Throw a hand grenade into the lobby of the office of Google Ireland tonight and you could have blown every software project schedule in Dublin by six months. The lifeblood of the irish software industry, its young geeks, were out in force to see the father of the Internet, Vint Cerf and to discover whether all the rumours of the Nirvana inside Google were true. We had the full complement of pony-tails, anoraks , tee shirts and beards. Pity the two poor saps who turned up in pinstrip suits.

Google put on a full court press, with everything from free wine (Faustino VII red, and an unidentified white) to the legendary Google food (the samosas were excellent). It was in faith, a recruitment night for Google and Vint played his part like the true gentleman he obviously is.

At 6.55pm Vint took the stage and we all settled into our pale blue chairs (so web 2.0) to listen to the great man speak. He is an easy speaker who is very comfortable in front of an audience. He rolled through the history of the Internet and peppered it with anecdotes which although some may have heard before carried extra weight due to the speakers history.

His discussion ranged widely over a number of issues facing the Internet in the 21st century, what follows is my precis of his talk. All errors are my own.

IP destroys the telephony business: He has little time for the Telcos who scorned packet switching and still have no sensible standard protocols that allow application level interoperability. He stressed that the IP protocol just moved packets and this is the flexability that allowed WIFI, VOIP, FTP, SMTP etc. to flourish.

Presence in the dial tone of the 21st century: Presence is our ability to be contacted by others. In the 21st century Presence will be controlled by the user some will get email, some will get messenging, some video, some voice.

Mobiles creates issues for the Internet: With mobile devices initiation is easy, but discovery is a problem.
IPV6 fixes some of this and Boeing have done wonderful work putting networks into Aeroplanes.

Convergence: Opportunities for applications that converge GPS, mobile internet and location based data. For example, I am driving, I ask (using a microphone) for the nearest ATM. Voice recognition software converts this to a command, searchs a location based service for an ATM giving it my coordinates, gets the coordinates for the ATM back and uses the navigation system to guide me there.

Broadband Symmetry: As we create more data than we download (pictures, video etc.) the need for symmetry becomes more urgent, ADSL won’t cut it in the 21st century internet.

Governance: Policy is much harder than technology, legislating for privacy, security, cross border domain adminstration
Governments like to have somebody in charge and are distrustful of distributed management or decentralised control.

IPN, InterPlanetary Network: The IPN is move by NASA to standardise the network protocol used in all of its space vehicles and satellites. To date each space mission has used a purpose built protocol designed for a specific payload. With a standard protocol so they can communicate over long lifetimes (for outer planets, radioisotope power sources are used that last for many years). Problems are long delays between transmission (high latency) and slow links (low bandwidth). The new protocol will be “mail like”.

Turns out this protocol is also very suitable for mobile networks.

Vint then took questions from the floor:

What is the best research environment?

Well it took 22 years of government funding to development the internet. Who in the private sector is likely to make that investment. The Internet pioneers worked under extreme constraints. Sometimes the formulation of the problem holds the solution.

Will mobile devices supplant the Wired Network?

All networks generate high core traffic, its unlikely that mobile networks can support this core intensity in the near future. Wires will still exist at the core.

Will the scarcity of IPv4 addresses generate a new market the way domain names did in 2000-2002?

Commercialisation generates loopholes. He hoped this wouldn’t occur. He described a process I hadn’t heard of called “Domain Tasting” where a company waits for a name to become available and then puts up a page and measures who visits the page over the first 5 days of operation. If they get lots of hits they keep the name and fill the page with advertising. If they get few hits they abandon the name at no cost, because under the current protocols, you can return a domain name within five days of registration at no charge.

How is Google Different?

70,20, 10 rule: 70% of work is allocated to a specific project, 20% is dedicated to work related to project and 10% to any project you like.

Google is focussed on small teams, very little hierarchy, high bandwidth communication and is very project oriented.

What is your opinion on software patents?

Vint and his co-worjers didn’t patent Internet work and TCP/IP to encourage vendors to integrate. Thinks patents are problematic but companies need to patent defensively so the other guy doesn’t patent the same idea.

A fascinating talk all in all from a Man who work will impact all our lives for many years to come.

Another idea I want to unburden here, please feel free to make millions of dollars, send me a postcard if you do.

Entertainment distributed on USB keys for use by travellers

Loaded by a vending machine that takes credit cards. The vending machine in turn loaded over a broadband connection every few days. The content could injected into the USB key (which could be sold as part of the package) with the content embedded in a player program. The player program is designed to timeout with the timeout being set to around 48 hours. After that you can discard the data and use the key as normal. Next time just reload the same key with a different set of movies/shows.

