The Salamander

The recent efforts of a malicious net-based worm brought up an idea of mine. The idea is: can software "live" in the Internet? Every worm that we have seen comes nowhere near the capabilities needed to truly survive the Internet.

What I imagine is less a worm and more a salamander. A colony of non-destructive, adaptable, and independent salamanders, roaming the Internet, feeding off our CPU cycles. The question is; from where is the salamander born? We could give monkeys Emacs and GCC and see what happens (to represent the puddle of mud/evolution idea). Or we could play god and write what I would think would be the most interesting code created (to play God).

For a salamander to truly exist in the Internet its number one trait must be adaptability. It must be able to work like a living being to survive the hostility of the Internet. It must be able to find new ways to store and retrieve information. It must be able to redesign its IO interface to be able to talk to new hardware. It must be aware of other salamanders to share information and grow as a colony. Those are just a few of the traits this must posses.

The problem here is we cannot teach these things. We must take a minimalistic approach, giving the salamander the core tools be adaptable, and a set of basic rules it must follow. The basic rules are enough to perform a 'bootstrap' procedure; just enough to get it going on its own. It is also likely that we will loose many salamanders before it is able to survive on its own.

Another major issue is gaging its progress. For us to truly know how successful the salamander has become we need to be able to where they are, what they are doing, and analyze their current form. This could be done with a beacon tied into its main thought process that will report its location and perform a memory dump.

The important idea here is that I think the Internet is a habitable world for the right piece of software. With so many systems connected, their world would be immense. Just think of the Internet as a universe. Each system connected is a world, the ethernet is a wormhole, and LAN's are galaxies.

My only worry is this becoming destructive; not by design, but by the salamanders' need to survive.

A night with the B's

This past weekend I saw the Bruins for the first time (live that is) play the Columbus Blue Jackets. I went with my Grandfather, Dad, Uncle, and Brother ... it was a family/guys night out. My Grandfather, Dad, and Brother drove out from (the real) western mass, picked me up, and drove in to Waltham where my uncle lives. From there we drove into Boston where we caught dinner at the Harp, an Irish pub near the Fleet center. After dinner and a few Guinni we walked across the street to the Fleet center. Our seats were in the balcony, but it wasn't bad because we were only a few seats from the edge and had a great view of the game. The game was great. Crisp passing, fierce hits, amazing goals. In the end it was a 7-2 win with all the excitement you could expect from a live hockey game. The only other live hockey games I've seen were a Springfield Falcons game and several UMass games, so this was quite a treat. This is something I am definitely going to have to do again soon.

My 0.015 minutes of fame on Slashdot

Today on slashdot they ran an interview with Ethan Galstad, a successful Open Source project leader of Nagios . The intervew was made up of 20 questions collected from an earlier post . Well, a question from yours truly made the cut and was one of the 20 questions asked. You can find the slashdot post here, my question is number 17 (under my alias CountJoe) :)

Filesystem Abstraction

I have been thinking about a new project for Linux which is closely related to A New Gui. Its purpose is to provide a level of abstraction to the filesystem for use with user files in a new and easy to use manner. The idea is to provide a more user friendly way of accessing user files. This is not meant to replace the Linux filesystem, but to separate operating system and application files from user managed files. There hasn't been too much thought into the idea, but it may constitute a /var/spool article and possibly a new
project.

Updates

Just thought I'd mention some updates. First is I just finished an update to this server. I upgraded Gentoo Linux from 1.2 to 1.4. This was not an easy task. The meat of the upgrading was going from GCC2 to GCC3. So, my server has spend about 48 recompiling everything on my system.

The other update is my page will try to reflect the current weather conditions outside my apartment. So far I only support no weather, snow, or rain. This is all automated, so I'm sitting at my window watching for a change in weather :)