Night's Watch: the Software that allows you to watch your machines

As software get more complicated, better hardware is needed to support it. More servers are installed, and thus they all need to be maintained. This project is initiated as an attempt to capture the performance of multiple servers connected on the same network. The product captures the cpu utilization, RAM usage and availability and other information and allows the user to process and analyze this information. There is a live web interface which provides an active state of the servers and whether they are online and up and running. The solution is designed carefully to be scalable and portable, currently only supported for windows machines.

Today, I bring you the alpha version of a software that I have been working on for a while. The Nights Watch.

Night’s Watch is an easily configured application that allows you to monitor network connected Windows machines from a web interface and see their CPU and RAM usage, whether they are connected or not. The real power of the Night’s Watch is that you don’t require installing any client software in the machines that need to be monitored. Which makes the installation and scaling very easy to implement.

It is a matter of simply adding the machines that you want to monitor into a configuration file and the Night's Watch takes care of the rest. 

Try it out guys and let me know, here is me shipping it finally.

Download Night's Watch Version 0.1 here

Web Service to get the "n" th digit of pi

So you might think what does this have to do with GIS, will it does since pi is the best simple complex number ever existed and it represents the circle which is a geometry. So GIS.


Recently, computers were able to calculate up to 10 trillions digits of pi, why? because it is a good exercise to test the power of a computer. What I didn't find though is a web service which will get you the n'th digit of pi. Now I don't know how will someone use it but I just got curious to make it available for researchers out there! Just celebrating PI day

So, researchers and world changers behold and a nice 24/7 web service written in php, you give it a digit and it will return you the pi digit at that index. Very simple.


http://geshout.com/pi.php
GET parameter d: where d is the index starting from 1 till 100,000. As a start, if you people need more I'll think of including it.


Here is some examples of how to use it

just type this in your web browser or call it in piece of software.

Get the first digit, that is 3 of course.

http://geshout.com/pi.php?d=1

The seven'th digit

http://geshout.com/pi.php?d=7

You know the drill

http://geshout.com/pi.php?d=99999

ENJOY! 

Hussein

Research: Stock Market and the Moon Phase

Moon Phase vs Stock Change

Stock Market has been always tricky and unpredictable. Financial analysts come up with theories everyday to predict the drop or jump of a given stock market. They do this by analyzing many external factors that might affect this change including politics. Yet analysts keep getting dazzled on how the market can get kinky sometimes.

We keep linking the price change to parameters in our daily life, a war in Greece, or a new Apple product. However, no one ever thought to projecting this fluctuation against a measured that is not influenced by man. Something that human nor politics can control. I'm not being superstitious here but when I share what I found, it'll give you some fruits for thought.

The Work

Let us say I have dates and I have prices. I can extract Year, Month and Day from the date but with some little work and a help from the startdate guys I was able to calculate, yes, the phase and illumination factor of the moon and then project it on the price. To try that out I selected Ahli United Bank (AUB) as my testing subject, and extracted 12 years worth of stock market, 2600+ worth of stock data prices from 2000 till 2012 from the Bahrain Stock Exchange. I Formatted  the data and post it to Google Spread Sheet.

After that I used Google Visualization API to create some sexy charts out of that. In a nut-shell, this is my result. click down to see the website.

Stock Market vs Moon Phase Website Chart AUB

Here are some snap shots

Findings

1. 2012 AUB New Moons are 93% safe, they either Hold the stock price or increase it. So if someone wants to sell its good to select a New Moon date (Somewhere between 15 and 16 September). Lets monitor that until the rest of the year.
2. 2012 AUB Waxing Gibbous Moon  (Near to a Full Moon)  (Spans from 24-27 September)  is dangerous there is a 50% chance that the stock will drop.
3. So I would say for AUB it is good to buy on Waxing Gibbous Moon days for AUB and then sell them on the next New Moon.
4. Each year the correlation differs for some reason if I bring another variable into the story I might find the relation.

Now the findings might differ of course from one company to another but it is essentially the formula.

Visit the website and you can even find more.

