JC blogs

Digital Communications II Progress by 27.11.2009

clog — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:30:00 -0800

QoS, Int-serv, Diff-serv, RSVP, and Traffic Engineering.
Last lecture, monday, 30 nov. wrapup.

falconer on question time....

clog — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:03:00 -0800

last nite on bbc 1 on questiontime, falcolner defended tony blair about the decision to invade iraq

why doesn't anyone actually ask the question
"Since invading Iraq, we've had 7/7/ and we've had shoe bombers and liquid bomber plots in the UK and this has been caused by this deciison - aren't the people who made the decision going to admit they are not only probably guilty of a crime by starting an illegal, and certainly unjustified war - they also are guilty of causing otherwise loyal British citizens to become terrorists in their own country and therefore cause the death, harm and misery for many people" - i.e. even if tone wont atone for the deaths in Iraq, why can't he say sorry for screwing things up for his own people?

iraquriy wont help one bit, of course.

withouthoppair

clog — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:46:00 -0800

so we can't all save as much carbon emission as we'd like - maybe we have gas guzzling cars and planes - so how could we reduce our feetprint?

one way would be to turn off lights - this would obviously be quite dangerous, but it would certainly save fuel - but (a bit like going round plugging in lots of plugs to stop electricity leaks, but then unplugging all the phone chargers to stop wasting electricity) it is "in the noise" (as david mackay's excellent book explains so clearly)

A better solution (as outlined in aforementioned book) would be to stop using brakes - lots of stopping and starting is what messes up your engine efficiency (and requires you to push all that air out the way, especially when doing take offs, or pullin away with both turbos on the 5.8 liter engine spinin on max) - so we just need to drive (or fly) at crusin speed all the time

what about intersections? No problemo - all that happens is after a few days of mayhem, darwin will eliminate all the drivers and pilots with poor timeing, and then the total number of vehicles on the road (or in the air) will be far less anyhow, so then we will have succeeded globally and locally in optimising the greenicity of the world's car and air transport networks....

simple, doncha see?

4D printer - Maxwell's Angels....

clog — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:43:00 -0800

so we've all heard about 3D printers, and pretty naff they are too - and soon we'll have 3D fax machines (poor man's matter transporter)

but what about a 4D printer?

This would basically extrude reality - it could be a nascent universe in a box, with an output being a stream of space time continuum - the settings (God's Dials?) would be quite complicated....perhaps the implementation would entail use of Maxwell's Angels (a bit like his demons, only without sense-of-humour failure).

trying to understand the world of 2009

clog — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:50:00 -0800

just went through what I read in trying to get a handle on just what is going on in 2009 - see
my 2009 reading list - note this is not compelte - i've only listed things I liked:)

alien consciousness (machine intelligence or extraterrestrial)

clog — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:22:00 -0800

so reading What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink
Everything
by John Brockman , Brian Eno (Introduction)
Amazon Reference
I was struck by the similarity of arguments about alien and artificial intelligence - how do we know something is conscious? how can we make something conscious? what is society but the combination of the theory of other and a model of self?

meanwhile, perhaps Drake's famous equation, promoted by Carl Sagan, and dismissed by some because of lack of detection of any
other is because once you reach singularity, you become
dark matter, and society is simply dark energy.

there's a theory for you to munch on.

sci fi game on google sky map

clog — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:11:00 -0800

would be neat to play a sort of
plan your sci fi plot game using google skymap o na bunch of smart phones -

basic model would be to take plot of any classic space opera SF book or film, and tag the journeys in it (most space opera is basically an adventure trail, challenge, journey -) on the skymap visiting relevant planets or stars and see who can get it most right....

Friday, November 13, 2009 Digital Communications II Progress by 20.11.2009

clog — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:02:00 -0800

Switching & Sharing done now

next week - intserv, diffser, traffic

Digital Communications II Progress by 13.11.200

clog — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:48:00 -0800

Friday 13th - we havn't got quite as far as I thought - so we've done Scheduling (and Queue Management), and made a start on Switching.

Next week, must finish switching AND do contention networks.

john barleycorn - subversion NOT cautionary tale

clog — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:11:00 -0800

I'm definitely very slow - after 11 zillion listenings to the old standard folk tune
John Barleycord, I finally figured out it is an
instruction manual on how to make booze, NOT a warning about its risks...viz

There were three men come from the West
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow:
"John Barleycorn must die."

They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head,
'Til these three men were satisfied
John Barleycorn was dead.

They let him lie for a very long time,
'Til the rains from heaven did fall,
When little Sir John raised up his head
And so amazed them all.

They let him stand 'til Mid-Summer's Day
When he looked both pale and wan;
Then little Sir John grew a long, long beard
And so became a man.

They hired men with their scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee;
They rolled him and tied him around the waist,
And served him barbarously.

They hired men with their sharp pitchforks
To pierce him to the heart,
But the loader did serve him worse than that,
For he bound him to the cart.

They wheeled him 'round and around the field
'Til they came unto a barn,
And there they took a solemn oath
On poor John Barleycorn.

They hired men with their crab-tree sticks
To split him skin from bone,
But the miller did serve him worse than that,
For he ground him between two stones.

There's little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl,
And there's brandy in the glass,
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last.

The huntsman cannot hunt the fox
Nor loudly blow his horn
And the tinker cannot mend his pots
Without John Barleycorn.

