Friday, October 26, 2012

Principles of Communications 2012 up to L10 - week 4

Made Errors:)

About to Start Flow Control. (Feedback welcome:)

Asked what books cover the non math component of PoC - answer is on the course web page - best reference is the other book by Keshav (An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking), which should be in most (college/lab) libraries.

Asked where to find proof of the bound on diameter of Erdos-Renyi graph - refer to this review/tutorial paper:
http://www.barabasilab.com/pubs/CCNR-ALB_Publications/200201-30_RevModernPhys-StatisticalMech/200201-30_RevModernPhys-StatisticalMech.pdf


Friday, October 19, 2012

Principles of Communications 2012 up to L7 - week 3

Couple of errata on graphs :

1.
s/walk/path/ in one slide (i.e. whether a vertex can appear more than once!)
2.
p<3 -="-" algorithm="algorithm" dar="dar" does="does" finding="finding" fraction="fraction" good="good" greedy="greedy" high="high" in="in" is="is" make="make" of="of" p="p" probability.="probability." property="property" succeed="succeed" sure="sure" that="that" to="to" triangles="triangles" with="with">
progress:
finished LS&DV Routing -
Coming Monday,  wil complete Multicast, Mobile
Wednesday, errors
Friday, Flow Control& Start on Control Theory

Friday, October 12, 2012

Principles of Communications 2012 up to L4 - week 2

Today, started Graph Theory (well, background at least)
Monday, will pick up on graph properties, random graphs, small world/clustering and searching. Then Next week, should cover most the Routing area.

For further edification and amusement,

Cambridge Networks Network

http://www.cnn.group.cam.ac.uk/

Erdos Bacon number
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number

Erdos zombies:
http://xkcd.com/599/

kirchoff geek traps
http://xkcd.com/356/

Friday, October 05, 2012

Principles of Communications 2012 L1 - week 1/2!

oops #1 - failed to spot 2nd box of lecture handouts - so they will be available on monday - apologies - mea culpa (not the admin fault)

oops #2 - 1kbps on the net is 1000 bps, because the k is from the sample rate (so a KHz refers to 1000 samples a second) but 1k bits (or bytes) in computer speak refers to 1024 bits (or bytes) coz its 2^10 memory locations or whatever

so being pedantic and wrong on slide 9 is a bit embarassing:)

Michaelmas Term 2012 - Start of Term & IET President's Inaugural Speech

Today (well this week) term kicks off and I'm teaching Principles of Communications to Part II, and Network Architecture to Part III and MPhil students.

Meanwhile, last night, I attended Andy Hopper's really excellent speech at the IET in London, where a host of stars turned out, including an MP who is an engineer (and female) and other luminaries to hear his very very good words on how to make things innovative - he used a lot of nice use cases, taken from his experience and others nearby (ARM, RealVNC, Xen and of course UbiSense) but he also made some very good high level points about UK industry (under investing in Research) and how to fix that, and about Universities (do LOTS of innnovation and let the market pick) and about government (stop the REF now - it served its purpose and is past its sell by date and actually probably damaging things now). All good stuff - I dn't want to stand up and ask a question but if I had, I'd have asked him about the new stuff we're doing with raspberry pi, Digital Life Foundation, OcamlLabs, and Computing at School, all of which have extreme "business model" approaches -
See IET TV of Andy Hopper's talk

might have been a good place to name check serial entrepreneurs like Ian Pratt and Keir Fraser (Bromium and Convergent.IO, post xen), too....next time:)

Two ideas
1. cheap opthalmoscope made out of toy microscope & android camera phone & some simple DSP code (on the phone
2. remote control for hearing aid using ultrasonic sound from the android phone (speaker can go to frequencies higher than you can hear, but hearing aid can hear them) so you can reset programmes for different environments
(both for me:)

3. Must talk to CCNx folks about Andrea lo Pumo's work on policy routes for content centric networking - ok, so we are ignoring "content value chain" but I think its more than just "cache flow" versus "packet flow" :)

Back to school.....