Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
02 2007
I've started processing the 38GB+ of audio I recorded at SkyCon 2007 and have started to put slightly cleaned up and processed versions of the audio here. All the talks, slides and resources that I'm permitted to share with the public will gradually appear here over the next few days and weeks. If anyone has extra relevant links to be added, drop me a mail at blog@signal2noise.co.ukblog@signal2noise.co.uk and if it's appropriate, I'll add it.
Enjoy...
posted at: 14:32 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Niall Walsh has very generously taken the time to build a distribution of Linux for Ireland, with Irish as the default language and a few other settings and configuration items localised for Ireland. I've mirrored it on some kind of Celtux Mirror site.
posted at: 17:57 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Congratulations to Steve and Nóirín on their engagement announced in the late hours of yesterday. I wish them many years of happiness together.
posted at: 00:23 | path: | permanent link to this entry
#awooooga!!!!!!111111oneoneoneelevenonehundredandeleven</aol>
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Kevin Lyda has been trying to bring 'Democrats Abroad' and ex-pat American's right to vote to the fore here in Ireland. Today, he went through some of the ways in which the internet and technology has changed the way political campaigning happens in the US.
The internet allows ordinary people to advertise, campaign and interwork in a way that was previously difficult, expensive or impossible. Virtual call centres can be managed, allowing volunteers to cold-call people from their homes instead of having to drive to a call centre. Blogs allow anyone, not just the professional lobbyists and political consultants, to make their opinions (political or otherwise) heard.
There is a risk that anonimity will allow fake or smear type campaigns, with little risk of being able to penalise the culprit.
posted at: 14:05 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Dave Wilson of HEAnet came down to evangelise (in a good way) IPv6 and a migration to a bigger, more scaleable series of tubes internet. Using HEAnet as an example, Dave detailed the mixed requirements that academic users require from their networks. Physicists in particular require short bursts of very high bandwidth ( > 1Gbps ) so perhaps we can separate them on to end-to-end VLANs. If we could have a provisioning system that used a common platform, we could provide bandwidth on demand to high traffic point-to-point type users (and more) and thus optimise each network to more closely match the requirements of the traffic traversing it.
posted at: 12:14 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Modern networks are converging on an IP transport, with voice, video and data traversing the same networks. This gives us a cost saving and complexity saving, but introduces other problems such as jitter, latency and packet loss. QoS allows 'selective unfairness' to be applied to packets traversing a router - EF (Expedited forwarding), AF (assured forwarding) and BE (Best effort) type classes are generally available. There's no such thing as a free lunch, some traffic is going to have to suffer - and there is often a political or administrative issue in deciding exactly what traffic should be put in each class.
Network monitoring (mrtg, cacti, etc.) gives us some view of how the network is looking, but doesn't give us an indication of what effect micro-bursts and short-lived traffic patterns are having. This is what the Corvil Bandwidth Quality Manager attempts to model. By getting a copy of real traffic (from a span or tap port) and building up a virtual model of the network in software, the system can make some estimates of the expected latency. Not only that, but since it's a virtual model in software, what-if analysis can be performed.
posted at: 16:39 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Huge thanks to Sarah and Sorcha for helping with the recordings at SkyCon. Most speakers have agreed that their talks be made available on the internet. Some are already up in rough / raw recorded form. I will clean them up and recompress soon, but for the moment recording the remaining talks is the priority.
posted at: 15:31 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Bill O'Brien came to speak on Microsoft's source, their attitudes to open source and free software, and how they integrate with other vendor products and F/OSS products.
There's a huge body of people who contribute in a very valuable way to the Open Source community, but they don't code. Alan Cox detailed some of the roles that these people play and how they make a contribution that is every bit as valuable as the people who write the code.
Mikael Fernstrom showed some of the projects that have been implemented in the University of Limerick. PD allows things like a virtual Bodhrán to be prototyped and built - various sound effects, including multi-tones (like the ever rising / falling note) to be generated and something like the Tap-O-Meter to be made. The Tap-O-Meter was a real-time counter for James Devine, the fastest tap dancer in the world, to measure just how many taps per second he was able to achieve. PD allowed changes to be made quickly and with recompiling code, which makes debugging and interactive composition to take place.
Interactive sonification type projects like Squiggle and Celeritas used PD to generate audio from various sensors - and in general can be used to create audio from any data input. This provides huge flexibity and massive scope for fun, judging by some of the videos Mikael showed of IDC (Interactive Design Centre) students and staff.
Something like Max/MSP is almost becoming stale, since all the new exciting developments are happening in the open source world. PD is implemented in C, and the source code is available - so the only limitation is our imagination.
Jono Bacon travelled to Limerick to deny any and all rumours regarding his preferences for aquatic marine fowl - though he felt the nice picture of Alan Cox with a lake full of ducks in the background added something to his presentation. Despite the early hour and it clearly being the morning after the night before, an excellent presentation centring on 'Community' ensued.
