[Freeswitch-users] Social Configuration module for Kamailio released

[Phil Mickelson]

You have way too much time on your hands.  Did you read Cloud Atlas by any
chance?  If not, do so.

Thank you for a great start to my day.


On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 1:09 AM, Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com>wrote:

> For immediate release:
>
> ATLANTA, GA (1 April 2014)--Evariste Systems LLC, an Atlanta-based
> consultancy and software vendor specialising in Kamailio-based VoIP
> infrastructure solutions for the ITSP (Internet Telephony Service
> Provider) market, has announced the public release of its groundbreaking
> "Social Configuration" module for the Kamailio open-source SIP server
> and SIP proxy.
>
> Evariste principal Alex Balashov explained:
>
> "It's no secret that writing Kamailio configuration in its embedded
> scripting language is complex. Social Configuration integrates with
> Twitter and Facebook to allow tens of thousands of people to write a
> config simultaneously through social networks, over a variety of devices
> and media, including PCs, tablets, smartphones and SMS. This lets Kamailio
> users harness the benefits of crowdsourcing."
>
> Continued Balashov: "The process begins when the Kamailio administrator
> writes the desired intentions of their setup--yes, in natural English
> prose. This isn't for propellerheads.
>
> The module sends this to our proprietary QNLP (quantum natural language
> parsing) server, which splits these desiderata into Business Action
> Items (BAIs). These are then sent out to participating Facebook and
> Twitter users via our expansive middleware, and the users return their
> piecemeal script implementations, which are usually one line of code or
> less. These are consolidated back into a fully functional Kamailio
> configuration."
>
> Brooks Bridges, Director of Engineering at Evariste, explained how
> Social Configuration handles reconciliation of conflicting implementations
> from across the Twittersphere and Facebook:
>
> "This is really the heart of the technology. It's handled via a deeply
> recursive, Rails-based social A/B testing and multiple-choice polling
> system. It uses hashtags, trending and RSS and stuff. The days of merge
> conflicts with unified diffs are gone! Throw out your legacy version
> control, 'cause this is Conflict Resolution 2.0: The Feed!"
>
> Another frequently asked question lingered: assembling the contributions
> in a particular order. On this topic, Balashov offered a surprising
> answer:
>
> "Plot twist: that's social, too! Twitter is an infinitely dynamic
> collaboration platform. The question isn't so much 'what can social
> networks do for us?' as 'what can't they do?' You can see that there
> are many strata of social clouds here: cumulus, stratus, cirrus--we've
> got all the clouds!"
>
> "Xzibit would make it easier to understand for the layman," chortled
> Balashov as he shifted his position slightly.
>
> "The whole process uses infinitely differential recursion manifolds.
> It's like: 'Yo dawg, I heard you like crowds, so we put a crowd in your
> crowd, so you can crowd while you crowd', you know? All stages of the
> process happen simultaneously and in real time. It's consensus-driven
> development by a Committee of the Ultimate."
>
> Balashov also stated that total development time for Social Configuration
> was only three days, rather than the thousands of man-hours normally
> required to develop complex technology. When asked how this was possible,
> he deferred to Bridges:
>
> Bridges explained:
>
> "It's all because we embraced the Agile Full Vapour method at our company.
> Maybe you've heard of it.
>
> Classic Agile and 'customer-driven development' says 'release early,
> fail often'. That wasn't enough for us. Agile Full Vapour is Agile
> extended to its logical maximum. Our slogan here at Evariste Engineering
> is 'Release Too Early, Fail More Often'. And stand-ups? Ain't nobody got
> time for that. We've done away with all team communication or collaboration
> of any kind. We've slashed overhead to a new level, and the numbers speak
> for themselves. We get three thousand percent more out of our developers
> than anyone, anywhere else."
>
> Balashov concurred, gesturing to the Evariste office "Vapour Board":
>
> "I really don't know how legacy Agile companies get anything done!"
>
> Initial reactions to the new technology from inside the VoIP community
> were positive.
>
> Sean McCord, Vice President of Wholesale Hashtag and viral marketing expert
> at Atlanta-based social media anaytics giant CyCORE Systems, agreed
> that Social Configuration is an essential leap forward for the Kamailio
> ecosystem:
>
> "The Social Configuration module heralds the long-overdue marriage of
> Kamailio with the Social Web, the biggest trend of the Internet in this
> millenium so far, and probably for the rest of the millenium. Everyone
> knows that the wisdom of crowds is greater than the wisdom of one."
>
> On the broader theme of Kamailio's ascendancy to the mainstream of the
> Social Web, McCord said:
>
> "Anyway, the whole reason Kamailio hasn't gone viral so far is due to
> lack of network effects. We have planking, owling, Grumpy Cat, so why
> not Kamailio? Kamailio's imagery is green like Philosoraptor. What's
> stopping it from going big like Philosoraptor? No network effects, no
> multiplier--that is, until now."
>
> J.R. Richardson, Chief Technology Officer of Dallas-based Ntegrated
