Just came about this great description on the victory of the British Destroyer Glamorgan over the US Carrier Coral Sea at Brad DeLong's weblog.

The British Admiral Sandy Woodward essentially used what crackers call Social Engineering to disguise his destroyer as an Indian cruise liner and get close enough for an attack on the superior US ship. Quite Entertaining.

It's just another example of how you can beat advanced technology using simple human interactions.

I haven't had time to finish the SOAP interface to my XML/X example app just yet as I've been travelling. However I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about SOAP.

The big debate at the moment is wether SOAP should be used using an RPC based paradigm or a message based Paradigm. I think really it depends on what your particular need is.

However asynchronous messages are generally a lot more efficient for large scale distributed applications. Just look at Investment Banking where they have to deal with large amounts of real time feeds. The only way to do this is by using Message Bus'es and Message Queues.

I think people tend to go for the RPC based approach, because it's easier to code. If you take the Message based approach you really do need to rethink your application architecture. Which is exactly what I will do for the XML/X application.

While it's not exactly the same, a similar problem occurs when writing web applications. HTTP is a stateless protocol, so you need to simulate state in some way. App Server and Toolkit vendors invented Session objects to take care of this and make it easy for the developer to handle state. Now, I've never been a great fan of Session objects. Maybe it's because I've been doing CGI coding since 1994 and I just dont trust other peoples code. But really I think most bugs with web applications are because of misuse of Session Objects. The session objects were invented to make web programming more similar to traditional gui programming. (Artificial GUI Events such as in ASP.NET and NetDynamics are another)

There are many other ways of handling state in web based applications that are a lot more robust. They just take a slightly different approach to programming. I have always favored a Non Session based approach, where we dont care about what happened before, but only on the value of CGI variables.

A few interesting stories about this are:
RPC won't wash with SOAP and Beyond Encapsulation by Phil Wainewright.
The Correct Use of SOAP by Mark O'Neill
REST + SOAP by Sam Ruby

I've decided to branch off my Economics opinions into a separate weblog called EconoFist.

I will keep all my other geek related musings in this web log.

Lars reports about a new micro payment system CoinClick in Denmark. Apparently there is already another one Valus available.

CoinClick is developed by an association of Danish Banks and PBS - the Danish payment and clearing company, who also own DanKort the leading (only???) Danish Debit card system.

It looks like Valus is operated by Den Norske Bank the large Norwegian Bank. I went to www.valus.no to see if there was a Norwegian equivalent and it just came up with the Danish homepage. So maybe Denmark is their first roll out with Norway to come later.

Most of the sites listed on either site were either News Papers or Mobile phone services sites (SMS, Ringtones etc). But none of the ones I looked at had any mention of the payment systems on their sites. May be its under construction ...

La Prensa reports that Panama's flag carrier Copa are buying 12 new Boeing 737s.
I thought I read last week that they were in serious debt. Maybe its my slightly dodgy Spanish??

On that subject, we desperately need a Ryan Air in Central America and the Caribbean. A cheap airport in the Miami area would be the ideal hub. Ft. Lauderdale or W. Palm Beach I guess. However Panama, Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic all have the required infrastructure and fairly good locations for it.

Flights can be ridiculously expensive here. A month or two ago I had to fly to San Jose, Costa Rica. I flew Taca the Costa Rican airline. I think it cost me $450 return. The flight was only half full. Irish RyanAir and its competitors such as Go and EasyJet have much more profitable business models than traditional airlines. In reality I think Copa or Taca could convert to that model in less than a year and become seriously profitable. Latin American & Caribbean people travel a lot and would travel even more if there were cheaper flights available.

Lance Nobel's great Davos Newbies web log has an article "Good news from the World Bank" about the latest World Development Report from the World Bank.

Lance's says it's great to finally see some good news and I agree. Of course as he says the reports says that we can't sit on our hands for this positive out come to happen.

I've been having a quick read through the accompanying press release, but haven't yet read the full report. Generally I agree with most of the conclusions, but my libertarian side has some issues with a few things.