Disclaimer: This is just fruit for thought, a new edge if you will. I searched the net and no body have done it before so I said why don't I do it.

Research: Find out Serial killers from the Random numbers they select

In a previous post, I talked about how Random Numbers are actually not so random and depend on many external factors.

Based on that formula, we could come up with a pattern and a relation between the random numbers selected by Serial Killers. Then plug this formula into suspects to rule them out.

Lets take 100 serial killer, and let each choose a number between 1 and 10,000. Chart out the results against their birthdays. Then use  Fourear series and quantum mechanics to approximate a formula that will let you limit the numbers range. The resulted chart will be interesting. You may change the variables or add more and see the result.

Now, to test out if someone is a serial killer you only need to plug in his birthday and let him select a random number, if his result fell near the drive of the function. Then most probably your guy is a serial killer.


That's Nuts I know. But hey I'm thinking loudly. Others have listed the serial killers characteristics already.

Research: A Software to Prevent Cancer

Am not saying not to take the neccessary health measures to prevent Cancer. Nevertheless, Science and Technology are advancing so fast that we are able to connect to, use and control living organs. Here is the latest technology where some group of mad scientists created a robot with a "live" rat brain.

Therefore, it is not impossible to use the Human API idea I wrote 2 years ago to prevent cancer. Here is my proposal.

The Human API is a set of methods and functions that allow developers to write software that can communicate with our body cells and organs through a device. But the Human API V1.0 I proposed 2 years ago can only access each cell individually regardless where this cell is. So I need to enhance this API to identify organs such as Liver,  Colon, Stomach etc.

Prevent It
An Apple a day keeps the doctor away, the first design to cure cancer is to prevent it. So I'm gonna introduce the interface IBodyOrgan and create the classes that implements this interface such as Liver, Colon etc..

Now with this new Object Oriented design we can access each body organ individually as follows.

Lets say I want to access my Liver cells and detect if there are any abnormal cells in my liver. Here is the code to do so using the Human API.

Dim myLiver as IBodyOrgan

'get the liver organ as object
myLiver = deviceapi.getOrganByID("LIVER")

'lets send a signal for the liver to start detoxification.
myLiver.SendSignal(LIVER_DETOXIFICATION);

Dim eCells as IEnumBodyCells

eCells = myLiver.getCells()

'lets access those cells and print if any are abnormal

For Each pCell In eCells
   If pCell.isAbnormal() Then

       'print the location of the cell and its ID on a map for the doctors for investigation
     PrintCellMap pCell   End if
Next


This small software can print a map of abnormal cells in a human liver and quickly hand that to his specialist. Imagine if we can install this application into kiosks machines in public, so anybody can easily do a check up for cancer cheaply. Perhaps with the advance of technology and biometrics this application can be deployed on iPhone or Andriod so people can do a checkup right on their mobile! I'm gonna write another post just for that.


Cure It
One can enhance this application to even cure the possible cancer by killing or disabling the growth of those abnormal cells. Here is a proposal.


Dim myLiver as IBodyOrgan
'get the liver organ as object
myLiver = deviceapi.getOrganByID("LIVER")

'lets send a signal for the liver to start detoxification.
myLiver.SendSignal(LIVER_DETOXIFICATION);

'lets access those cells and print if any are abnormal


For Each pCell In eCells
   If pCell.isAbnormal() Then
         'Send a signal to disable the cell
         pCell.Disable()  '
   End if



I'm sure one day we will hear of an iPhone application that can cure cancer.





Readers Suggestions
Ali Abd Aljalil

How about an army of nano machines, which can be injected and circulated around the human body. They can be programmed to attack mutant cells, viruses and other alien objects? Can be switched on and off, guided to the targeted organs, provide statistics and reports.

Interesting Idea, especially that science is booming into nano technology.

Research: Technology enabling Changing Movie Cast on Demand

With the tremendous improvement in the BluRay technology crazy as seems I believe this idea is doable in the coming decade.