3 masters 3

clog — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:23:00 -0800

so in my life i've been lucky to meet
3 masters of trinity college cambridge

interestingly (imho)
one was afraid of women
one was afraid of men
one was afraid of god
as far as i could tell
but i'm not telling who or which

horizon is getting weaker

clog — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:03:00 -0800

not a good recent edition of horizon - here's an idea for a decent edition

get ben goldacre (or someone similar)
to do something on
what is medical science?

what constitutes evidence and what constitutes grounds for
accepting a theory (or rejecting it)
and what constitutes waffle -

could start with historical perspective - e.g.
John Snow et al...and give some
homeopathic and placebo lessons
and explain
statistical significance
and risk, properly....

remember, the stuff those folks did has contributed more to human happiness/quality of life than just about anything else except the invention of the electric guitar and the football.

jobs and houses - how to take up slack?

clog — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:01:00 -0800

1st capital connect didn't run any trains this sunday- reason? no drivers wanted to work overtime!

note there are a million able bodied people looking for work in the uk

similar - there are a million empty houses and a million people looking for somewhere to live

what government intervention would fix this without "distorting the market" too much?
in these times, I am not a fan of pure Adam Smith.....gimme some new deals, and some homeless bankers

can 3D printers print 3D printers

clog — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:28:00 -0800

and can they print robots that can turn off 3D printers?
and if not, why not?

cf. those of you familiar with Philip K. Dick's dystopic visions of consumer society will recognize the rogue post-war autofac meme, here

Digital Communications II Progress by 6.11.2009

clog — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:28:00 -0800

This week, should have finished
error control (sequence numbers, retransmit/rtt timer estimation)
and
flow control (at least intro to open&closed loop)

as with last week (routing)
these topics come up in exam questions frequently.

oribtals & flat earth and the ecliptic

clog — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:26:00 -0800

you know i never could understand how people worked out all the orbit stuff when I was a kid - it was coz noone ever told me that all the orbits were in the same plane! - if you think of the planets goin round in arbitray planes, like hurts your brain....meanwhile so does xkcd
http://xkcd.com/658/

what's not to like if you are the army?

clog — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:25:00 -0800

"A US major is under guard at a Texas military base as officials investigate what prompted him to shoot dead 13 people."

spunds like he was doing his job, just a bit early - he was about to be shipped to the "eastern front"....

Unversities versus Lord Mandelson

clog — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:21:00 -0800

One good news measure of our economic impact -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8340552.stm

The report is well worth reading as it puts a bottom line
(and an impressive one) on our economic impact
and explictly excludes the societal impact (which I believe
would be a trivial case to make)

On Mandelson and turning HE into a 1960s
Comprehensive System....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8339454.stm
as part of his higher ambitions (viz
http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/higher-ambitions
if you were having a hard time finding it)

I really think we dont handle these guys very well - obviously
we don't "just rely on A levels" when doing admissions -
that would be stupid -
its the government that are stupid to say so,

Why don't we have a Alastair Campbell type press person
to fight our corner in the public eye -
the government press office gets away with
repeatedly reporting complete and utter balderdash
(witness their attempts to trash the Cambridge report on primary education,
let alone their wilful ignorance in attempting to
supress other science advice recently).

Why do we listen to politicians when they don't listen to us?

We should take our case direct to the public more.

For example,
fundamentally, if someone is disadvantaged by a
state education in getting to university the
solution is not to disadvantage children of wealthy parents
by displacing them from university by people with lower achievements
which would be obviously 100% unethical,
reducing the quality of education for everyone,
but to put the resources into fixing
secondary schools.

every time some good university
catches "criticism" from Mandelson,
for a low %age of state school kids
(e.g. UCL, Imperial, Cambridge, Oxford)
we should look at the list of
schools where we rejected people from
and say
"so what are you doing
about these useless schools,
Lord M?"

and pass this on to the applicants and their parents to
go to their LEA and ask what they are doing with the tax money...
and the subsidy they are getting from people who send their kids
to private school and still pay tax but don't put load on the system
(oh, ok so the private school gets teachers....well if the state school was god, and more state schools are getting people in to uni than private, so more are, by this definition good) then they will attract good teachers - and they do - its just naff schools that don

comprehensivising the universities will screw them up just the way
it did to english 2ndary schools for a couple of decades - solution is
let the teachers do their job and resource it properly (like pretty much any where else in europe(including scotland for example) except england)

and lay off -if you cut university income, you are cutting a profit center - no-one who has "business" in their job title, vuts
profit centers.

the day the internet stood still

clog — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:45:00 -0700

this has it just about right

Tricycle design

clog — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:36:00 -0700

i was lookin at the design of a bike made
simply of 3 circles
front wheel, backwheel and seaterwheel
connected in a triangle by their axes...

O
/ \
O - O

tryin to realise this in materials... ...

as with economics, so with science - british government refutes expert advice

clog — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:26:00 -0700

the latest fiasco in british government denial of expertise involves drugs - but why should we be surprised when this is a government that since Tony (technophone) Blair, has been run by people whose only training is legal and who subscribe to medieval superstitions (e.g. religion)
and prefer the advice of marketeers and gurus than doctors and scientists (or even people who just do business properly!).

shocking if it wasn't actually going to also do harm, which makes it bordering on criminal ignorance.

dan brown - the lost clue?

clog — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:34:00 -0700

so there's a bit in the lost s symbol when a super hacker
is trying to find the source of a document that a distributed search engine has uncovered magically, but is phoned up by the CIA mid hacking to be asked what he is doing...oh yeah, some super hacker, eh...

meanwhile, the writing "style" (for want of a better word) still reminds me of a small child or puppy that wants to go "wee wee" - it's all breathless urgency, but for no obvious reason whatsoever - the hacks (every chapter starts with a jump forward in time, then has to go back and explain how we got there, then ends with a cliff hanger) reminds me of early TV batman episodes (don't even mention Dr Who:)

THe occasional complete misuse of words is astounding (don't his editors do anything for their vast profit/income he generates...

nevertheless, it was a fun 33 minutes read.

Digital Communications II Progress by 1.11.2009

clog — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:22:00 -0700

This week I'm doing routing - I've updated the material so please check the new version of slides - DAR + DV/LS is a bit tidier (I hope) but if you spot errata, let me know!

lots of stuff for supervisions and exam questions now.

Poppys and stuff

clog — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:53:00 -0700

last day in october (a hallow's eve!) you're "supposed" to wear a poppy - well I suppose I wont because although I respect and am in awe of people who go fight to defend me, I am not enamoured of the folks that decided the last two times to send these guys "in my name" - no you didn't - and there's no way for me to unbundle this in a poppy without insulting people.

meanwhile, wallace and grommit should do a movie called
12 Angry Dogs

also recently, it occurred to me that the Cambridge Man-o-Science center should build a very small homunculus - that would be their crowning achievement..

