My Lost Theory

A couple of weeks ago I was sick with the flu. I spent Saturday on the couch with my soup and a head cold in a miserable state.

Lucky for me, I subscribe to Netflix so I decided to rewatch Season 1 of Lost. I really didn't watch Season 1's episodes the first time so I thought I would pay closer attention to details this time. Anyway, I was sick and had nothing better to do.

After rewatching a few of the episodes, it dawned on me what was happening on the island and to the Lost characters.

I will stop here and warn you. If you do not want to know my theory or learn about any spoilers then do not scroll down this page. I will not be upset if you turn the donkey wheel and transport yourself elsewhere.

But, if you do want to know my theory, I will give you three chances to stop and reconsider before revealing my theory, a la Locke with Charlie when Charlie wanted his drugs.

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First chance to stop, if you still want to know scroll down.
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Second chance to stop, if still curious scroll down.
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Last chance to stop, scroll down to read my theory.
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It's a Game: Backgammon

After watching the episode with Locke and Walt on the beach playing a certain game together, I realized that Lost was a human backgammon game between Jacob and the Man in Black. The Lost characters are the pieces and the island is the game board.

In backgammon, to win a player must get all of his/her pieces off the board first. In Lost, the goal is get off the island first which the Man in Black is trying to do in Season 6.

The Playing Pieces: the characters

Also, black and white playing pieces are used in backgammon. So if you notice Jacob wears white and the Man in Black wears, well, black. After being 'claimed', Sayeed and Claire now wear black meaning that they are 'pieces' of the Man in Black. Remember, Dogan said there's a darkness growing within Sayeed meaning that he was turning into a black playing piece.

The Numbers: 4 8 15 16 23 42

4, 8, 16 are all numbers on the six-sided doubling cube. In backgammon, there are two-sets of 15 playing pieces. On the board, points are numbered and one point is notably numbered, 23-point . And for the last number, 42 is an opening roll strategy in backgammon.

Final Episode Hope

Having said all of this, my hope is that in the final episode we will finally see a full shot of the entire Lost island. I may be wrong, but we have yet to see the entire landscape and topology of the island, a bird's eye view. I found a few probable Lost island shots on Google Images. As you can see in this image, the forests on the island make up points just like those on a backgammon game board.

My final hope for the last episode is a camera shot of an old, almost ancient backgammon board used by Jacob and the Man in Black somewhere on the island. I think whomever the next candidate to protect the island will inherit the game to play against the Man in Black or the next nemesis. Because there must be two players to play.

Backgammon on Wikipedia

If you are still skeptical of my theory, I encourage you to read the backgammon page on Wikipedia. There you will find the history of the game, men used as playing pieces, the numbers, the Jacoby Rule, and a technique called bearing off (polar bears).

Please feel free to leave comments for me if you agree, disgree, or have other thoughts. If you have a better theory I would love to read it. Lost is a masterpiece and I have loved watching every minute!

--Corey

MLSN URL's Reusability

One of the major benefits of MLSN URL's is the ability to reuse assigned MLS Numbers. Using an simple scenario, I'll go in detail of how reusability works with MLSN URL's.

In the diagram above, Alice is an owner of an accredited OpenMLS registrar. Her service is located at alicesmls.com.

Bob the seller, needs to sell his house in Orlando, Florida. He registers it on Alice's MLS for 60 days and receives a unique MLSN URL, mlsn://1.1.1@3203.840.

Unfortunately, Bob's house does not sell within the 60 days and expires. When this happens, the assigned 1.1.1 or triple short number returns to Alice's block of MLS numbers to be reused again.

A new seller, Cristy, registers her house in Atlanta, Georgia on alicesmls.com and receives her unique MLSN URL, mlsn://1.1.1@30329.840.

As you can see, 1.1.1 was used once with Bob's listing and then again with Cristy's. Each MLSN URL represents two completely different listings, which demonstrates reusability.

By the way, the number 840 in the MLSN URL's represents the iso country code for the United States.

--Corey

MLSN Protocol User Session Diagram

A Simple User Session

Scenario: User wants to know the status of a property listing in the downtown Orlando zip code, 32801, located in the United States.

A user starts a session on a client desktop. He enters the following MLS Number URL at the prompt:

user>mlsn 1.1.1@32801.840/status

The mlsn client application sends the MLSN URL via port 32801 over tcp through the internet to an MLSN Messaging Server which accepts the text string via port 32801.

The MLSN Server routes the URL text string to an application server which parses and creates a query for the database which returns a result.

The result is sent from the application server back to the MLSN Messaging Server which sends the result via port 32801 over tcp back through the Internet cloud.

Finally, the client desktop receives the result via port 32801 and displays the results to the user:

user>active

--Corey

Multiple Listing Service Network Protocol v0.5

The Numbering Problem

One of the problems in the Real Estate Industry revolves around the numbers assigned to listings by Multiple Listing Services. Six, seven, eight, or more numerical digits may be assigned to an individual MLS listing number along with possible alphanumeric characters preceding the number.

From my research, listed below are ten randomly selected, real world MLS numbers I extracted from a daily Google Alert listening for text string 'MLS#':

• MLS# 829710


• MLS# 90035087


• MLS# 4240855


• MLS# H740907


• MLS# 9088503


• MLS# 100006059


• MLS# M1366719


• MLS# MC5555362


• MLS# H741473


• MLS# 4334588

Lacking Visual Meaning

The problem with these numbers and others is that they have no visual value or meaning to a user. MLS numbers are stored and generated within datatbases by MLS providers. Since these numbers are required to be unique, a field type of serial is assigned to the field which increments the next unique MLS number by 1 to enforce a primary key's uniqueness. However, this system does not benefit the user from deciphering where the listing is located nor any other details.

