I’ve been having some more sedate adventures during the last couple months, so I’ve been remiss in telling y’all what I’ve been up to. Well, now I’m about to start some new stuff, I figured I better flush out the queue! My last update was from New Years. I spent January in Arnold. I occupied myself there by working on DTN2, the reference implementation of the emerging Disruption Tolerant Networking protocols. This work will be useful both for the Interplanetary Internet, and also for getting information to parts of the world where networks don’t reach reliably, like developing regions. For more information about how this (and other technology) can improve people’s lives in emerging regions, see the TIER website at Berkeley. ...

A coworker of mine from when I was at Tellme has started a new blog to show and tell what he’s learning and thinking about network configuration management. In his most recent posting it turns out he’s found a paper written by a friend of mine from college! What a small world! This problem is an important one. Automated system administration is a well accepted concept at this point. You simply cannot run 10,000 node clusters without extensive automation, and there are a lot of clusters that size these days (not to mention service providers who use over 10,000 computers to implement their service). Networks were growing in absolute size due to the pervasive nature of the computers they connect now. But as if that wasn’t enough to demand automation, network admins are adding a myriad of devices on top of (and embedded within) their networks, all of which have configurations that depend on the overall configuration. Over and over again, we see in outages in production networks precipitated by seemingly unrelated changes in far-off parts of the network. Assuming you can predict the dependencies and write some software to address them, automated network configuration management should be able to nip some of these outages in the bud. ...

I’m on Jabber as [email protected]. I’m running my own server, and supposedly other Jabber servers are supposed to be able to contact mine and send me messages. I’m not convinced it’s really working because my test case didn’t seem to do what I expected. So if you use Jabber and want to talk to me, give it a try. The Jabber guys ship their stuff configured to talk to MySQL instead of to BerkeleyDB. Doesn’t make sense, since the average Fedora Core install has the right BerkeleyDB, but doesn’t have MySQL. Dumb, dumb, dumb. We need to lower the bar to non-commercial chat systems, not make it harder. ...

They say that the nice thing about Open Source software is that all the users are looking at the source checking it for bugs, so it will be higher quality than closed-source software. Heh. I have proof that people don’t read the code they are installing. Since the earliest widely-distributed releases of Cricket, there’s been an easter egg in it. It is hidden in code that should arouse the curiosity of anyone doing a security audit, but it is hidden well enough that someone poking around in the code won’t see it. To my knowledge the only person who’s ever found it was Javier Muniz, my officemate when I was writing Cricket. And that was only after I dropped a hint that I’d put an easter egg into Cricket. Javier’s a bright guy, and it didn’t take him long to find it. ...

Austin Powers is on TV. I totally forgot about the hilarious monolouge by Dr. Evil about his family background: Dr. Evil: The details of my life are quite inconsequential. Therapist (Carrie Fisher): Oh no, please, please, let’s hear about your childhood. Dr Evil: Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian woman named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it’s breathtaking, I suggest you try it. ...

I just noticed a really cool feature of Gmail. This is subtle, so hang in there with me… It, like other mail programs attempts to automatically maintain your address book for you by adding entries for addresses in mail you send. When you reply to someone who’s e-mail arrived without a real name, just an e-mail address you’ve got a problem: how do you add a useful address book entry for that? ...

I use Firefox, and I like the little search box thingie in the upper left. I decided it might be fun to figure out how it works by making a search plugin for the website SamSpade.org. Sam Spade looks up whois data and other interesting things about websites, and I find myself using it from time to time. If you’d like to get the Sam Spade plugin for Firefox, visit this page. After installing it, you’ll have a new search type in the popup menu in the upper right. Look, ma, no restart! ...

Hello, all my travel-watchers! Hope you all had a good holiday season. Thanks to those of you who put me up, and those others who asked, “Where are you?” Since I last sent out an update, I’ve returned to the US from Dakar, Senegal. I made my way home by a sequence of trips that, if the TSA had known about them, would have put me on the no-fly-list for life. I flew one way from Dakar to Lisbon, spent the night, then caught the second half of a round trip I bought back in October. I landed in New York and made a bus trip north to Boston, then spent several nice days there with Jennie Hango. It was cold outside, so we did traditional winter things like hang out and play video games, and make chicken soup from scratch. Jennie makes really good noodles, and she does it like an Italian grandmother, without a bowl; she just puts the eggs into the flour and goes for it with her fingers! ...

Some random observations about Senegal: You must bargain over virtually every purchase. I would have thought that would drive me crazy, but you get used to it. And the Senegalese sense of humor makes it fun, since a huge part of the bargaining process is making the other guy laugh. If you are at a place where negotiations seem to be at an impasse and you add in some Wollof sprinkled with even more broken French, they crack up into gales of laughter, and give in on the price. Once a guy told me that he could not possibly go any lower because the money was for his mother. I countered, “But this is a Christmas gift for MY mother, and I cannot go any higher!” (Sorry Mom, it was actually something for me!) ...

Hi everyone! We made it to Senegal! This passage was much easier than the last one. It was over 850 miles, so we were prepared for it to take over a week to get here. That’s a long time on a little boat! The weather was pretty much in our favor all the time. That meant almost the entire way the wind was behind us, or on our port beam (perpendicular to the boat on the left side). When the wind is exactly behind you, you can put the main on one side and the jib on the other in a configuration called wing-on-wing. It’s really beautiful to behold! And it makes the boat go fast, so we got here in just 7 days! ...