CS meets news control and CS meets germs and immune systems

clog — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:48:00 -0700

1. wonders how easy a provenance tracker for news would be to hack up (hint hint = plagiarism detector + rss feed merger) - this'd automate flat earth news reporting - maybe google news could run it as an aggregator:)

it would be nice to see a threaded source of news, and see when the BBC, Fox, CNN, Guardian, Times of India are "reporting" things that are actually just press releases from Number 10 Downing St or Company X's publicity department....

2. your immune system can cope with a certain number of different viruses and a certain number of different immune responses - has anyone done cryptanalysis to figure out
why? for example, immunising you against a new thing can make you less immune to another thing - this sounds like wherever the T cells store their signatures has a finite heap or stack size

the former would be good for sanity, the latter for general well being:)

to a first approximation....

clog — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:02:00 -0700

to a first approximation....the second approximation
isn't any more accurate...

end of amateur internet era, what a sad loss

clog — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:40:00 -0700

bye bye geocities and xkcd today has it spot on...

blairite society

clog — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:18:00 -0700

ASBO - anti social-behaviour orders
sound like something you get in a restaursnt - like
anti-pasti -

waiter, here's my order for some SBs before we get on to the main event

the main event will be 42 days without Al Dante - this is just sufficient as every good Tuscan knows, to cure the most obstinate Florentine Ham...

I suspect Tony BLair wasn't a closet catholic at all - he is an afficionado of that ancient secret society of the lodge of flock wallpaperers, whose rituals include
stripping all the old varnish from their law degree certificates and prostrating themselves before a bowl of steaming pasta - the flying spaghetti monster rears her ugly head one more time...

you can tell I've been reading Dan Brown..

Digital Communications II Progress by 23.10.2009

clog — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:17:00 -0700

We have now covered the material in Section Two of the course

Part 2 - Philosphy/Design

Systems, lecture 5
Layering, lecture 6
Implementation, lecture 7
Alphabet Soup, lecture 8

So I talked about user land and kernel implementations, concurrency and OS problems, and finally about what IP and TCP (and ICMP packets look like

A very nice reference for this last bit is W RIch Steven's fine books
TCP/IP Illustrated volumes 1 (operations of protocols) and 2 (walkthru of code!)

v8

clog — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:55:00 -0700

talk yesterday about optimsiing runtime for javascript vm in chrome
by the chrome add-on man:)

i was confused at first as v8 is a nice multi-vegetable drink we have at home a lot
and its also one of the signs on the back of the Rover 3500 they trashed on top gear recently, and both these associations were probably not along the lines the speaker intended....

on the other hand, he obviously hadn't read about making oCaml networking apps go fast:)

why is there no Wiipedia yet?

clog — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:05:00 -0700

everythign you want to know about gestures...?

collision avoidance for cell phone walkers (and cyclists (and drivers))

clog — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:09:00 -0700

here's the thing - you're walking along and suddenly someone crashes into you - normally, humans use eye contact to avoid this, but nwoadays all humans are only eyeballing their smart phone screen so the obvious thing to do is to give the phone
the awareness its about to hit someone and have it beep (faster and faster as you get closer - like the parking radar systems on fancy cars and airplane collision warning systems do)

this could be made very ergomomic with camera phones in that as you get quite close, your phoen could show you some eyes and have them look the way you should go (the other persons' phones having made sure they do the same so you don't all go the same way in that collison avoidance dance you sometimes see) _ actually another verison would be one that shows you the person you are about to walk in to is a friend and maybe you should say hi rather than texting/emailing them:)

this could extend for cyclists so they no longer need to look where they ride
and drivers too in cars and buses...

then eventually the phones could just do the driving for you

and we could all just stay at home...

UK's proposed Research Evaluation Framework and "Impact"

clog — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:36:00 -0700

One of the problems with this debate is that we are all so self deprecatory as
a community that we miss some important things about the big picture.

RCUK are trying to justify their budget to the treasurey and lord Mandelson
(both roles may change in the next 1-2 years:)
about science spending - note Joe Public is not in this debate - we are not being asked to
justify our existence in the wider arena -

my view is that in the last few years,
public appreciation of science has been very high
(note I say "appreciation", not "understanding")
due to efforts of great popularisers like
Attenborough and Jones and Hawking and many others.

I think it would be quite easy to win the fight that
science research is worth doing in public - that's not the problem - the
"adversary" we have to convince is the senior civil service and
the government in power (as Anthony Finkelstein correctly implied, and
Ross Anderson indicated)....

So what are we looking at in the changing evaluation framework...

1. transparency - is each project (or person) worth funding?
2. scale - is the total budget defensible? (the REF)
3. efficiency - are peer review and the REF/QR mechanism
good ways to assess how to allocate money, and which is better...

A Lot of what is going on is we
are being groomed in a concerted campaign
to believe that this is finely motivated,
(this grooming reminds me
of the way marxism, and free market philsophies
were put over on societies at points in history,
or wars are justified to populations) ...

The peer review system already is quite transparent
(if quite expensive) -
What I dont know why the same word is used
in the new project form 2 page impact statement,
as is used in the HEFCE Proposed REF ...

but what is obvious is that impact at the REF level is to do with QR,
so should be assessed on aggregates,
not on individual fine grain, and also
should be assessed on long time scales (not 10-15, but 15-50 years).

There are two obvious reasons for this
1. research high impact events are black swans.
2. however, the rare events considered as some time series
(probably self similar)
are in fact products of a large aggregate of work in reality
(indeed large deviation theory about such time series come
from collection of feedback processes over
multiple time scales) -

the lower impact work
that may have very low biblimetric impact
for example (typically drawn from some zipfian distribution)
are far from irrelevant - they are the background from which emerge
the succesful results - without all the searching,
we wouldn't get the significant events. (this is not simply
about negative results - its about predictability of impact).

What should be done in the REF?

