tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35707262024-03-12T22:18:47.855-07:00Postcards from the Bleeding EdgeDavid Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.<p></p>David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.comBlogger838125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-54565379653834855672020-04-05T11:50:00.001-07:002020-04-05T11:57:39.390-07:00Sharing your home network better in a time of covid-19 isolation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Advisories from the fcc and elsewhere are encouraging folk to "schedule their time", to "stop using bandwidth hogging applications", and so on, when the root cause of why so many of our home and small business networks share badly is a problem called "bufferbloat". I've been working on solving this problem, worldwide, for a decade now, and while many solutions are now available, very few are configured properly, but when configured properly, you really, really can, do multiple things with multiple people with your home network at the same time.<br />
<br />
If you have having issues sharing your network at home with your family, particularly with videoconferencing running simultaneously with anything else, try running a dslreports.com test, and note the bufferbloat grade. See also the <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/bufferbloat?up=1">worldwide report of the bufferbloat problem they provide</a>, as in an ideal world, no uplink would have more than 30ms of persistent buffering. Overbuffered uplinks contribute to the lag and quality of your videoconference, in particular, and any competing traffic can mess it up. <br />
<br />
A metric ton of home routers today have a "QoS" or "SQM" (smart queue management) option. If you take a few minutes out to configure it at slightly below your advertised bandwidth settings for up and down from your ISP, the overall sharing behavior of your network will probably get much better. If your router doesn't have modern queue management as an option, get one that does. Or, reflash an existing router with something more modern, and secure, like openwrt, dd-wrt, etc. (but certainly don't risk your main router doing this for the first time!). All the most bleeding edge code for fixing ISP bufferbloat (cake) and wifi (fq_codel) are in these third party firmwares. There are <a href="https://openwrt.org/toh/start">thousands of routers supported by these third party firmwares</a>, and the odds are good you might have one in a junk box somewhere. You can build a pretty good router out of an old x86 box as well, and layer openwrt, ipfire, pfsense or dozens of other firewall distros on top of it.<br />
<br />
DOCSIS 3.1 modems have "pie", but it's not universally turned on, but get one if you can. Ask your cable provider which ones have pie enabled.<br />
<br />
Off the shelf, many leading wifi brands nowadays also have some form of SQM, of particular note are evenroute, eero, and ubnt's edgerouter series. Most of the time, if your ISP bandwidth is below 100Mbit you have a major bufferbloat problem there. Faster than that, it shifts to the wifi, for which only a few (google wifi, eero) have fixes (outside of the more bleeding edge firmwares like openwrt, which have had them for a long time)<br />
<br />
pfsense has an easy to configure fq_codel option (the underlying algorithm for many SQM implementations). Preseem is selling a WISP solution, also<br />
<br />
We've given a lot of talks, and written a lot of stuff about the bufferbloat problem, (which ideally would be solved by ISPs supplying correctly configured hardware, in the long run). You'll find more info at www.bufferbloat.net , wikipedia, and by scouring the web, sites like reddit, and the outputs of the <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/wg/aqm/">IETF AQM working group</a>. Perhaps the most comprehensive recent article was by jim gettys,<a href="https://gettys.wordpress.com/category/bufferbloat/"> where he put out a call to action that too few have heard</a>.
<br />
You can make your network better at every bottleneck point by applying modern SQM techniqueues. We generally don't need "more bandwidth", but <i>better bandwidth</i>.
<br />
<br />
PS:This past week, I've dedicated some time to making the <a href="https://forum.openwrt.org/t/aql-and-the-ath10k-is-lovely/">ath10k drivers vastly better in linux</a>, finishing up <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/">some work that got cut short due to lack of funding 4 years ago</a>. If you look at plots like that and extrapolate to millions of users in the field with wifi behaving that badly, perhaps you'll want to toss a <a href="https://www.patreon.com/dtaht">bit of funding into my patreon</a> for this round... and at least, get sqm running on your existing routers, and cross connects. It would be good if more ISP's also told their customers how to go about fixing bufferbloat on their routers, or autoconfigured.</div>
Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-28658773522195646922019-12-26T09:08:00.002-08:002019-12-26T09:08:36.918-08:00Designing for the disconnect<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I gave a version of this talk, dramatically cut down in size to the Adelaide users group, back in 2008.<br />
<br />
I totally forgot I had it in draft here... I lost the accompanying slides (which help a lot) but the video is still in australia. I've been trying to tie it all together for year in some format that will make sense. I'm close. Perhaps getting this draft out will help me find a way to pull it together. It's important.<br />
<br />
[PROPS] – broom,<br />perfume, nokia, cellphone, laptop, goggles, ball, glasses, bluetooth<br />keyboard<br />
<br />
[TOOLS] – ACCESS POINT, LAPTOP,<br />
<br />
I'd stopped being homo sapiens and become google sapiens.<br />
<br />
I wanted to be here – [slide showing water scene] - to be able<br />to spend a productive day – getting in some exercise and sun –<br />but still able to work – unattached to the internet.<br />
<br />
This is the first chance I've had to give a talk in about a year,<br />I have a lot of slides to get through, so I'm going to take a 5<br />minute break in the middle. This talk is not particularly technical<br />in the first half, but it does wax and wane through some deeply<br />technical matters in the second.<br />
<br />
Today's talk was actually inspired by last month's talk here,<br />where [author] showed off all sorts of neat web and linux based tools<br />for managing the information in your business.<br />
<br />
And several times through the talk, he lost his internet<br />connection. [disconnect slide]<br />
<br />
The presentation... and all coherent thought... ceased. It<br />Stopped. Cold. I'm really glad our mission critical systems – like<br />the ABS brakes in your car, or the gas valve in your stove - are not<br />reliant on a SLA from your ISP or a genuine advantage guarantee from<br />Microsoft.<br />
<br />
He got back online after a frenzy of clicking, it was high stress,<br />but we've all been there, and we cut him some slack.<br />
<br />
That is what the last year has been like for me. I have been<br />offline far more often than I have been on... In some places I've<br />been I haven't even had electric power for days at a time. The<br />fundamental point I'm going to be bashing to death today is that you<br />have to design for the disconnect.<br />
<br />
You need to design around the inevitable disconnect. There's a lot<br />of forms that can take, whether accidental or deliberate.<br />
<br />
We have a generation growing up now that has almost never been<br />offline, and doesn't know how to function without a connection to<br />something. A good name for them, like generation X before them, is<br />“millenial”, and there's all sorts of writings on that generation<br />on the web, I'm not going to go into it.<br />
<br />
I'm a dinasour. I believe -<br />
<br />
Having to be connected all the time is a bad thing. That we need to be able to fly without the Net.<br />
<br />
We are all getting closer and closer ties to services like the<br />crackberry. The profits of those businesses, and google, and myspace,<br />and youtube, etc, is measured in stickyness, in talk or hang time, in<br />advertising pages delivered, not by how more effective you are in<br />conducting your daily business. Your traversals of their tollbooths<br />is measured in the stock prices and sale prices of the corporations<br />that are making you do it. Your dependency on them is not much<br />different than an addict's dependence on his drug dealer.<br />
<br />
Everybody wants to be building tollbooths. Few want to be building<br />new roads.<br />
<br />
[internet roads and the speed of transport]<br />
<br />
To get from point A to point B, you have to get through someone's<br />road, and go through their tollbooth. It might be faster – or a<br />nicer trip – to get to point B via point C, but services like that<br />aren't going to tell you about that, because you won't go through<br />their tollbooth then. Other services might advertise on your A-B<br />service, if possible, but no one is going to tell you about the<br />delightful trail through the mountain that goes past the waterfall,<br />you have to find that for yourself. They'd rather send you through<br />their big, glitzy tollbooth as often as possible.<br />
<br />
If you want to go off the map, a GPS helps.<br />
<br />
Portable GPS's are wonderful. Rental car agencies are renting them<br />out by the truckfull at 25 bucks a day. They save so much time and<br />stress and worry for someone moving around a strange place that they<br />are worth every penny, but they have limitations. Outsourcing all<br />your thinking to them is not always a good idea.<br />
<br />
I got a GPS once that decided that the best way to get where I was<br />going... was right through Newark, NJ's ghetto at 1 oclock in the<br />morning. I was so focused on the turn by turn directions on that trip<br />was – that I – ALMOST – didn't notice the prostitutes slouching<br />in the doorways or the three dudes crouching around a burning<br />trashcan. I DID notice the hulking guy that came up to my car window<br />and tried to sell me cocaine, but the light changed and I sped away<br />before I could be tempted.<br />
<br />
Those rental GPS costs add up quickly. Inside of a few weeks of<br />travelling around you can pay for one of your own. I was travelling a<br />lot so I bought one. It didn't work in New Zealand. but it works just<br />fine here in Oz.<br />
<br />
Actually, spending a day figuring out the public transport system,<br />involves even lower costs and less stress, you can outsource the<br />driving to a cab driver when needed, and read a newspaper, and having<br />the GPS along, even when walking, means you are generally lost only<br />for a few minutes and meters at a time.<br />
<br />
But - what do you do when you are in the middle of a strange<br />wilderness and the batteries to your GPS give out? [next slide]<br />
<br />
TIP for the Millenials: If you are in the northern hemisphere, the<br />topmost star in the little dipper is Polaris, the north star. IF you<br />are facing that way, east is to your right, west is to your left, and<br />south is behind you.<br />
<br />
[next slide] If you're in southern hemisphere, the closest<br />equivalent is the bottom star on the southern cross, which is here. I<br />think. I haven't got lost enough down here long enough to have to try<br />this one out.<br />
<br />
None of these alternatives is a good as a simple compass, which<br />requires no batteries, works in darkness and rain, and can be made<br />very small... not that I've ever seen a cell phone with one. It's<br />rare I see a car with one. I have seen a pocketknife with one –<br />that even had mp3 capability.<br />
<br />
Now there's a lot of people that think that the distance between<br />two points is measured by the number of highways and subway exits<br />between them. [new slide] This is a picture of ping times between all<br />the points on the internet taken a few years ago by caida.org. It<br />takes about 1/3 of a second, max, to get anywhere on the internet<br />that's up. Pretty neat – all this data that is out there...<br />
<br />
I've had this happen three times now. I'll have a kid over for a<br />day, and to distract them I'll put them in front of one of my<br />computers, a laptop, an OLPC, something... and the kid will ask me:<br />Can I get on the internet with your computer? Why? I want to play<br />tetris. [bring up tetris running locally]. No joke – I'll bring it<br />up here, on my machine, and they are amazed... The idea that<br />everything interesting exists – out there – not here – is one<br />of the things I'm trying to combat.<br />
<br />
It's NOT true that in order to be productive and functional, you<br />have to be online, all the time. Everything that's good about your<br />computer can exist on it.<br />
<br />
<b>DISORGANIZER</b><br />
<br />
Back in the 90s there was a brief trend towards the personal<br />organizer.<br />
<br />
There's a <a<br />href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bcTc8e2-6U>famous palm pilot<br />ad</a>. <a href=Palm.mpg>local copy</a> There's two<br />people, in different trains, that spot each other - It's love at<br />first sight, but they are in two different trains! As their trains<br />pull away, in different directions, in desperation they aim their<br />palm pilots at each other, with their contact information, and<br />presumably ring each other up, and live happily ever after.<br />
<br />
I can't do that with these. [point to laptop, nokia, cell] You<br />can't do that with anything being made today. My physical presence<br />has shrunk to my physical presence, and that's it. I've had to go<br />back to exchanging business cards and bothering to type them up when<br />I can.<br />
<br />
Look, I've got my laptop up on the net here, it's got all my<br />stuff, including this presentation, up at 54Mbit, on this address. If<br />you want it, logon while I talk for a while and snag yourself a copy.<br />[pause on this slide]<br />
<br />
Back when I had a personal organiser, all my contacts, all my<br />phone numbers, etc, etc, I could function without the net.<br />
<br />
Cell phones do much of that now, but not enough, and in some ways,<br />too much.<br />
<br />
I was in Boston last year, and saw that Richard Stallman was in<br />town. The GPL has had something of a large influence on my life, so I<br />rung him up, and asked to take him to dinner. He insisted on calling<br />my cell phone a “Government tracking device”, and we talked more<br />about 14 tone music and art than anything else. Some of that music<br />was incredible! I love listening to the music brilliant minds listen<br />to, to get people like that to play dj for me. But the phrase<br />“Government tracking device” stuck with me, and I stopped<br />carrying a cell phone a while back, which I hope makes Richard<br />happier. I kind of like not spending 50 bucks a month on it – ever<br />since I got off the regular phone network and switched to sip and<br />skype, my telephony cost has dropped below a fifteen dollars a month,<br />fourteen bucks of which is spent on keeping a regular phone number.<br />If you were to get off the regular phone system and adopt a free<br />service like those, my costs would drop to zero, as would yours.<br />
<br />
My disconnect from the cell phone network makes my Millenial<br />friends crazy. Hi greg.<br />
<br />
There is one cellphone out there for every two humans on the<br />planet, they have far more penetration than the desktop computer ever<br />had, or will have, and they are mostly locked down, fixed function<br />devices that could be amazingly useful as an organizer, web tool, and<br />brain enhancer if only you could get code onto them without having to<br />pass through some vendor's tollbooth. easily.<br />
<br />
Google's android looks like a good start. I'd still prefer a phone<br />that wasn't a government tracking device, though – but that's the<br />price of centralization, bandwidth monopolies, and huge<br />infrastructure buildouts, I'm not going to rant about that today.<br />
<br />
There's one thing that drives me absolutely insane about<br />cellphones. Voicemail. Despite the fact that you have a perfectly<br />usable data connection on your phone – voicemail requires that you<br />make a call to a system – to listen, respond, or delete it – it<br />requires that you be online, and in range. If you are on a fuzzy<br />connection, tough, you have to listen through it.<br />
<br />
Voicemail is DATA. There's enough storage on today's cellphones to<br />store thousands of voicemails, have the message get transmitted to<br />you reliably in the background whenever you have a good connect, and<br />let you listen to it – and even reply – offline.<br />
<br />
I transfer my voip voicemail to email – which is great – but<br />convincing the average carrier to route missed calls to my voicemail<br />system is an exercise in frustration.<br />
<br />
<b>DISCONNECT</b><br />
<br />
We used to build LANs so we could SHARE files. I go to internet<br />cafe's and hotels nowadays only to find that their wireless access<br />points have got local access turned off, so two machines in the same<br />room can't talk to each other. Now, they do this because it stops<br />worms dead, but it also means that, for example, I can't play a game<br />with someone in the same room without routing the packets over the<br />internet and back. Nor can I connect my 3 wireless devices together<br />to sync them up. My computers run linux, which has no issues with<br />worms...<br />
<br />
Lots of stuff that used to just work between two computers on the<br />same lan has stopped working... it makes me feel – disconnected –<br />why should all our traffic have to go out to a server located in<br />timbuktu and back because we are afraid to share files with each<br />other, directly?<br />
<br />
[hold up nokia] This is a nokia 810. It's got wireless. I love it<br />– but it doesn't – by default – come with any file sharing<br />software. I'd LOVE it if I could drag and drop files over to it. File<br />sharing used to be what networks were for, now people are debating<br />about the legality of it.<br />