Community, Governence (Be excellent to one and other) and localisation are the keys to making Ubuntu the successful distribution it is today. With over 8 million users, applications getting better and better all the time and a very successful and still growing community, Ubuntu is going from strength to strength.
As an example of the translation and localisation effort, Jono cited Jokosher being added to Rosetta (the Ubuntu translation tool) and being available several weeks later in 12 languages.
Michele Neylon of Blacknight runs spam filtering for a large number of commercial mail users - but what Open Source technologies are available for dealing with the spam problem. But firstly, why open source? It's flexible, robust, customizable and expandable. Starting from being a small start-up, open source was the only feasible solution at the price-point. Today, open source is still the best technical solution to the problem.
Mailscanner is a perl based MTA agnostic mail scanning tool. It's mature and works on all the required distros (CentOS, Debian, Whitebox, Red Hat, etc.) SpamAssassin provides the main spam filtering functionality.
Over the last few months, the shared mail platform has dropped over 200k mails per hour, 13 million e-mails were processed in the last 5 months of which almost 60% were spam and dropped. This saves a huge amount of storage, network bandwidth and people's time.
Blacknight mirror URIBL and try and share scoring, which means that lookups are on the local network, another mirror is provided for other people as a community service and with sharing, spam patterns are detected quicker and dropped faster. DNS lookups are used to look up a geoip like location for e-mails, and some trust is attributed to various countries.
posted at: 17:41 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Mel Gorman, another of the skynet members speaking at SkyCon, brought us through an example of a large matrix multiplication and the implications of optimising this using libhugetlbfs library and HugePage support in the Linux kernel. Huge pages are pinned in RAM, and generally must be allocated at boot time, since it's unlikely that the memory will be available.
Using opcontrol as a profiling tool, Mel demonstrated that on various systems around his office, performance increases of between 10% and 300% could be achieved simply by changing from using 4K pagetable blocks to HugePages.
The discussion of which hardware platform has the best MMU has been postponed until later in the pub :-)
Rachael Holt describes some of the technology that connects schools around Ireland to the internet. Wth upwards of 28 million URLS in the Fortinet content filtering system, connectivity to end users on ADSL and Satellite and a userbase ranging in age from 5 years old (Junior Infants) up to 65 (or whatever age the oldest teacher is) the mix of requirements makes provision of service a difficult problem.
Fortinet manage an overall whitelist for all the schools, and there is no differentiation at the HEAnet level between different schools, and different computer users within the schools. Whitelisting only means that access can be controlled very rigourously.
Cacti, Google maps machups, RT, mrtg and a wealth of other software systems are used on a day-to-day basis, providing an often visually rich user experience, allowing problems with the network to be highlighted and visualised.
Open questions: Kids have Nintendo DS computers and PSPs, both of which support WiFi access - can they be given internet access in the classroom? It's not available in Ireland yet, but has already been discussed by HEAnet.
posted at: 14:38 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Val Henson presented a theoretical world-view where:
Colm MacCarthaigh gave us a run down of the e-voting system proposed for use in Ireland. In the only three trials, the only useful statistic measured was the number of people who turned up to vote, Vs the number of votes recorded. Once the information was made available to the public as to how thes trials were run, it was revealed that even those numbers did not match up. In one constituency, 1200 more votes were registered than people turning up, yet in another 600 votes were 'missing', which meant that a systematic error could not be blamed. It transpired, as time went on, that no formal methods had been used to verify the software and that there was even a question about consistent version control. This was unteneable for a 'trusted' computer system.
Eight days after being told he should not spend another cent on a flawed system, the government committee voted, in closed session to spend €42 million of public money on the system - a system without a functional specification, with no committment to passing any tests and with a great deal of secrecy surrounding the entire thing.
In order to raise this issue publicly, the concept of a Voter Verifiable Audit Trail (VVAT) was highlighted. Since, without publishing everyone's vote publicly, it is very difficult to prove that a VVAT matches with the recorded data, this was enough to have the Commission on Electronic Voting founded. Thus far, 172 submissions have been made to the commission, with approximately 8 somewhat in favour and 2 in favour of e-voting.
Today, only one party supports e-voting in Ireland. Dick Roche is adamant that the computer hardware will be used at some point, so it's still in storage. The VVAT issue was specifically precluded from the remit of the commission. Bertie Ahern stood up in the Dail and claimed that although he had read the report, there were no hardware errors with the report. This is despite the report making quite clear that there were over 20 errors found at the time. This includes a rounding error in the distribution of votes, which could result in the wrong candidate being elected. This was discovered within a month, despite having no access to the source code.
So how does Open Source tie in with the lobbying against the flawed e-voting system in Ireland? The vast bulk of the press releases and discussion were held on an open mailing list. Information was verson controlled using tools such as LaTeX, CVS and diff. Many of the security exploits, such as RF emissions from the voting equipment have been known in the wild for a significant time - and were available to groups analysing the equipment. The machines have been comprehensively hacked at this point, including getting chess to run on the hardware.
