At last back to Karlsruhe again

After 2 years of hard work, we have come back to Karlsruhe. It was nice to have a house at the same location as we had two years ago. We feel we never left Karlsruhe. Some familiar figures left the city, some new moved here. The environment is not the same as it was two years ago. Still we feel very comfortable.

UVFSEditor has been released

UVFSEditor, an extremely customizable hexeditor, has been released. Major features of this version are:

1. CompoundFile (.doc, .xls etc), File System Folder and any file can be loaded.
2. The file contents (stream for compound file) are shown in a hex viewer
3. Folders/Files can be copied from source to destination.

• Stream from a compound file can be copied to file system
• A file from the file system can be copied to a compound file as stream
• Drag/Drop, Cut/Copy/Paste works

The HexViewer is very flexible. The features are:
1. Viewer (hex, oct, binary, decimal, ascii, unicode) can be chosen arbitrarily and place any order.
2. Values (byte, int, double, char etc.) of cursor position byte(s) are shown in a list view
3. Selected bytes are shown as text

The project needs .Net 2.0 framework to install and run properly. Any suggestion is welcome.

FlexibleRegister has been recompiled in Visual Studio 2005

FlexibleRegister has been recompiled in Visual Studio 2005. The code remains the same and should compile in earlier versions of VC++. I am currently writing a script to compile the project with any version of VC++ available in the system. An installation package will follow in few days.

Renamed hexEditor to uvfsEditor (Universal Virtual File System Editor)

I have renamed my open source project hexEditor to Universal File System Editor . The reason behind is - the project has grown up and more like a hierarchical custom file system viewer rather than a simple binary viewer. The repository has been moved from CVS to SubVersion.

Need a dictionary?

Lingeos is the best free dictionary I have ever used. Try it out...

http://www.lingoes.net/index.html

Will relational DBMS eventually die?

Over two decades, relational database management systems (RDBMS) were overwhelmingly successful for the storing and retrieving of information. On the other hand, thousands of documents are being generated now-a-days in XML format. It has established itself as the de-facto standard for information exchange, especially, over the Internet. For the efficient storage and retrieval of this data type, a new sort of storage management is required which is often termed as XML database management system (XDBMS).

Most of the commercial database vendors extended their respective databases with XML support. IBM’s DB2 UDB supports native processing of XML with pureXML. Oracle’s 10g release 2 and later versions provides native XML processing with XML DB. Microsoft also supports XML natively in SQL Server 2005 XML. These databases support simultaneous storage and retrieval of XML and relational data (i.e. these DBMSs are called hybrid databases). Traditional relational technologies are being tuned in these databases to work well with XML data.

Companies like Tomino provide XML only storage model. Various efforts are currently running in the research area for the efficient storage, query and retrieval of XML data.

The first effort for some XML support in relation system was shredding method. The XML data were decomposed into atomic values which were then stored as individual column values in a relational table. With the incredible spread of XML documents and emergence of native storage of them, it is considerable to build up a generalized Relational over XML (ROX) system. ROX is an approach opposite to shredding where XML is proposed to be stored natively in a DBMS and an XQuery engine is build on top of it. A SQL-to-XQuery translator translates SQL statements into XQuery, retrieves XML data and finally converts them to relational data.

XQuery Data Model (XDM) can be considered as a superset of relational data model. The data model supports structured, semi-structured and even unstructured data. Therefore, structured relational data can be stored as XML. The success of this approach largely depends on the degree of translation from SQL to XQuery and the data from XML to relational data. Performance would be the next big question. The relational systems have implemented many successful algorithm and techniques for the optimal storage and retrieval of data. The question is whether such a system can achieve the same optimization success like the relational counterpart.

Assume, after some successful research breakthroughs efficient storage and retrieval of XML data and support of SQL query are achieved resulting in an optimized ROX system. If such a system could be built, it might not be necessary to support a RDBMS anymore. Such a system would serve the dual purpose of storing XML data or relational data converted to XML. Both XQuery and SQL could be used to query data, though XQuery would be more efficient.

The result of this would be:

1. XML would be de-facto standard for data modeling
2. SQL would only be supported for backward compatibility.
3. All SQL programmer must learn XQuery to survive.
4. Currently established database vendors would fail to meet the client requirements unless they change their core engine to give the XML higher priority.

The assumption would probably not come true in the near future if ever. No further research is being seen around ROX or in this direction anymore. No enterprise would ever agree to convert their existing relation data store to XML. Besides, enterprise adoption of a technology is mostly guided by the large commercial vendors. No vendor would agree to diminish their current line of products in the coming years.

So RDBMS developers can relax!!!

Immigrants and Loyalty

A lot of discussion is going currently in the developed countries on the loyalty of immigrants. Whenever an immigrant becomes the citizen of a country, the country deserves loyalty from him. In the changing political world after 9/11, the countries which are frequent targets of immigrants are trying to reshape their policies. Several of them introduced special integration programs for the immigrants to accept and exercise host country culture.

Freedom vs. Loyalty:

Freedom means the liberty of one to express his own view on a particular matter as long as it is not against the law of the country. Each democratic country must exercise freedom for its people, media, and newspaper. It doesn’t mean only to enforce some law in the society, but also that the society members must accept different views of the same matter and respect the views of others. Developed countries are in general pioneers in integrating freedom in every aspect of the social culture.