<br />
One time I was sitting in the San Francisco airport, fiddling with<br />this thing, feeling really disconnected, trying to get online, to get<br />through another Internet tollbooth, tediously filling out yet another<br />credit card form – 10 minutes to fill it out so I could get online,<br />for 2 hours of access – bored off my nut – lonely - and all of a<br />sudden a message popped up on my screen – somebody within 30 feet<br />of me, was offering me an mp3 to listen to!! Over bluetooth!? Cool. I<br />downloaded the file. The song sucked. But it was the thought that<br />counted.<br />
<br />
Somebody still wanted to share...<br />
<br />
<b>HISTORY</b><br />
<br />
Back in the early 90s – and I've been on the net for far longer<br />than that - I had a very different vision for what the internet would<br />be like today. I thought the net would be an extension of your home<br />into cyberspace. Your files, your devices, would all be reachable<br />from anywhere on the net that had authorized access, that we'd do all<br />the authorizations with digitally encrypted certificates – never<br />have to type in more than one password a day - And that we'd pay for<br />it all with micro-transactions.<br />
<br />
I thought that email would come right into your server –<br />directly to your house - just like postal mail – and it would have<br />the same protections and security of regular mail – in fact –<br />more – it would be encrypted and private all the way up to your<br />eyeballs.<br />
<br />
I thought everybody would have a static ip address, and be able to<br />route back to their homes so they could turn on or off the heat.<br />
<br />
I thought that your car would download your favorite music, news<br />reports, and reminders. Your fridge would tell your car that you<br />needed milk, your mp3 player would flush itself out to your servers<br />and reload itself with new stuff – and that it would all be<br />entirely under your control and easy... your cat would be able to get<br />itself in and out of the house... That that 1/3 of a second latency<br />on everything I keep mentioning wouldn't exist...<br />
<br />
For the record. <a href="http://maps.google.com/?t=k&ll=40.704438,-74.008332&spn=0.001395,0.002516&t=k">I<br />never thought we'd be flying biplanes to work</a>. [pic from<br />metropolis]<br />
<br />
It didn't work out that way... In the case of email...<br />
<br />
A few bad guys have buggered it up for all of us. To get a single<br />piece of email accepted onto my server requires something like 5 http<br />requests to the various realtime blackhole mechanisms, and seperate<br />runs through a spam filter, and an antivirus filter. And before I can<br />accept an email from someone for the first time, my server greylists<br />that user, delaying that first delivery by 4 hours or so.<br />
<br />
All this happens even I'm sending email to the guy the next<br />cubicle over. And now people are outsourcing their email to gmail.<br />I'm incapable of doing that – my mail is my mail and I don't want<br />big brother having his shot at it first.<br />
<br />
It's no wonder to me that various IM schemes have virtually<br />replaced email in some environments. Email is too much hassle, it's<br />too slow, and you have to work at it...<br />
<br />
I never imagined that vendors would arbitrarily split upload and<br />download bandwidth – Oh I knew the cable guys basically only wanted<br />enough backchannel bandwidth for a buy button. I didn't think that<br />the ISPs would rate limit transfers within their own country - I did<br />think a tiered pricing scheme would develop, where you'd pay more for<br />international data than national data – those undersea cables are<br />expensive! and for data off your net than on it – much like how the<br />cell phone biz evolved – but a general bandwidth limitation? Never<br />thunk it.<br />
<br />
The incentives are perverse. There's no percentage – aside from<br />access speed – to locate services inside your own country – when<br />you can buy hosting in the states for tons less money. Unless you are<br />aware of the costs when the undersea cable is cut or those servers go<br />down... there's this built in assumption that servers must exist<br />because clients must exist, and I'd prefer a world where everybody is<br />more equal.<br />
<br />
Sharecroppers by the information superhighway. We get our<br />information from the company store, we accept company scrip, we get<br />paid in devalued dollars, and we all voted in the first ICANN<br />election only to be disenfranchised. I really get grumpy about not<br />being able to get a dedicated ip address, and that's why I tend to be<br />hot on ipv6.<br />
<br />
This isn't so much a disconnect as a purposeful slowing down...<br />That 1/3 of a second is too long...<br />
<br />
<b>OVERCLIENTIZATION = SLAVERY</b><br />
<br />
I've worked primarily on embedded Linux applications for the last<br />8 years, and ... [talk about the gap between what you could do then<br />and what you can do now]<br />
<br />
Now the consumer mentality is leaking over into Linux – ubuntu,<br />which I otherwise like – doesn't install the manual pages or<br />documentation for many applications – there's no way – it doesn't<br />install “server” applications like a webserver or windows<br />filesharing by default, nor a development system, the search engine,<br />trackerd.<br />
<br />
<b>OLPC</b><br />
<br />
Now when I went to Nicaragua for 6 months last year, I didn't have<br />the ideas I'm sharing today, I was all set, and hyped, to work on the<br />one laptop per child project.<br />
<br />
[random fill]<br />
<br />
And I got utterly stopped by this: [new slide]<br />
<br />
I'm a product of the post literate internet society. I was fat,<br />out of shape, tired, and I really admired the fun that they were<br />having with a ball that cost maybe 8 bucks, split 20 ways.<br />
<br />
What right did I have to take their ball away, and replace it with<br />something else?<br />
<br />
I sat on the beach and thought about it a while, and observed the<br />populace, how they interacted, what they needed. [OODA slide]<br />
<br />
Cell phones – ubiquitous. Roads – universally terrible.<br />Connectivity – bad. Electricity – unreliable. Garbage –<br />everywhere. Food – always fresh. Surfing... excellent. People...<br />happy....<br />
<br />
<b>[COMPLETE RIFF THATS ON THE VIDEO AND NOT WRITTEN DOWN YET]</b><br />
<br />
<b>MEMORY</b><br />
<br />
How do we remember things? The scent, the place, the time, the<br />words ...<br />
<br />
<b>INPUT VS OUTPUT</b><br />
<br />
It's like a 1000x1 ratio for me, of input to output.<br />
<br />
Observe, Orient, Decide, take action - <a<br />href=<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist</a>)>OODA<br />Loop</a><br />
<br />
The folk over at olpc, compressed the heck out of Wikipedia, a few<br />months ago. It fit into 59GB, heavily compressed – 15 of these or<br />half of one of these. [lift 2 ½ inch hard disk]<br />
<br />
What Doc Searls calls the attention economy would collapse, if<br />nobody was producing. Production is more import. You PAY for<br />attention, you COLLECT for creation. How do you create stuff?<br />
<br />
I have a couple answers:<br />
<br />
Ipv6 <a<br />href=<a href="http://www.caida.org/analysis/geopolitical/bgp2country/ipv6.xml">http://www.caida.org/analysis/geopolitical/bgp2country/ipv6.xml</a>>courtesy<br />of caida.org</a><br />
<br />
There's a law on the books making it illegal to share.... theres's<br />quite a few people that have forgotten everything they learned in<br />kindergarden, especially over at the RIAA.<br />
<br />
[BACK TO INTERNET PING TIMES]<br />
<br />
That by pushing more and more stuff out into the nether regions of<br />the Net, we've increased the duration of the quantum between our own<br />neurons - Click on a web page – kerchunk! get it back – send<br />email – kerchunk!<br />
<br />
Executable content was hard. Java tried to solve it and then<br />dissolved into a steaming pile of version numbers, specifications,<br />and revisions, just like everything else. CSS is hard. There's<br />actually a thing in the spec for handhelds. It bugs me nobody but lwn<br />uses it.<br />
<br />
That the only way to speed this up, is to move the data closer to<br />me. You'll note that while<br />
<br />
they are using it to build really, really big caches<br />
<br />
What I did instead was setup my laptop to only accept email over<br />Ipv6 , and so far it hasn't been a problem.<br />
<br />
d being a dinosaur.<br />
<br />
[point at laptop] This is my big external brain. [hold handheld]<br />This is my personal brain [point to head]<br />
<br />
I started to realize, was that I'd finally got was enough distance<br />from the problems, sitting on that beach, That what I was doing was<br />actually back on the bleeding edge - I was starting to build<br />Intelligent Agents for myself, fragmenting parts of my personality to<br />live, full time on the internet, where they needed to be, and keeping<br />the parts that needed to be off it, off it.<br />
<br />
relentless tilting towards the center is in itself, that in order<br />to make further progress the pendulum needs to swing back<br />
<br />
It doesn't need to be this hard. We can build autonomy back into<br />the internet. If we so choose.<br />
<br />
You don't have to suffer a stroke every time you disconnect from<br />the Internet – You can take it with you... you can function<br />autonomously<br />
<br />
The beauty of this talk – to this audience – is that I can get<br />technical. I could go on and on to make my point to a more general<br />audience, and perhaps will – but that's your job. I have a lot of<br />technical stuff I skipped<br />
<br />
autonomous<br />
<br />
And not have to pay rent or royalty every time I have a new<br />thought.<br />
<br />
I don't want anyone – government or corporation or cracker –<br />to hack my brain.<br />
<br />
<b>AFFLUENZA AND AUTISM</b><br />
<br />
A couple months back my cousin and I went to buy some DVDs. He<br />picked up 4, but the store where we were at, had a 2 for 1 special.<br />My cousin then spent the next 20 minutes looking for two more disks<br />so he could get one of those for half price. I know I'm weird. I'd<br />have put one back. Dinner was getting cold.<br />
<br />
We as a society are going autistic. Maybe we're retreating into<br />second life because this life isn't worth living?! I know people<br />unable to have an orgasm without two laptops and a cellphone present.<br />
<br />
Fragrance-Free zones. There was a library back in felton, ca,<br />where I used to live, that had declared itself a fragrance free zone<br />– and right outside the door – a lovely hydrangea, and a bed of<br />roses. I kept wondering when they would pull those out by the roots<br />and replace them with sterile concrete. What's next, banning flowers<br />because they smell? Or food because it's too spicy? There's one thing<br />I've really liked about all the Australians I've met this month.<br />Every last one of 'em supports more immigration – why? because<br />every culture brings in a new cuisine. I keep thinking that America<br />would be far more supportive of immigration if it meant less Mexican<br />food...<br />
<br />
A trained nose can do tens of thousands more<br />
<br />
[open a bottle of perfume]<br />
<br />
Other senses – smell, taste, touch – pain - are important for<br />memory formation, and none of our internet society is presenting<br />those sensations to those senses. When we encounter them in the Real<br />World, we recoil...<br />
<br />
<b>SAVING ENERGY</b><br />
<br />
[david rowe cranking the olpc]<br />
<br />
I'd love it, if I could have a bicycle wheel tied to a generator<br />under my desk.<br />
<br />
so if I had to pedal faster to make my drain on the earth more<br />apparent, I would. If I'd had to crack virtual 30kph just to get the<br />darn cpu to kick into overdrive and finish my compile... - I used to<br />compile 9 million lines of code on a regular basis – I'd be buff<br />now.<br />
<br />
<b>IM</b><br />
<br />
You'll note that<br />
<br />
It's great – it's spam free -<br />
<br />
But you can't send a message, unless you are online...<br />
<br />
[END OF RIFF]<br />
<br />
<b>FIRST HALF CLOSE</b><br />
<br />
Do we really want to create a world where the sole muscles<br />developed in the human species are the mind, eyes, and a massively<br />overdeveloped clicking finger?<br />
<br />
I'm exaggerating the problems to make a point. And in the winter<br />of my disconnect, I found a few ways to make it better, I'm working<br />on some more.<br />
<br />
I've spent most of the last 8 years working in the embedded space,<br />mostly on devices that sit between you and the internet – routers,<br />voip phones, pbxes, caches, filters...<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Openwrt and nslug are showing the way<br />for the devices in the middle... what we have inbetween us and<br />everything 1/3 of a second out there is a relic of when we didn't<br />have enough local storage.</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There are some great trends that are<br />making room now for all kinds of neat new services on your firewall,<br />on the router, on the cable modem that we didn't have room for<br />before. There's room on your laptop. There's room on your handheld.</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
These trends have made it possible to move a whole lot of formerly<br />server code into the edge of your network or onto your own computer.<br />
<br />
And I'll get to that, after the break. Thanks.<br />
<br />
<b>SECOND HALF</b><br />
<br />
Some of this, I know, is a bit extreme.<br />
<br />
I keep going back to this slide:<br />
<br />
The only way to break the speed of internet light is to move the<br />relevant data closer to you. And keep it there. And run services<br />locally that do on a small scale what the services out there do on<br />the large.<br />
<br />
<b>FIXING SEARCH</b><br />
<br />
Probably the biggest thing I had to do to get offline on a more<br />regular basis was find a way to dramatically reduce the amount of<br />internet searching I had to do to get my job done. I'm involved in a<br />lot of really complex stuff, and every twenty minutes, I had to ask<br />google, I had to ask google, I had to ask google, I had to ask<br />google... usually finding what I was looking for in the first 4-5<br />entries... I was productive, but I had to be online all the time.<br />
<br />
I solved that. Using the Google API and python toolkit you can<br />write a script that not only googles from the command line, but also<br />mirrors the contents of whatever sites it suggests, so with one<br />command you<br />
<br />
goog for whatever. It's like having a live human research<br />assistant doing all the heavy lifting for you. When the data gets<br />back to me, it's indexed by my own local search engine – and best<br />of all, it's permanently on my machine now until I chose to delete<br />it. Let me show you that. My blog is all on here, so...<br />
<br />
Sometimes I just say screw it, and mirror the whole website<br />involved, at one point I had mirrors of ubuntu, and linux-faqs.org<br />just lying around. I wish I could mirror all of wikipedia, but that's<br />a lot.<br />
<br />
I fixed search. I've moved to where 95% of the data I need most of<br />the time is in a cache nearby, up from nearly 0%. I'm happy about<br />that.<br />
<br />
The code is actually, at present, pathetically simple and works<br />really, really good. It's as fast as contacting google directly... I<br />can't run it now but it's only a page of python, and the cgi version<br />is not that much longer.<br />
<br />
<b>FIXING IRC</b><br />
<br />
<div style="font-weight: medium;">
Most open source developers don't use<br />services like MSN, etc – they all congregate on irc.freenode.org.<br />IRC has one major advantage over other chat servers - people<br />congregate in groups dedicated to their projects – and one major<br />problem – it doesn't do reliable delivery of the messages you<br />missed while offline. IRC is probably the most valuable tool to doing<br />productive development available today – it's an incredible brain<br />amplifier. Somewhere, in the thousand + minds I communicate with<br />every day, is someone with the domain knowledge to solve nearly any<br />problem I face. Most – nearly all - of the design discussion and<br />programming work that I'm involved in is discussed exclusively on<br />IRC. And as I said if you aren't on irc – all the time – you are<br />going to miss something important.</div>
<br />
<div style="font-weight: medium;">
so on my permanent server -<br />toutatis.isc.org I run a bot – supybot – with a name of dtahtbot<br />- that stays up all the time and logs all the conversations that take<br />place on the irc channels I care about -</div>
<br />
<div style="font-weight: medium;">
#asterisk #ardour #freeswitch #astfin<br />#emacs #gtk #iforgetwhatelse</div>
<br />
<div style="font-weight: medium;">
And whenever I get online, I rsync my<br />laptop or handheld with those channel logs, after a little filtering.<br />These are character files, very short, it only takes a couple of<br />seconds to sync up with a day's conversations, and another split<br />second for them to be indexed and available to my local search<br />engine, so I can keep up or help out.</div>
<br />
<b>GOING BACK TO SEARCH </b>(probably skip)<br />
<br />
There's still a bigger, unsolved problem with search. With google<br />– you always get what you are looking for – even if it's not what<br />you need.<br />
<br />
We have a lot of web tools for positive reinforcement of how you<br />already think – the virtual equivalent of yes-men - and not a whole<br />heck of a lot of tools for challenging how you think.<br />
<br />
I've fantasied about this a lot – some sort of anti-oogle – a<br />service that would give you not what you were looking for but was<br />appropriate - A white supremacist would be forced to read the works<br />of Martin luther king, a socialist, key market oriented facts, a<br />austrian economist, some actual history about the development of<br />Central America, and so on. It might challenge a few minds.<br />
