion’) – another milestone on the road to
practical quantum computing. Their controversial claims seem worthy
in their own right but they are particularly important to the
semantic web (SW) community. The significance to the SW community
was that their quantum computer solved […]
Posted at 23:06
Semantic Overflow has been active for a couple of weeks. We
now have 155 users and 53 questions. We’ve already had some very
interesting questions and some excellent detailed and thoughtful
responses. I thought, on Egon’s instigation, to bring
together, from the site’s BI stats, some of the highlights of last
week. The best loved […]
Posted at 23:06
www.SemanticOverflow.com is a new site based on the hugely
popular StackOverflow.com, devoted to Q&A on anything related
to the semantic web. The site is very new (created today) and I’m
trying to get as many people to visit as I can, so please come and
post your questions and together we’ll create a thriving community
[…]
Posted at 23:06
I can relate to this: I’ll take a lake of fire any day over
more than three strangers in a room with which I share no common
task and with whom I’m expected to socialize How to express this to
my wife without her thinking that I am suffering from a combination
of acrophobia and […]
Posted at 23:06
Proving that Cockroaches are not indestructible, Kerry neatly
(if inadvertently) demonstrated that Australian port is capable of
killing things that heat, cold and lethal levels of ionizing
radiation cannot. Of course Kerry was gagging for days just at the
thought that the thing had been in her glass all along – it
probably hadn’t – […]
Posted at 23:06
... there's plenty of ways that RDF specifically addresses the
problems it seeks to address - data interchange, standards
definition, KR, mashups - in a distributed web-wide way. RDBMSs
address the problems that were faced by programmers at the coal
face in the 60s and 70s - Efficient, Standardized,
platform-independent data storage and retrieval. The imperative
that created a need for RDBMSs in the 60s is not going away, so I
doubt databases will be going away any time soon either. In fact
they can be exposed to the world as triples without too much
trouble. The problem is that developers need more than just data
storage and retrieval. They need intelligent data storage
and retrieval.
Posted at 23:06
I recently used Matthew Podwyszocki’s pattern matching classes
for a top level exception handler in an App I’m writing. Matthew’s
classes are a really nice fluent interface attaching predicates to
functions generating results. I used it as a class factory to
select between handlers for exceptions. Here’s an example of how I
used it: ExceptionHandler […]
Posted at 23:06
I thought I’d start with a lyric: That one’s my mother and
That one’s my father and The one in the hat, that’s me. You could
be forgiven for wondering what Ani Difranco has to do with this
blog’s usual themes, but rest assured, I won’t stray too far. My
theme today is the limitations […]
Posted at 23:06
John Mueller recently sent through a link to a series of
articles on working with RDF. As well as being a useful
introduction to working with RDF, they use LinqToRdf for code
examples. Modeling your Data with RDF (Part 1) Understanding and
Using Resource Description Framework Files (Part 2) They provide
information on hosting RDF […]
Posted at 23:06
Kingsley Idehen has again graciously given LinqToRdf some much
needed link-love. He mentioned it in a post that was primarily
concerned with the issues of mapping between the ontology,
relational and object domains. His assertion is that LinqtoRdf,
being an offshoot of an ORM related initiative, is reversing the
natural order of mappings. He believes […]
Posted at 23:06
The semantic web is a GOOD THING by definition – anything that
enables us to create smarter software without also having to create
Byzantine application software must be a step in the right
direction. The problem is – many people have trouble translating
the generic term “smarter” into a concrete idea of what they would
[…]
Posted at 23:06
OpenLink has recently posted an excellent white paper on
using LinqToRdf with Virtuoso and the Virtuoso Sponger: Recently
OpenLink has been investigating LinqToRdf, an exciting project from
Andrew Matthews which aims to bring the Semantic Web to .NET.
Because of their language bindings and heritage, existing RDF APIs
such as Sesame, Jena and Redland predominantly favour […]
Posted at 23:06
I’m very pleased to announce the release of version 0.8 of
LinqToRdf. This release is significant for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, because it provides a preview release of RdfMetal and
secondly because it is the first release containing changes
contributed by someone other than yours truly. The changes in this
instance being provided by […]
Posted at 23:06
I’ve just uploaded version 0.7.1 of LinqToRdf. This bug fix
release corrects an issue I introduced in version 0.7. The issue
only seemed to affect some machines and stems from the use of the
GAC by the WIX installer (to the best of my knowledge). I’ve
abandoned GAC installation and gone back to the original […]
Posted at 23:06
October 04
This is the first in a short series introducing Knowledge
Graphs. It covers just the basics, showing how to write, store,
query and work with graph data using RDF (short for Resource
Description Format). I will keep it free of theory and interesting
but unnecessary digressions. Let me know in the comments if you
find […]
Posted at 06:06
For a while I’ve been trying to find a nice way to convert
project Gutenberg books to look pleasant on a BeBook One. I’ve
finally hit on the perfect combination of tools, that produces
documents ideally suited to 6″ eInk ebook readers like my BeBook.
The tool chain involves using GutenMark to convert the file
[…]
Posted at 04:06
Carlton Gardens, a set on Flickr. This was my first outing
with the Pentax K-x that I got recently. In these pictures, I’m
trying to get to grips with the camera, so I didn’t have any
particular objective other than to take pictures. The light was so
harsh it was very difficult for me to […]
Posted at 04:06
This one took me a long time to work out, and it took a
non-latin alphabet user (Russian) to point me at the right tools.
Yet again, I’m guilty of being a complacent anglophone. I was
producing a database installer project using WIX 3.5, and ran into
all sorts of inexplicable problems, which I finally […]
Posted at 04:06
Petri Nets are extremely powerful and expressive, but they are
not as widely used as state machines. That's a pity, they allow us
to solve problems beyond the reach of state machines. This post is
the first in a mini-series on software development with Petri Nets.
All of the code for a full feature-complete Petri Net library is
available online at on GitHub. You're welcome to take a copy, play
with it and use it in your own projects.
Posted at 04:06
Last year, a company called DWave Systems announced their
quantum computer (the ‘Orion’) – another milestone on the road to
practical quantum computing. Their controversial claims seem worthy
in their own right but they are particularly important to the
semantic web (SW) community. The significance to the SW community
was that their quantum computer solved […]
Posted at 04:06
Semantic Overflow has been active for a couple of weeks. We
now have 155 users and 53 questions. We’ve already had some very
interesting questions and some excellent detailed and thoughtful
responses. I thought, on Egon’s instigation, to bring
together, from the site’s BI stats, some of the highlights of last
week. The best loved […]
Posted at 04:06
www.SemanticOverflow.com is a new site based on the hugely
popular StackOverflow.com, devoted to Q&A on anything related
to the semantic web. The site is very new (created today) and I’m
trying to get as many people to visit as I can, so please come and
post your questions and together we’ll create a thriving community
[…]
Posted at 04:06
I can relate to this: I’ll take a lake of fire any day over
more than three strangers in a room with which I share no common
task and with whom I’m expected to socialize How to express this to
my wife without her thinking that I am suffering from a combination
of acrophobia and […]
Posted at 04:06
Proving that Cockroaches are not indestructible, Kerry neatly
(if inadvertently) demonstrated that Australian port is capable of
killing things that heat, cold and lethal levels of ionizing
radiation cannot. Of course Kerry was gagging for days just at the
thought that the thing had been in her glass all along – it
probably hadn’t – […]
Posted at 04:06
since 2005.