For example rather than concentrate on goverment action, we must realise that most of the problems in the developing world has been because of government action. Most of the development that is happening is happening despite the goverments not because the goverments. Hernando de Soto of Peru's Institute for Liberty & Democracy discusses it thoroughly in his book The Mystery of Capital.

I agree that an important part of solving the problems facing agriculture in the developing world, the developed world (Read US and Europe) MUST stop their foolish agricultural subsidies. I disagree with the report in that it says that more aid is necessary. People in the developing world are born survivors and will work things out themselves without any further layers of corruption introduced.

When it comes to the environmental problems, I believe it's quite simply an issue of survival. When people reach the stage where they're not wondering where the next meal is coming from, they will generally start protecting their environment them selves. I hear many better knowing arguments about conservation etc from Northern lefties all the time, but that really just proves how much they like to take the paternalistic Plato like approach to the poor "subhumans" south of Europe.

Besides that argument, governmental and trans national environmental policies usually just end up as magnets for corruption in both developing countries and in (particular) developed countries. Please lets not encourage more.

I think we can easily reach the goals of the report, if we learn from the past and focus on whats important.

Ray Ozzie has a piece about Security and User Interfaces:

" It's not the individual's fault! It's up to us - the technology industry - to create systems that are complacency immune - that are designed to be complementary to the way that users and administrators really act. ...

No, it won't be perfect: this is all about risk management. You can't control how people behave - so create an environment in which they do the "right thing" naturally. "

I agree whole heartedly. It needs to be natural to use a program securely. The minute you introduce extra steps it starts to be a hassle for the user and they wont do things securely.

Mark O'Neil writes in his weblog about his experience demonstrating secure email.
If a governmental wished to limit the use of strong encryption, a good approach would be to plant lousy UI engineers in the security departments of messaging companies, to ensure that the process of setting up encrypted and signed email is as confusing as possible.

It's not just day to day usability thats a problem, but also how easy is it to setup. In this respect PGP is way superior to any of the x509 based systems. Just attempt to get a certificate for your outlook mail and you will see why no one does it.

Jon Udell has an interesting little piece today called Mr. Slippery. It's about all the old cypherpunk favorites such as nyms, digital signatures etc. Recently there's been a lot in the press about the failures of CypherPunks and how everythings going towards an identity based internet.

I'm glad to see that Jon share's my idea that Nym's are still usefull. A Nym is simply an name for an anonymous identity. I wont use the word ficticious, because a nym can build up it's own reputation and value, exactly like a real person.

Almost everything I see coming out of the US on the whole Identity front is based on your real (offline) identity. Not taking privacy into acocunt I can see how this makes sense in certain developed countries like the US, Denmark et al. It makes it so much easier to link into the existing financial and corporate infrastructures for dealing with clients.

What about citizens of countries, where there isn't such a good infrastructure in the first place. Or countries with recent memories of bad dictatorships (eg. Nicaragua), with current dictatorships (eg. Cuba) or with slightly uncertain futures (such as Venezuela and Argentina). How about countries where the only realistic way to earn a living for most people is through informal businesses (such as Haiti and Somalia).

People from these countries need an alternative, not whatever is most suitable to US financial institutions who wont be providing services for them anyway.

A good infrastructure based on Nym's, Transparency and Reputation capital can do just this. Which is essentially what I'm working on with my Neubia project. In Neubia there aren't even usernames in the traditional sense. There are just NameSpaces and Names. These are virtually never mapped to a real identity because there is no need.

If you want to build trust in your name using transparency you open up your activities under a namespace and allow the public to view a transaction log.

If you need to do something that doesn't involve building trust in you, you dont have to use this feature.

Through the rest of August and September I shall be revealing more and more about this architecture and what will be possible.

(Currently in sunny Dorset, England)

No, not the game but Earth Quakes have been alot in the news the past month in Panama. Starting with a biggy on July 30th on the Richter scale at 6.5, they have continued several times a week ever since. Most of them seem to be around 4-5.

I don't know much about earth quakes as I've never really lived much in Earth Quake zones before. Actually Panama City is considered to be pretty much out of danger for Earth Quakes. But as a true geek, I'm of course obliged to research it.

