android g2 phone....

..we got some for a project (on mobile social nets..) and they are jolly nice (this is the HTC hero) - very very close functionally to the iPhone, plus a lot of cool apps (Doom, can you believe:) - and all this on an open platform....neat...with wifi and GPS on it lasts about most a working day, but with 3G on, wifi and GPS off, about 2 days....with just voice, about 3...so not too bad...nice camera...

wireless on planes

--------
yesterday we flew back from Crete to London on a nice A320 run by
Monarch Airlines - very pleasant - after the usual safety announcements
about turnign off all wireless (which actually listed wireless
laptops, games, GSM, 3G, SMS and so on), we took off, quickly reached
cruising altitude and then a whole bunch of different kids started
playing on their Nintendo DSs - there's this cute ad hoc wireless
conferencing app that they all started using, and slowly, abut 30 kids
discovered each other and a game evolved which was very like
Nottingham University's "can you see me now", with kids waving arm in
the air and other kids had to tag a person on screen before a hand
went down....very cute

and of cours, entirely based on wireless ethernet......
the game ewnt on most the 3.30 flight and noone from the
flight attendants said a word....

ignorance and creativity...

so cute:)

and prima facie evidence that a WHOLEr LOT Of wifi traffic has abslutely zero impact on the safe flying of a fly-by-wire moden plane.

software engineering is really about programming avoidance

just reading the very amusing "Head First Design Patterns" book by Freeman&Freeman (freemen) _ basically, as far as I can tell, all of software engienening is about deferred gratification, or in other words, putting off the real work as long as possible - i.e. avoiding programming if it costs you the earth...

this means that by definition we should never ever ever teach Software Engineeing
becuase no-one learning it would ever do any programming, and so they'd never know why you need software engineering (doh)

maybe we need a new OO paradigm called Manana - the ultimate in late binding...

meanwhile, I am trying out this excellent book on python programming on an 11 year old kid in my house - he's on chapter 3 in 1 day...awesome!

epidemics....how the swine flu should roll out, and back again

so the beeb reports 100,000 people have h1n1, mainly in under 14s.

Schools finished last friday, i.e. 6 days ago, and in the younger age group, people are infections for 2 days more (7 days), and shed virus thru skin (i.e. touching) - assume most these kids are in families of 4 on average, one would expect all those in the family to be infected during this period too (but not necessarily displaying symptoms just yet), which means an underestimate by *4 - i.e. 400,000. assume most these people are infected last weekend (when kids came home from school and socialised most) and then went to work as normal monday - they would infect (but with lower probability) a fraction of the people they socialise with (on average a person's social group is 150 - this is in physical world, people in family, friends and colleagues) - say per day they infect 1% - i.e 1 person - by end of the week (tomorrow) you'd expect to see the number grow * 7 - ie. 2.8M. This weekend, the rest of the family (except the, curiously, and luckily, mainly immune grannies and grandpas) get it and nex week, those 2.8M infect around 7* more, i.e. 21M

so I'd predict the epidemic peaks with 1/2 the population infected by mid august, but then as everyone who's had i is now immune (we hope) form re-infection, the faction still infectious is decreasing, and the faction not yet infected is decreasing, so the rate should fall fairly fast til september...

that's my 2 cents.

oh, background - i'm using handwavy approcximation to the SIR model (good for pandemics over large numbers) - see
wikipedia entry for SIR for more details

dI = [ beta * I * S ] - [R * I]
dt

where beta is contact rate (we meet that many people a day)
I is number infected so far
and S is susecptability
and R is recover rate

so in discrete terms, with a 1 day step
taking beta as 4 and S as 1/3
and R 1/4 (recovery time as 7 days)
I grows at nearly doubling per day until we hit about 1/2... as per above
and this then starts to fall....

3 startup ideas and one visual metaphor

1. using contact graphs (as per haggle project) do a
realorgchart.org
startup - basically find out what true
hubs and clique, and flow of info between them is
and comapre to company's "pretend" org chart:)

2. pedagogoc virtual machines (aka tinyxen) - so we need to teach people about
multicore and h/w support for virtualising (core/thread, memory, I/O) and OS tasks that use this - so we need a small (like linux was origianly, or xen was or minix or xinu)
system (both a multicore arm and a multucore VM) to teach people from - sort of the henessy&patterson h/w: s/w interface book, but most of that concentrates on what the interface between programming lanagauges (stack/procedure call) and h/w - now we need it for microkernels and OSs etc

3. a business model process for managing the Techncail Intercept window - this is the time that it is best to try spinning an idea out - we were discussing internet food shoping yesterday and remembered a US failed startup a few years back that tried to do an Ocado - just a few years before there were enough broadband accustomed customers to make it make sense...so how tdo you find the ideal window?
(say from inception to boringiness is 20 years and there's roughly a 5 year gap in that 20 years when there might be a 1 ear opportunity to get things first, but not too soon.....optimise!)