Loyalty, on the other hand, refers to individual’s emotional bindings to some matter of state. Loyalty is a very complex stuff with deep inherent meanings. It is always explicitly visible and must automatically come out of heart similar to the feeling of love. Each country deserves from its citizens obedience to laws as well as to its feelings. When a country is in crisis, loyalty can be visible. It can also be noticed during some course of sports or joyful events. A society expects that its members support the team naturally and spontaneously during a game. It’s my loyalty to Bangladesh when it plays a cricket match against India or Pakistan, I will be emotionally bound to Bangladesh team and will wish its success. Countries’ original citizens are frequently seen as disloyal. What about the corrupt citizens who are bringing down the progress and pride of the nation? Some disloyalty is also done by framing new legislature which benefits corrupted politicians and harm the progress of the country. There are many people in a country with high social support who register themselves as unemployed and draw social and/or unemployment benefits even they can find suitable jobs for themselves.

Freedom sometimes collides with Loyalty when someone supports the opponent during a crisis of the state. I have freedom to express whole-hearted support for Pakistan in a Bangladesh vs. Pakistan cricket match. But it would contradict my loyalty to Bangladesh. There could be conflict with the political agenda of a country and citizens in democratic country have the freedom to criticize country’s policy. But the reason must be that they believe their stand would be beneficial for the country in the long run. Hundreds of thousands protesters on the New York street condemning the war against Iraq before and after US invasion into Iraq are good such example. It does not collide with loyalty to the homeland. Certain balance must be made between Freedom and loyalty. The free voice or act that goes against the emotional, traditional, cultural aspects of the country is considered disloyal.

Loyalty of immigrants:

A country accepts immigrants on the basis of humanitarian reasons or if it thinks that the immigrants would contribute to the benefits of the country. People migrate to other country to pursue a better future. Loyalty is the most important things that the countries deserve from its new citizens.

But experience shows that loyalty is a very hard thing to achieve. It takes years if not decades to create some form of loyalty in human beings. In some cases, it is not achieved in one generation.

Loyalty and Integration

Some countries introduced special integration programs for the immigrants to promote them to accept and adapt themselves to the culture of the host country. Some extra lessons have been added to the traditional language courses; special courses are offered and enforced for the immigrants who intend to become the future citizen of the countries. Parallel to encouraging the adaptation of immigrants to the culture and making them acquainted with the history and law of the country, integration also helps them to respect freedom of others.

Many countries also encourage simultaneous existence and exercise of multiple cultures, most of the time with some minor restrictions. Adapting to the host country culture can be much simpler to achieve than loyalty. Turkish community arrived in Germany in 1950s. They have been contributing to the economy of the country since then. Many Germans questioned the loyalty of some members of the community during World Cup Football 2006 when German team was playing against Turkey. It is frequently observed when Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi team plays in England, the supporters of opponent teams are large present in the stadium.

How to win loyalty for the host country

I have asked myself in several occasions what could be the best way to achieve loyalty of the new citizens for a country. First of all, the immigrants must be given enough time. It will not happen overnight. It might be always a good idea to let them exercise their own culture unless it hurts someone or contrary to some state laws. Enforcing the host culture, especially, on the new generation of immigrants might accelerate integration but might not succeed gaining loyalty from them.

It is natural to think that the Indians who migrated to various countries of Africa a century ago are loyal to the respective country. The reasons might be twofold:

1. While they were leaving, they were sure about not come back to home anymore. They accepted the country where they settled down as their own.
2. It might also take several generations to be natural loyal to the host country.

The immigrants must learn the official language of the host country as natively as possible. It might help them to avoid many misunderstandings. Their children must learn from their parents to love the country and be emotionally engaged for the good of it

Many immigrants complain about the unfriendly and harsh behavior of employees in the Government offices. These people believe that the reason for that is because they are foreign origins. A newly converted citizen should be treated as good as with original citizens of the country.

During a crisis, people from some origin should not be blamed in general. Misdeeds are done by some individuals or groups motivated by his/their own beliefs apart from the ideology of common citizens.

A topic for Master Thesis

For the master thesis in the summer semester 2008, I am looking for an interesting topic. There are three different fields in my specialization area (http://lgis.informatik.uni-kl.de) from which I have to choose one:

1. Database and information system: The DBIS research group, lead by renowned DB researcher Prof. Haerder, has two fundamental research areas:

• XML database (XTC project): Most of the employees and students are engaged in this project. The basic idea is to build us a transactional multi-user native XML database system.
• DB Caching: to reduce the response time specially in the Internet DB applications.

2. Heterogeneous Information System: There are several interesting projects going on under the leadership of Prof. Dessloch who has recently won the "IBM Faculty Award 2007" for his distinctive contribution to the DB research. The Caro project deals with change management of large scale enterprise information system.

3. Dependable System: This working group is lead by Prof. Andreas Reuter

Among all on-going research areas XML database system interests me most. I have been first acquainted with XML in early 2001. Since then, its emergence in various fields drew my attention. I am focusing mostly on working with some conceptual topic rather than some programming staff. Probably, I am going to choose a topic in XTC project.