I propose we accept the _collection_ of fine grain data,
but we object to the simple formual used -

the impact needs to be attributed,
and that is where the formula is clearly silly -

attribution of work in research is hard to do,
and the longer the time scale, the wider you have to look -
but we have quite a well known algorithm for attribution -
its called
pagerank.

jon

p.s.
I quite like things like pagerank,
satnav, cell phones, wii games controller/console,
PVRs with online programme guides, engine management systems,
programmable dishwashers, washing machines, ovens,
etc as examples of CS impact...we should get a big list together and
divy it up amongst us...there's plenty to go around...

p.p.s. at the other extreme
economic impact is rarely large, but some cases can justify an entire programmes
existence - for example, DARPA programme manages used to enjoy telling US congress
that 1 single tax year, cisco paid enough tax to justify the entire ARPA research budget
developing the Intenet (on the order of 600M dollars)...

p.p.p.s.
if you're interested about the problems of research assesment,
one interesting source is the analysis of programme ctte
reviews from a number of conferences - for example, see
http://www.usenix.org/event/wowcs08/tech/full_papers/anderson1/anderson_html/

Science fiction title fashions

clog — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:36:00 -0700

short:
space
grass
sparrow

long:
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54' N, Longitude 77° 00' 13" W

good:
The City and the Stars
Altered Carbon
Vurt

bad:
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Difference Engine

ugly
woken furies
maul
flood
chrysalids
more than human

pretty
childhood's end
the goblin reservation
more than human

privacy, the internet, and asymmetric warfare

clog — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:08:00 -0700

A recent paper on Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization, by
Paul Ohm (colorado school of law...)
and a recent report on net legislationby the All Party Parliamentary Communications Group of the UK government, both conclude that there are interesting times ahead when it comes to personal privacy, and both seem to say that "database state" and "database capitalism" are bad ideas. Essentially, the ability to do "joins" on unrelated databases, whether they are anonymized well or not, allows accurate pinpointing on individuals to a very very fine level of detail.

Solutions invlve
1) only gathering data for fit purpose for specific use by specific users and anonymizing it
and (AND, not or)
2) strictly controlling the flow of such data in any way, means or form.
AND
3/ deleting it for ever when you are done (forgetting things is not an evolutionary error - it is a vital part of staying sane for individuals and probably should be wired into the networked society too - c.f. losing freinds on facebook in a friendly way!)

The problem is that Brin's proposal (we all watch each other, so we lose privacy, but so do the watchers), doesn't work when you have assymetric power (large organisation v. small individual), whereas controlling the flow of data might just work if it is legislated and penalties are good. Note that this does not stop useful things like evidence based medicine, because we have shared goals - but it does stop the use of correlation (think, signal processing, minimum entropy information theory etc) between completely unrelated databases.

For me, this makes a lot of sense human behavioural terms. We all present ourselves differently to different people at different times (we "lie" all the time) - this is essential for society to work well - unifying all views flies in the face of good social flexibility - so the government and the advertisers wet dream of combining information about belief, health, education, employment, finance, for every individual is completely and utterly misguided and actually extremely dangerous.

We already have a stressed out society because of speed of change (c.f. John Brunner's excellent shockwave rider). Complete transparency would be (as has also been speculated in various Sci Fi books) like reading everyones mind all the time - we'd hate everyone. it would be a disaster. I doubt we'd survive in fact.

hard-to-lose money idea

clog — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:34:00 -0700

so we could use the fact that now it is possible to have N or S magnets on their own to create a type of money you would find hard to lose -

your money could be South and your money North (other way round woud be bad, since your money would "head south" which would not be good) - then money would stop falling out of your pocket so easily

we could call this (pause for a comic beat)...

Monopoly Money

...

word splay

clog — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:26:00 -0700

Esplionage is a word I accidentally uttered yesterday...it could be
swimming in a sea of meaning, if it was esperanto, but it isnt - why don't you tell me what it might mean? :_

When looking at Chelsea tractors delivering kiddies to school in and around Cambridge each morning, narrowly avoiding being crushed by one of these farm vehicles set loose in the narrow streets of this ancient city, I wonder at the marketing wisdom of the automotive industry:-

Rage Rover
Free Loader
Porsche Crayon?

i dunno

Digital Communications II Progress by 16.10.2009

clog — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:10:00 -0700

By the end of this week, I will have covered the historical review of
telephone nets (circuit switched, voice networks), basic Internet technology (packet switched, datagram networks) reminders, and the comparison with B-ISDN and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (Cell Switched, virtual circuit) Networks.

From Monday 19th, til end of next week, I'll be covering
systems design in general, layered protocol designs, specifically, a quick
overview of different implementation strategies, and then a very quick tour through the immensely thick alphabet soup of protocols - all of Part II (hopefully!) on
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/DigiCommII/slides/index.html

swiss army locksmithereens

clog — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:57:00 -0700

a lot of inventions are really just bi-sociation - one simple exmaple is
wouldn't it be nice if your mobile phone was a camera, or your phone was a laptop, or your phone was a razo

now, lost your car keys, your front door keys, your bike lock keys, your phone keypad unlock keys? solution: the swiss army lock smithereen.

Detente and MAD

clog — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:55:00 -0700

used to be about mutually assured destruction of capitalism v. communism

now we have capitalism v. the biosphere
or mammon v. gaia

who will win? well we'll never know.

just reading Stephen Baxter's "Flood" which is quite depressing, really.

