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 communiqu? 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 pasar?n! ?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?"