<br />
Recently I went through a 4 month period of infatuation with<br />politics. Although I'd started with an opinion, I forced myself to<br />read sites from all points of view – places like redstate,<br />dailycos, nolanchart, and many others. In the end I'd learned a lot,<br />and changed a few of my own opinions. It was astonishing, though, how<br />virulent the virtual tribes of the left, right, center, and other<br />orientations could be, and how intolerant they were of other points<br />of view.<br />
<br />
If I had one wish for people using the internet today, it would be<br />that more people would consciously go looking for information and<br />people that challenge their point of view, and to try to sort it out.<br />In the long run, it would be a better world.<br />
<br />
[Someone on the internet is wrong graphic]<br />
<br />
If I had a second wish, it would be that babelfish.altavista.com<br />could translate arabic and hebrew. But all this is offtopic. I note<br />that babelfish was really popular in Nicaragua, though. With the<br />girls, especially.<br />
<br />
<b>FILTERING OUT ADS FROM THE WEB</b><br />
<br />
There's all kinds of things out there that can cut down on the<br />kerchunk, that 1/3 second of delay between thoughts that you have<br />when surfing the web.<br />
<br />
Whenever I get to feeling even slightly kind towards advertising<br />companies, I think of the drug rep that slammed down a tissue box –<br />with her company's logo and drug of the day emblazoned all sides<br />right in the middle of my doc's chess set. Drug reps – blond, blue<br />eyed girls – 22, 23 – fresh out of college after studying<br />volleyball for four years - flounce into doctors offices across the<br />land bearing gifts of this sort – and encourage physicians to<br />prescribe drugs of dubious value and extreme cost... And gifts like<br />that really screw with human psychology. It's a gift! you can't move<br />it! It took us three weeks to recognize the problem before I removed<br />that glaring tissue box for him so we could resume our game....<br />
<br />
And thus I have no pity on the advertisers, and use firefox<br />adblock plus and privoxy to filter most of their stuff out before I<br />even see it.<br />
<br />
Back before I had the filters I do I kept noticing that every<br />Linux related article seemed to have a large flash ad with a sexy<br />girl pimping Microsoft in it. Is this still going on? This sort of<br />cognitive dissonance is what normal people have to deal with. I<br />don't.<br />
<br />
Stripping out ads has huge benefits. Ads take up, I don't know,<br />90% of the bandwidth on a typical web page. Stripping out the ads<br />makes up for all the extra mirroring I do to pull down the top 6<br />results from google on every search.<br />
<br />
Firefox Adblock Plus and Privoxy – install them, you'll love<br />'em. They make browsing the web on this thing a tolerable experience.<br />Squid helps cut your bandwidth requirements too, if you have enough<br />users.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-weight: medium; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Yea, I collect<br />searchable data like some people collect mp3s – but just the good<br />stuff...</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<b>TIME AND SPACE SHIFTING</b><br />
<br />
I don't have any mp3s except of my own songs, what I do is rip a<br />stream using “streamripper” from several of the internet radio<br />stations I like, at night, so I can listen to 14 hours of them in the<br />morning on whatever device I want. This is time and space shifting of<br />the purest sort and I sure hope it stays legal - I don't feel any<br />compulsion to horde the music I get, it's all good, and it all gets<br />deleted after a couple days.<br />
<br />
<b>GRABBAG Solutions</b> (client side)<br />
<br />
I run my own DNS. I'm old fashioned and tend to run my own copy of<br />bind. I don't like it when someone elses's DNS starts returning<br />results filled with malware. Run a caching server, on your laptop, at<br />least, you'll cut a tenth of a millisecond off most queries. I run my<br />own database server, too.<br />
<br />
<b>SKIP FROM HERE</b><br />
<br />
I run my own name servers with split dns. Why? Well, statistics<br />are showing that an increasing number of nameservers are corrupt –<br />delivering ad or malware pages – and it's about 1/30<sup>th</sup><br />of a second faster than relying on an external nameserver, and also<br />guaruntees when I'm running ipv6 that ipv6 actually works. Also –<br />and most importantly – with split dns - I can configure<br />pbx.hm.taht.net to resolve to my internal voip server when at home –<br />and the voip server in the co-lo when on the road – when at home<br />internal calls stay internal, never touch the external network –<br />and I never have to change the configurations on my laptop and<br />handheld. I know it's hard to do the first time, but it's worth it.<br />
<br />
SKIP - In the embedded space, dnsmasq is actually really easy to<br />configure, and you can at least.<br />
<br />
I run my own database client and server? Why? Most databases are<br />client/server – they were designed to operate that way - I like<br />being able to type as fast as possible, keep my code on my own<br />machine, and just let the connection handle the latency – most<br />people are sufficiently paranoid that I have to connect to the<br />database through a couple ssh tunnels, but it works really good.<br />
<br />
I run my own web server...<br />
<br />
I run my own pbx. I don't do this for any particular reason, at<br />the moment – besides the fact I'm working on some code - does<br />anybody here have a connection to the internet? Well, if you – over<br />there – were willing to share that connection, and offered it up as<br />a viable route, I could get a phone call right now - and since I'm in<br />the middle of a talk, I'd ignore it - I could let it drop right to<br />voicemail on my machine and get mailed to me.<br />
<br />
TO HERE<br />
<br />
The total effect of running all this extra stuff on my laptop is<br />about 100MB. I've 4GB of RAM, I can spare that, for the benefits.<br />
<br />
<b>Solutions</b> (server side)<br />
<br />
Avoid dynamitism wherever possible. Mask latency with caching.<br />
<br />
Grabbag:<br />
<br />
Do set expiry times for as many static files as possible. Make<br />sure your clients follow the caching rules.<br />
<br />
This file – the one that describes the format of a HTML<br />document, is in almost every modern web page. It hasn't changed in<br />years, it's expiry time is set to a week – and yet w3.org is<br />overwhelmed by 130 million requests a day for it. w3.org is begging<br />people to cache their own copies, and implementing things like<br />tarpitting to slow the abusers down.<br />
<br />
I would argue that if you have a website, you should audit it for<br />proper caching, fix it up, and you'll make your user experience<br />better. In particular, most images, javascript and css files are<br />static, and almost never change.<br />
<br />
Example – I was running an RT (request tracker) server at a<br />co-location facility a while back, and it wasn't properly expiring<br />static data. To move from one web page to the next, from next door,<br />it was taking 3 seconds and 14 http requests. From overseas, it was<br />taking 5 seconds. The server was getting pretty overloaded. After<br />looking at the data, and convincing apache to mark it properly, I got<br />it down to 2 HTTP requests and .3 seconds to switch between pages,<br />and I saved almost 100k per page view, saving everybody on time and<br />bandwidth, and I saved them a new server. A day spent doing that cut<br />a lot of people's stress levels down a lot. Do it... You can look at<br />it in firefox or with a sniffer or with the HEAD command...<br />
<br />
<b>COMPRESSION and TIMESHIFTING </b><br />
<br />
My dad can get through an entire American style football game,<br />which is 5 hours long in the real world using his tivo's remote<br />control, in 2 hours and twenty minutes flat. He fast forwards –<br />impeccably – from the tackle on one play all the way through the<br />huddle right into the snap. Commercials. Hah. He never sees them. My<br />dad's got muscles on his thumb to rival chuck norris's pectorals.<br />
<br />
This sort of 2 to 1 compression of every day experience seems<br />however to be about the best we can do for football. There are<br />probably other games that would compress down even better. Cricket<br />for example.<br />
<br />
The rest of him is going to hell, but he's got muscles on that<br />thumb. In some ways this gives me hope, if we can play back life at 2<br />times normal speed, we can get more living in... spend more time<br />doing stuff rather than consuming it.<br />
<br />
Modern compression goes both ways though. I watch two minutes of<br />what passes for tv news today, and then spend another 58 minutes<br />analyzing what I just saw, trying to sort out what the window on the<br />bottom was saying as it scrolled in different directions, with what<br />the talking head was saying, what he or she was implying by his<br />facial responses, and trying to get a grip on just how expert the<br />expert on the screen was... I try not to watch the news.<br />
<br />
<b>VERBAL NOTETAKING</b><br />
<br />
My laptop, two years ago, half this speed, could function as a<br />wireless access point. My more modern one, twice as fast, with twice<br />as much storage – can't. This is progress? I can't even convince<br />ad-hoc mode to work on it. The special usb cable that the nokia uses<br />to connect? Lost it in New Zealand. This special micro-SD to SD<br />adaptor? I keep misplacing the teeny little thing in some compartment<br />of my luggage. My laptop's bluetooth dongle? God knows where that<br />went. So I have these two GREAT devices separated by an air gap of a<br />few centimeters – two devices capable of transmitting 54Mbit a<br />second, but not directly to each other.... right now the only way I<br />reliably have to get data from here to here is copy it to this ram<br />card, using these 2 adapters, to wedge it back into this with another<br />2.<br />
<br />
And yet for all my bitching, the nokia is still the closest thing<br />to an auxiliary brain that I've ever had...<br />
<br />
For the first time since the invention of the laptop, I can leave<br />the laptop behind - I can walk around without a heavy backpack. For<br />what I've saved in chiropractic bills alone, the nokia's paid for<br />itself. And it could get so much better, the devkit for it is great,<br />I can cross compile any, absolutely anything, for it, in a matter of<br />seconds, and then transfer it with those 5 adaptors....<br />
<br />
Here's a device I like. It's an olympus WS-110. The standard AAA<br />battery lasts a really long time. It lasts a lot longer when I<br />actually remember to press the hold button before I put it in my<br />pocket, otherwise I end up recording a lot of random stuff. [toilet<br />flushing].<br />
<br />
I'll spend an hour wandering around my house, saying things like –<br />call the plumber. pay the mortgage. get flowers for my girlfriend –<br />and then I can play it back, later at something like 30 to 1<br />compression so I can plan out my day in the car or when I get a spare<br />moment.<br />
<br />
But, even with that level of compression, it's incapable of<br />recognizing what's important to my internal monologue.<br />
<br />
[recorder says - You idiot. Get flowers for your girlfriend!]<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Or reminding me to get new batteries<br />for it the next time I'm at the store, because a gps isn't integrated<br />into it and there's no such thing as speaker independent voice<br />recognition yet.</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And, unlike my two other<br />recorders, it's standard. You plug it into your USB port, and it<br />looks just like a hard disk. [ try to plug WS-110 into nokia, fail ]</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
The WS-110 timestamps everything, and the nokia has a GPS built<br />in, that can keep a log of where I've been and when... If I could tie<br />the two together I could have an audiological record of everything I<br />was thinking, where I thought it, and when. I'd be able to point to<br />an otherwise random filename and bring up that amazing conversation I<br />had with David while we were in that restaurant... or the restaurant<br />and get the same – upload it all to google maps - But in order to<br />connect it from here to here, I need to build a custom USB OTG<br />adaptor, and carry it around. USB did not have to be designed as a<br />master/slave connector, but it was – and now we have to cope with<br />kluges like that.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My point is that this is one of the<br />negative results of designing for disconnection, on purpose, because<br />it generates profits on all the accessories for the makers.</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<b>WAP</b><br />
<br />
In my mind, owning a wireless access point is no different than<br />owning a truck. As soon as you buy a truck, anywhere, you become the<br />instant buddy of everybody that needs to move something. I don't run<br />security on my access point, neither does bruce shneir -<br />
<br />
We don't because their aren't sufficiently transparent services<br />running on most access points to let you divvy up the guest traffic<br />from your own, and that's a shame.<br />
<br />
<b>ENDING</b><br />
<br />
Back in January at some festival or another I was at a routine<br />traffic stop in New Zealand. The cop shoved a Breathalyzer into my<br />face and said – “say your name into the machine!”. I said:<br />
<br />
“Rip Van Winkle”<br />
<br />
The cop looked at his machine and said: “You can move on”.<br />
<br />
Taking this past year off has been kind of good. I've seen a lot<br />more of the world than I've ever seen before, and met more people in<br />a year than I've met in my whole life. Also...<br />
<br />
A lot of software projects I worked on and was frustrated at –<br />things like LV2, ardour, rosegarden, jack – have all moved along at<br />a nice clip and are shaping up handsomely, without my help. It was<br />nice to know – this guy here actually has working floating point –<br />that I can slow down.<br />
<br />
I didn't think that after a year off that I'd have difficulty<br />finding work. I am. Maybe it's because of this crusade I'm on about<br />bypassing tollbooths, eliminating billboards, and battering down<br />citadels, and my focus on building roads, and saving bandwidth,<br />creating bridges and new ways to operate autonomously, and things<br />like that.<br />
<br />
A truly western life is hard on me, some things, like fast food,<br />getting on the internet, etc are all too easy to do, and kind of hard<br />on me physically. I'd rather live near the ocean and have the<br />periodic power failures remind me that there are other things in life<br />worth doing. So I'm going back soon, or maybe somewhere else, like<br />china, to see what else I can learn, or what else I can create...<br />
<br />
<div style="border-bottom: 1px solid #000000; border-left: none; border-right: none; border-top: none; padding-bottom: 0.03in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">
<br />[last side]</div>
<br />
<div style="border-bottom: 1px solid #000000; border-left: none; border-right: none; border-top: none; padding-bottom: 0.03in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">
<br />Lastly, I just want to point out that web surfing is nothing like<br />real surfing. Getting pounded flat by the waves really clears the<br />mind... and dropping in on one like this is a real rush.</div>
<br />
<div style="border-bottom: 1px solid #000000; border-left: none; border-right: none; border-top: none; padding-bottom: 0.03in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">
<br />Thank you</div>
<br />
<div style="border-bottom: 1px solid #000000; border-left: none; border-right: none; border-top: none; padding-bottom: 0.03in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">
<br /><br /></div>
<br />
<br /></div>
David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-61072444461382504832019-12-26T08:57:00.003-08:002019-12-26T08:57:42.609-08:00Email lists going down the memory hole<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Once upon a time, email was my primary application, as well as netnews. It was the primary internet application for everybody! not just me. And thus, for decades now, various folk have attempted to supplant or replace it. Few under thirty have ever seen a "Real" email client, or used email to effectively manage their workflow. Everywhere I've been lately (Portugal, Central America) whatsapp dominates....<br />
<br />
Once upon a time, gmane indexed mailing lists, and in turn, google indexed those. Of late, especially since gmane died, core reference material to these ongoing conversations has seemingly vanished from the internet. The mailing list is the refuge of puzzled old farts that wonder where the conversation went.<br />
<br />
The <a href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net/">main</a> <a href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/ecn-sane/">lists</a> I <a href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/make-wifi-fast/">interact on</a>, almost never show up in a google query, despite 9 years of history, discussion, theory and code, about <a href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/bloat/">fixing the bufferbloat problem</a>, shared by some of the best in the business. I doubt my lists have seen more than 3 new subscribers a year since 2015.<br />
<br />
Hell, recently, the <b>internet history</b> mailing list dropped off the net... the https slash slash www.postel.org/internet-history/index.html link is no longer "secure" - and I'm afraid to put a direct link to it in this post because then I might get downgraded by a search engine somewhere...
