why be square? own a parallel-i-pod now

new, no right angles anywhere in site. a parallelipod is a new mp3 player that can give you a sharper sound due to the acute angles on it - don;t be square, dont fall for the obtuse or roundy bits - get a parallelipod now - with masses of spiky features and some groovy artefacts too. features our novel new patent free prick-up-your-ears haptic
selection tool tested after thousands of seconds of user trials.

feelin flat and uninspiured, get the new multicore parallelipod - plays songs 1000 times as fast as any other mp3 player, guaranteed - so fast that they are, if not out of sight, ought of earshot before you can blink - come to think of it, if only we can get it out of the lab before christmas, if you get the quatipod, it plays songs before they are released, solving digital rights problems for all time (at least from then on).

beer marley (not mere barley:)

Until the philosophy which hold beer superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned -
Everywhere is beer -
Me say beer.

That until there no longer
First class and second class booze of any brewery
Until the colour of a mans pint
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes -
Me say beer.

That until the basic drinker's rights
Are equally guaranteed to all,
Without regard to ale -
Dis a beer.

That until that day
The dream of lasting haze,
World intoxication
Rule of international drunkeness
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued,
But never attained -
Now everywhere is war - war.

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That hold our brothers in the eagle,
In the castle,
the Bun Shop
Sub-human inebriation
Have been tippled,
Utterly decanted -
Well, everywhere is beer -
Me say beer.

Beer in the east,
Beer in the west,
Beer up north,
Beer down south -

compact routing and the internet

it surely is a shame that the internet is not a planar graph - if it wer, then it would fold up very neatly along various edges until it fit into a small envelope, then we could find our way around it a whole lot easier

as it is, its embedded in around 14 dimensions, which means it would crumple up if you folded it, and maybe even break in places that were more brittle, which would sure upset the ISPs

graduation re-defined

today several of my PhD students graduated in cambridge (yes, wearing silly gowns etc)

so when i did chemistry, graduation was what you used pipettes to do - dripping very accurate small amounts of stuff out

so maybe I should see myself and the university of cambridge as a sort of grandiose
phdiphdette (pronounced "fuddy fudette")?

perhaps not...

dave allen, woody allen, lily allen, paul allen:
to be sung to the tune of la allen's "Smile"
and without pronouncing ANY t's.

"Computer science aint better
than ICT, but its fitter,
not like plumbing or bein a knitter,
or even bein a baby sitter

programming aint more wicked
than babyshambling, insipid
stuff i aint keane on, like sid's
vids an' cds and my old fake i-d.

can you help me wiv me printer
i lost me passwd and now i'm outta
luck and outta toner, what a bummer
this aint the life i'm into....

can you get me credit back
me tea's gone cold and sorta lacks
the tide's gone out the back
and so has my lift home...

CS & SF

it aint just coz we is geeks that CSers like SF -
computer science research is often about taking one facet or dimension of the world, and exagerating it beyond all reason - so is SF - what if, one day, it starts raining, or snowing, and doesnt stop. ever. or what if one day, average intelligence increases by 50%, or we all become telepathic, or we stop? similalry, what if we put all the processing in the world in one plae and just had dumb displays in offices and homes? or what if we put ALL the storage and processing in all the homes, and NONE In data centers? or what if a processor only had 2 instructions and no registers? or all instructiosn were self modifying? etc etc

ICT v. CS

So re-badging a bunch of CS under the banner of ICT was a vain attempt by the telecom industry (see who backed it - principally BT, FT, DT etc) to hitch their sinking ship to the rising star of computing - alas, too heavy was the titanic that was telekon, too
nice, undefensive and not quite buoyant enough Computer Science - so we are now all hands on the same deck, playing mozart while the boat sinks without trace