Duplication Misery

Another problem is that there are hundreds of MLS's in existence and the probability of the same number assigned to two different listings in two different MLS databases is highly probably. If a user only has the number to reference, which listing number is which? And how much time is lost trying to figure out which listing corresponds to which MLS database?

Zero Reusability

Since MLS numbers are simply incremented by 1, the opportunity for number reuse is eliminated. A provider's MLS numbers will continue to increase by 1 which will increase the number of digits of the MLS numbers over time. Having no delimiters, MLS numbers become humanly impossible to remember since the average human is said to only have the capacity to remember up to 7 consecutive digits. But looking at the random MLS numbers I collected above , a high percentage of real world MLS Numbers either equal or are greater than 7 digits.

The Solution

The Scheme

The MLSN URL scheme is used to designate Internet MLS listings accessible using MLSN (Multiple Listing Service Network). The scheme adheres to IETF's RFC1738 which describes syntax for strings representations or URLs via the Internet.

The Registrar Assigned Number

After a user posts a listing to a registrar, a 3-octet number is assigned to a listing just like an IP address is statically assigned to a machine or device. But in the case of the MLSN protocol, 3-octet numbers are dynamically assigned to allow for reusability. After a listing expires, the 3-octet number returns to the registrar's pool to be later reassigned to alternate user's listing.

For example:

User registers listing with AlicesMLS and receives the following MLS Number URL Address:

mlsn://1.1.21@32821.840

The listing expires after 30 days and 1.1.21 returns to the registrar's pool of mls numbers and is reassigned to another user's listing:

mlsn://1.1.21@32819.840

The new MLS URL Address reuses 1.1.21, but is a different listing from the previous listing.

Note: 1.x.x is designated as a reserved Class A block of numbers and used for testing purposes.

The Postal Code

By adding a local postal code to the URL, the listing becomes visually meaningful. Just by looking at the URL, a user can tell if the MLS listing is located in an ideal or non-ideal postal code area. In addition, postal codes are used by the majority of the world's countries which makes MLSN URL's extensible to potentially cover any property in the world.

The Country Code

Keeping the global MLS market in mind, a 3-digit country code follows the postal code. Every country is designated with an ISO 3166-1 3-digit number.

This number enhances an MLS Number URL for reusability and visual meaning when coupled with the postal code.

The Port

Two weeks ago, I secured internet port 32801 with IANA on its list of registered ports.

mlsn            32801/tcp   Multiple Listing Service Network
mlsn            32801/udp   Multiple Listing Service Network
#                           Corey Leong  27 January 2010

The purpose of this new port will be to send and receive request and response messages from client machines to designated mlsn servers. This type of messaging mirrors the whois service which enables a user to lookup domain names over port 53.

The Resource

Using a RESTful approach, a resource appended to the URL string permits lookup of a particular attribute of the listing.

For example:

A client sends the following request to an mlsn server.

mlsn://1.1.17@32802.840/status

The mlsn server returns "active" to the client, then the connection is severed.

Other potential resource lookup scenarios include beds, baths, square footage, price, etc.

Conclusion

The above information is a high-level perspective of the Multiple Listing Service Network (MLSN) Protocol, URL, and Port. MLSN is in development mode. Eventually, MLSN will be used by any user to query MLS Listings from registrars over the Internet.

I intend to continue testing a multitude MLS Number URL strings until this protocol reaches full 1.0 version.

--Corey

Real Estate Protocol Submission

This past weekend I submitted our online application for a new user registered port with IANA. Here is a simple client server model depicting requests and responses.

The protocol, Multiple Listing Service Network (MLSN), will involve online users and applications querying a real estate database of listings.

I'll post more diagrams and information regarding this protocol/port as we draw closer to our application being approved. :)

--Corey

RealPM Model Use Case Diagram

This is a first pass at building a use case model for real estate project management. As you can see on the left side of the system, there are five actors: the project manager, salesperson, administrative assistant, buyer, and the seller. On the right side of the model are three external systems which interface with the model. They are Google Wave, SalesForce, and OpenProj.

The system's use cases are self-explanatory and may need refactoring. Again, this is a first pass. In addition, I'm sure more use cases will rear their heads so I expect the number of use cases to grow.

Feel free to leave comments and suggestions for this model is open for public comment.

--Corey

Building The Perfect Reputational Beast, Part 2

Continuing from Part 1, this modeled diagram represents components of a concept reputational application. As do most web applications, the system is comprised of three tiers: client, application, and the database layer.

The user of the system interfaces with a browser on a desktop computer or an application on a mobile device. The middle tier is comprised of JBoss Application Server and Apache's ServiceMix. I chose JBoss AS to allow for enterprise javabeans to be used along with all of the lovely enterprise features such as remoting, security, transaction management, presistence, messaging, resource pooling, concurrency control, and directory services.

I included a servicemix implementation component to jboss for deploying a webservice to external webservice clients. In addtion, servicemix allows for xmpp implementations along with messaging services over Java Messaging Service (JMS).

For authorization, an OpenID provider is accessed for warehousing usernames and passwords. Having users' credentials stored by an OpenID provider removes the potential possibility of a security breach regarding usernames and passwords.

Lastly, I selected PostgreSQL for the application's database layer. I have used PostgreSQL with many projects previously while the zero licensing cost to implement is most ideal.

To continue this development drill, I will next blog activity diagrams from using the potential use cases.

--Corey