2008

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What are “Soft” and “Hard” states ?

This question has been bugging me for a long time, and I’ve just read this short technical note which is by far the best piece on the distinction between these two types of states.

“Hard-state” protocols mean that in the absence of some event to trigger a protocol response, the protocol’s state will remain unchanged or “hard” for an unbounded time period. This happens in a deterministic manner. Hence hard-state protocols must be reliable, with acknowledgments and retransmissions.

On the other hand, “soft-state” seems a bit difficult to comprehend. In this case, the state is not necessarily consistent, maintained probabilistically, and the existence of the state may or may not be critical to the receiving service. Interested readers should go through the technical note.

eNVy formed !!!

Last Tuesday our on-going investigation on network virtualization has taken a formal shape after the formation of the eNVy project. For anyone interested, eNVy stands for NV or network virtualization, all credits to Fida. (I think at some point I thought about eNVious, but that’s just me being myself)

Members of eNVy will be working on different aspects of network virtualization, ranging from theoretical foundation to real-life implementation.

Right now eNVy is headed by Prof. Raouf Boutaba, and consists of five members: Constantine, Fida, Muntasir, Nabeel, and I. Hopefully we will be having regular project meetings starting next week.

I will be posting updates in this blog regularly.

WordPress 2.5.1 released

WordPress 2.5.1 have been released today with some major and minor fixes, as well as improvements. There is supposedly one security fix for a scary security hole completely unknown to the general people. But I am curious anyhow.

Download it here; and for the newbies like me, upgrade instructions can be found here (basic), and here (extended).

As for me, I didn’t take much time before jumping into the upgrading bandwagon. I always love new stuff.

Hello World !!!

This is my first post, ever !!! Just hoping that it won’t be the last one. Can’t say for sure though.

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