The idea is as follows, introduce a concept where each actor in a movie can be replaced by another actor. Movies should be recorded in a generic way using the abstract actor objects. An Actor Object can be either male or female.

Just like what video game vendors do in games, they create a 3d model, and then simply plug in any concrete player into the model. If some if you played Tekken, she will be familiar with the player Mokujin who can imitate any other players' moves.

My idea is something like that

The entire movie should be compiled using Abstract Object Actors. Once the movie is complete, we replace the Abstract Object Actors (or AOA) with a Concrete Object Actor (COA) which is an actual actor like Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks etc..

COAs will include the character in 3d, face structure, makeup, voice, and lots and lots of details. Of course you will have a library of pre-built and compiled COAs ready to use in your BluRay disc.

Example:

Let's assume the following, you go and buy Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides BluRay disc (OA Enabled), you insert it in an (OA Enabled) BluRay drive. This movie comes with a predefined set of COAs (in this case Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz and Ian McShane) but you may choose to change these starring actors in the option menu. Lets say you don't like Johnny Depp, you go to the BluRay option, select Johnny Depp COA and choose change COA, you will be presented with a compiled list of COAs. Lets say you chose Brad Pitt, you simply apply the changes and TADA you got Brad Pitt starring in the movie.

If this worked, it can replace my ultimate Ceed Idea.

Research: Hussein's Frog Experiment

This thought experiment is somehow similar to Schrödinger's cat Experiment of Quantum Physics.

Hussein's Frog
The experiment goes as follows. If you ask a random person, whom you don't know, to think of an object. Then instructed him to obtain that object, place it in a box and seal that box. Assuming a condition this person does not disclose the content of the box to anyone. We will have a sealed box with an object that only one person in the entire world, our world, knows what is it.

The second step of this experiment takes place after that person leave this world, (i.e. dead). Next, fetch the box and before opening it, wish for a frog to be in that box. Imagine the frog inside the box before opening it and when you do open that box, you will always find a frog, or whatever you wish for. The frog, according to Schrödinger's, will be of course both alive and dead at the same time up until the moment we upon the box.

Why is that?
The reason, according to quantum physics, is that whatever was inside that box was there because our person puts it there. He knows about it, he was the only one affecting its existence. With our person gone, the box can freely contain ANYTHING depending on the power of the direct wave function affecting that box.

Exceptions
If the person we instructed to take the object told someone about the content of that box, the box content will snap "back" into that reality. If people start guessing whats inside the box you get all those probabilities and its up to the strongest wave thought function (or the sum of the thoughts with the same frequency) to create the reality. Basically uncertainty principle plays the major rule here.

So for our experience to be effective you shouldn't tell anybody about it.

Research: Saving feelings "Digitally"

The brain has two memorizing mechanisms.

You can remember an event clearly if it happened concurrently with another event that touched your emotions at the same time span.

For example, most of you can remember clearly where you were when the 9/11 events happened.

The other approach is done by repeating something over and over until it get written to the brain. Of course this is not as effective as the emotional memory.


Lets talk about the first day of your wedding. You were extremely happy and while you are in that mode, your wife puts a new perfume that you never smelled before. That's it, that perfume will act like a pointer to this happy event, and it will keep pointing to that happy moment all the time.

After ten years if you smell that perfume, it will be indexed through the brain, point back to that emotion and restore it. Of course unless if that pointer didn't get 'overwritten' by some other memory.

Here is a great way of saving feelings and read it back.

The smell is a signal sent to the brain. If we could integrate this in the Human API I talked about few months ago. Psychics could use that to remove the depression from people and tap back the great moments.

The Human API can search the brain for happy moments and associated indexes/pointers (Like perfumes, paintings, colors, etc..) And send the signals when needed.

I know. I'm crazy.

Research: Thermal Sensing Mouse

What if the mouse served as both input and output device.

It reads the x,y coordinates and it outputs, well, heat!

We could utilize this feature to do some cool stuff.

1. Browsers can emit heat to the mouse when the visited website is new or recently updated!
2. Digg can emit heat to the mouse when the current post has rich diggs.
3. Facebook can emit heat to the mouse when the current member has too many friends or wall posts.