> Solutions, reported positive results from his initial testing:
>
> "Down here in Texas, we're a real social bunch. But I always felt so
> lonely writing Kamailio script by myself. I don't even know what I'm
> doing half the time. But now, with this Social Configuration business,
> the whole neighborhood can help out!"
>
> John Knight, Chief Engineer at Ringfree Communications in Hendersonville,
> North Carolina, also spoke highly of the new social technology:
>
> "It's great! The config just writes itself! But the best part for me,
> as a civically conscious businessman, is the economic boost. It's a
> much better employment opportunity for stay-at-home moms in Appalachia
> than Mechanical Turk. I'm paying out 2 cents per core function call,
> 4 cents per modparam, 10 cents per Record-Route parameter, and 5 cents
> per module function invocation. Stimulate this economy!"
>
> Carlos Alvarez, an international business consultant at The Himley
> Dock Table Agency, a Phoenix, Arizona-area think tank focused on
> sociology of the World Wide Web, was keen to note that the technology
> brought forth by Evariste was far more than just a different way of
> implementing Kamailio solutions.
>
> "We were talking with Evariste about building an XMPP server and selling
> it to Facebook for $20 billion, but that train left the station. It was
> a blessing in disguise, though, because it told us that we weren't thinking
> big enough. Social Configuration is way more transformative."
>
> Asked further about what it meant, Alvarez said:
>
> "This is going to have implications way beyond esoteric programming.
> A crowdsourced config is nothing like an individual's config; it's
> e-cosmopolitanism, it's Humanity 2.0. It will open up the floor to
> new kinds of first movers and lead to new assumptions about how
> scripts of all kinds should be written.
>
> It's going to challenge established notions of what it means to program,
> and it will make the playing field more level by disintermediating the
> supply chain of session initiation. A lot of middlemen are going to hurt.
> One does not simply program the program anymore; the program programs
> you, too. It programs all of us. For the first time, request routes and
> SRV load balancing are part of a living, breathing organism. And that's
> worth way more than an XMPP server. That's disruption right there."
>
> After a moment's thought, Alvarez added:
>
> "I can probably flip it to Facebook for at least $3 trillion in Zuckerberg
> funny money--whoops, did I say that? I meant Facebook stock."
>
> The transformative impact forecasted by Alvarez is seemingly borne out
> in the enthusiasm for Social Configuration shown around the world by a
> variety of societal constituencies not traditionally thought to be
> associated with software development and telecommunications.
>
> Jakub Klausa, a self-described member of an "anarcho-syndicalist reading
> group" in Wroclaw, Poland, confidently offered a hypothesis about the`
> new era brought forth by Social Configuration:
>
> "Let's start with the deeply-ingrained assumption of Kamailio consultant
> or trainer as 'teacher', as a purveyor of knowledge that he has and you
> don't," said Klausa.
>
> "That's a very oppressive, authoritarian construction. It's quite
> presumptuous and dehumanising. Oh, does the Kamailio 'expert', His
> Royal Highness, deign to 'teach' us, to 'share' what he knows with
> the little people? Oh, thank you, massa', thank you!" lamented Klausa.
>
> "You see, it's not so much about what the consultants and self-anointed
> mailing list demigods can 'teach' us. It's more about what we can all
> learn from each other! Social Configuration is a tool that finally
> allows us, the workers, the so-called 'newbies', to take the power
> of Kamailio into our hands and master our own destiny. It's time to
> put a knife through the tyranny of 'expertise' and 'knowledge'."
>
> The Chairman of the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the
> Revolutionary Communist Party of Poland, Magdalena Boksa, issued the
> following communiqué from the party's headquarters, thought to be
> located in an underground bunker beneath a Starbucks:
>
>       Social Configuration empowers the revolutionary vanguard
>       of the activated, class-conscious proletariat to commandeer
>       the machinery of Kamailio, in order to advance a scientific
>       understanding of the objective laws of motion of the
>       capitalist system, together with the tension of its internal
>       contradictions, in keeping with the essential truth of
>       dialectical materialism.
>
>       The global imperialist division of labour, as revealed by
>       V.I. Lenin in Selected Works, Vol. 1, shall meet its end
>       through the thunderous destruction of the petit-bourgeois
>       monopoly on knowledge-as-capital and the extraction of
>       surplus value from it. Through the dogma of Social Configuration,
>       the means of production in Information Technology shall be
>       socialised among the working class, distributed according to
>       the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each
>       according to his need".
>
> When asked about the revolutionary potential of Social Configuration,
> a young student member of the RCP-Poland Youth Brigade concurred
> with Comrade Boksa's recitation:
>
> "¡Venceremos! ¡No pasarán! ¡Hasta la victoria siempre!"
>