It turns out that the Chiriqui the province of Panama with most incidents of earth quakes, have a pretty cool network of earth quake monitoring gear. There are currently 4 unmanned nodes in the network. Each one strategically located to cover a certain area. Each node has a 100Mhz Pentium with a watch dog circuit and is connected wirelessly to the internet. This allows the staff to monitor it remotely.

I'm sure this is all standard stuff in the world of earth quake monitoring, but as an outsider and a geek, I'm pretty facinated.

Wired News have an article today about Ethiopean eCommerce site EthioGift. They provide a service where (I'm assuming here) Ethiopians abroad can buy gifts for family and friends back home.

One of the things that you can buy as a gift is Sheep, in 3 different sizes with prices between $41-$66. Other products offered are cakes, spirits and coffee (I love Ethiopean Coffee).

The Wired article also mentions the problems faced by the site, with the lack of credit cards and internet usage in Ethiopia. They have tried different kinds of payments but have focused on Credit Cards due to problems with other systems.

This is interesting. I've heard of similar sites in Pakistan and India, but this is the first ecommerce site Ive heard of in Ethiopia.

My guess is, that if payment systems can be sorted out. For example an alternative to credit cards such as e-gold or GoldMoney. They would hit it off. I'll try and contact Dawid Bekele the owner and see if I can be of any help. In any case it would be interesting to hear more.

(Writing from currently very sunny Madrid Barajas Airport)

Panama City has countles Internet Cafe's. Many of them are used for Net2Phone and NetMeeting conversations with friends and family abroad.

As Cable & Wireless still have a monopoly on trunk and foreign calls here, the clever Internet Cafe owners have managed to create a market for Net2Phone as you can see from this sign. I know Cable & Wireless took an ISP friend of mine to court about this in Jamaica a few years back, but they appear not to be doing anything about it here. This particular Internet Cafe is virtually next door to Cable & Wireless's head office.

I think the proliferation of Internet Cafe's in most of Latin America and the Caribbean is extremely important, far more than people realize up north. These places have the potential of becoming ebusiness centers for small and informal businesses down here. Anyone attempting to market internet services down here, who don't understand the importance are bound to fail.

(Currently listening to Rabanes - "Money pa' que". This is Panama's very own (and very good) super group.)

Bell South Cell Xpress in Panama have this weekend introduced these new top up cards for their pre paid cellular phone service. They cost $12 and have a built in mini cd with 2 tracks of popular hits on it. Suprisingly they even give you $12 worth of airtime as well.

I was lucky enough to get one with Celia Cruz's super hit "La negra tiene tumbao" (Make sure to check the video for this one) and hold your breath ... "Asereje" with Las Ketchup as discussed below. I've managed to offend someone claiming to be in the group with my comments. Click the comments link on the posting for more fun.

I read an article a few months ago in I think the Economist about the findings of the Catalan Economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin about the supposed rise of global inequality that all the anti globalisation people are shouting about. I was reminded of it by an article in the New York Times I received yesterday, so I decided to have a read through Xavier's actual paper.

Now I've never quite been able to believe 100% in this rise, based on what I've seen with my own eyes. But the annual UN Human Development Report that everyone quotes from says it's so.

Xavier has done some detailed analysis of many of the figures in the HDR and has some very suprising things to say about it.

1. In country inequality is generally not rising. Since the seventies there has been a growth of a significant middle class just about everywhere except for Africa.

2. Poverty levels have gone down, within countries. This again is suprising, if you've read the HDR before hand.

3. While the in country differences were reported in the HDR with adjustments for Purchase Power, the across country global figures were not. These figures were based solely on a non PPA adjusted GDP/Capita figure, which I at least was taught in school was not very accurate at all.

4. If you redo the statistics using PPA adjusted figures the global figures show no or little rise at all.

I think this is very interesting, and it shows the importance of globalisation. There can be no doubt at all that tariffs and other protective measures are bad for the people of poor countries.

Xavier mentions Africa as the only real sore spot, where there has been rises in inequalities. This he claims is due to the absolute corruption of many countries. Nigeria being the prime example.