<br />
<br />
Should I mourn the death of email and the mailing list? Yes! Can I do anything to save them? I don't know. Just because <b>I</b> don't like handing control of the conversation to disquis or to facebook, etc, doesn't mean anything. I do know that since g+ died, a lot of my regular "web" correspondents "vanished" into diaspora, and maybe I should check out if the grass is greener there.
</div>
</div>
Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-15996921128370376672019-12-26T07:41:00.003-08:002019-12-26T07:41:57.877-08:00Instituting saner, professional source code management for embedded devices<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
http://www.taht.net/~d/fcc_saner_software_practices.pdf<br />
<br />
We advocate: that rather than denying users the ability to make any changes to the router
whatsoever, router vendors be required to open access to their code (especially code that controls RF
parameters) to describe and document the safe operating bounds for the software defined radios within
the WiFi router.
In this alternative approach, the FCC could mandate that:<br />
<br />
1. Any vendor of SDR, wireless, or WiFi radio must make public the full and maintained source
code for the device driver and radio firmware in order to maintain FCC compliance. The source
code should be in a buildable, change controlled source code repository on the Internet,
available for review and improvement by all.<br />
<br />
2. The vendor must assure that secure update of firmware be working at shipment, and that update
streams be under ultimate control of the owner of the equipment. Problems with compliance can
then be fixed going forward by the person legally responsible for the router being in
compliance.<br />
<br />
3. The vendor must supply a continuous stream of source and binary updates that must respond to
regulatory transgressions and Common Vulnerability and Exposure reports (CVEs) within 45
days of disclosure, for the warranted lifetime of the product,
or until five years after the last customer shipment, whichever is longer.<br />
<br />
4. Failure to comply with these regulations should result in FCC decertification of the existing
product and, in severe cases, bar new products from that vendor from being considered for
certification.<br />
<br />
5. Additionally, we ask the FCC to review and rescind any rules for anything that conflict with
open source best practices, produce unmaintainable hardware, or cause vendors to believe they
must only ship undocumented “binary blobs” of compiled code or use lockdown mechanisms
that forbid user patching. This is an ongoing problem for the Internet community committed to
best practice change control and error correction on safety critical systems.
This path has the following advantages:<br />
<br />
● Inspectability: Skilled developers can verify the correctness of software drivers that are now
hidden in binary “blobs”.<br />
<br />
● Opportunity for innovation: Many experiments can be performed to make the network “work
better” without affecting compliance.<br />
<br />
● Improved spectrum utilization: A number of techniques to improve the use of WiFi bands
remain theoretical possibilities. Field trials with these proposed algorithms could prove (or
disprove) their utility, and advance the science of networking.<br />
<br />
● Fulfillment of legal (GPL) obligations: Allowing router vendors to publish their
RFcontrolling source code in compliance with the license under which they obtained it will
free them from the legal risk of being forced to cease shipping code for which they no longer
have a license.<br />
<br />
Requiring all manufacturers of WiFi & 5G devices to make their source code publicly available and
regularly maintained, levels the playing field as no one can behave badly.</div>
Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-17482351421066569682015-11-14T05:55:00.005-08:002015-11-14T06:17:26.260-08:00Wireless and Wifi in 2015 - not what I dreamed of<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I will go into the battle with the FCC I'm in in more detail later. <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi">Click here for some details</a>.<br />
<br />
As it was, I had a chance to return to the USA (from my university gig in Sweden) for a 10 day whirlwind trip up and down the East Coast. I took notes on how wireless technologies worked throughout.<br />
<br />
Neither supposedly international sim card for my cell phone worked anywhere in the US I went.<br />
<br />
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px;">
</div>
<br />
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px;">
My ubuntu phone doesn't do tethering without hacking on it, anyway, and I refused to join the app store.</div>
<br />
After wandering around a while in La Guardia airport I found good enough wifi signal to get online long enough to figure out where I was going.<br />
<br />
My hotel in NYC had good wifi, with hotspot. The AES conference did, ultimately have a place I could sit down, finish writing my talk, and upload it via wifi. It was up against a wall, I had to sit on the floor.<br />
<br />
The bookshop I had a meeting in had a nasty password that the owner had to read to me 3 times before I got it right.<br />
<br />
I sat in Penn Station, in NYC, with a few open APs within range, and was unable to get an IP address.<br />
<br />
I got off the train in Princeton Junction to find 4 open APs there, from Xfinity, etc - which all demanded a login with one of their TV services, with no means to plug in a credit card if you didn't have an account already, which I don't, neither residing in the US (currently) or an owner of a TV<br />
(for 3 decades).<br />
<br />
So, I got in a cab and said "Take me to your WiFi!".<br />
<br />
The cabbie took me to Barnes and Nobel where after navigating past the web only hotspot interception screen, I happily swapped the email I needed to get picked up by the person I was visiting. I also browsed a few books, but decided it was saner for me to just get stuff for my kindle, except that all 3 of my tablets had broken this year, and I'd left my main kindle in a hotel in slovenia - where I hope someone else is getting an education from it. I see no signs of any pages being turned though...<br />
<br />
My lady friend had working wifi, but had to look up the password on a sticky note, stuck in a drawer,to share it. All her kids spent more time on their tablets than talking to me....<br />
<br />
The wifi on the train to DC only worked for the last 30 minutes of the trip. I watched my cell phone register with LTE provider after another, with still no actual connectivity.<br />
<br />
I stayed at the capitol holiday inn in Washington DC, where the local DNS server failed late in the evening. IT was called, but it was still down by the time I had to leave at 10. Thank god for 8.8.8.8!<br />
<br />
The air and space museum had working wifi with the ubiquitous hotspot interception screen, making me agree to whatever terms and conditions were required to get on the internet from within this museum of technology.<br />
<br />
The exhibits were old, and tired, and almost exactly the same as I remembered from my last visit a decade before.<br />
<br />
I went to the FCC, while someone shared the guest password, I was too busy talking to be able to get online. I wondered if I could just share my data via a usb stick, but didn't have one that I didn't trust to not have malware on it, and I sure wasn't going to take one of theirs - so I decided to wait til i got back to the air and space museum to send my followup email.<br />
<br />
I sat by spaceship one to do that, wondering if spaceship two would ever fly.<br />
<br />
Returned to philly. Fell asleep on the train. Got woken up so suddenly at 30th street station as to forget to grab my laptop on the way out.<br />
<br />
<br />
Went onto Malvern. ESR's CeroWrt box was still awesome (hundreds of days of uptime), but cloudflare had found ways to break the dnssec in that release, and thus I couldn't get to any IETF sites. Disabled dnssec... thought about restarting cerowrt in the face of all that adversity... went back to sleep.<br />
<br />
Went to Philly the next day.<br />
<br />
Outside the comcast HQ there were protestors protesting, begging to be hooked up to the Internet in their rural locations. The entire square outside the building was roped off in the drizzle and security guards located well outside deeply quizzed me as to my business therein. Inside, screens showed animated fish all across the back wall, with still no wifi to access, and only a very few "approved guests" to admire them. I got to my meeting there and they told me the one truly open AP had a hidden SSID, and what it was, but it did 10-20KB/sec at best, and timed out long before I could get my email.<br />
<br />
I had a chance to look over Comcast's hardware and test design for their upcoming "buffercontrol" bufferbloat trial. Buffercontrol - shown to be fairly ineffective 3+ years and one DOCSIS 3.1 standard ago.<br />
<br />
Under trial, finally, on the one modem they could make it work on.<br />
<br />
I could say more depressing things about it... but I need the business, and I like getting actual field data for stuff we only proved in simulation. Perhaps this coming year we'll get a box in the field that does what CeroWrt did 3.5 years back and nearly every third party firmware already does.<br />
<br />
Went afterwards to Atlantic City. Wifi in the casino worked in the coffee shop, but not the bar. My brother's apple based wifi was awesome - because - he said - his Internet service got tons better when he dumped the POS cable modem he was supplied by comcast for an Arris - but he was still paying rent on the one he wasn't using because they wouldn't accept the fact he wasn't using it. He'd run wires for everything he could, throughout the house, also.<br />
<br />
He showed me some of the cool RF plotting code he'd written but asked me not to tell people about it because he only had time and budget to support users only in his workgroup.<br />
<br />
I got on the next plane to florida, where at least my mom's wifi worked, but there were 5 others sharing the channel, evidently, from 6PM onwards, watching netflix in HD. ssh was nearly unusable from anywhere but a few feet away from the AP. Mosh worked ok.<br />
<br />
The wifi in RSW, 30th street station, and PHL actually did work reasonably well.<br />
<br />
Amtrak found my laptop in Penn Station and sent it to 30th street station after a couple futile phone and productive email exchanges. I picked it up between the flight from Florida and the next flight to London with about an hour to spare.<br />
<br />
Having just a phone for half the trip made me realize just how crippling and damaging to the mind must be to everybody else using the internet, typing on their thumbs. Maybe other people's minds work better at much less than the 120WPM I type at.<br />
<br />
All the airplanes home had no connectivity, and while I was offline for nearly 24 hours, the FCC put<br />
out a press release claiming they were not trying to ban openwrt and dd-wrt, and laid out new guidelines that still appear to do so - all but in name - protecting 50 weather radars at the expense of billions of wifi users.<br />
<br />
I still need to read the details. The devil's in the footnotes.<br />
<br />
I got back to the university having forgotten my eduroam password. I plugged in a wire, but had to clear the mac address of my new laptop with IT.<br />
<br />
Did a 2 hour discussion on VUC about where to go next, trying not to despair. I got encouraged to do more politics and less technology, for some reason. I think I'd rather do the technology. There's enough people in politics.<br />
<br />
And I sat here until 4AM in my new apt in Sweden, writing up this wireless report... of 15 APs within listening distance, 5 with strong signals, all are locked down with WPA, with not one open one within range.<br />
<br />
<br />
Not being a resident (yet), I can't order DSL service, and even if I could it would need a year long contract for me to get. Even if I got one, it would have bufferbloat. I'd go to the office if I could remember the passcode, or back to sleep if I wasn't so jetlagged. The local coffee shop opened at 9. I got here by 12 to have 30+ emails I had to read in my mailbox. I had to download a youtube downloader to download last nights video.<br />
<br />
While offline last night I spent some time editing video and listening to music instead of talking to facebook friends that were still awake somewhere in the world. Not a bad thing actually....<br />
<br />
We are in an age where Bob Frankston's (and mine) dream of ubiquitous wireless connectivity was eminently possible, and yet, due to poorly implemented technology, fear, greed, stupidity, and regulation, it feels in many ways worse than the wireless world I left behind in 2006, when I left the USA for the first time.<br />
`<br />
Back then I could just lean up against a building and make a skype call.<br />
<br />
How far we'e come! <sarcasm>We used to use networks to share files, now we're down to usb sticks.</sarcasm><br />
<br /></div>
Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-66530074103577332262015-10-09T07:43:00.001-07:002015-10-09T07:43:10.304-07:00Saving wifi! Fixing Bufferbloat! Fighting the vendors and the FCC!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
I have been working on fixing bufferbloat now, for 5 years. After we came up with the utterly spectacular solution for it, back in may 2012, we only had the "minor" problem of a few billion devices to upgrade to solve, which is taking far longer than I imagined to do, even on CPE. <br /><br /> Bufferbloat remains an epidemic across the Internet, even at GigE!<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/bufferbloat"><img src=http://huchra.bufferbloat.net/~d/bloatup2.png></img></a>
<br /><br />
After fq_codel was developed, we wrestled with how to go about incorporating a similar algorithm into wifi, and about this time last year, pretty much fully worked out all the theory for it, but it became engineering problem of a scope our small team cannot handle at any reasonable scale - and, worse, our biggest problem became getting enough access into almost-universally locked down wifi and dsl firmware to apply the fixes, and the FCC's rulings last year, and upcoming this year, have made it almost impossible to even start!
<br /><br />
So Vint Cerf and I - and whole bunch of other people you'll find in wikipedia - have <a href="http://huchra.bufferbloat.net/~d/fcc_saner_software_practices.pdf">drafted a letter</a> to the FCC explaining how they can make for better/faster/safer home routers if they write better regulations, substituting sane, well understood software engineering practices for handling wifi and binary blobs than what exists today. <br /><br />
In part, the letter is fueled by our anger at VW cheating on emissions tests, but it is also driven by our fears of continued network insecurity, and our frustration at the speed at which bufferbloat fixes are rolling out to the real world - if we only had access to some more wifi and dsl firmware, we could be done, in weeks! It's only 1300 lines of code!<br /><br />
So... please consider <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1FjRR-ex0t-7bebPUliCGuuAzJlrli5c4AyT0ZiKSjKA/viewform?c=0&w=1">signing our letter to the FCC</a> before the deadline of 2PM EST, today. <br /><br />
The network you save may be your own.
<br />
</div>
Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-83821162891066267362015-03-01T14:29:00.000-08:002015-03-11T15:39:58.981-07:00Virgin Media - Fixing the epidemic of bufferbloat with a little more truth<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b> UPDATE: </b> After I made very big stink about this here, on g+, and slashdot and multiple mailing lists, I received a private email this morning from Virgin Media telling me my access to their community forums had been restored. I hope that one piece of fallout from creating this controversy about the <i>terribly slow ISP industry progress towards recognising and fixing their bufferbloat</i>, that now a constructive dialog can now ensue. As in the past, and in the future, I will attempt to do my best to help Virgin (and the rest of the cable and dsp and fiber ISPs, and the makers of their chipsets, and CPE) provide <a href=http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki>better information about how to fix their bufferbloat</a> to their customers... and continue to help get the fixes more widely distributed - and into more firmware... after I wake up! - yesterday was a very stressful day for me. Thank you all for amplifying my concerns and to whoever found the right person at Virgin to address my issue - THANK YOU VERY MUCH! <br /><br />
Btw, this song, <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2XCr2HJU1o>You gotta be loud</a> from the wonderful musical, Matilda, ran through my head all day, yesterday. It simply drips with irony and sarcasm in the context of the play. It is very, very British, and I have a lot of empathy for the travails of the main character. If you haven't seen the play, you should. I went to see it each of the last 3 times I was in London.