> The impact of Social Configuration has even played out on a national, and
> perhaps global level of significance. A brief statement from the Ministry
> of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea read:
>
>       Social Configuration of Red Star SER [as it is known inside
>       North Korea] is consistent with the teachings of Kim Il-Sungism
>       and Kim Jong-Ilism. Great Leader Kim Jong-Un, Supreme Commander
>       of the Korean People's Army, First Secretary of the Workers' Party
>       of Korea, will chart the glorious course to the maximum realisation
>       of its full military and civil potential in all spheres of public
>       and private life. It will boost the resilience of our prosperous
>       socialist nation in the face of a continual onslaught by the
>       imperialist menace and its ROK puppet regime.
>
> Motivated by chronic energy shortages, the secretive North Korean state
> has been rumoured to be working on a Kamailio-based personal VoIP
> appliance that is--the first of its kind--powered not by conventional
> electricity, but by The Juche Idea.
>
> Social Configuration has also garnered attention from scholars attentive
> to the role of gender, race and privilege in the configuration scripting
> process.
>
> Moriah Trostler, a resident feminist scholar at the Phoenix,
> Arizona-based Scorpion Bay Institute of Gender Studies, gave some
> insight into the ways that Social Configuration potentially broadens
> the inclusiveness of the Kamailio tapestry:
>
> "If people would check their cisprivilege and open their eyes, they
> would see that Kamailio, and SIP itself, is full of oppressive,
> psychologically violent gendered constructions. For instance, there is
> the infamous 'loose routing vs. strict routing' dichotomy, which is
> clearly a dark, sadomasochistic allegory for capricious--dare I say
> schizophrenic?--sexual humiliation. It's a lurid invitation to
> indulge the prurient whims of the boss-with-secretary."
>
> Trostler gave another example:
>
> "And From and To 'tags'? Please, the idea of ownership of another's
> corporeal being, of branding--tagging--like cattle, is transparent.
> That's straight out of the Larry Flint smut-peddling playbook. And what's
> more, all this makes use of 'globally unique identifiers', the signature
> scent of industrial alienation--an anonymising, dystopian, Kafkaesque
> labyrinth. This has all the markers of masculinised depersonalisation.
> Need I go on?"
>
> Trostler went on: "Social Configuration opens the door to speaking truth
> to some of these discriminatory, alienating, gendered mental categories
> in which brogrammers think. Finally, women can write the Kamailio config
> as they might have written it, without compromising their identity or
> their dignity. Maybe we can even make some headway in influencing the
> male-dominated IETF standards process."
>
> Asked to summarise the impact of emergent minority voices and critical
> discourse enabled by Social Configuration, Fred Posner, a literary
> theorist based in Gainesville, Florida, offered the following comments:
>
> "The larger power of Social Configuration is essentially meta. It
> offers a new language, a new word-prism through which to look at
> the neosemiotic discursive space of SIP express routing. It's about
> reader as text, and text as reader, and the joy and wonder of their
> sizzling interplay."
>
> "It is evocative of Nietzsche," said Posner, gesturing to an open manhole
> cover on a busy Jacksonville thoroughfare.
>
> "If you stare too long into the Kamailio configuration, it, in turn,
> stares back into you! But now it speaks with a palpable collective voice,
> giving shape--definition!--to a bold, muscular subtext of configuration
> as culture, and culture as configuration. It is a semantic fusion of coder
> as critic, and critic as coder. Without knowing it--and it was
> inconceivable
> that they could have known it--Evariste has set into motion a wondrous,
> intricate and mesmerising ballet, a shower of sparks, a thrifty, yet
> spirited rejoinder to the supposed futility of poststructuralist
> rationalism.
> As we speak, a new 'Social Text' is being written!"
>
> Alistair Cunningham, a physicist from the University of Cambridge,
> provided an appraisal from a different angle:
>
> "Social Configuration, as interpreted by Balashov, embodies the
> kind of nonlinear thinking that is noticeably missing in software. At
> first glance, it does seem to invite a deafening cacophany, an
> undifferentiated chaos. But if one phase-shifts it slightly, the shadows
> of mathematical signatures emerge, waiting to be unlocked. The quantum
> resonance of social entropy doing its work gives us valuable clues into
> the origins of the universe at the sub-particle level."
>
> Asked about what Evariste has in store next, Balashov was
> uncharacteristically tight-lipped:
>
> "I can't say too much. But I can tell you it's big. Though he doesn't
> know it yet, we're even going to hire Leif Madsen for this, because
> the database is going to be at least 6 GB. That's almost a byte for
> every person on the planet. Definitely Big Data territory."
>
> Pressed for details, Balashov said:
>
> "Okay, okay, but this is all I'm going to say. I've got three words for
> you: IMS With Friends. It's a proprietary mash-up of Snapchat in the
> front, Hadoop in the back, and a DIAMETER billing interface in the
> middle. What could possibly go wrong?"
>
>
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