Real reason for Polanski's arrest is....

clog — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:13:00 -0700

...to suppress the release of the movie The Ghost, based on Robert Harris' fine book, a thinly disguised story about Tony Blair's memoirs, which has some fairly devastating material about the war, and a really shocking denoument - my guess is (conspiracy theory alert!) that Tone asked Obama to tell the Swiss to get Polanski before the edits were done

its clear the film is on hold, at least until they find someone else to finish the thing, which could be some time - time enough maybe for Tone to become first European President???

journalists dont get it

clog — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:31:00 -0700

some dweeb at the bweeb complained about watching a footie match avaialble only on the interweb, on their 12" display instead of on their 40" plasa tv - doh, why didn't they plug the PC into the TV? all 3 TVs in my house have at least 1 simple way to plug in a mac or a pc....and they're mostly cheaper LCD things....

really we should stop referring to what people produce in newspapers, radio and other broadcast media as "news" - these guys are the "olds".

comment is content free

clog — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:15:00 -0700

so i am not one that subscribes to the idea that the internet is full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but it is interesting how cultures online vary from site to site and time to time , in terms of restraint or thoughtfulness of user contributed content - today's astoundingly stupid stuff includes both youtube commentary

this time: appalingly ignorant comments about the nature and history of the song Helter Skelter, and a fairly hardcore punk/goth version by Siouxie & the accurately named Banshees, apparently a "hippy song" according to some pundits...hmm - i wonder what Charles Manson would do to them; and the BBC's Have Your Say, comments on the significance (or otherwise) of the 2nd Irish referendum on the EU's Lisbon Treaty- case in point, where the most recommended comment at the time of typing this isn't even grammatically correct.

astonishing.

enunciation/earcorns

clog — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:08:00 -0700

so when i was a yoof, we used to go around wearin ex RAF greatcoats wot we bought from the army and navy shop on hampstead road - this was before punk (and i wasnt yet a post-punk hippy) and we used to go to the Roundhouse and see bands like Magma and Amon Duul and henry cow, or occasionaly famous people like the stones or thin lizzy or whatever

but we woz conufsed as many of us didn;t kno that it was a "greatcoat" - peopel thought maybe it was a Grey Coat...

a bit like
common-or-garden, which some people seem to pronounce common-all-garden

or maybe you can fink of other fings wot we got wrong, i'd appreeshiate u dropin me a line...

maybe you went to the music machine or the electrik ballroom to see madness/speshuls/selector too...

or remember the first gong gig in camden and the global village trucking company, or even Osibisa

market dogma and impact

clog — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:58:00 -0700

so reading more about herding and cascades - interestingly enough, cascades can be demonstrated to happen without appealing to behavoural economics - but behavoural economics means that they happen sooner because of herding behaviour....oh well.....another nail in the coffin for the dogma of markets - the more i read of the 1980s BS people wrote, the more it looks like the old Marxist style rants - one big hammer so everything looks like a nail. sad sad sad.

meanwhile, having an impact is an interesting problem (to which UK government funded researchers anre now required to address themselves) _ looking at the Mcleod fine book on the history of inventors, it is very much a matter of hit or miss whether some one thing out of millions is the one that succeeds - many people had a go, for example, at making telegraphs work, and radio work, and so on, but the guys that get their name on the thing (Edison, Morse, Marconi, Bell, etc) are just ones that got lucky, really...although in some cases, they were also extremely fine (and possibly ruthless) business minds as well as (maybe) being creative in the tech. arena. Its part of what I said before here - "realizing the applicability of an invention" is crucial, in both senses of the word "realize" -

1/ intellectually grasping the commercial or social benefit the "new" idea will have.
2/ building it and getting it out there as a product or service in the Real World (TM)

driving licenses for everything

clog — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:45:00 -0700

so we have these European Computer Driving Licenses, which are supposed to make sure you don't do anything dangerous on the net. I propose extending the scheme to other walks of life - obviously we should have a
European Voters driving license
to make sure people don't vote unless they actually have a) a clue about the candidates and b) a clue about politics, economics and society
and a
European Genitalia Driving License,
for obvious reasons - this would let us fine people for
being drunk in charge of a penis, for example.

zipf v. ohm

clog — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:42:00 -0700

"remember, son", zipf junior was to remember his
father's dying words
"with great power
comes a heavy tale"

with apologies to xkcd

google wave

clog — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:28:00 -0700

bbc article about google wave says "how e-mail would look if it were invented today" - actually it looks how Lotus Notes looked about 20 years ago.

what a lot of people using cr**ppy internet email today don't realize is that early systems for collaboration (Notes, but even Microsoft Exchange) started from a model of sharing documents and sharing editing of documents, and included facilities for managing groups, instant comment/annotation, privacy controls, and multimedia, and predate most of the internet wave of stuff - its amusing that google can rely on the lack of colective memory of the past, and claim they are inventing the future, when really all they've done is re-package an old old old idea (vanevar bush, rip, c.f.)

indeed, the backend for early systems like notes was a database, which meant search/index was optimised already so its even closer to google than you think...

all the sad young men

clog — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:39:00 -0700

what is so sad about this is that it isn't just about geek guys 'n gals - its about most boys and girls and it doesn't have to be a notebook - it could be a paperback or a hat.
and this too...

foundational computer science research "at risk"

clog — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:38:00 -0700

we had a visit from the EPSRC's ICT team last week - for those people who don't know, ICT is Information and Communications Technology, wherein CS (including theory and systems and HCI and all the rest) is lumped alongside radio and optical and other low level engineering things, and is a term favoured by eurocrats who don't see why silos are bad, and incorrectly labelled silos are even worse.

Anyhow during the conversation between computer lab academics and EPSRC it was fairly clear that they didn't think it was important that the top ranked computer science department in the UK (and equal top ranked deparment in cambridge, the top ranked university in europe) currently had no EPSRC (i.e. UK government basic research) funding for its theory faculty.

Someone in the EPSRC is either asleep at the wheel, or else they have become slaves to the blairite mantras of industrial relevance. what they don't seem to get is that if the EPSRC only funds short term "industrial relevant" work, why would we need the EPSRC? we could go to the EU.

What is depressing about their taking the moral low-ground like this is that we wil lstart to go to the European Research Council (ERC) to get money first (i.e. the better places will try that) and this wil lstart a vicious cycle of driving EPSRC funded projects ever more short term, making my projection ever more likely...

the rot must be stopped...

Time for Carbon Neutral Conferences (and Standards)?

clog — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 02:10:00 -0700

SOme conferences like Infocom and some standards events like the IETF attract a thousand people who fly around the world - a typical academic trying to get promoted might go to 4 or 5 a year just to find out what's going on (just look at the travel budget on any typical research proposal if you don't believe this). So someone working on internet standards and trying to publish papers might do 7-10 inter-continental flights per year.