I blame the downturn of interest in CS (at school and uni) partly on this - they (ICT) made us (CS) look boring, male dominated and engineering-only ish - the dead hand of alexander graham bell and thomas edison, instead of the livewire of maxwell, faraday jefferson and turing (sort of mangling my metaphors and history of science a bit there you understand:-)

pet area networks

so i've decided that the killer app. for haggle is to put opportunistic networking nodes on pets - imagine your poodle or siamese had a collar with an iMote in it - you'd tell where it had been, and it could carry info around in an emergency - sort of like a St Bernards rescue dog (with the bradny barrel udner its chin) only virtual...

cool tech in daily use in merc

just got a cab ride from frankfurt to darmstadt - the taxi driver's phone rang - he answered withotu taking his hands of the steering wheel - speaker phone mike/volume all adjustable on buttons on the big mercedes steering wheel - but cooler - his cell phone was docked without wires and chardging in a wide slot you just drop it in and pick it up when you get out - very classy indeed - eat yr heart out mit:)

I take a dim view of this:-)

some folks at UW and M have built some tools to take public archives of people's snaps and build really really cool fly around views of the world, mixing metadata, virtual and real in a novel way -

only downside of this is that its possible it may deter people from publishing some stuff (flicr and other things may start to offer more closed community views) - especialyl when pictures contain private components - one could imagine a tool that allows synth-photo-shopping out those components auto-magically so people would have the private view for their friends and famiily, but still publish the public components (mostly this would be a foreground/.background edit since most snaps have one's subject in foreground (person) and the scene in the background (leaning tower of teleon or Voter Damn cathedral in new your or whathave you) -such automatic algorithms exist and are pretty good...

etch a sketch for the Mac

so the ibook/macbook have accelerometers which you can program - so time to implement a software etch a sketch = use the tracker pad do draw, then shake it clear - easy as pie

about 3 minutes programming...

could be web based acherlly now i think about it...

Human Scale Metrics

When I was a kid I used to measure the price of things in units of Mars Bars (a popular chocolate teeth desctructor in the UK).

as a frequent cyclist (coommuniter) since 1981, I measure time in units of changing inner tubes (around 3 minutes with relevant kit)

I now measure credit and debt in books (loaned) and far prefer pounds (livres) as a measure of weight (4 apples) than kilos (enough potatoes for a rugby team).

SI units do not pass the usability criteria - just think of 1 Farad capacitor, or a 1 Tesla magnetic field - what were these guys doing when they came up with those? :-)

fooled by randomness - rain in cam is mainly on the tracks

Reading this fine book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

so one thing I "observed" is that whenver I come into cambridge by train and it is raining, the rain is either on the track before the station, or on the road after the station, but not both.

this is an observation bias - i only notice this as I will probably have my waterproof ccling gear on already if it is both, but have to put it on or take it off if its exclusively one or other. so i only remember the times i have to change gear:-)


bizarely, steven hand recommended this book to me the day it arrived from amazon for me - of course, he probably bought it because of the same publication and reviews as I did so thats not a "coincidence" - its understandable (else how would "charts" ever work:-)

Building MAD Systems

today I am in Bertinoro at FuDiCo III, a
workshop on building MAD systems - FuDiCo is Future Directions in distributed Compting,
and MAD is not totally crazy, but stands for "multiple administrative domains".

I took some happy snaps with my trusty camera fone:-)

So far, the place is totally cool, and the talks are v. interesting!

So from the network perspective, I offered these notes:

1. End users adapt their rate to maximize utility & network providers provision
routes to maximise profit and minimise costs (through getting high utilisation)

Separately, ISPs compete by offering transit to end users, and to other ISPs
(either in customer / provider relationship, or peering)

