What defines a really good systems architecture?

whether network, operating system or processor architecture, what defines a really good one, is that no matter how much stupidity is thrown on top of it (whether its unix, the internet or RISC) it mostly survives intact -e.g. people added X to Unix, BGP to the Internet, and floating point co processors to RISC, but they still didnt manage to completely break them

this was promopted by watching yakov rekhter's google video tech. talk about 18th year of BGP hacks with what I would say was a remarkably consistent 10% inability
to abstract

(as in Cool Hand Luke: "what we have here is a failure to abstract")

so there

The Molecular Theory of Bicycles

Glory be to god, today I have seen with these my own eyes, in vivo evidence of the wonderful molecular theory of de Selby, reported in the Dalkey Archive by the learned Father Flan O'Brien.

I was waling by the river in Cambridge when a bicycle went past with an adult home sapiens on it, unsurprisingly, you might observe, but then, right behind, was a much smaller bicycle with a much smaller human, who I can only surmise was a child of the larger human.

One must assume that when the child climbed on the bike, the admixture of molecules casued it to become more childlike, and, further, because of the familial relationship between the human in front, and the child behind, the foremost bike evolved a hand to reach out and hold the rearmost bicycle, just as its rider might do on foot.

Mirabile dictu, the first evidence. An interesting experiment suggests itself, which would be to see if placing the child on a bike in front of its riding parent would systematically work in the same way, or would the riders and bikes turn around to go the other way.

of course, were the council to improve the road surface, as de Selby reports, the problem might go away.

stunt web pages

so what would a stunt web page be? it is first and foremost a more anonymous looking web page that stands in for the "real" star web page, but then does cool things (like jumping motorbikes through flaming hoops type things)

examples of stunt web pages include tricks like removing the need for subscription,
ddos mitagation, and changing all the text into jivetalk

home wifi hotspot web redirect? wireless projectors

so why don't home wifi routers have a hotspot web server to allow one to give liogins to visitors but get info on them and et their agreement (to terms&conditions)
like public commercial (WISP) hotspots?

surely that would make life a lot safer in terms of liability in giving out open access to all and sundry...oh, steve coast pointed me at
fon who do this of course!

secondly, why are there not data projectors with WiFI and VNC so i can do my talk without VGA adaptors/cables and can share the projector space with other people in the room - could easily have a "floor control" implemented (e.g. as a remote control with wifi/bluetooth and some sort of s/w handover)...I am sure one could do this with the
NDIYO on OLPC that michael dales did for example....

I want one now (and then)!!! !!!

thirdly why are blueteeth and zigbeeswax such silly names?

answers on a cartel

post modern blog art

so how about we take
Yahoo Pipes
and combine it with
Post Modern Rant Generation
and put together a sort of uber blog art out of plumbing - sort of like RObert de Niro in the wainscotes in That movie Brasil?

(thanks to john naughton and Q and richard gold for dangly pointers

fed up with rejection (of papers, not just you:)?

why not submit them to my new conference - like the journal of irreproduceable results, this conference is for unsustainable research...we specialise in accepting papers that are not acceptable anywhere else

my friend richard clayton pointed me at this wonderful site, which includes some quite astoundingly daft

reviews of some quite famous papers that you might have heard of...

don't look now but someone stole my MANET

today I am in the middle of nowhere, about 17km from the edge of nowhere, just in front of the back of beyond, at the 7th Ad Hoc Wireless Scandinavian workshop, giving a talk about haggledy-paggledy stuff, and listening to the other work going on round here.

The wireless access is good and free, but I doubt it is ad hoc - as steve hand wisely said, Ad Hoc workshops never go as expected. the taxi driver got lost on the way here from Aarland, but then used a set of multiple multi-hop phone calls to find out how to get to the destination (he had satnav, but it didnt have the name of the place in its database:(

The event itself is jolly good with a lot of technically sound, interesting, and fun talks on DTN, MANET, practice, modeling, and other...seems like Scandinavia (and the related places some attendees came from) is a hotbed of hotnets

my talk is online already; i suppose that one of these days i'll show up but no-one else will as they'll have read the talk and realize i have nothing new to add to the fountain of noise.