There's a pending High Court action regarding whether it contravenes the consitution, and a quotation of €20 million from the suppliers to fix the known bugs, but not VVAT. Let's see if any of us see e-voting comes to Ireland in our lifetimes.
Editorial Notes & corrections: The e-voting platform was trialled twice in Ireland, first in 3 constituencies and then in 9. Also, it was a parliamentary committee (rather than a government committee) that voted to spend €42m of public money in closed session. Thanks to Colm for reading my blog entry and providing corrections - and apologies from me for any confusion caused by my limited abilities to type up his excellent presentation at speed.
posted at: 14:14 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Once again, Apple's hardware has let me down - in a bad way. I'm in Limerick, attending SkyCon and ntending to record many of the talks over the next three days, when I discover that a problem I was experiencing with Wireless on the MacBook (it would randomly drop the connection) is actually a much larger problem and that the laptop will no longer boot. My experience with Apple hardware seems to be that it is awful. This is a brand new MacBook - one which was faulty on arrival and returned to Apple for repair within the first 3 weeks.
To think I was contemplating purchasing a new Apple laptop myself: certainly not after this incident. I'm currently looking at alternate methods of recording the talks, which should hopefully (assuming I can find some working hardware) start appearing here as of tomorrow morning.
posted at: 04:54 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
"ATM temporarily in service."-- for the ATM in Balbriggan that's out of service pretty much every time I pass it.
"You plugged in a USB device that I don't have a driver for - but it's okay... I've decided not to crash, blue-screen and lose all your work."-- for Windows XP and Nokia phones - may their inability to work together consistently stop irritating me.
It's only when a vital piece of technology like your ADSL router dies after several years of continuous service that you realise just how many services were hanging off your home ADSL connection.
Many thanks to the plumbers who generously applied the live to the earth in my house, tripping out everything, while installing a new boiler. Bah! :-(
posted at: 07:40 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Perhaps someone could generously point me in the direction of a hotel that does not screw up the little things constantly. I've been over in Romania for the last week, staying in the Novotel, Bucharest and as a result of business I've had to extend my stay by one night.
Firstly, for some reason known only to the hotel staff themselves, that meant I had to pay some chunk of the bill last night, despite me not checking out until tomorrow. Fine. I handed over my credit card. After twenty minutes of mucking about with the various array of credit card machines (I counted three) the helpful girl suggested that she ring the bank regarding my credit card, as it was being refused without explanation. One phone call later she revealed that my card was fine but that the machines (all of them?) were broken. Normally I would not have minded this little charade, but it left me with approximately 2 minutes to get to the 7th floor, change clothes and rejoin my colleague in the lobby, from whence we were off to another office to continue our 18 hour work day.
Today, I arrived back to the hotel at about 9pm (EET) to discover that my keycard no longer unlocked my room. Imagine the situation - I'm tired; I've just returned from 12 hours in a customer's office and I cannot get into my room. Back to reception and an equally helpful girl explains that perhaps I should not keep my keycard near my mobile phone. I stopped short of explaining that maybe they should reprogram the keycard systems when people extend their stays. Perhaps their security system is broken, along with their impressive array of non-functional credit card machines...
Finally, to put the icing on the cake, I discover that my internet connection has expired. Great! In fairness, the internet connectivity here is good (far more reliable than any home ADSL type connection I've tested in Ireland.) Still, would it have killed them to extend it? By the time I discovered I could no longer get online I had removed my shoes and settled on the couch with my laptop. I rang the front desk and yet another helpful girl suggested that I could come down to the front desk to get a username and password. I requested that she read it out to me and hinted that I was probably not going to be in a good mood if they forced me to trek down 7 floors again. In fairness, after a pregnant pause she suggested that a bell-boy could bring it up.
Don't get me wrong - this hotel seems very nice. The food is reasonable, the location is perfect for where I'm working at the moment and would be great to see Bucharest city centre, if I only had the time. The room service is prompt and friendly and the food reasonable. If only these hotels could remember that I'm here to work - and my employer is paying a premium so that I can do so and don't have to worry about anything else. These little niggles have thus far wasted a total of over an hour that I really could have spent working. In fairness, it's also annoyed me enough to make me take 20 minutes to write this blog entry.
My inconveniences at this hotel are not an isolated incident. Almost every hotel I've been to has had issues with credit card authorisation, problems with internet access, getting bookings wrong or losing them altogether (in one case suggesting that I had faxed and cancelled my own reservation, despite their inability to produce said fax when I requested it), completely failing to handle something as commonplace as extending a stay, providing a room not matching the type reserved, and many other little irritations that take time and effort to sort out. If these were at cheap hotels, I might be prepared to look the other way - but they are generally not. Perhaps if they got things right first time, and wasted less of their own staff time fixing things and having to deal with irate clients, they could economise and bring prices down... just a thought :-)
Come on hotel people - get it right!
</rant%gt;
posted at: 21:57 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
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