However, end users cannot choose ISP - the mechanism that might work is loose
source routing - it could be policed coarse or fine grained, but is in fact
blocked. If a user subscribed to an IS that advertised "long haul provider
selection" it could be done to differentiate traffic (e.g. by delay, reliability
or whatever), but ISPs argue against this option
i) incorrectly, that it would be a security flaw (claiming it would allow
trangular/indirection attacks on the internet - in facty it still reveals the
source, and most indirection attacks on the net relay on higher level relays to
obfuscate the source)
ii) more crucually, that it would "level the playing field" between ISPs - that
is the point - in an ideal sense, by allowing users to game the system, just as
ISPs can do to each other, it wold move them to a marginal profit (i.e. a
"perfect market")

The question is whether in practive it might have other problems if there are
malicious players out there or accidentally bad players as well as rational and
altruistic users and ISPs

how would we show that offering Internet "AS long haul provider selection" is, in
general, not the end of the ISP business (and further is stable or has other nice
properties in terms of deployability)?

2. There are perverser incentives for ISPs to not prevent Distributed Denial of
Service attacks - An ISP in the UK that has no servers measures wuite frequent
traffic flows traversing their network to other ISps at aggregate data rates of
up to 7Gbps! Since their own customers are not impacted by this, AND they get to
claim they are forwarding lots of traffic transit to other ISPs, they get to peer
with those other ISPs instead of just being a customer so they have no reason to
block/ratelimit or blackhole these DDOS attacks!

Other examples of perverse incentives are
Microsoft shipped an anti-vurus advisory system in Windows XP Service Pack II but
did not include their own antivris software because they were worried about
litigation (e.g. under anti-trust law) from the Windows Virus protection software
vendors - default-on anti virus software would mean that less systems would be
susceptible to explotation as (say) botnet bot/farm/ddos sources, but because
microsoft didnt ship a product, many people installing XP chose not to spend
extra to buy antivirus, and so are vulnerable to being used as attacker sources!

how would one mitigate this?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
background - distributed systems versus networks - areas of interest, community focus, venues and research approaches:


tcp/ip
problems
non gameable congestion control/rate
e.g. dual opt formulation
U: maximise each users utility
N: maximise revenue for min cost

properties we'd like to derive
deviation from fairness?
range and scope of efficiency?
[i.e. quantitative] <- sigcommm

bgp
problems
converge (bad gadget)
goal (rational/byzantine/altruistic)
negotiation & revelation

propertues we'd like results for
non-gameable
range of business relationships
[i.e. qualitative] <- podc



DoS-Proof (Next Generation) Internet & MANET
problems
incentive align/game
start with strategy proof
identity/resource use
propertes we'd like to have
risk/impact of attack
percentage free riding
[i.e. quantiative] <- sigcomm

P2P
problems
incentive align (upload v. download)
reputation/recommendation
sybil proof (non fakeable ID)
non foregeable token
attack on content (dos on content)
desirable properties
cooperation (whether by altruism or enforcement)
performance of p2p v. server v. multicast
[i.e. quantiative & qualiative] <- sigcomm and podc!

whither weather back when? backcasting

here's a half an idea

last week in italy it rained like help - the forecast predicted it would rai na bit but was out by a factor of 3, but anyhow who am i to complain, but now i try to find a record of
1/ the forecast
2/ the backcast
for last week, i find nada, nuttin, doodlysquat - there's no record of what people predicted versus what happened. what kind of a service is that then eh? its not like we're giving away trade secrets (like form and horsies). It should be Out There for us to find. The truth (or lack of it) should be in weather backcasts.

the could be a whole new brand of dweeb who stands up on youtube or whateve god forsaken technology comes along next to replace TV, and tries to "do better" given the data - we could have Met Office Bake Offs (oops, sorry, bakeoff is a trademark of some american apple pie company:) - but perhaps, in this era of global warning, it would be a bake off (which city is gonan bake its greenbelt right off next summer? perth? LA? ulan batur?

This has been another barking and reading idea from the Free Plotware Foundation.

(yeah , i know the wayback engine would have sort of provided this, but the wayback engine was wayback, like when the web was tiny (smaller than my memory stick) and even then it was way behind:-)

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...