<br /><br />
<i>But! to preserve all the information I put out here originally remains important! So the original post, remains below:</i>
<br /><br />
...
<br /><br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
<b>To whom it may concern at Virgin Media:</b></h2>
My IP address is apparently <a href="http://snapon.lab.bufferbloat.net/~d/virgin_bans_me.png">now banned from accessing your site at all</a>, for "advertising", on <a href="http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-152Mb/Bufferbloat-High-Latency-amp-packet-loss-when-connection/td-p/2773495">this thread</a> about bufferbloat... and my post, was deleted. For the record, that url was:<br />
<br />
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-152Mb/Bufferbloat-High-Latency-amp-packet-loss-when-connection/td-p/2773495<br />
<br />
Believe me, I understand the degree to which advertising pollutes the internet. And certainly, given the brevity of my post, you could assume that I was just some random guy, selling snake oil. Nothing could be further from the truth.<br />
<br />
Admittedly, it was a short message, it was kind of late, and I was in a hurry, being that I have so many other networks to help fix. To clarify matters: I am the co-founder of the <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/">bufferbloat project</a>, and I like to think, a world-wide acknowledged expert on the topic on this thread.<br />
<br />
In particular, I worked pretty hard on part of the cable industry's DOCSIS 3.1 standard, which was ratified years ago, and has a <a href="http://www.cablelabs.com/how-docsis-3-1-reduces-latency-with-active-queue-management/">specific section on it regarding technologies that can help fix *half* your bufferbloat problem</a>.<br />
<br />
I admit to some frustration as to how long it is taking DOCSIS 3.1 to roll out.<br />
<br />
The cablelabs study that led up to the PIE AQM component in the 3.1 standard - in which <a href="http://www.cablelabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Active_Queue_Management_Algorithms_DOCSIS_3_0.pdf">I participated and am cited in, is here</a>.<br />
<br />
I happen to prefer the <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/Wiki/">fq_codel based solution as that works better on most traffic</a>, but am perfectly happy to see PIE get deployed.<br />
<br />
If you continue to exist in denial of what your own R&D department for your own industry is saying, ghu help you! After giving <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/immF8Pkj19C">this 23 minute talk at uknof, the premier conference for network operators in the UK</a> <i>over two years ago</i>!!, I met with 6+ technical members of Virgin Media's staff, who all agreed they had a problem, understood what it was, and they all grokked the various means to fix it. Judging from the enthusiasm in the room, I figured you'd be rolling out fixes by now, but I was wrong.<br />
<br />
A rather human readable explanation of what has gone into the pending 3.1 standard is in the <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-white-aqm-docsis-pie/">IETF DOCSIS-PIE internet draft here</a>.<br />
<br />
Sadly, just DOCSIS-pie rolling out on the modems is not enough - you have to somehow, yourselves, <a href="http://burntchrome.blogspot.com/2014/05/disabling-shaping-in-one-direction-with.html">fix the dramatic overbuffering on the CMTS side, as shown here in tests done on comcast's cablemodems in the USA</a> with typical results in the 240-800 millisecond range.<br />
<br />
<img src=https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIoAH0rbyKpqTd4WwiXzlwi742kfMw3D7pzAZMctYNEVBZBcckxDFaQNDTSh6aLVZWWWxPzNOYOjxwdYNFqnPOWXpPS11N6gGhgpVOJjEEg8UpET7-RQDzVgA5RyjvVjRKiz_K/s1600/downstream_disabled.totals.png></img>
<br />
These downlink problems have been discussed thoroughly on the bufferbloat.net bloat and the ietf aqm mailing lists, and rather than point at direct links I would encourage more people to join the discussions there, and browse the archives.<br />
<br />
As I have seen no visible progress on the CMTS front yet... and no acknowlegment or visible understanding that you get it yet...<br />
<br />
The best way to fix bufferbloat for your long-suffering customers <b><i>for the past 3 years</i></b>, is to help them - and your customer service departments - recognize the latency and bad performance bufferbloat causes when it occurs and propose sane ways to fix it with stuff available off the shelf which includes the <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/generic/">free firmware upgrades for thousands of home routers distributed by openwrt</a>, or nearly any Linux derived product available downstream from those manufacturers that have bothered to keep up with the times. <br />
<br />
I have no financial interest in <i>free firmware</i>. I'm just trying to fix bufferbloat on a billion+ devices and nearly every network in the world as fast as humanly possible. Furthermore, me and a whole bunch of Internet luminaries gave the <a href="http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2209336">theory</a> and code away <b>for free</b> also, in the hope that by doing so that might more quickly get the megacorps of the world to adopt them and make the quality of experience of internet access for billions of users of the world vastly better.<br />
<br />
Fixing bufferbloat was a 50 year old network research problem, now solved, with great joy, several different ways, thoroughly, by some of the best minds in the business, and the answers are now so simple as to fit into a few hundred lines of code, easy to configure for end-users and easily embeddable in your own devices and networks if only you would get on the stick about it.<br />
<br />
We have provided the code, are in the standardization process, and have provided free tools to diagnose and fix your epidemic bufferbloat accurately on every kind of device you and your customers have.<br />
<br />
Here are <a href="http://burntchrome.blogspot.com/2014/05/fixing-bufferbloat-on-comcasts-blast.html">two actual examples </a>of <a href="http://snapon.lab.bufferbloat.net/~cero2/jimreisert/results.html">fixing bufferbloat on cablemodems</a> without needing to upgrade the modem or CMTS.<br />
<br />
And the *free* tool designed not only to accurately measure bufferbloat, but one that you can setup internally to test your networks and devices for it privately and quietly without publicity - and then fix them! is here:<br />
<br />
https://github.com/tohojo/netperf-wrapper<br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
<b>So, now, a rant:</b></h2>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Now, if me pointing a customer of yours that might have correctly identified the root cause of his own problems, <i>at the solutions both available now, and pending</i>, <i>on your own forum</i>, is considered "advertising", then there really is an <b>orwellian mixup between the definition of that word, and the truth, on your side of the water</b>.<br />
<br />
Please, unblock my "dtaht" account and unblock my IP, and allow in better information about how customers of yours can solve the incredibly serious, and incredibly epidemic problem of bufferbloat...<br />
<br />
... A problem that is now easy to solve with cheap gear now all over the market so that all your customers suffering can fix it for themselves if they so choose.<br />
<br />
And: I would like a public apology for blocking me, and a clear statement from Virgin, as to how, when, and where, they will begin to roll out their own fixes to bufferbloat across their subscriber base. And perhaps, you could publish some guidelines - like what accurate up/download settings to use - to help your customers fix your problems for themselves. <br />
<br />
Sincerely,<br />
<br />
Dave Taht<br />
Co-founder, bufferbloat.net</div>
</div>Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-46565586706686501862013-08-11T18:34:00.000-07:002013-08-11T19:22:14.219-07:0049... and trying to find my navel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Wow. My posts here have declined to nearly nothing - in fact, this is my first post in a year. There's a lot of reasons for that.<br />
<br />
1) Social media has changed. In g+ it is too easy to write something bigger than twitter but shorter than a blog. So I now do the g+ thing. I didn't care for twitter, I didn't like joining the flood of tiny little messages on important topics, now I can do stuff that's more bite-sized...<br />
<br />
2) My day-to-day communications in life are mostly talks, email and irc these days. I spent the rest of my writing time coding or writing documentation or correcting stuff on other websites. I haven't done a lick of creative writing in ages... aside from giving about 10 public talks in the last 10 months. Writing and giving talks takes a heck of a lot out of me! No matter how natural I might look on youtube, I lose a week under the bed working out what I was going to say. And every time I've tried to write something bigger than that, I've frozen up with terrible, crippling, writers block.<br />
<br />
3) I started a different blog only to tire of remembering formating rules of markdown vs textile vs html vs blog-tool-of-the-day. I keep hoping that something better than ikiwiki will show up without much luck... and keep meaning to resume my efforts with ikiwiki only to run out of steam quickly.<br />
<br />
4) I don't have a lot to say - sure there's lots of important issues I care about - but while everybody else is off busily "caring" about them (if being noisy on blogs actually made a difference) - I've had a laser like focus on actually *fixing* a problem I care about deeply.<br />
<br />
I wouldn't mind if I wrote stuff down more, but I don't feel like sharing much more of myself with the universe than I already do.<br />
<br />
And probably my biggest problem has been:<br />
<br />
5) A whole bunch of people important to me died last year, and - in particular - after <a href="http://ronsravings.blogspot.com/">my dad went to the great fishing reef in the sky</a>, I locked down, emotionally, to an extent I've only barely begun to discover, and just took an iron grip on work, and work only, to keep going.<br />
<br />
Only in the last few months have I begun to open up and heal a bit, and take in bits of life, and I'm grateful very much to those that have reached out to help.<br />
<br />
So, I sit, today, 49 years old, wondering how the heck did I get here? Professionally, I'm really happy with what I've helped accomplish in fixing bufferbloat. Pretty unhappy about the pay scale, but all around, I see signs of adoption and I foresee a much snappier internet in a few years for nearly everyone... But personally... about the only thing I've been feeling semi-positive about is that 14 days ago I smoked what I hope would be my last cigarette, and that even my cravings for the gum are going down. BUT: I have not been fun to deal with for the last month. And the main reason why I felt I could quit and lose the braincells is that the ietf has stepped up with a <a href="http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/aqm/charter/">WG tackling the problem</a> that I've lost so much sleep on. I'm not as needed anymore; the real experts can step up now. <br />
<br />
Today started especially badly, but I don't feel like writing that down right now. Trying to remember the previous year...<br />
<br />
I totally missed posting last year, and the year before. I have no idea what my state of mind was on those days. I'm mad at myself for letting any form of journal lapse. <br />
<br />
So today, in addition to that rather bad morning, I was feeling like I was making no personal progress, that I'm just as stuck now with my life as I was 10 years ago... so I went and <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003_08_10_archive.html">looked up what I'd written 10 years ago today</a>...<br />
<br />
Wow. Reading that cheered me up tons. The space program is so massively back on track... it's freaking wonderful. I'm missing out on being a part of it, but that's ok, so many others care and are doing something about it, and maybe if I can assure myself the internet is in good hands again, I can re-join....<br />
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It still doesn't help my "life", per se'... but seeing mankind make it into space was my childhood dream and earliest professional goal, and it's happening! it's happening!<br />
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<a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2004_08_08_archive.html">Moving forward a year</a>... well, I solved the exercise problem then, I need to get around to solving it again. Outside my yurt now sits the same bike I had then, and unfortunately a MUCH taller mountain. I can't make it anywhere on the thing without gasping for air and walking uphill for what seems like miles.<br />
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I spent a few more minutes in my navel looking over that stuff leaping forward to today...<br />
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I still don't really have an action plan. Maybe I'll write more after I get better focus on my navel... <br />
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1) I need to write more stuff down, but I no longer feel much urge to tell the universe off (as I did for a decade), I just want good backups for whatever's on my mind...<br />
<br />
2) I need a viable business model for what I'm doing, or to find a way to reduce it to a background process and do something else. Today, I lean towards doing something else that would let me have a life back again. I have no idea what that is. Maybe tomorrow I'll return to seeking a business model. It turns out that I really enjoy "fixing the internet". It's not a bad job description...<br />
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In looking over that sea of blogs from 2003 to 2009 or so, for most of that time I felt I was washed up, and irrelevant, with skills nobody needed anymore. I don't feel that way at all now! (and I'm so glad I took that timeout to change my life and life in nicaragua, surf, play music, and learn spanish)<br />
<br />
I do wish I wasn't pushing 50. Everything hurts, from my knees to my hands, to my back, especially. I look forward to being uploaded, or to some form of regeneration. The rest of my life - outside of work - would be more feasible. Most people can golf when they retire, I can't manage 3 holes without calling for a massage therapist.<br />
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Aside from that... well, hell. It's been a while since I looked inside myself and there's some ugly in there that's going to take some time to sort out. But it's looking like clear skies for the Perseids tonight, I've got my guitar packed up, and I'm heading somewhere quiet and dark to commune with them again in a few minutes.</div>
Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-25037764309765171402012-08-05T22:44:00.004-07:002012-08-06T09:17:49.630-07:00Wheels down on mars!<p>After all these years I can hardly stand to sit through the last stages of a landing - everything has already happened, all you can wait for is news of success... or await the silence and questions that followed for months on all the unsuccessful missions, like the mars polar lander, and Beagle2...</p>
<p><b>This time</b> tho, the cheers rang out, in mission control, with the 600+ people in the theaters here tonight, and no doubt on web streams and television rooms throughout the globe, after the mission controller cried out:</p>
<h2>"We are safe on mars!</h2>
<p>... We continue to recieve telemetry from mars. We're safe."</p>
<p>I've had <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE69GhmzI9s>this song</a> running through my head all night.</p> and...
<h2>"We've got wheels down on mars!"</h2>Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-8687231747124321912012-08-05T21:14:00.002-07:002012-08-05T21:19:41.772-07:00Tracking the landing of Curiosity, from Seattle<p>Shortly after arriving in Seattle, I discovered Ray Ramadorai had mailed me a link to the <a href=http://www.museumofflight.org/event/2012/aug/05/marsfest-2012>live mars curiosity landing event</a> being put on at the <a href=http://www.museumofflight.org>museum of flight</a> tonight...</p>
<p>My cousin Aaron and I took one look at each other, unloaded the dogs, and boogied over there.</p>
<p>The theater was full when we arrived. The overflow theater had overflowed, too. And the air conditioning had failed. The audience sat rapt as the engineers and scientists explained each subsystem, each design, each instrument...</p>
<p>As I write, the main entrance to the theater is now full, and they've just added a second monitor for the <b>rest</b> of the crowd that keeps flowing in, and in, and in.<p>
<p>I remember in the time from one presentation to the next, Curiosity moved 8,000 km closer to Mars, 28k away, about 20 minutes ago, as best as I can remember... maybe it was during the <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ_8Md4iK-o>7 minutes of terror</a>?</p>
<p>The time continues to fly by. Landing in less than 70 minutes! There's people here with their babies, guys with their girlfriends, girls with their guyfriends, NASA employees, members of alt.space, Aerojet, Planetary Resources, MPL, name it, and they all sit with eyes aglow in anticipation and hope...</p>
<p><a href=http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=%23%23curiosity>##curiosity</a> is an irc chat channel on freenode dedicated to the event.</p>
<p>And they are about to switch over to the <a href=http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html>NASA tv feed</a>, on the big screen, in high def.</p>
<p><a href=http://www.nerdist.com/2012/05/interview-planetary-resources-chris-lewicki-wants-to-mine-some-asteroids/>Chris Lewicki</a> is up now, describing the comms systems.</p>Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-47088296047499548942012-06-28T23:02:00.000-07:002012-06-28T23:02:33.574-07:00spotting NEOs from around venus's orbitI gotta say that seeing all the excitement around NEO exploration *finally* is rather wonderful.