You may add to the list.

From a technical point of view, I don't think its difficult, we just need it to be supported in Windows and Mac to catch in fire.


Feel the heat while net surfing.

Research: Saving data in Water

I had this idea for a long time. What if I can save data in water?

I would have my hard disc sealed and filled with water. 

Add more water to get more space.

Storage costs will be down the drain.

Imagine the cool thumb drive with water.


How to do it? Well I thought of that.

The Water molecule is H2O, Two hydrogen atoms (two electrons) and 1 Oxygen atom.

If we can (by any means) save one digital bit (0 or 1) in each electron of the Hydrogen atom. In 1 liter of water I would be able to save 7606104190927 Tera Byte (TB), (1 Tera = 1024 GB)


Here is the math:

In 1 liter of water

= 334.52*10²³ Water molecules.= 334.52*10^{23 *} 2 = 669.04**10²³ Hydrogen electrons = 669.04*10²³ Bits (We said we'll save 1 bit in each electron )= 669.04*10²³ /8 = 8363000000000000000000000 Bytes

= 8166992187500000000000 KiloByte

= 7975578308105468750 MegaByte

= 7788650691509247 GigaByte

= 7606104190927 TeraByte= 7606104190 PetaByte= 7606104 ExaByte= 7606 ZettaByte= 7.6 YottaByte


That's in 1 liter of water.

In a water drop (about 1 micro liter) I can save 7 ExaBytes. That is approximately equal to all words ever spoken by the human beings. And I didn't touch the oxygen atom yet.
The limitations are many I guess, but the world after that idea is prosperous isn't it?

Research: The Human API (Human Enhancement)

This is some sort of Human Enhancement, Develop a device that could be attached to a human organ. This device will read the nerve signals passing through this organ.

The device should list all nerve signals received by this organ with details such as (Destination Cells, source, signal strength etc.)Later, upgrade this device to be attached to the brain, this device can command the brain to send signals to a particular cell (perhaps you can develop a Cell Identifier using the gene or DNA) or a collection of cells. Then create an Application Programming Interface (API) that will interact with this device and publish the API for the public.

Now programmers can innovate, for instance they do something like this

Dim pCell as IBodyCell
Dim sCellID as String = "aj3lk28cfkfdjdh297hc2" 'Gene/DNA
pCell = deviceapi.getCellByID("aj3lk28cfkfdjdh297hc2")' itching signal, the person will feel itechy..
pCell.SendSignal(Low)
People can now write applications to do anything, for instance to cure Cancer.


Dim eCells as IEnumBodyCells
Dim pCell as IBodyCell
'This will return a collection of cells for hand
eCells = deviceapi.getCellsof("thumb")

For Each pCell In eCells
If pCell.isAbnormal() Then
'Disable this cell from growing, avoid infecting the rest cells
pCell.DisableGrowth()
End if
Next


Its an idea. I don't have the knowledge about biology and that is great because it allows me to imagine. Biologists have more difficultly in imagination because they have a lot of knowledge and this knowledge installs rigid restrictions to imagination. 


If you liked this post you probably will like DeusEx Human Revolution game. It is all about how we can implant mechanics into our bodies to enhance it.

Ceed: An idea that will change the world

History of Compression
In 1952, David Huffman invented the Huffman coding to compress text. He based his analysis on the redundancy of bytes.

The more redundant bytes the better the compression.

He did an excellent job. Thanks to him we have WinZip, WinRar, Power Archieve, 7-Zip and alot of compression tools.

we use them daily.

Are the compression Algorithms mature enough?
When we try to compress exectuables and binaries that are naturally doesn't contain so much redundant bytes, we didn't get so much out of it.

We Suffer. We suffer when we want to send a rar achieve of 10 MB the email keep bouncing back. We suffer when we want to download large files such as music, movies, maps, ISOs. We suffer when we want to open a webpage filled with flash, images, rich texts or videos. We suffer when we want to want to review an online album.