I'm not an Statistician nor an economist, but it all kind of makes sense to me. However if any one else has comments on his figures or methodology please comment here, or email me. I'd like to see it.

While trying to figure out how to deploy my XML/X beans as a SOAP Web Service, I discovered Bruce Scharlau's great little EJB Axis Hello World Example.

Basically it boils down to packaging the required files into a .wsr file, with a web-services.xml using Axis's WSDD (Web Service Deployment Descriptor) format. He has an example using Ant, which I've managed to integrate quite easily into my own ant buildfile.

While I understand all the simple WSDD file's used in the examples that come with AXIS I see that it might be worth delving into code. The WSDD file used with JBOSS EJB's doesn't use the className parameter. Rather it uses a <parameter name="handlerClass" value="org.jboss.net.axis.server.EJBProvider"/> .

This of course makes sense, because we don't necessary know the final implmenting class name when we deploy an EJB. So this bit needs to be App server specific, until someone defines a standard way of mapping an EJB to SOAP.

This is pretty cool, it should be exceptionally easy to deploy EJB's as SOAP using this method. Lets see if I agree when I'm finished. One question I have is that AFAIK JBoss uses Axis beta 1 and Axis is now on beta 3. Some of the messages I've seen indicate that there are some big incompatibilities here, allthough I'm trying to ignore the specifics. I'm guessing that it will be updated soon, if it hasn't already been in CVS.

Talking about CVS, I discovered that they have some XDoclet tags in there to automatically generate the WSDD file, if the class has a @jboss-net:web-service in it's javadocs. I'll investigate further. This would speed development up even further. Of course, it's not mentioned anywhere but in the source.

(Currently listening to the excellent group Koop out of Sweden)

I have heard from various unnamed parties that Costa Rica were heading the way of Argentina. To be honest, I don't know alot about the situation myself, but they Western (Well actually Northern) liberals tend to use Costa Rica as an example of a well ordered egalitarian society in Central America. They definitely have the closest you'll see to a well fare society outside of the French Antilles down is this neck of the woods.

With the ever present global down turn and their reliance on Tourism, Intel and Coffee, It's probably not a suprise that they might be in trouble at the moment.
This is particularly obvious when you read the news in La Prensa this morning that the Government Deficit has gone up for the first 7 months by 47% over last years in the same period.

Costa Rica has probably one of the last real government telecomunications monopolies around. I hear people complaining about it all the time. Supposedly there's a one year waiting period for Mobile phones etc. The news of the Government Deficit will probably set any future liberalization of telecommunications way back, as this is supposed to be one of the few real cash cows that the government has.

While Panama definitely has their fair share of economical troubles, we seem to be doing already here with telecoms. Cable & Wireless, who has the monopoly on trunk calls, land line phones and international phone calls, will need to share this as of the 2nd of January 2003. Everything else is pretty much liberalized, even though the 3rd entrant in the mobile phone market the Dominican company Tricom, did receive a fair amount of harrassment by Bell South Cellular and Cable & Wireless. But the courts have ruled in their favor and everything is now ok. Data is excellent, plentyful and cheap down here, so thats cool.

Hopefully Costa Rica, with their dependence on High Tech companies like Intel, might see the point in liberalizing their telecoms some time soon. But I fear that short term needs are more important for our Social Democratic neighbour.

It turns out that Helger Lipmaa who maintains a cool compedium of Crypto Links as part of that also has a List of links related to Time Stamping Services.

My Neubia project which will be explained more here as we go a long is quite reliant on TimeStamping Services.

A TimeStamping Service is kind of like the Digital equivalent of a Notary Public. Basically you give it some data and it signs it with a timestamp.

This means that you have independent 3rd party verification that what ever it is you had signed was as you say it was at a given time. These kinds of services have many different applications. Many of which I'll probably get into in a while.

This is great news. NAI's PGP Suite of Products have been sold to a new company PGP Corporation. This is great news as NAI had decided to discontinue the product.

What this also means is that we will be seing a new PGP Version 8.0 released in November with full support for both Windows XP and Mac OS/X. This was one of the most sorely missed additions of current versions of PGP.