The B612 foundation is planning on <a href=http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-06/first-privately-funded-deep-space-mission-will-chart-all-asteroids-inner-solar-system>Charting the NEOs from near Venus's orbit</a>, which is a good place for energy, and maybe a few interesting rocks on reachable orbits...Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-23144237449852939312012-04-22T01:23:00.001-07:002012-04-22T13:36:23.445-07:00Asteroids as lunar orbit resourcesFor nearly 9 years, I've had one of my early attempts at a coherent argument for <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/08/refocusing-space-program-on-getting.html">leveraging near earth asteroids in the space program</a> sitting on the right hand side of this blog. I've been meaning to revise that piece for years too (nearby rocks are moving fast and are useful to hit, but not land on), but haven't got around to it.<br />
<br />
A few weeks back I learned of a NASA study that <a href="http://kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/asteroid_final_report.pdf">costed out how to do a major sample and return mission</a> to lunar orbit. It's cheaper than a moon landing. By a lot.<br />
<br />
And today I learned about <a href="http://www.planetaryresources.com/">Planetary Resources</a>, which with some billionaire backers <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303513404577356190967904210.html">is aiming to take on asteroid mining on some scale</a>, according to the WSJ. <br />
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<br />
<center>Wow.</center><br />
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For the last 4 years I've been watching the <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/06/asteroid-delivery-service.html">successes</a> of Spacex, Armadillo Aerospace, Bigalow, Xcor, Scaled Composites and others, thinking that they needed payloads, and places worth going to.<br />
<br />
Of late, I've been too busy helping <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/">fix the internet</a> to pay much attention. I was in Florida for the (scrubbed) 3rd launch of the Falcon 9, and was hoping to be there for the upcoming one, but that's about it.<br />
<br />
I'd still, despite admiring those successes, basically given up.<br />
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Years ago I'd suggested that Google throw 30m into an Xprize for asteroid exploration. I didn't expect something as big as what Planetary Resources might turn out be. I look forward to more detail Tuesday.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Back in the early 90s I tried writing a SF book about the economics and human interactions of what realistic near earth asteroid living would be like, the spectre and the glory of travelling between Jupiter and Venus every four years. I'd hosted one civilisation on the asteroid "Toutatis", in particular. I had fun building the place out with lap pool around the waist, installing plumbing (if you know anything about Toutatis's rotation, this is actually an interesting problem) and observatory, and the stuff that would keep settlers alive and happy for long periods of time, and how cultures would exchange people (much like the American Indians) and knowledge (Usenet!)<br />
<br />
I projected 20-30 years of robotic exploration and then a severely modified humanity, to make it out - legs amputated at birth like the dangerous appendages they are - etc. I never finished writing the book, though. Vinge beat me to it with the Usenet hook, dang it.<br />
<br />
But: along the way, I proved (to myself at least) that using the NEOs as waystones was the lowest cost/highest payoff starting point for expanding out into the solar system, which has led to countless debates with Mars Society members. I'd steer people at Lewis's "<a href=http://www.amazon.com/Mining-The-Sky-Asteroids-Planets/dp/0201328194>Mining the sky</a>", at Buzz Aldrin's <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler>Cycler</a> concept, and at the mass requirements for O'Neil colonies.<br />
<br />
I've kept sort of a low level interest in the subject ever since. I always use examples of spacecraft failures in my talks about reliable embedded software design. It's always a good hook with grad students. I keep up on launches, subscribe to several enthusiast lists, read what little literature emerges and sometimes even make it to a conference.<br />
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I was a little non-plussed by the recent NASA study for landing people on an asteroid. First up, in my mind, was always robotic exploration and extraction. Still: the costs on that looked pretty good, and I knew mars was more expensive...<br />
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If bugged about space stuff, I try to explain that the solar system looks nothing like what Asimov depicted in "Marooned off Vesta". Exploring the rest of it is far more akin to the age of sailing ships that took years to get anywhere, rather than 1g spacecraft that bop from place to place in days, as all the early SF writers mislead us. The economics of sail apply. Except that space is *bent*, in weird ways. The archipelagos move, and the shortest time between two points is never a straight line, and there are keyholes and other interesting gravitational phenomena, and you don't need rockets to get around an asteroid (springs and tethers suffice), etc, etc.<br />
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Another big problem has been that most people's impressions of the solar system were formed by the Apollo program and those aforementioned writers - in stories that predate the discovery of thousands of Near Earth Objects in interesting orbits.
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<br />
Over the years I tried dozens of ways to get the points across, trying to educate people about <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2007/03/31-orbital-resonance-with-jupiter.html">resonance orbits with Jupiter</a>, proposing a <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2009/07/new-grand-tour-of-innermost-solar.html">grand tour of the NEOs</a>, and talking about replicating Deep Impact on a grand scale, and various other serious bits like that.<br />
<br />
Sometimes I seriously tried to be unserious, in trying to find bridges from everyday experience, to space. I went looking just now for the serious stuff I'd written about Deep Impact and instead stumbled across me channeling Howard Cosell during Deep Impact <a href=http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2005/06/space-impacts-as-sport.html>here</a>, <a href=http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2005/07/nubile-projectile-gets-no-respect.html>here</a>, and <a href=http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2005/07/nubile-projectile-vs-penetrator.html>here</a>. Ah, I'd wrapped it around <a href=http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2005/06/space-impacts-as-sport.html>"The Thrilla in the Chilla"</a>, indeed. In retrospect I'm pretty sure that I missed both core audiences with those pieces...
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<br />
I threw a party every four years on Feb 29th, called <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2008/01/asteroid-appreciation-day-feb-29th-2008.html">Asteroid Appreciation Day</a>. <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2008/03/livin-in-00ze-asteroid-appreciation-day.html">Asteroid appreciation day</a>, this year, I moved to 12/12/12 or so (still haven't planned it out)...<br />
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I wrote songs about <a href="http://www.taht.net/%7Emtaht/songs/SaxInSpace.html">the Challenger</a> and the KT event. The KT event one, "Living in the 00ze", well, I have a much better version of it <a href="http://www.teklibre.com/%7Ed/newsongs/00zewamy.mp3">than this</a>, but haven't bothered to lay it down.<br />
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As for the other one... I've played "Rhysling and me - Falling Free and Flying High" more times and in more venues than I can remember - most recently twice a week for over 3 years, live, in front of unknowing tourists, while I was in Nica. I've recorded it <a href="http://www.teklibre.com/%7Ed/music/David_Taht_Angel_Bidinost-Falling_Free_And_Flying_High.mp3">with flautista</a>, and <a href="http://www.teklibre.com/%7Ed/newsongs/Rhysling_2010.mp3">in the studio</a>, and a couple other ways, and even <A href=http://www.taht.net/~mtaht/songs/RhyslingandmeSCRIPT.html>wrote a script</a> for the video.<br />
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That song got me invited to the Heinlein centennial! Spider Robinson didn't sit in, but what evan and I did went over well - <a href="http://www.teklibre.com/%7Ed/heinlein/rhysling.mp3">recorded at the Heinlein Centennial</a>. (Evan's song <a href="http://www.teklibre.com/%7Ed/heinlein/home.mp3">Home</a> went over well too, and I just discovered I still have this <a href="http://www.teklibre.com/%7Ed/heinlein/friday-night.tar.gz">enormous archive of all the filksongs</a> played that friday night that I should edit down. Justin Kare, Margaret Middleton...). I also got a chance to meet a bunch of people that I'd only corresponded with, and a few I'd admired from afar.
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Not a lot of people know <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/07/sax-in-space.html">the story of the first sax in space</a> that I reference in the song. <br />
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I haven't had much urge to play that song since the last shuttle landed. I'd like to write something happier.
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I even tried writing a children's book once, in verse, figuring that having lost this generation, I'd try the next.
"Son, your mommy and daddy are both unemployed, and you want to live on an asteroid?" (I still think it was a wonderful story - the kid flits off to dactl and has to be pulled back via tether by his dad - I got a chance to try and explain tethers with a Tom Lehrer/G&S reference - try finding rhymes for centrifugal! ) <br />
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Every couple of years, I publish links to Lance Benner's work on <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2006/06/536-good-reasons-to-go-to-asteroids.html">NEO asteroid rendezvous and intercepts</a> pages. It's my way of keeping up with the rate of discovery.<br />
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I was critical of the Dawn Mission on two different occasions because they were focused on big bodies, not small, and of New Horizons, <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2006/01/january-in-space.html">for the length of the mission and the data rate</a>.<br />
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While I look on with admiration at Dawn's early mission photos... not having spacecraft, in the space program, with a reasonable cycle time from design to construction to launch to data, from redesign to *mass construction* to launch to more and more data, to enough raw materials for a sustainable ecosystem, frustrates me.
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I worry a bit about <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2005/11/life-on-aten-asteroids.html">Apohele</a> NEOs, they are both nearby, frequently, and hard to see. Since discovery, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apohele_asteroid">10 have been confirmed</a>. Apoheles also strike me as an opportunity. I don't know if anyone's calculated intercept or rendezvous orbits for them yet.
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My main machine is named cruithne. Backup laptop, ida. My Kindle? dactl.
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So like, I dig asteroids. And rockets. And space.
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Please note if the above seems excessive - I've just written up what little I'd managed to accomplish in 30+ years of trying, not hard enough, in my spare time. I have no idea if anything I've ever said, did, wrote or sung about space ever succeeded in convincing anybody about anything.
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<br />
But I'm really happy with the direction the space program is finally going.
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<a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/06/asteroid-delivery-service.html">All I ever needed was a rocket ship</a>, and the stars to steer her by.
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<br />Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-29422950114429645532012-01-18T09:44:00.001-08:002012-01-18T10:12:58.673-08:00SOPA is bad news<a href="http://xkcd.com/743/"><img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sopa.png" /></a><br /><br />I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to American politics of late. At least one variant of SOPA, as proposed, will mess with DNSSEC.<br /><br />I believe - wholeheartedly - that DNSSEC has the ability to improve the security of the Internet for everyone. It's a critical component of my cerowrt project, comcast just rolled it out nationwide, many other providers are also doing so, and that has taken tens of thousands of people, over 10 years of effort to accomplish.<br /><br />I have also been working for years to make DNSSEC just work, only to look up now, to see clueless politicians in the pay of a a few lobbyists playing with technologies they don't understand.<br /><br />I've been busy this year, on <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/">another front</a> - trying - and succeeding!! - making the Internet, actually better, for everyone.<br /><br />It really bugs me to see all the time, energy, and money, that can go into screwing up the internet, especially vs all the time, energy, and money that goes into making it better.<br /><br />I don't have a comprehensive grip on what sopa does, but <a href="http://dyn.com/sopa-breaking-dns-parasite-stop-online-piracy/">here's one reference</a> that seems good. Doc Searls <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2011/12/17/please-no-new-laws/">also ranted well</a>...<br /><br />Seeing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more">wikipedia go dark today</a>, was a terrible, terrible thing. I'd like to keep the light of knowledge, burning bright, throughout the world, for everyone, all the time.Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-12358013553799312322012-01-16T08:53:00.001-08:002012-01-16T09:09:00.040-08:00Departing France for England, then 'home'.So, I looked up, and realized that it was time to leave Paris.<br /><br />Tomorrow.<br /><br />I'm sad to be packing up and leaving, and mad at myself on a few particulars, but on the whole, it's been a wonderful experience to have spent time in one of the still beating hearts of civilization.<br /><br />As a tourist I got to see the Eiffel tower, and tour the entire Louvre - (it wasn't the Mona Lisa that grabbed me, it was the painting on the opposite side of the room that really blew my mind - and the statuary - oh, my!)<br /><br />I ate dinner at nearly every restaurant between my apartment and my graciously donated office at <a href="http://lincs.fr">LINCs</a> lab, and a few other places. I got turned onto some wonderful places with friends that I will never find again. The wine, was wonderful... I had a couple dates, too, but romance escaped me - and I was working my brain dry... I spent 99.9 % of my time obsessively trying to beat the bloat.<br /><br />I met some people I'd only corresponded with for years, helped a couple students, gave a couple talks, did a ton of research, and my life revolved around work, primarily. Darn it. Again.<br /><br />There was so much more I could have done - in particular I'm sad I missed seeing both the catacombs and Monet's gardens, but I hope to be back one day, and those will be tops on my list. I wish also - although I fell in love with Duc Lombards and the two other big jazz clubs in Halles - that I'd actually got to *all* the jazz clubs, and seen some plays and concerts, but it was very hard to navigate alone...<br /><br />I didn't manage to learn that much French. I will have to study the language far more fully before I choose to return. I did learn lua, though.<br /><br />I'm off to London now for a week (I'm giving a talk at <a href="http://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof21/agenda.html">UKnof21</a>), and I hope to spend time there, seeing things and people that I've always wanted to see, in that country. Then... Back to Florida to see my folks, and after that...<br /><br />I have NO idea. Usually I write up a summary of the last year, and make some new years resolutions, and review the old, and I guess I'll start doing some of that, while trying to ingest as much of Europe as I can, in my time remaining here.<br /><br />I wish I'd got to Amsterdam, Spain, and Italy on this trip, too.<br /><br />Ahh, well. The work was good.Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-34061807149368668222011-11-07T05:46:00.000-08:002011-11-13T13:06:43.537-08:00An incredible stream of co-incidences passing me byFor the past couple days, while waiting for code to compile, I've been playing an old song of mine, "Living in the ooze", revising the lyrics, coming up with a bridge (finally! 6 years without a bridge!) that I think might work. This morning I even went out to get batteries for my recorder. I didn't get them because I don't know how to pronounce 'batteries' in French, and staggered back, defeated, to my apartment in Paris.<br /><br />
I've told the <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2006/12/easter-island-redux.html">story behind the song</a> in multiple posts over the past 6 years, and we're coming up on asteroid appreciation day feb 29th, next year, and I don't have a plan or place for the party... and in part those stories are always about impossible co-incidences and weird stuff happening at all the same time... <br /><br />
I have NOT been paying attention to space stuff AT ALL for the last 9 months, being deeply immersed in bufferbloat. I even stopped reading the Arocket mailing list. I spent the weekend completely immersed in a set of algorithms that finally, finally might reduce latency over wireless to sane values once again, only to end up with one bug per line of code and multiple kernels that wouldn't boot. Never left the house all weekend. Still haven't made it to the louvre. Or anywhere else in paris but the <a href="http://lincs.fr/">LINCs</a> lab. I'm insanely frustrated with this project.This morning at 12:40 AM I was ready to chuck it all and get on the next plane to anywhere that didn't have computers... but was stuck on thinking where on earth that might be, so I did a few other things about my stuck-ed-ness..
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I haven't been reading the news, either, as news.google.com insists on coming up in French no matter what I do. I'm still stuck on the six different ways to pronounce 'e', in my French-english dictionary.