According to Professor David MacKay's fine book, on sustainable energy, without hot air, (and he is now Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which is a very good thing)
a single intercontinental flight is about equivalent to 1 year's worth of communting 30 miles per day by car. So these academics (mea culpa) are basically contributing about 10 fairly heavy commuters' worth of Carbon emmissions.

We've been nattering about using the Internet to collaborate for a long time, and tried all sorts of tools (now we have even more with twitter, wiki, blogs, social nets, skype with video and shared white boards). Why don't we bight the bullet and
replace some big conference event with a virtual event and make it work by necessity?
People whinge about it, but the alternative is to plant a lot of trees every time you go to Sigcomm, Infocom, IETF, IEEE 802.foo, etc etc....which would be ok, but expensive, whereas we're supposed to be the technologists, so why don't we set an example.

We could use EDAS (erm...) and annotate every author, TPC member, conference registree, with a C02 measure....that'd be a way to name and shame em....

google become critical infrastructure, and government buys them:)

clog — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:29:00 -0700

so gmail failed (again) yesterday - and some other google services - I am not complaining as they do a fine job compared with some other companies.
but someone was walkin by my office from their outfit and said
"please don't say we're critical infrastructure"

well, i don't think they understand - it isn't up to them - if you build something and it becomes indispensable, it simple becomes critical infrastructure
de facto. it isn't on a whim of a provider- irrespective of what their contract says or they think - its what a0 the public/users think and, b) what governments say.

and before people think governments have no power, lets just point out the UK gov just bought 175 billion worth of worthles banks last year, so buying google if necessary steps are needed to protect national resources, is entirely reasonable - actually, I wonder if Obama had thought of this as an alternative bailout strategy - instead of
supporting a bunch of useless morons on wall stret and in detroit (car companies) he could have used the 1 trillion dollars to buy a bunch of solar power and hi-tech companies and maybe a few oil companies then let the banks go broke.
1. cancel everyones debts in the banks
2. use dividends on new worth while stock to pay interest of people who saved money in the now defunct banks
3. spin out a few new banks based on this new principle - first
google bank of america...a gift oriented bank, which instead of paying interest to, you give away your privacy and see a lot of adverts...

you know it would work....any objects must surely be exactly the same only worse for bailing out banks...for example people who think
"The Man" owning something outs a "chill" on innovation and success of business...well that is a very American disease, and perhaps the Chinese wont care (!!) but in any case, if it is true, it is even worse that the Man now owns banks and car manufacturers who were already broken, and maybe an arms length investment of taxpayers money in things like high tech would have changed things around about this attitude...

new job title for programmers..

clog — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:28:00 -0700

I think we should call them
software artistes
and systems analysts could become
computational magicians

patents, monopolies and innovation

clog — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:42:00 -0700

I'm just reading Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750-1914, by Christine McLeod (CUP), and was thinking about
why we have patents and market failureshttp://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/

[aside: this was because I attended an excellent workshiop run by the
Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Lawin Cambridge earlier in the week, where we were discussing the nature of the invetor, the invention and the inventive step. ]

The market is supposed to deliver the best for consumer and producer (Adam Smith etc)
but it requires efficient (information rich) competition, Market failures are usually indicated by monopoly behaviour (price hiking) which can include cartels.
Markets are claimed to be good for social welfare...
Innovation is supposed to be protected by patents, and a large patent count is supposed to indicate innovation is happening.
Innovation is supposed to be good for social welfare..

What is happening these days (and was happening in the 1600-1700 period) was a lot of patents and a lot of monopolies or near monopolies. In the 17th century, this was regarded very badly and parliament put big changes in place....now, what is happening is big companies are smarter - by analogy with high functioning autistics, who can emulate empathy by running a purely cognitive model of how they should feel, rather than actually feeling it, large companies run a "model" of how a competing company in a market should behave (as close to the line as they can get away with, occasionally overstepping it) - the idea is exemplified by Cisco, whose CEO has allegedly said that they always want to own the middle 50% of the market - i.e. neither be an innovator, nor truly work in the purely marginal business (bottom feeding?) of cheap and cheerful devices - similar observations could probably be made of microsoft and intel - they
tolerate the existence of low end and very high end, but only when its a small part of the market -
they use this to price as high as possible without appearing to have market failure.

they engage in generating as many patents as possible, as close to the line of
obviousness or inaaplicability as can be allowed, to give the appearance of being innovative without the reality.

this also puts a chill on innovation.

innovation often happens in computing related areas in government sponsored labs (same is often true in bio-medical in fact) and then is "absorbed" magically into these large organisations....typically by hiring of PhDs -

what universities should do is charge a LARGE finders fee for PhDs placed in companies.
what patent offices should do is have a revocation on patents that are not exploited with a VERY large revocation fee. the revocation interval should be set according to aggressive norms of the sector. revoked patents are put in the public domain.

Where do you want your Go To to go to, today, sir?

maybe, we should ask what happened to the "Come From" idea? is this google?

end2end and neutrality principles

clog — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:23:00 -0700

the end2end principle is simplest described
as the right to receive any well formed IP packet
no matter what it contains

net neutrality refines and extends this principle to say
that it shouldn't matter
where it came from.

many victims of unsolicited stuff, end users and ISPs alike,
might retort:
"be careful what you wish for"

why is #storm >> #planetlab

clog — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:52:00 -0700

so if I wanted to develop an internet scale ap, why wouldn't I buy time on storm instead of Amazon EC2 or planetlab? eh? eh?

white van drivers, eh?

clog — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:00:00 -0700

cycling down the road, i go thru a red light - hey, i'm a cyclist - this is my god given right

anyhow, at the next light a white van pulls in front of me, and pulls right over to the cuber and then into the greenbox (for cyclists only), so i pull out round him and go as the other lights go red (but before "ours" go green)...so then he pulls in front of me and stops in the middle of the road and shouts at me about going through red lights.....

he broke 3 laws and was dangerous to others v.
i broke 1.5, and was only dangerous to myself - n.b. I had carefully checked there were no pedestrians within a zillion miles - hey, we're not even talkin about 4-ways here - these were just crossings....

where do these people get off on thinkin they control the universe coz they've got a gearstick? bozos.

cloud atlas....an idea for future privacy architecture work

clog — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:59:00 -0700

two areas (not unrelated) people want to do better security (both privacy and access control) are
1. social networks
2. cloud computing

I'm going to ignore the (hard) problem of traffic analysis and full on pseudanonymity for this blog for now...

since social nets run (mainly) in the clode, lets see if we can use 1 hammer for both rusty nails:

traditionally, we'd like to have a full subject/object matrix of capabilities - in general, for cntrolling who can see/use/alter what, for n objects, with k attributes and z access styles, we could end up with z*k*n^2 entries.
This doesn't scale for computers, and it doesn't scale for people.