So who are PGP Corporation? According to their Press Releases its a brand new Corporation with $14M from Doll Capital Management and Venrock Associates.

The new board sees among other people Phill Zimmerman (The original author of PGP) and Bruce Schneier (Author of "Applied Cryptography" and founder of CounterPane Security.

Thats not bad news to start this week on is it?

NAI handling of PGP was much disliked by people in the industry. Hopefully they will find a way to actually market PGP properly this time.

La Prensa writes today about an increase of turnover of $3.1 million over the same period last year.

In the first 10 months of the 2002 fiscal year, they charged $493 million in channel tolls. They were still $1.7 million under the forecasted amount.

This as everything else nowadays is blamed on the general world wide economic slowdown. But I think its still pretty good.

Its generally accepted in Panama that they guys at the Canal Authority are doing a pretty good job. Some even say better than when the Americans ran it.

Check out their cool web site. In particular their web cam is cool. They've also got a fair amount about the history of the canal. For me being in Panama City though, the Weather Radar is useful, as we are currently in the middle of Rainy Season.

Ian Grigg from Systemics and Erwin van der Koogh from Sun have come up with a design for a XML based format for making payments and otherwise interacting with various account based systems, such as GoldMoney and E-Gold.
See the Busy Developer's Guide to XML/X for a quick intro to the format.
I'm definitely very happy with the general layout and proposed functionality of XML/X. While XML/X itself doesn't define a transport system, Iang and Erwin suggest a simple XML in a HTTP POST request. I've been having a discussion with Ian about using SOAP instead. Ian's not convinced of the benefits of SOAP. I can understand his arguments, XML/X already handles most of what SOAP does and in a simpler way.
SOAP Requests can look extremely messy, thats for sure. But one of the great things about SOAP is that there is no a wide variety of systems that automagically handle the binding between XML and the code. It is also a lot easier to create client interfaces for just about any language.
So the result of this, is that I'm working on an implementation of XML/X on top of SOAP.
The first thing I did was to create a simple J2EE Application implentation of an imaginary gold backed currency provider. This consists of a bunch of EJB's the actual logic being handled by a bunch of Entity and Session Beans. I've then implemented all the major functions of the XML/X interface as a Session Bean.
The next thing I need to do is to create a SOAP binding ontop of this Session Bean. I'm using JBoss 3.0 for my J2EE stuff and will be using The Apache Group's Axis SOAP Implementation for SOAP binding.
Now JBOSS 3.0 claims to support Axis, but it also does claim that it's automatic support is very early and there is next to no documentation about it, so I guess my task over the next day or so is to play with it.

(Currently Listening to Minnie Ripperton's classic "Inside My Love" on ?uestlove's excellent compilation of classic R&B "Babies Makin' Babies", Sweet)

The biggest hit at the moment in Panama (and probably the rest of Latin America and Spain) is "Asereje" by a new Spanish all girl group "Las Ketchup".
I like to think I'm open minded with music (hmm... Actually I guess I'm not), but this song has to be the most annoying thing since the Macarena craze of the mid 90's. It comes complete with non sensical lyrics and entire clubs doing the dance that goes with it, when it comes on.
The worst thing is, no matter how much I dislike it after hearing it I cant get it out of my mind.
I have irrational fears about flicking over HTV the big Latin Music Channel in case it happens to be playing.
I guess I'll just have to live with it and give in.
(Still listening to Alejandro Sanz - Unplugged, IMHO the best artist out of Spain)

Welcome to my new blog. I'm a Dane based in currently partly clouded Panama City. (The real one, not the one in Florida)

My technical interests lie in Web Services, Crypto, Java, C# and various other related items.

Otherwise I'm quite facinated by using creative technical and human approaches to solving some of the issues in the developing world. Some of the projects I'm working on are directly or indirectly a result of this interest.

Other interests that I might talk about here is food, music, movies, Panama or whatever I'm interested in at the moment.

It's my second attempt at a blog. The last one was about Security for Financial Applications. It kind of died a bit as I didn't have time to work on it. I think it also kind of failed the general rule of blogs, in that it wasn't really personal.

(Currently listening to: Alejandro Sanz Unplugged )