FInally, it'd be neat to have a "bad idea crime scene investigations" toolkit - we could carry away the broken ideas in body bags, leaving a chalk outline on the lab floor and pieces of string where the bullets flew....

greening the internet/computing

is a bit naive - take a look at
gavin schmidt's rather more holistic and complex view of the type of things we need to consider about models and the future in general

Recent CL proposal successes

so we've been sucessful in two EPSRC proposals - one is we are part of the Nottingham run hub in gdigital economy called Horizon - this is mostly about new business models (e.g. advertising) in pervasive computing - the other is an ordinary project in secure by design federating of sensor nets, called Fresnel, collaborating with folks in Oxford (OII and Computing) - each entails 2 post docs and soem PhDs - adverts will appear shortly on the CL normal vacancies page

better than zero-copy stacks

conundrum - can you do better than a zero-copy stack?

far as i recall, some folks at Sun Microsystems did the first unix with zero copy
from user space to/from network device way way back (prob. 92?) so that was as good as it gets in some sense....or is it? can you get a packet from the net in less than no time? I think you can in the sense that you could wake up the application before all the packet had finished dma-ing (or for a non blocking read/write application, you could do the copy on write thing 1 bit ahead rather than the whole packet) - of course, you'd need some insanely fine grain lock on the packet buffer somehow (or some fine grain virtual memory hack) which will be Rather Expensive(TM) in Real Life...

quantum networking...

I just got back from madrid where we had a nice dinner in Real Madrid's home stadium restuarant. the event was IMDEA's seminar n qunatum networking and had some seriously interesting talks from

Chip Elliott, BBN Technologies, USA
has a real operational QKD net in Cambridge Mass

Matthieu Legr?, id Quantique, Switzerland
works for a company that sell working QKD kit

Michele Mosca, Inst. of Quantum Computing, Canada
runs this institute in Waterloo which does the whole thing (incl QC algorithmics)

Emina Soljanin, Bell Labs, USA
very clear theorist with clean models of things like quantum multicast

Paolo Villoresi, Univ. of Padova, Italy
QKD over satellite and other free space (i.e. non photonic/fiber) based channels!

i had 4 bad ideas during the meeting
1. have a classical resource model of qunatum resources for the classically challenged
2. QKD satellelites could provide eye in the sky secure control plane
3. QZKP and other interesting zero knowledge or shared secret stuff, homomrphic hashes, quantum watermarks)
4. what's the Qbit rate for a multihop free space qunatum channel?

my proposal is to get the physicists to do this under some bogo-banner (e.g. Quntum Grid)

isps complaints about content companies

so here's th thing
BT, (for example) complain that the bbc's iplayer (for example) causes too much traffic.
well, huhn - now I susbscribe to the internet at a given data rate because that is what is advertised - note this is a _download_ rate - I am already getting a massively erduced uplink speed to prevent me messign up the net as a small customer, and that is fine (and partly due to technology and physics limitations of ADSL on copper).

but when they sold me a service, they should have thought "oh, maybe he'll actually use it" - note I have a solid 8Mbps...

and when the BBC connect a large scale data center to the net (at some large scale price)
maybe the service provider should think "hmm, wonder why they're doing that" and think about who they are (oh, the bbc - maybe they want to let people download programmes later)

so when they service provider complains about the content provider "causing too much traffic", recall AT& complaining about google "causing load" and wanting a slice of the action

whaty is really going on is that company A failed to realise company B was going to be a success, and is now upset it didn't and is trying to remove neutrality as a threat (stick) to get a part of company B's profit. Nevermind that there was nothing whatsoever except lack of imagination stopping company A being in the business company B provided (oh, ok, so in BT's case, there was a long running rule about being a TV company....however this didn't stop them making money out of selling capacity to TV broadcast companies, and now, thanks to Ofcomm, is going away anyhow).

No, sorry, this is getting silly - nonetheleast because they "blame" is the wrong direction - blaming the BBC because the BBC's customers use BT's customers to use BT's network is surreal. You sell some folks a network, (and get a monthly fee, AND a lot of them upgrade as fast as they can pay more to get the upgrade) then complain when they use the network. Doh. what business did you want to be in then, is it?