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<br />
So, later this morning, in an impossible co-incidence, I meet someone who just spent the summer in Nicaragua, who points me at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-badt/nicaragua-girls-filmmaking-_b_1017051.html">her huffpost article</a>, and I send a link back to one of <a href="http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2008/03/more-livin-in-00ze.html">my adventures in australia</a> which happened to be the last thing I'd written about this particular song... and happens to be about some weird coincidences in spite of my agnostic-ism...
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<br />
And then... I notice... at the top of HER post...
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<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/04/asteroid-2005-yu55-earth-2011_n_1076838.html?ref=mostpopular" style="align:left; float:left;">Quarter mile wide asteroid to miss earth Tuesday</a>.
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<img height="480" src="http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/541440main_2005_YU55_approach.gif" width="640" />
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Nerts. It's going to miss Texas. It almost hits the moon though! That would have been spectacular! And the article has quotes from Lance Benner who I've exchanged multiple emails with over the years, and I still point actively at the data he collects on <a href="http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/%7Elance/delta_v/delta_v.rendezvous.html">plausible rendezvous trajectories</a>...
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Perhaps the universe is telling me something. About what, I don't know. Perhaps some sort of sacrifice to it is needed. Perhaps it - or something in it - needs attention.
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Either I get back to recording this song or go back to work, or go for a rendezvous.
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OK, I've googled for how to pronounce batteries. And I wonder what can rhyme with UV55? <br />
PS: <a href=http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/ibis-sainte-catherine.html>Boycott the Hôtel Ibis Sainte Catherine, Bruxelles</a>David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-18626239532764780612011-10-15T05:17:00.000-07:002011-10-17T23:31:34.982-07:0012 suggestions for startupsI'd written this months ago and meant to post it then. Having been through 14 startups now (of which 3 I started, 1 (none that I started) that worked out ok), I figure I have sufficient background to give advice... especially to myself. I tend to forget one or another of these points much to my own detriment, in the heat of creating a startup.<br /><br />I keep forgetting to apply points 10 & 11 below to my own work. At present, I'm merely applying startup-like methods, some of which are working, some not, to a <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/">major R&D project</a>. The number of points missing on the strategy are sometimes glaring - I merely want to fix a problem (bufferbloat) so well that it never bothers anybody again. As for profit motive, I have none - merely cutting my own annoyance level regarding the behavior of wireless networks back to "mellow", almost suffices.<br /><br /><h2>12 suggestions for startups</h2><br />1) Retain control. Most successful startups go through three rounds of<br />funding.<br /><br />If done wrong, by the last round the founder(s) generally reduced to a tiny minority shareholding and have lost control of the company... and are usually forced out by the 4th round or IPO.<br /><br />If done right, the founders retain 80% or more of the stock in the 3rd round.<br /><br />I note that 9/10th of startups are not successful, and that a large percentage of the ones that 'make it' did so without benefiting the principals or employees to any real extent, only the VCs.<br /><br />2) Paul graham is good. I'm a big fan. The ycombinator model appears to be working, but as to how much it meets goal 1, above, I currently have no insight.<br /><br /><span class="il">3</span>) Have a pitch, and a plan, pitch it often, *listen* to the responses and objections, and revise after every meeting. Don't be deterred by failure. Make sure your goals are shared with the people working with you, as well.<br /><br />4) Selling something is great.<br /><br />Selling something you can actually make and sell at a profit is vastly to be preferred.<br /><br />5) Get to plausible promise before seeking any money at all. If you can't do a startup's initial development on what you already have, you can't afford to take risks of this size, and should stay gainfully employed at something else.<br /><br />Once you start chasing money, chase it hard, chase it continously, get it in the bank, and spend it appropriately. While there is such a thing as 'too much money' while in growth mode, it's a nice problem to have.<br /><br />6) Decide on your exit strategy early. "go public, "stay private", "make money for 5 years", "lose money for 5 years".<br /><br />Cynically I note that you don't have to share your exit strategy with your employees or your investors.<br /><br />It does help in planning and in motivating your people if you know what your exit strategy is - there are very different motivators for 'GOING IPO IN 2 YEARS' vs 'Make money, reliably, starting in 2 years', or 'provide a valuable service', or 'solve a global problem', and it changes the kind of people you get.<br /><br />7) Incorporate early. Twice. The first company loses money, the second is in reserve. Both are handy to have around. Shell companies in particular establish credit that exists independent of your own income, over time.<br /><br />It is best to have had a company around for <span class="il">3</span>+ years before starting to really use it.<br /><br />If it were legal, given todays legal and tax environment, I'd incorporate kids at birth. As it is, at the moment I'd recommend incorporating 'em as soon as legal in Delaware rather than overseas. It really complicates you life unnecessarily. (that said, doing business with other businesses outside of the US is mildly easier, and shipping your kids overseas will give them a bigger picture than they can get in the US of world needs)<br /><br />8) Get a good lawyer. Also, get a good accountant. Take the advice of both particularly as regards to points 5 and 6, not me! Two lawyers and two accountants are an even better idea. Bad lawyers and bad accountants have sunk more than a few startups.<br /><br />Have a clear goal, corporate rules, etc, laid out, in a mission statement, etc.<br /><br />I have no opinions regarding sub-s or LLCs. A few years back LLCs were all the rage. Talk to two lawyers and one accountant about it.<br /><br />Regardless, you're going to lose money for a while. It's good to make that tax-deductable any way you can. Cash-flow will always be a problem, whether it's early days of no income or while facing unexpected growth.<br /><br />9) Contract to hire. Never hire until you have to. The costs both of hiring someone and of firing them far outweigh the extra costs of paying contractors of various worthiness. Getting business insurance is a problem, getting health insurance is also a problem.<br /><br />Limit your fixed commitments rigorously.<br /><br />Contract yourself if you want. I use MBO partners for this - they get me a pair of 401ks, 1m in business insurance and take care of a ton of details that I don't want to, in exchange for 5% off the top of my billings (in the US) - where most agencies take 40%.<br /><br />10) Recognize your own faults. If you are a detail person, get someone that can stay focused on the big picture. If you are a big picture person, get people that do details. If you can do both, do both, but on separate days. REMEMBER to do both, regularly.<br /><br />(Being a detail person myself, I have to reset with <span class="il">long</span> weekends periodically to review the mis-fired plans and replan. I've had to do a lot more of that this year, than I'd like)<br /><br />In all cases, having a good and well enabled AA/secretary working for the CEO primarily is tremendously useful. Get stuff WRITTEN DOWN. (I use <a href="http://transcribr.com/" target="_blank">transcribr.com</a> whenever possible)<br /><br />Also having a good shared scheduling system is helpful. I could go on for <span class="il">pages</span> here...<br /><br />11) Set goals, and plan, rigorously, and both conservatively and optimistically. Revise your plan monthly. Software developers are notorious for over-estimating what can be done in a month, and underestimating what can be done in 2 years. Marketing guys are notorious for missing trends until they've already happened, and selling visions of things that can't be built by any software developer on the planet and promising them 'tomorrow'.<br /><br />12) If you are risk-adverse, don't do a startup. By all means, DO! form a company to fund your own interests, and lose money with it profligately, it makes the IRS mad, and that's worth it in itself.<br /><br />The seed capital to accomplish the starting procedures above is about $15k. Yearly, maintaining the corporations depends on your locality, but runs less than $1k each, accountant < $1k, lawyer less than $3k, and if you can't find a way to lose 3x that much money pre-tax on a regular basis to make up for it, see multiple points above.Dave Tahthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16115281578739979183noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-13983940522241863142011-10-06T15:39:00.000-07:002011-10-06T15:45:31.346-07:00Steve Jobs, RIP.I am going to miss Steve Jobs. I'd admired/hated/loved/wanted to be like/unlike him for much of my adult life, and now that he's gone, I can't think of anyone else in the industry that could have stirred up such emotions and thoughts in me. He spoke well, <a href=http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-commencement-address/>here at Stanford</a>.
RIP, Steve. I intend to stay both hungry and foolish, for as long as I can, thanks to your inspiration.David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-42261340963371395652011-09-18T10:22:00.000-07:002011-09-18T10:43:02.654-07:00Welcoming my father to the blogosphere<a href=http://ronsravings.blogspot.com/>Ron Taht, my dad, is finally, blogging</a>! My mom and I have been encouraging him for years to stop wasting his time with letters to the editor, which would - whenever published - always get published, truncated, with salient points removed.<br /><br />A few months back I showed him how to use blogspot and finally - after a few false starts, he started generating some good stuff, at lengths more suitable to what he has to say.<br /><br />I'd delighted to see him finally getting his full say - and while my dad and I don't see eye to eye on many things, he instilled in me a great love of debate, that I didn't exactly appreciate when I was younger, while I seeking moral guidance rather than debate. Back then, he'd always pick the opposite side of whatever I was thinking about, no matter what he actually thought, just to sharpen my wits (and leave me confused about, well, just about everything)<br /><br />Now, after finishing his career as a prosecutor, lawyer, and judge, he speaks with conviction, about what he really thinks, and *I'm* the one that automatically picks the opposing side when discussing anything with him! <br /><br />I'm very glad he's finally writing his stuff down, and speaking his true thoughts from his heart and mind.<br /><br />He has tons of entertaining stories that I'd like him to blog about, too - fishing tales, golf stories, multiple episodes in court both tragic and funny, hysterical funny scenes from housing sales, and scary stuff from his prosecutor days...<br /><br />But, as he's not much of a typist (as yet), he's primary writing about the issues that concern him now, deeply, about the current problems and future of America... and I find myself agreeing with him far more often than I'd like (or am willing to admit, while debating with him)<br /><br />I hope for a big welcome from the blogosphere <a href=http://ronsravings.blogspot.com>it's newest 75 year old member at ronsravings.blogspot.com</a>, my dad, Ron Täht. Comments and criticism of what he's writing about will be deeply appreciated.David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-42880619459460792432011-08-17T09:31:00.000-07:002011-08-17T09:33:28.740-07:00Any other musicians at linuxcon in Vancouver?I was wondering if the old band could get together for the 20th anniversary... I've got the management behind borrowing the hyatt bar and the piano....David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-46650178542543939282011-08-12T10:33:00.000-07:002011-08-12T10:50:32.278-07:00Me, 46, Cerowrt - RC5Usually I write a long, contemplative blog post on my b-day, but I simply haven't had time to gaze into my navel all that much.
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<br />I AM however, hoping that the <a href=http://huchra.bufferbloat.net/~cero1/>RC5 candidate</a> for <a href=http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki>CeroWrt</a> proves out to be a good one, and begins to address <a href=http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-invented-embedded-linux-based.html>the mistakes I made a decade ago</a>, and mistakes everyone has been making since the 802.11n deployment.
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<br />I spent the last week with the incredibly helpful folk at <a href=http://www.isc.org>ISC</a> getting <a href=http://jupiter.lab.bufferbloat.net/cerowrt>a lab</a> put together to test this release of CeroWrt, and it's looking really good... but I did make the go/no go decision on a RC at 2:38 AM this morning, which worries me - but hopefully there will be few problems.
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<br />I'm hoping actually, for a dramatic difference in wireless network behavior for those giving the RC5 a test - certainly in testing I saw some of the cleanest TCP/IP streams I've seen all year.
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<br />I also look forward to people exploring all the new ideas inside of Cerowrt - DNSSEC, mesh networking, a local web server, etc, etc.
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<br />There are still a <a href=http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/issues>ton of bugs</a> left to fix, but no priority ones, and that... is good enough to take a day off on, and enjoy wandering a park or two in california, and play some guitar. I'm off to Vancouver for a pair of conferences next - and I hope to stage a reunion from the band we played in, in Nicaragua - with the flautista, Angel, as well. Got a few new songs in my stack now, notably 'Please come to boston'.
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<br />So while blogging has been light, if I'm lucky, things will slow down enough for me to talk about what we've been up to for the last 8 months, and where we're going. Where I'm going next, after Canada... is <a href=http://lincs.fr>Paris</a>!
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<br />The greatest gift I've ever got for a birthday! - was the help of <a href=http://jupiter.lab.bufferbloat.net/cerowrt/credits.html>hundreds of people</a>, all helping to fix, and finish the internet.
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<br />I'm in awe and delight. Thank you all, above!