In reality, many systems reduce the problem by two means
a) hierarchy (or multiple hierarchies with domain specific roots) reducing the space to k*z*ln(n) - think unix file systems and r/w/x
b) groups. n.b. with enough groups, you can do the entire s/o matrix of course, but that kind of defeats the purpose (which is simplification by aggregation)....think unix file systems and sudo and r/w/x for u/g/o, and then add newgrp etc etc

People do this sort of thing manually in their online existence by having multiple social net accounts and managing their friend lists differently on each one.

The problem (something Boris Dragovic did his phd on here a few years back) is that a hierarchy doesn't always capture what you want, but an ad hoc collection of exceptions
breaks things and makes things hard to remember for poor old humans again

so lets introduce two new things
1. Dunbar's work on social groups and layers of trust
2. games and BAR-T

In 1, we have a way to express trust relations which auto-magically gives us groups - the layers of trust in a social network are known to decrease as you move out from kinship, through friendship, through colelagues, then acquaintences. But, its dynamic, jim, and not necessarily, dynamic as we know it....
In 2, we have behaviours that are trustworthy (altruism, rational, byzantine) and measureabl, and can be attested to by witnesses....

SO we can build a system that creates defaults and learns and relearns the right settings in the (number of) hierarchy(s), and number of groups and access rights for each layer of the onion, both socially and technically.

We can also incorporate downgrading (or your reputation,creditworthiness, or access rights) forgetting (or un-friending) in the same architecure -

activity keeps friendships alive and rational or altruistic acivity keeps a cloud access right alive at some level.

Now we need a data structure that is an efficient representation of a tree but within a sparse representation of a (easy to update) matrix...that should be easy...

US healthcare reform proposed solution

clog — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:33:00 -0700

and the answer is: the US should outsource it to the EU - there's lotsa different systems to pick from and almost any of them are better than the US's or cheaper, or both. this would stimulate competition from the US healthcare industry to get its price/performance in shape, and that would in turn do the same the EU systems - proper global capitalism...clearly Americans will find many objections to this, which is just fine, as I really don't care what they do provided they go away from our tv sets and stop being so **** embarassing.

data points (always disputed by defenders of the status quo)

US spends twice OECD average (16+% GDP)
US has worse than OECD average healthcare(WHO)
Medicare + Medicaid are expensive
Private healthcare is even more expensive, and not significantly any better, and getting more expensive (see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8160058.stm
for example)

US fear of big government (possibly correct in their case given military and healthcare and other costs) means local solution counter-indicated.

Solution: shop abroad.
(for anglophobes who love to kick the NHS, note we are allowed to buy healthcare
from EU - for people that hate state provided soliutions, noone's stopping you buying private, but it might get cheaper AND better if there's proper competition - if you like a free market, then the common market is for you:-)

only kidding...can you imagine americans having to go to a french hospital?

why do I care?

1. old fashioned middle class middle england anglican guilt about poor
2. i like most americans and wish them better
3. hospitals are like airports - people only remember the bad things that happen, and then they leave - few people look at the good stats.

when did britain start scorning engineers?

clog — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:52:00 -0700

it was a truth universally acknolwedged that a chap in possession of a neat idea (possibly patent pending) could rise through the ranks of Victorian SOciety, yeah unto the Lors (viz Brunel, or read about the New Victorians in the Diamond Age, or the old ones in the steam punk literature)....

so when did this turn around...? its a very english disease (i dont think its true in scotalnd, or wales) - when did you get asked to check the oil in someone's car if you said you disigned airplane engines for rolls royce, or to fix someone's printer if you said you wrote VMs for citrix?

what went wrong and why?

is it the dominance of Oxford PPE/Greats educated politicians in parliament who thing
NatSci/Engineering geeks from Cambridge are "beneath" them?
Why doesnt the eminence of the Royal Society and Academies fix this?

Time for a techno-vanguard lead revolution!!!

more molecules in a cup of water than cups in the ocean

clog — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:49:00 -0700

only there are less notes in a good tune than there are good tunes in the world...

why is that, pray?

s/w update process heading for 100% duty cycles

clog — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:14:00 -0700

so every time I go away for more than 1 day, i live in fear of coming home or back to my office -no, its not the mountain of email (or spam) - I have the tools for that

its the s/w update on windows, linux, mac (and ditto smart phones) that is queued up waiting to install (and ask me to agree to terms I already agreed to 11 zillion times before for iTunes or Mac Office or foobarbaz antivirus)...

but also it's how **** slow the whole system goes (and there are lots of systems) and how unresponsive it is till all the stuff is done and dusted.....note this is not an anttimicrosoft rant - its just as bad on a Mac and not much better on linux boxen...

there really ought to be a better way (pre-click EULAs and then trickle the updates in is ok, but its not very green or even safe as I have to leave a zillion boxes on in my house - there should be a "sort merge " on the update (I know service packs do this, but perhaps not in enough permutations)...

parochial americans

clog — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:30:00 -0700

most the americans I know are cool

but from time to time, i come across the most contrary people,
not that there aren't such people in other parts of the world, but
it's just more fun to rant about the richest country in the world (and shouldn't they know better after throwing their weight around the planet for the last 50 years and not even winning a single war in that time (think: korea, vietnam, chile, somalia, afghanistan, iraq, etc etc)

anyhow, what occasions this annoyance? you guessed it: healthcare

I have the temerity to get involved in what I think is an open debate (its online and not in a private mail list) on this, so I inject some comments
1. data from US medical pub
2. comment that there are many models for funding national provisioning of healthcare

Note: I did not venture an opinion, except to say that I accept that the UK NHS Is
a) not an exemplary model to follow (actually it isn't bad, but see next):
b) the conditions for setting up a system whereby the state employs all medical staff in a country are almost certain never to arise anywhere or anytime again other than in post war england which had some very odd pre-conditions and some timely money (thanks to Keynes) from the USA.

anyhow so I sugges that one might look at some of the other systems in the world that do better (or cheaper, or both) and take components of them for a revised US system - note that (as in the UK) this does not preclude people using private insurance based healthcare, just provides for a scaleable, cost effective, and lawyer/insurance company free syse that sets a better operating point for the majority (and therefore average) person - actually, evidence shows its better for rich people too whether they opt in or go private, but that seems to be too political for some people )though why evidence based medicine is political is a mystery to me - perhaps people prefer their pinions to be based in mythology and rumour rather than fact).