A nice little hook up with the airlines and they enable your USB port on your seat for a fee in coach, for free in business class and boom a whole launchpad market right at your fingertips.

Go on, make me proud…

Egg subsitute and rice milk when combined in the standard proportions for pancake mix make a substance that is probably patentable as a new glue. Non-stick pans don’t stand a chance….

Once the pancake is removed from the pan (throw that pan out by the way, no dishwasher is up to the task, and life’s too short to scrub that hard) put straight in the bin.

Under no circumstances try to ingest aforementioned substance.

Quick guide on how to do screen captures (full, partial, active window et.c) on the PC and Mac.

This additional document covers the gaps in capturing just the active window on the Mac.

On the latest versions of OSX you can use grab to do all the leg work.

Landmine clearance is an idea I’ve given some thought to, but I can’t execute on it right now. So I thought I’d park it here and update it as I find out more about the problem space. As far as my limited knowledge goes the problem is defined by the following parameters,

• The one common ingredient in all landmines is explosive
• One landmine costs about $3 dollars to lay and between $300 and $1000 to defuse
• Landmines (particularily anti-personnel mines) are often scattered indiscriminately over a wide area (often by air)
• There are over 110 million landmines extant today (mostly in the third world)
• Clearing landmines is an extremely dangerous occupation

Any solution to the problem must have the following characteristics (to my mind):

• Be of the same order of magnitude in cost as the cost of laying (lets say $5)
• Not involve any human interaction
• Detect all kinds of explosive devices (purpose built landmines and home made devices)

Ergo, build a self-contained, self-sustaining, insect-like robot. The robot will have,

• A chemical sniffer for detecting explosives
• Solar power so it can operate without recharging
• A wireless network capability so it can communicate with its peers
• GPS so it can pinpoint the location of landmines to its peers (and a master)
• A simple search algorithm so it can operate in isolation
• A more complicated search algorithm so it can collaborate with its peers if they are detected
• A non-lethal tamperproof mechanism to discourage theft, tampering

A network of these could be scattered by helicopter over affected areas and scour the area searching for mines. Once detected the mines need to be disarmed (I don’t know how we might do this at the moment, but detection is a great start). The GPS would allow each robot to indicate its search route and the master could be used to collect and upload search data to a central location. This map could be overlaid over a standard topo map to indicate danger areas, unscanned areas or areas left to be cleared. Each robot would attempt to link to all the others to form a mesh network. This network could then be used by the group to establish new areas to check or to scan existing areas twice etc.

The hard problem is not the individual components, its fitting them all into a resilient, cheap, easy to manufacture package that can be deployed with a minimum of expertise and used directly by locals with a minimum of training.

Potential Problems:

• Still don’t have a good plan for disabling them
• Getting everything into a small enough package is a challenge
• How do we prevent theft damage of the devices before they do their job
• What if you were to attach a mine to these devices and use them as the weapons they were intended to protect against
• Can a chemical sniffer be made that can detect all the most common kinds of explosives
• Is GPS accurate enough to allow safe detection (the mesh network may be able to triangulate itself, though)

My robotics links are on delicious.

More junk. But we’e getting there. This post on the wordpress support forums seems to be relevant. I use “%postname%” as my permalink and that may be messing things up. Here goes nothing…

Ok, went back to the default permalink structure and that fixed it. Ok, move along, nothing to see here, move along….

Apologies for the noise.

Looks like bloglines isn’t updating my feed for some reason. I’m trying to sort it out so this is one of a number of test posts. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

 Update:

The wp-rss2.php is not delivering any news since this post on JotFrom.

The feed feed seems to be working. 

I’ve been playing about with BlogBeat a blog statistics and reporting package that TechCrunch reviewed in the last few days. Its an ideal package for joedrumgoole.com which currently just hosting my blog. My hosting provider provides Webalizer but the level of detail is a bit impenetrable.

On the other hand BlogBeat provides a very clean interface, simple installation and offers its reports in very digestible form with graphs of referrers, visitors and pages visited. I’ll post another report after I’ve collected a few weeks data. FWIW the interface is very flickrish.

Here are three books I always recommend to people who ask for advice on how to do software project managment,

• The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks: Fred literally wrote the book on project management and while you might not recognise the hardware referred to in the book, everything else he wrote is a relevant today as it was 40 years ago.
• Rapid Development, Steve McConnell: Steve actually presages much of the Extreme Programming community in this seminal work on modern software project management. He taught me that convergence to a date was more important that hitting a date.
• Extreme Programming Explained : Embrace Change, Kent Beck: XP is probably one of the most important programming developments of the past ten years. Putting the customer at the centre of development is probably the most important precept.