(BT is a bad example, I admit due to the old no-TV rule) - so add your own.

Now look at Virgin's new "all you can eat" music subscription service proposal , and big stick if you do anything bad (they disconnect you) - this sounds like dubious practice to me...

a week in cambridge

this week has been bonkers - we had a great talk on monday by Fabio Bustamante about his use of crowdsourcing in bittorrent clients to measure the internet
then we had this stochastic nets workshop which Richard Gibbens organised which was fantastic, with loads of great talks on resource pooling, P2P systems and so on, then we had this workshop on pricing an auctions which Peter Key organised with some great talks on mechanism design and social networks, and now we have this biowire 2009 workshop which has some superb talks on the natural world and its "network" algorithms, and there was a really great semianr by Andrew Birrell on the history of concurrency!

enough for a whole year

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helping tourists from america

cambridge is famous for science, but that might put off some tourists so I propose that we found some new institutions to attract american investment

we could start with
1. the Darwin Institute of Theology
2. the Isaac Newton Institute of Astrology
and perhaps
3. the Stephen Hawking Economics Laboratory

twitter users clueless about computing

this survey of happy programmers on twitter just proves what I say about a) twitter users and b) perl....

perl amoongst swine?

how useful is pervasive computing....MP expense data analysis

this guardian datastore MP expense visualisation site is a very nice example of how the net + data processing comes togetehr to allow rapid analysis and display of things that matter - this is a lot better than all the headline grabbing and really brings home a lot of interesting facets of the behaviour of our elected representatives...its also a nice example of a distributed collaboration!

matter transmogrifiers & trek tech

so how come in star trek when they beam across to an alien space ship
the enterprise crew don't arrive in the alien transporter
in alien bodies, eh?

answer me that, dearie

all CS People should read

this interview with lamport is timeless (so to speak:-)

is a research lab useful?

a tech news report on MSR Cambridge open day on zdnet seems to feel that the sort of open ended research they do is not "useful" and is merely a status thing - the report is based on the things seen that day and could be contrasted with the glowing bbc report about google

The contrast is strong - the stuff the zdnet reporter says is useless and the stuff the bbc enthuse about are completely different - they are also selective
a) MSR cambridge has done shedloads of things (more than any other lab) that have made it into products and mainstream products at that (tools and techniques to fix concrrency problems, remove device driver problems, and game AI work, for example) -
b) the pipleline for work to get out of MSR into a products group is around 5 years...
c) the google work, in contrast is much more like Cisco's model (hire or buy some PhDs in whose work is nearly done...and
d) is mostly just development

The lack of context in either report is typical of modern slapdash journalism - IPv6 mobile work came from Lancaster - things like lo-power are on everyone's agenda from home users, EU and US lawmakers to data centers and mobile devices....the idea that apple would exist without the tech transfer from Xerox PARC into Apple research into product lines is laughable - the timeline there was more like 10-15 years - once tat group was done, of course Jobs shut it down but longer term, they will regret not having a constantly refreshed on tap pool of researchers

in the current economic climate, most pundits think it is even more crucial to have a research pipeline to come out of recession with shiny new stuff - hence Telefonica, T-Labs, MSR, etc etc, have ring-fenced the budget for their research labs - governments too have (Obama increased US research budgets, the UK have tried to at least keep EPSRC funding level...)

yes it has status and marketing value none the least amongst tech/geek followers - of course it doesn ,because it is a clueful strategy, not some empty-headed shell purely for windows-dressing (pun intended).

Having recently been part of a review team at Telefonica I&D, the Hamilton Institute, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Eurecom (in Sophia Antipolis) and MSR, I can honestly say that these guys are all fantastically useful, and people that can't see this are looking for the wrong thing (I'm not just talking about contributions to fundamental human knowledge, I am talking about contributions to health, entertainment and business (the bottom line)

class hierarchy and facebook

I've just got facebook on my Windows mobile 6 phone

next to my friends who have iPhones, I feel pretty sad

and next to the folks here who haev snazyy android phones, I feel somewhat sad

so
windows mobile = working class
android = middle class
iPhone = upper class

This is inline with th immortal Cleese, Barker, Corbett class sketch from pre-python years....

Monty-Haskell, anyone?

jolly good project to do with helicopter....

oh, ok it's quite cool - iphone
to run things :-
remotely, in the air

maybe a nintendo wii controller would have been better tho