I drew an analogy with music where record companies often recently have their heads in the sand ignoring both old (e.g. live music, like the grateful dead used to perform or the rolling stones still do) and new (e.g. subscription, pay per item, or paid through adveritsing, as in lastfm, itunes and spotify models) - this was purely to point out that often there are many workable models and some beliefs that the incumbent model is best and futureproof may be weak under even the mildest scrutiny.

ANyhw, no sooner do i say this than I get accused of all sorts of things. I dunno, I gave up being involved in the "discussion" - but it depressed me that
the debate had sunk so low and that people that lived in such a great country could have their views distorted by the massive vested interests wheeled out and repeatedly given preferential coverage in the media - the majority voted for Obama, but the healthcare mafia are sure fighting to beat him down - the massive failure for constitutional democracy that this will represent is as bad as many things Bush did with virtually no mandate.

Some of the discussion bordered on the surreal type of conversation one used to have with white racist south africans during Apartheid, 10% reasonable on any topic under the sun except one.

I talked to a friend from microsoft who'd had a similar experience on a different topic (guns) when on a long visit to the US - note neither of us actually expressed a particular opinion as to one "side" or another, just put in some comments and datapoints....what is annoying about this is that there are lots of discussions on the healthcare model in the UK (and elsewhere) due to ageing population, recession, advances in pharma etc, and so an informed discussion is of global interest/relevance. Of course, I undersrtand that some americans have a distaste (hatred?) of "big government" and that this colours their views of anything a government might do - biut it is monomaniacal to reduce every debate to this (at the least, an hypothetical "good" government might do somethign better - indeed, as exemplified in germany, france, scandinavia, greece, ireland, and quite a few other places, they do. for much less money. allowing for differences in how data is counted (e.g. infant mortality etc) - do you think WHO and health practioners are morons and don't know how to do statistics? certainly the majority of widely circulated US press coverage doesn't present data - indeed, laughable errors "Stephen Hawking would have died if he depended on the NHS) are propagated daily.). Articles are written by people who havnt practiced for 30 years or are not actually on the medical front line, or have zero knowledge of economics.

I used to admire the US education system in its ability to instil a sense of open discussion from high- school on - perhaps many people still acquire this, but the rapid domination of any discussion by a small number of hyper-aggressive, sociopathic, parochial few makes engagement in any important topic completely pointless.

so there.

p.s. on a minor note, I got "told off" for suggesting that the US government had supported the IRA. well, from JFK until Reagan, successive US presidents courted Irish-American votes (much as they courted, or at least didn't offend Cuban-American voters) and went to so far as to claim their "oirish" ancestry - during this time, you could go into a bar in Boston or NY and see collections being made openly for the IRA, a proscribed organisation in the UK at the time (and the UK was allegedly supposed to be an Ally of the US). If that isn't government support, it is as close as needs be - certainly it wasn't until Senator George Mitchell's fantastic missions to NI to help the peace process that anything actually constructive towards solving the situation was attempted. One hopes his contributions in the middle east have even 5% of the impact. one wonders how the US would have felt in 10/11 if someone had gone round arab restaurants in the Edgware Road part of london collecting for al qaeda.

we live in financial times...however, not everything is rational...

clog — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:02:00 -0700

for example, on Mill Road on friday I observed a Pizza Hut shop which would not sell me a hut of any description and a penguin dry cleaner which did not remove stains from a single book or flightless bird no matter how much money I offered them....worse, none of the gadget shops in Cambridge can offer me a device to separate a drawer full of tangled thumbtacks, paperclips, rubber bands and treasury tags - this is surely a business case begging for some serious Venture Capital

this is why we have to put up with airport nonsense

clog — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:49:00 -0700

bbc reports so far jury has spent 11 days deliberating on the "drinks for bombs" case

At the very least, we know that the defendants claims (that they wouldn't have actually blown up a plane) are objectively true - the chemistry tells us so - of course, they could be naive (like the shoe bomber, the glasgow airport idiots, and the second lot of london underground wannabe martyrs). nonetheless, proving intent to do someting that isn't scientifically possible is going to be tricky

Post docs in Cambridge - could be a whole lotta fun

clog — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:51:00 -0700

Horizon Project at Cambridge Computer lab is lookin for 2 researchers (fairly experienced/senior) - it's 5 year
mission, to boldly explore new pervasive computing universes and make them commercially relevant...

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/hr/jobs/vacancies.cgi?job=5622
http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/hr/jobs/vacancies.cgi?job=5623

this could be a lot of fun...please pass it along!

cheers
jon

android g2 phone....

clog — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:15:00 -0700

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

wireless on planes

clog — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:22:00 -0700

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

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

ignorance and creativity...

so cute:)

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

software engineering is really about programming avoidance

clog — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:51:00 -0700

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

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

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

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

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

clog — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:37:00 -0700

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

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

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

that's my 2 cents.

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

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

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

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

3 startup ideas and one visual metaphor

clog — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:36:00 -0700

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

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

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

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

greening the internet/computing

clog — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:29:00 -0700

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

Recent CL proposal successes

clog — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:38:00 -0700

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

better than zero-copy stacks

clog — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:48:00 -0700

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

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

quantum networking...

clog — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:18:00 -0700

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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