Travel & timesync
Okay, time for a new update I guess. Lots of stuff happening the last couple of weeks, though much (most) of it not GSoC related unfortunately. Skip this paragraph if you don’t care about that. I’ll begin with me being back in Oslo, Norway (actually my hometown Molde at the time of writing – at a family visit for a few days) after leaving Vietnam the 13th. Terrible day really, I hope to be able to go back in not too long, Vietnam really is a great country in many ways. Anyway; I wish I could say the trip went uneventful but that would be a understatement. After leaving Vietnam my first flight left for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where I stayed a few hours in Chinatown waiting for my early morning flight. Somehow I managed to get sick, throwing up+++ and getting fairly dehydrated – the perfect thing to happen before a 12h flight, right? Found a couple of medicines at the pharmacy at airport and ate both types of pills just to be sure.. they came up again fairly quickly of course like everything else. I’ll skip the details. When I arrived in Sweden I had to do a re-check-in, and I guess I looked fairly suspicious so the customs guys started asking me questions – first time ever. No problems though. After waiting for a delayed flight to Oslo, the same thing happened there(!). I’ve flown quite a few times abroad and never been stopped before, but now I guess I know what those customs guys look for – unshaved guys, red eyes, pale, sweaty skin with lots of baggage. Again, no problems. So, I’m back, on a much faster and more stable internet connection, and I even have reliable electricity!
So, something more related to GSoC; both before and after this we’ve had several conference calls setup for the group of people involved in the synchronization efforts, with general questions, discussions about how we imagine the solutions, what to do some more research on, who’s doing what etc. I’ll admit that for me it’s a little bit scary, and I’ve probably been to passive until now, especially as the scale of the solution seems to increase quite a bit (and so has the group of developers involved). Nation-wide synchronizations has been touched, but there’s still a lot to look into. My mentor Maros relaxed me though, we’ll tighten the scope in a while, but let the discussions drift a bit for now – even some thoughts about patient identification using biometric information like fingerprints with scanners, and how that would work with millions of patients – many of them performing manual, hard work wearing down their fingertips.
It feels a bit “scary” for me too sometimes, I realize that the other guys and girls have a lot of experience compared to me, there’s no doubt that I’ve got a lot to learn from all of them. Also, I’ve always felt it a bit hard to discuss orally with native-speaking English people in English, it always makes me a bit stressed – at least in the beginning. I’m sure that’s a thing that will change as I get to know them and the project better.
During the last conference call I got the task of looking into time synchronization of the different events/server-instances. We’ll probably need that to make sure we know which record is the newest one in a reliable way, in most cases it won’t be a problem, but – clocks drifts and all kinds of bad stuff can happen. Maros pointed out some information on Wikipedia about Lamport Timestamps, so I’m currently reading the article about that before our next call tomorrow to see if that’s useful. There’s something similar called Vector clocks too that I might have to check out.. and maybe something completely different. This is something I haven’t touched and thought much about until now, we’ll see how it turns out and what we end up with in the next few days.
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