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@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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