botwerks

little dude: today, i had an assignment due … but i was able to watch jesse (the female ball python) eat 3 rats and i was able to get it done in the nick of time.

some interesting nerd topics i’ve been poking at or reading about recently.  in no particular order.

bufferbloat

you know how stuff zooms up to incredibly high xfer rates and then just stalls.  this is an interesting journey down a series of passages all twisty, not necessarily all alike.  this stuff is not for the faint of heart, but there’s definitely some interesting work going on there.  jim gettys’ has been doing some interesting work here and while the knobs available for turning are a little arcane, following these lists will get you to poke at your OS’ networking stack in new and novel way to see what happens.

of perhaps even more interest here is the BISmark project over at GA tech where there’s some interesting instrumentation work afoot. i’ll handily step aside from the various political and service provider motivations around measurement, deriding measurement, etc..  (these machinations hit acutely close to home for me.) but i will point out that measuring the performance and the characteristics associated with a beast as unwieldy as the internets is incredibly fascinating … as an engineering problem.

LISP

i’ve been poking at LISP in some form or another for the past couple of years.  as it’s matured and is starting to see more enterprise applications and deployment i’ve been finding all sorts of novel uses for this.  if my october weren’t so packed, already i would have my ass glued to my seat for the upcoming NANOG session discussing the various map-n-encap flava’s that are floating about.  i can’t quite put my finger on the appeal here.  still, it’s fun.

fwiw – the lispmob folks just shipped a reasonably useable implementation of the mobility functions that LISP provides.  worth reading the docs and reviewing the use cases if nothing else.

DIY book scanner

when we were at the maker faire in NYC i checked out this guys stand.  he had a remarkably slick book scanner assembled and was demonstrating it.  the design is slick and the speed with which you can do the scanning is pretty impressive.  they’re talking about being able to scan 1000 pages / hour.  every library should have one of these.  there doesn’t appear to be one of these at the twin cities hacker space either.

do-it-yourself ikea

more stuff from  the maker faire.  these folks have a few designs that you can download and tweak.  subsequently, you get someone to laser cut it and you assemble it into your custom, one of a kind furniture.  bespoke household items and one-off manufacturing was a persistent theme at the maker faire, and these folks seemed to have some of the most polished stuff in the mix.

little dude got a cell phone.  this serves primarily as a means for him to arrange his own play dates and request items that he leaves at the household for which he’s not staying during the current week.  not to mention leaving me incredibly terse and cryptic (he’s still learning about asymmetric communication) SMS messages.

of course he nearly immediately fixed his gaze longingly upon the nearly discarded iphone 1st generations that were sitting on the shelf and he somehow persuaded me to see about jailbreaking the phone so he could use it for an upcoming trip. given my need to just have my phone work and not having the time to hack away on my phone, i have largely ignored the jailbreaking phenomenon. i simply pay for the phone that works on the network where i get support and i move along.  it’s not interesting, but the focus is the workflow.

for folks who hack on iphones as a matter of hobby, this is the mythic maze of twisty passages all alike and there’s no shortage of lore, clueful and clueless folks and tons of poseurs in this particular subculture.  however, a few googles and i’m knee deep in the world of colored sn0w jokes and DFU mode on the phone.  now here’s the rub, when you’re hacking devices which are nearly 4 years old and have subsequently gone through numerous iterations, this culture seems to leave a lot of poorly organized detritus in its wake.  folks have moved their attentions to hacking the 3G versions, the iPhone 4 and dealing with the various baseband hacks that apple has rendered useless. this involves no shortage of following scores of spotty web sites to dead ends and working one’s way through oodles of lame message boards.  in the end, the cable and a little bit of redsn0w got the job done.  followed up by a jailbreakme.com fix to correct a horked cydia installation.

some interesting tangential observations:

• there are some teenagers with some impressive technical savvy that pull together some reasonably decent screencast and tutorial videos.  i lacked the patience to wade through them, but i was surprised how google is willing to prioritize video search results and how these things seemed to have pretty high hit and watch #s.  good job guys.
• oh. my. god. is the 1st gen iphone slow, or what? we thought this shit was amazing at one point. how quickly we get spoiled.
• t-mobile coverage in our house is for shit.  if little dude wants to use this as a phone he’s going to have to go out on the deck to make his calls.  i might be forced to reconsider how crappy i consider AT&T’s coverage to be.

RFC1925 section 2(3) – put another way, just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. some of these are just bad ideas. useful in parenting, quietly winning arguments, home ownership and a host of other applications.

the RFC while largely tongue-in-cheek in intent as an april fools RFC has repeatedly proven itself to be rock solid philosophically.   who knew that a mere …

zendoggy[sulrich]% wc Sites/rfc/rfc1925.txt
     171     576    4294 Sites/rfc/rfc1925.txt

ahem, 576 word RFC would be chock full of so many koans.  re-read this one often.