The Hindu Business Line : Control is the key to the Net

THE MIT Press (http://mitpress.mit.edu) never fails to surprise. Take, for instance, Protocol by Alexander R. Galloway, Assistant Professor of Media Ecology at New York University.

"You may be wondering why someone with a cultural and literary background, not a scientific one, is writing a book on computer protocols," begins the author's preface, pre-emptively.

And he justifies thus: "Discipline-hopping is a necessity when it comes to complicated sociotechnical topics like protocol."

For a change, there is a detailed foreword by Eugene Thacker that opens with "a scene in the 1982 film Tron, in which Kevin Flynn, a computer programmer by day and hacker by night, gets sucked into the digital world of computers."

MCP or Master Control Program was the name that Disney Studios chose for the `despotic operating system' in the movie.

"Computer languages exhibit many of the qualities that define natural languages," argues Galloway.

"Like the natural languages, they have their own sophisticated syntax and grammar.

Like the natural languages, they exist in specific communities and cultures, uniting a community through shared meaning and value."

Not a bad thought, as long as some local nut doesn't insist that computer languages also be translated into the vernacular!

"This book is about a diagram, a technology, and a management style," explains the author.

"The diagram is the distributed network, a structural form without centre that resembles a web or meshwork.

The technology is the digital computer, an abstract machine able to perform the work of any other machine.

The management style is protocol, the principle of organisation native to computers in distributed networks."

And he goes on to discuss `how control exists after decentralisation'.

The founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, according to Galloway.

"The controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible."

If you're foggy about protocols, the book can help you understand through the analogy of a highway system:

"Many different combinations of roads are available to a person driving from point A to point B. However, en route, one is compelled to stop at red lights, stay between the white lines, follow a reasonably direct path, and so on."

So, too, there are "conventional rules that govern the set of possible behaviour patterns" within a heterogeneous system such as computer networks.

"Protocol is a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment."

It has its virtues such as "robustness, contingency, inter-operability, flexibility, heterogeneity, and pantheism," points out Galloway.

"A goal of protocol is totality. It must accept everything, no matter what source, sender, or destination. It consumes diversity, aiming instead for university."

The best tactical response to protocol is not resistance but hypertrophy, advises the author

A chapter is devoted to `tactical media' - meaning "political uses of both new and old technologies" such as the organisation of virtual sit-ins, campaigns for more democratic access to the Internet, and so on.

"Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition... the bottom-up struggle of the networks against the power centres.

And the networks against the power centres who have recently reinvented themselves as networks!"

Compelling read, irrespective of whether you classify the book as `computer philosophy' or `cyber politics'.

Patterns capture best practices

ANOTHER heavy-duty book for the week is Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 3, which is on `patterns for resource management'.

It has been written by Michael Kircher and Prashant Jain, and published by Wiley Dreamtech (www.wileydreamtech.com) , bringing down the Indian price to about a tenth of the original US tag.

First, a definition of `resource'. It is an entity that is available in limited supply, as for instance "memory, synchronisation primitives, file handles, network connections, security tokens, and database sessions."

Identifying resource can be challenging, point out the authors.

"Very often, the non-functional requirements of a piece of software, such as performance, scalability, flexibility, stability, security, and quality of service, depend heavily on efficient resource management."

Where do patterns come in? They help capture best practice in solving problems in almost every domain, explain Kircher and Jain.

"Patterns in software architecture can show how one or several design principles can be applied in a concrete situation to find an optimal solution."

Patterns have interesting names. The Eager Acquisition pattern helps speed up initial resource access, and thus the response time of the overall system, you'd learn from the book.

Then, there's the Caching pattern to increase performance by avoiding expensive re-acquisition of regularly used resources.

You know the `Leasing and Evictor' patterns in a real estate context, but these are relevant to scalability; they help in freeing unused resources, "reducing the risk of resource starvation and thereby increasing system scalability and stability".

To attain `stability' in resource management, there is a Resource Lifecycle Manager pattern.'

It ensures that a resource is allocated to a user "only when sufficient amount of resources are available."

A pattern is called Lazy Acquisition, I learn, though I'm too lazy to find out what it does.

As for the book, however, the pattern I'd suggest software guys and gals to follow is `eager acquisition'.

Tailpiece

"The activists broke the computer!"

"Why?"

"Because it didn't say khidkiyan when it started!"

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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