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<br />Despite all that sentiment... First up this morning, on my list, is laundry.David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-7734344932577345972011-05-28T07:50:00.000-07:002011-05-28T08:05:13.684-07:00Battling the bloatSo, I've been so busy for the past few months as to have let multiple things slide. I've been all over the US - florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, NJ, Boston, California, Georgia, and now, I am back in NJ, living out of a suitcase with increasingly irrelevant clothing for the weather.<br /><br />I hope to jaunt to Europe next, after my billings catch up with me. Then back to Nicaragua.<br /><br />On the minus side:<br /><br />My main email went down for a month. I hardly noticed.<br />I completely forgot an important anniversary... for over a week. The lady involved is not speaking to me.<br /><br />My laptop crashed 5 days after I'd used the USB stick I use for backups for something else.<br />I haven't checked my voicemail in a month, at least.<br /><br />I got no exercise. <br /><br />On the plus side:<br /><br />Eric Raymond now has IPv6. So does Evan Hunt. Two down, several billion to go.<br /><br />The latest and greatest bind9 - with dnssec support - is now available for openwrt in the <a href=git@github.com:dtaht/ceropackages.git>Cerowrt</a> git repository, for testing, as part of <a href=http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/iscwrt/wiki/>ISCWRT</a>. DNSSEC is a mere 3 configuration commands away! <br /><br />I gave a fairly well received talk at asilomar about the problems with the Net outside the USA.<br /><br />I attended <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ljdiwrxjg>jim gettys' recent google tech talk</a>, and breathed the same air as Vint Cerf.<br /><br />The debloat-testing kernel now has most of the features we were trying to test (SFB,etc) , and it has been updated to 2.6.39. <br /><br />There is now an extensively debloated (but not perfectly by a long shot) version of <br />openwrt - which also contains the critical stuff from debloat-testing, so we can test<br />end to end connectivity in all sorts of ways.<br /><br />That release is entering the final stages of testing, and is codenamed, <a href=http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bismark/wiki/Capetown>Capetown</a>. It works on the netgear wndr3700v2, which is a wonderful piece of hardware.<br /><br />And some routers using that are now up and running, capetown, South Africa, as part of the <a href=http://www.projectbismark.net>Bismark</a> project, which I'll be helping out at through mid-august.<br /><br />The last 4 weeks of my life I worked at a level I have not worked at since my late 20s. <br /><br />I'm beat. And I'm taking the weekend off. Hopefully someone else will enjoy this stuff and put it to good use in their research into battling the bufferbloat problem.David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-70287674737361112772011-03-16T09:39:00.001-07:002011-03-16T10:56:16.946-07:00Operator overload & nuclear troubles at Fukushima 1I'd actually written my last blog post on monday, thinking it was tuesday, and wednesday in Japan. Shows how much sleep I've been getting. <br /><br />The quality of media coverage has improved significantly, but the scope of the cascading failures at the Fukushima nuclear plants has grown - with secondary damage from the explosions and over <a href=http://www.japanquakemap.com/>500 aftershocks in Japan</a> complicating matters. <br /><br />The original links I pointed to in <a href=http://nex-6.taht.net/posts/Heroic_Engineering_In_Japan/>my first post</a> have been updated and revised, with <a href=http://mitnse.com/> MIT's department of nuclear energy doing a better job of filtering through the events involved</a> than any other media organization. <br /><br />MIT has not addressed the questions raised about the Mark I containment facility that concern me the greatest. I daren't speculate. <br /><br />Several other aspects of the news coverage and analysis bother me:<br /><br />A) lack of understanding of the effects of all those aftershocks, and for that matter, coverage seems to be limited to talking about the first quake, even on wikipedia. It's obvious that these had effects, in part, making post-quake inspection difficult. <br /><br />B) lack of understanding that these were some of the oldest and most obsolete plants in the world, not just Japan. I keep seeing calls for increased safety, or damning nuclear plants for their lack thereof, when these were generation II plants, kept running long beyond their initial design life, due, in part, to the difficulty in getting new plants built. <br /><br />Generation III+ plants such as the AP1000 have, for example, entirely passive cooling systems, and have safety ratings 1000+ times better than the Gen II plants did. Furthermore they use their fuel more efficently with less waste. Nuclear energy is much more well understood now, nearly 50 years after these plants were designed.<br /><br />C) The on-going storage of the fuel rods - due to being unable to find another place to store them - is likely the largest danger now, as it appears as though at least one storage pool was damaged in one of the quakes and explosions.<br /><br />Everybody - on all sides of the nuclear debate - agrees that continued storage of the fuel rods at the facilities was dangerous - and most facilities were not designed with long term storage in mind.<br /><br />Now, that after the fact, the "out of sight, out of mind" nature of the ongoing storage of fuel rods in ad-hoc facilities in the presence of such debate has been exposed - perhaps some rational decisions about what to do with the spent fuel will emerge.<br /><br />I doubt the US will become rational on this point anytime soon. I suspect Japan will become so. I also think we'll see a surge of interest in solar power worldwide.<br /><br />D) with less than 50 operators on duty, that translates out to 12 or less operators managing the 4 reactors in trouble - I imagine that some of the additional failures since monday were in part caused by exaustion and overload, and the inattention to other pre-emergencies due to these factors. It's unclear how many people are monitoring plants 5 & 6. <br /><br />One of the big causes of both prior major nuclear accidents was operator overload. Too many things beeping, and buzzing and alarms going off, and too much complexity in the control systems.<br /><br />Future plants - if they are ever built - should have a good offsite management and monitoring facility inconceivable to those in the pre-computer design era.<br /><br />For all that, I do wonder that the world-wide reaction is overblown. I can't imagine, were I in charge - not sending in every available qualified volunteer and resource available. <br /><br />For all the worry reported in the press, <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents>this (via wikipedia as of about 10AM Wed MDT), remains true</a>:<br /><br />“To date, the radiation leaks beyond the plant's boundaries have not reached a level high enough to constitute any significant detriment to public health. However, there is still significant risk that a leak at levels high enough to affect public health may occur.”<br /><br />E) There have been more than a few hair brained schemes floated to cool the reactor pools - for example, cooling the overheating fuel pools by dumping water via helicopter. Dumping water by helicopter cannot be done gently, and would release a great deal of radiation to the crews dropping it. <br /><br />There is a huge amount of mis-information on the web regarding the deaths of the pilots that flew over Chernobyl, I've been unable to determine the truth of matters.<br /><br />I find myself tearing up at the dedication of those working to stop an even worse nightmare not just at Fukushima, but throughout the country and the world. I wish I could help. <br /><br />I also remain in awe and admiration at an high-tech engineering culture and country that could go through a disaster this size, and have under 20,000 dead.David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-68911467371945840482011-03-14T23:19:00.000-07:002011-03-16T09:39:20.871-07:00bad wednesday for nukes in japan...after my last blog entry, lots of bad, scary information came to light, 2 more reactors ended up with more problems than the first two.<br /><br />Notably, the presence of spent fuel rods onsite and old flaws in the mark 1 containment system led to my greater concern, particularly after more hydrogen explosions damaged the surrounding area.<br /><br />According to wikipedia, <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents>after a fire at reactor 4</a>, hourly radiation reached 100 000 μSv. That's a big number. A scary, bad, number. But not a (rapidly) deadly number. Reactor unit 3 reached 400,000 μSv. Why people are reporting micro (10^-6)rather than milla (10^-3) bothers me, <br /><br />Years ago, I wrote about the <a href=http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2008/06/mccain-proposes-45-new-nuclear-power.html>dangers of running nuclear plants past their design life</a>. Now, with accident cascading into accident, the operators are tiring and making mistakes, and all seems grim in Japan to constrain meltdowns in several plants. <br /><br />My heart goes out to those attempting repairs. Things may turn for the worse as it gets tougher to spend time at the site, safely.<br /><br /><b>Update: Wednesday 8AM MDT</b><br /><br />I'd written this blog entry on monday, actually, thinking it was tuesday in the US and wednesday in Japan. Shows how much sleep I've been getting.David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-60505132699124818072011-03-13T11:52:00.000-07:002011-03-13T11:59:37.772-07:00Heroic civil engineering and disaster planning in JapanShortly after I'd written a piece on my other blog about <a href=http://nex-6.taht.net/posts/Heroic_Engineering_In_Japan/>the amazing successes of civil engineering in Japan to withstand the 8.9 earthquake</a> vs previous disasters, I got wind of another <a href=http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/13/some-perspective-on-the-japan-earthquake/>piece that was written by someone IN japan that goes into more and better detail overall</a>, and a third, that <a href="https://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/">talks clearly to the nuclear issues</a>.<br /><br />Universally - wikipedia and the bloggers have beat the conventional press hands down for accuracy on this nightmare. It's too bad that everything that hit print thus far is so off.David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3570726.post-697915783055820912011-03-08T07:07:00.000-08:002011-03-09T18:36:15.108-08:00Beating Our bloatAt my brother's wedding last week (way to go Steve!), one of his friends noted I had stopped blogging... instead, I've been making <b>serious</b> progress on this New Years resolution:<ul><cite>Collaborate more. Make a stronger effort to find people worth collaborating with. Use email more. Use usenet again. Push into the mainstream more patches - but logout at the end of the day - create some music.</cite></ul>Back in mid-November I'd first <a href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/first-puzzle-piece/">caught wind of bufferbloat</a> from <a href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/">Jim Gettys' blog</a>. <br /><br />At first I was merely intrigued... <br /><br />I had seen the kinds of TCP traces jg was getting while I was in Nicaragua (working on the wisp6 greenfield wireless mesh network), and in several cybercafes and hotels. I'd assumed then it was merely the tin cans and string connecting Nica to the rest of the world. I'd seen traces like this, in particular, a lot:<br /><br /><a href="http://gettys.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/screenshot-21oakknoll-pcap-wireshark.png" border=0><img src=http://gettys.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/screenshot-21oakknoll-pcap-wireshark.png height="480" width="640"></a><br /><br />I didn't understand the effects on TCP of bufferbloat until I saw his traces and then his <a href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of-glasse-must-not-throw-stones-at-another/">more detailed analysis with different tools</a>. <br /><br />This is a normal TCP trace:<br /><br /><a border=0 href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of-glasse-must-not-throw-stones-at-another/"><img src="http://www.tcptrace.org/manual/owin.jpg" height="480" width=640></a><br /><br />This is a bufferbloated TCP trace:<br /><br /><a border=0 href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of-glasse-must-not-throw-stones-at-another/"><img src="http://gettys.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/a2b_owin.png" height="480" width="640"></a><br /><br />It looks like an EKG on crack! (That's what <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Humor">Steve Lord called it</a>, anyway). I envision this picture on a milk carton, with the caption: <br /><br /><center><font size=+2>"Have you seen this trace?<br></br></font><font size=+1>Login <a href="http://bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat">to bufferbloat.net</a> to learn how to fix it..."</font></center><br /><br />I got <i>interested</i>.<br /><br />So, I re-ran <a href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/home-router-puzzle-piece-two-fun-with-wireless/">his experiments</a>, <a href="http://nex-6.taht.net/images/housenet.png">against the wisp6 router testbed</a>. The results, under bad conditions (heavy rain), were horrifying.... 10s of seconds of delay in the routers (!@#@!#!)... and explained why NTP, DNS, ND, DHCP, and most other traffic had stopped working under those conditions.<br /><br />Still, even at this point (late December), I thought it was a local, device specific, problem. I did a little patch to those routers and fixed it, (but good!) and went on my merry way, trying to cope with my other wisp6 problems of <a href="http://nex-6.taht.net/posts/Fixing_ipv6_autodiscovery/">autoconfiguration</a>, ipv4 in 6 encapsulation, ipsec, mtu size...<br /><br />Then I saw the netanylzr data and <a href="http://mirrors.bufferbloat.net/Talks/BellLabs01192011/">watched and listened to jim's presentation</a> about 3 times...<br /><br /><a border=0 href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of-glasse-must-not-throw-stones-at-another/"><img src="http://gettys.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/uplink_buffer_all.png" height="480" width="640"></a><br /><br />The diagonal lines are showing latencies - across paths that should be taking under 100ms to do anything - all over the world - measured in SECONDS.<br /><br />I realized, finally, it wasn't just me and my devices and my little network in Nicaragua. <br /><br />Bufferbloat was a global internet-wide problem, one probably growing worse, rapidly.<br /><br />I got <b>alarmed</b>. If NTP, DNS, DHCP, ND, etc., start breaking we're in a world of hurt, but if TCP/IP starts breaking worse really bad things will happen... <br /><br />I emailed <a href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/a-committee-is-a-life-form-with-six-or-more-legs-and-no-brain-lazarus-long/">Jim Gettys on January 10th </a> about the mis-understandings thus far in the press that I'd been trying to correct, and volunteered to donate a pair of servers that I had lying around, and maybe write an article about traffic shaping... he told me I was exactly correct in my own analysis... <br /><br />I'd met him a couple of times, we'd worked on the same stuff, like handhelds.org, X11, and OLPC... <br /><br />...and so I found myself instead hacking ruby and redmine, getting multiple servers running, using my rock and roll promotion skills to get people all over the world in disparate disciplines involved, hacking kernels, fiddling with AQMs and new algorithms, reading 70+ theoretical papers, writing multiple pieces and wiki pages, making deals, swapping services, picking up dropped balls, making a ton of phone calls and exhausting my personal email address book to get <a href="http://bufferbloat.net">bufferbloat.net</a> to be a real, functioning entity, with developers, theorists and users from all over the world, and <b>not</b> a talk shop.<br /><br />And the rest, is history in the making.<br /><br />I still haven't got around to writing the piece about traffic shaping.<br /><br />Basically, Bufferbloat (see <a href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/bufferbloat-faq/">FAQ</a>) is a new name for an old problem (RFC 970) that has gradually been re-introduced over the last 10 years. It's especially bad in cable modems, 802.11n gear, FIOS, but also can be seen in just about anything that has a wide dynamic range (GigE switches hat do 100Mbit). It's bad, it's ugly, it's screwing up the Net, big time, and it's just a mistake that we've (as engineers and network designers) have all been making for a long time...<br /><br />Head. Desk. Head. Desk. Head. Desk.<br /><br />The Bufferbloat problem is almost as bad as Y2k... And more solvable. It's just that the Internet is so much bigger now than in 1999 that is intimidating. More cell phones are being <i>added</i> to the Internet every quarter than we had total users in 1999. There's also <a href="http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/bufferbloat-and-congestion-collapse-back-to-the-future/">a persistent fear that it will get much worse</a>, before it gets better.<br /><br />So we've been lining up people to fix it ever since.<br /><br />While doing all that, along the way, I came up with a good idea for a <a href="https://github.com/dtaht/Cosmic-Background-Bufferbloat-Detector">cosmic background bufferbloat detector</a> that was extensively <a href="http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/questions/2011-February/028617.html">discussed on usenet</a>, and the <a href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/bloat/2011-February/000132.html">bufferbloat mailing list</a>. Nobody found any holes in the concept which means (darn it) I'm going to have to code it up - or convince someone else to do so. <br /><br />Good stuff keeps happening... there are nearly 200 members of the bloat mailing list now, John Linville just <a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/429943/">released a debloat-testing kernel</a> containing not only a new algorithm (eBDP) for wireless, but two new AQMs and some driver patches. <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/">Doc Searls</a> graciously loaned me his column for an editorial in Linux Journal's upcoming June issue... Vint Cerf loaned Jim Gettys his column for IEEE computer (due out in a few days), <a href=http://www.bufferbloat.net/news/7>multiple other writers</a> have chipped in... Theorists, coders, cats and dogs, all talking to one another on the <a href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net">mailing lists</a>...<br /><br />About the only flaw in all this activity of mine is that I've been so buried by it all as to stop blogging!! The effort required to write something for a more general audience is so much greater than carrying out conversations with the people I'm collaborating with presently on email and irc that I've stopped journaling entirely. I'm trying to fix that today, a little.<br /><br />I've learnt that while journaling/blogging is important, even necessary, <i>to the writer</i> and his/her creative process, writing the history down behind the writing matters to no-one else. (I'm journaling today so that <b>I</b> can remember the timelines here) <br /><br />Also, cutting the history from the finished work helps a lot. I just learned this trick from <a href=http://esr.ibiblio.org/>esr</a>, who has also taken time out on irc to teach me more about writing in the last 2 months than I've learned in 10 years of blogging. (It also took 5 other polished writers - Evan Hunt, Bill Weinberg, Richard Pitt, & Jim Gettys, to tell me in no uncertain terms that I was doing some things wrong - for it to register. I've undergone a writerly "intervention". It was painful, but I'll survive)<br /><br />I wish now, that I'd opened up my writing to a writers cabal 25 years ago, or earlier. I might have got a few books done by now. <br /><br />Tomorrow (wednesday) I'm in <a href="http://www.bufferbloat.net/news/8">open-to-all VOIP conference call about bufferbloat</a>, with the <a href="http://www.freeswitch.org">freeswitch folk</a>. Please join the call to hear more. Or check out bufferbloat.net.<br /><br />After I gave up on SIP based VOIP (after working on it for 6 years), and <a href="http://nex-6.taht.net/images/dave_taht_astricon2006-final.ppt">gave my last presentation on it, in 2006, at Astricon</a>, I'd had no idea then that a goodly portion of the problems I'd had with SIP were tied to bufferbloat. No idea what-so-ever.<br /><br />Solutions seem feasible, across the Internet, for a whole new level of interactive applications after we get bufferbloat fixed. SIP phones now do IPv6, which solves a lot of problems, too. I'm seriously encouraged.<br /><br />Sometimes it takes giving up on something, utterly, in order to make progress. It's been a zen 2011 that way. And also resolving to actually resolve your new years resolutions - works too.<br /><br />All this said, I'm going to take a break from all this soon and write a bit about listening to, and making great music, and about an old, cherished concept of mine (and <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/stram">jeff stram's</a>) called the jam-o-phone.David Tähthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06732901472015529220noreply@blogger.com0