Month: November 2002

Redundant routing

another outage. looks like something broke down in one of the upstream routers. a good opportunity to make the case for redundant connections end to end, down to the last km. to become the next utility, as some hope, the internet needs to become far more reliable. what technologies are available to provide redundancy, from the ethernet jack in my notebook up to the backbone routers?

locally, a multihomed setup, deeply connected to a mesh network, is conceivable. routing would have to become link-state aware at the endpoints too (something that today only applies to the backbone routers), picking the best connection out of several at any point. further upstream, better topologies would have to be found to make singular point to point connections the exception rather than the norm. as you get closer to the core of the network, components must not fail. fault-tolerant hardware might provide that additional reliability edge.

Becoming telegenic

my professional life requires me to give more and more presentations, talks at conferences, video conferences and so forth. there is only one way to become an excellent speaker: relentless practice. trouble is, there is not always a willing audience. or maybe there is, after all. ingredients:

  • a webcam (starting at $30)
  • serious magic
  • plenty of space and bandwidth

besides doing education or promotion videos, video blogging is an obvious application. if you want to eschew the strictness of a script, do the stream of consciousness thing and just ramble.

Reign of the flyover territory

democracy is a curious beast. what began as a sensible balance of power between cities and the back country is shifting ever more towards the backwaters being in control. due to representational logic, landscapes with hardly a living being hold far more relative power than densely packed urban hubs. this holds true in both switzerland and the us. while the cities are generating the wealth that is then redistributed to the countryside, they do not get to decide over issues that affect this wealth directly. the democrats in the us took the laudable step of picking the first female to become minority leader. her only problem: she is too liberal for the barbecue hinterland, being from san francisco. seems its time to end this second middle age by setting up city states again. this would eliminate quite a few problems:

  • no more SUVs (no space)
  • no more urban sprawl (densely populated areas being preferable)
  • less firearms (again, no space to enjoy them)
  • less cults (easier access to higher education)
  • a slimmer populace (overweight isn’t fun in a city)

Grumpy

rothfuss@lasagne(rothfuss)> grep grumpy log.txt | wc
76  587559 2995104

it must be true.

<brihana25> hey! leave poor gregor’s grumpy ass alone…
<Apakuni> Gregor is the youngest grumpy old man I know 🙂
<aXe> see, even Gregor’s not grumpy any more
<gregor> always grumpy
<gregor> people, don’t take it personal if im grumpy today
<gregor> but someone probably robbed my appt
<gregor> im only grumpy when prodded
gregor is now known as grumpyFuck
<Apakuni> tell us how you feel Gregor
<brihana25> i nominate gregor for the “grumpy young fart” award too…
<nobody> brb, gregor is grumpy, and I need more coffee to deal:)

Is credibility doomed?

ivan amato reports about video insertion technologies:

The ability to manipulate video data in real time has just as much potential as some of these forerunners. “Now that you can alter video in real time, you have changed the world, Deleting people or objects from live video, or inserting prerecorded people or objects into live scenes, is only the beginning of the deceptions becoming possible. Pretty much any piece of video that has ever been recorded is becoming clip art that producers can digitally sculpt into the story they want to tell.

clearly, these technologies erode the trust that average persons have in visual imagery. the parts of society that rely on television for their news are doomed.

Imagine you are the government of a hypothetical country that wants more international financial assistance, You might send video of a remote area with people starving to death and it may never have happened

amato then goes on to blame the internet because “so much internet content is unfiltered”. the opposite is true, actually. the only hope we have to counter these massive manipulations is decentralized publishing combined with a web of trust. already, mobile devices with integrated cameras are available, personal publishing is here (albeit not on a joe 6pack level yet), and the first crude experiments with trust metrics are being undertaken. big media relies on trust, and if this trust is gone, big media is dead.

thanks for hosting

we had some downtime here the last few days. turns out something ate away at the free space on the RAID. fixed now! simultaneously, a table of my database got corrupted, so i was curious how the backup would hold up. it did fine, and i’m now fairly confident we can master most disasters, with an ext3 journaling file system on top of a RAID 1 configuration. thank you andreas for hosting my (600 MB and growing) site. i really appreciate it.

Switzerland is going down the toilet

prediction: within 5 years, switzerland will be in dire straits, and will resemble the japan of today. economic growth will screech to a halt, and may even hit a deflation. within 10 years, switzerland will have a significantly lower standard of living in relation to other countries.

there are several reasons for this:

  • a failure to attract low wage immigrants by closing the borders
  • a failure to provide funding for new companies
  • misguided gov spending that emphasizes obsolete industries (military, agriculture)
  • a reluctance to push painful reform through
  • a belief that “swiss quality” will always reign supreme while failing to innovate
  • failing to train the next generation of an excellent workforce