Why only those with 4Mb T connections can enjoy the fast speed just because files are getting bigger and bigger and WinZip and WinRar failed to make them smaller?

I was working on this for the last 4 years.

I failed 3 times, I realize I am in a dip and that at the other side of the dip there is a promising IT world .

This is what I want to do:

I want to extract a 20 KB file from a 1GB file, that file is the essence and should be used to "regenerate" the 1GB file.

There must be a new approach very different then the classical one, this will involve new technologies and science such as Quantum Physics .

I have setup some approaches that will make some of you laugh. I'll continue to add more approaches from you guys

First approach
The idea is to extract a unique descriptive identifier of the subject file. (Think of this as taking a seed from a given tree) The (seed) is a very small file that can regenerate the original file (tree).

Technically, the seed will be a mathematical formula. By using complex numerical analysis I want to get a unique formula for each file, I started to read some numerical analysis books. Few people told me that its not possible because NA gives you an approximation of the formula. But I want to see for myself.

We know that, 1 Byte = 255 decimal. A typical file looks something like this.

offset 0 -> 125
offset 1 -> 56
offset 2 -> 12
offset 3 -> 55
...
Until the end of the file. This will generate a graph, we only need to get the formula.


Second approachThis is the backup plan. I need to study some biology first to achieve that. Please, open the window now, and look, really look outside.

What can you see? I bet you can see a lot, you can see trees, houses, there is a girl playing with her doll, you can see the colors, you can see the movements, there are birds flying, you can see the color of the birds how fast they are moving you can measure the distance you can see which object is near, which one is far.

You can see a lot amount of details. All these data, are handled by a very tiny part of our body. The eye. If your eye can capture and shrink this amount of details into a place smaller then an egg.

Can't we make a 1 GB file into a 20 KB ?

Third approachDigital Seeds with Fourier Series, I wrote about it here.


My readers suggestions
In this section I will list the approaches suggested by my lovely reader.


Yaseen titi
This guy is really interested in Ceed idea, in fact he wrote a lot of suggestions more than I've even did, you can read his comments. I love this guy.

PragmaTechie
If you can't find such a formula, then maybe you can divide the file in two arbitrary parts and then find the formula for each. That way, you're increasing the probability of a hit. You can shift this divider both ways for a more greater possibility of determining a formula.

Dr. Christian Lapp
What about considering every byte as one dimension in a multi(n-)dimensional space. so the entire file would be the surface of a n-dimensional figure, itself having the dimension n-1.
1 byte --> a point (0D)
2 bytes -> a line (1D)
3 bytes -> a plane (2D)
etc. Check out the idea of parallel coordinates


Dr4g0nF1y :
Now that I think of it, wasn't there another compression method, called Rainbow Paper? I can't find it anywhere, but I do recall that it should be able to print a 1GB file on a paper, using a regular inkjet-printer and read it back in using a regular flatbed-scanner.


Why Ceed?Imagine the life with Ceed.

You Tube
You will download the Ceed version of the video to your machine very fast (20 kb) then regenerate it in your machine very fast and play it as if it was locally there. No more stopping the video to let youtube download it full.

Google Earth
Google earth will send Ceeds Satalite images quickly to your computer then regereate the original files in your machine. Your internet speed doesn't matter so much. Because The work will be done on the machine as if you are browsing your own computer data.

Ceed Torrents
I don't need to wait for days to download a file.

Ceed Games
1 GB game can be shrinked into its orginial ceed 20 KB and downloaded easily, or sent via MSN messenger.

Ceed Browser
No more .html, or .asp or .php
its .ceed, www.yahoo.com/index.ceed. This will contain the whole page with the images and the text and videos and flash into about 50 kb size ceed file. Your ceed browser will download the ceed to your machine and the browser regenerates the original page easily, as if you are opening a page on your machine. No flickering, no loading. Nice.


You may add to the list.

Why I'm sharing thisI don't want the idea to die with me by being selfish, I have to let people read it and understand and share it and add to it.

That's why I am sharing it today.

Your comments are most welcomed.