Using RED for fair bandwidth usage

George Ou recently wrote an article titled "Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control" which starts off (my emphasis added):

Bob Briscoe (Chief researcher at the BT Network Research Centre) is on a mission to tackle one of the biggest problems facing the Internet. He wants the world to know that TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) congestion control is fundamentally broken and he has a proposal for the IETF to fix the root cause of the problem.

All this is quite topical given Comcast's attempts to throttle peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on their network, the FCC's involvement, and Comcast's recent promise to "stop meddling".

Nate Lawson wrote two great blog posts to address George Ou's article - effectively saying that the TCP/IP stack does not need to be swapped out and we don't need a complex new protocol to deal with the congestion problem. A simple option is to use RED (Rapid Early Discard) and Nate goes on to explain why this would work. Nate's 2nd post addresses Check the out here:

• A TCP stack swapout solves nothing
• How RED can solve congestion problems

3D graphics in Excel

Cutting-edge computer games use different graphics subsystems -- so-called 3D graphics engines. Source (used in Half Life 2), Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament), idTech 4 (Doom 3), CryENGINE2 (Crysis) or Clever's Paradox engine are well-known among the players and the game industry experts.
It's time to learn a new 3D game engine name: Microsoft Excel.

See the full article here, and be sure to check out the movies too.

My hat is off to you, sir!

They don't break plates here...

In Cape Town I used to enjoy going to some of the great Greek restaurants, and was always amused at the custom of smashing plates. (You can image how cool this seemed to me as a kid). Most of the restaurants would charge a small fee per plate you broke, and it was not too common to see people doing it, but rowdier parties and group celebrations would often end with ouzo, music, dancing and plate-smashing.

So, it is fairly interesting to note that in Seattle, not only are Greek restaurants less common than in SA, but plate-throwing is unheard of. It looks like the custom is on the way out everywhere. For example, in the UK restaurants have switched to less dangerous activities like tossing flowers, mainly to avoid the risk of injuries to customers and law-suits.

PS: You know you're in a Seattle Greek restaurant when you see salmon on the menu :-)

Ag Pleez Deddy

This song by Jeremy Taylor became a part of South African culture to the extent that even though I was born a decade or mroe after it was released, I still grew up hearing and singing it.

Here's a YouTube video of the older Jeremy Taylor singing a shortened version, so even the readers from the UK and US and A can appreciate its glory!

In telling {A} about this song, I realized my memory of the lyrics was a bit fuzzy, so I was happy to find them online. Have a look at the full lyrics here (be warned, some of the words would be percieved as racist/non-PC now). That website also has some nice details on the song.

The joys of wedding registry shopping at JCPenny's

Warning: Shameless whining and venting ahead.

This past weekend {A} and I went to the local shopping mall to get our wedding registry kick-started. We had some some research and planning in advance and knew which dinner set we wanted, and the prices that Macy's and JCPenny's charged for said set. (Let's refer to JCPenny's JCP from now on - they seem to like that abbreviation too...)



Needless to say, JCP was cheaper than Macy's. (For my SAfrican readers, JCP is kind-of equivalent to Mr.Price, whereas Macy's is more like Stuttafords or Woolies). So, off to JCP we went... To do a wedding (or general gift) registry, JCP has gone the totally automated, inpersonal route. (The first warning sign). A PC kiosk asks you for your pertinent info and then plays a "training video" with the audio so low you practically need to plaster your ear to the case to hear anything. Lovely... Part of the training video related to dinnerware, and instructed us to use the "Dinnerware Selection Book" at the kiosk to find the set we wanted ("choose from our extensive collection" yadda yadda), and then use a bar-code scanner gun to read the bar-code of the set we wanted. All well and good, but the afore-mentioned book was no-where to be found.



Thinking "outside the kiosk", we searched around the actualy dinnerware display area, but came up empty-handed. A helpful cachier redirected us to the customer-support / catalogue counter (which was next to another gift registry kiosk - a good sign I though). The person behind the counter looked at us blankly as we explained what we were looking for, and we very quickly realized she had never heard of this book. So, I resorted to Plan C (or perhaps Plan D, I lost track...) We used the telephone on the side of the registry kiosk to talk to - gasp! - a real person!



The helpful chap on the other end of the line informed us that the book should be under the keyboard at the kiosk, or very close to it. I informed it was not there. He then suggested I speak to the store manager... So, back to the person at the catalog counter to chase down the manager. For some reason the manager was only available over a walkie-talkie. (I guess phones are passe?) Luckily the counter-person cranked up the volume so that we (and everyon in a 1-mile radius) could hear the manager: Evidently the book had been discontinued in January 2008, and we were SOL (sweet outta luck). No apologies. No mention of an alternative. No humble admittance that the kiosk video is out-dated and misleading...



So, {A} and I were left feeling incredibly frustrated and disappointed. We decided to not register for anything at JCP and instead went to Macy's and were almost ready to not register for any dinnerware at all (since Macy's didn't have the color we wanted available online and their price was almost double JCP's ). A real person took our personal details and walked us through using the bar-code scanner (uh, thanks) and we then started browsing. Most of the linen and bed stuff was not our style, so we had difficulty getting started, but the kitchen department fixed that, and we soon had a lot on our list.

We had also asked the store assistant whether the dinnerware we wanted was available in the color we liked, and yes, he was able to find it! Despite the price being higher, we added it to our registry, and got a nice surprise when we got home and checked our list online: the dishes were the exact same price as JCP had been offering! So, after all that mental anguish, we were able to get what we wanted, with great service, and without paying more!

Poetic booze advice from around the world

There are a few verses in different languages that all purport to give advice about what to drink when (i.e. which order to drink things in). The sad thing is that they can't quite agree amongst themselves:

• English: Beer after wine and you'll feel fine; wine after beer and you'll feel queer
• German: Bier auf Wein das lass sein; Wein auf Bier das rat' ich Dir. (Roughly: Don't touch beer after wine; but wine after beer is fine)

The French notably ignore beer and instead focus on red versus white wine:

• Blanc sur rouge, rien ne bouge; rouge sur blanc, tout fout le camp. (Roughly: White on red won't go to your head; red on white and you're out for the night.)

This page on the Gaurdian website goes into more detail on these and other sayings.

The Perry Bible Fellowship

{A} and I went to Portland this past weekend for a little post-Valentine's-day break. This of course meant we visited Powell's, and one of the fun things I discovered there was the Perry Bible Fellowship - wickedly funny cartoons for fans of The Far Side. ("The Trial of Colonel Sweeto" is the book.)

1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc

No, sadly this is not a personal tasting note of the '47 Cheval Blanc. (I should be so lucky!)

Slate has an interesting article by Mike Steinberger on how a "defective wine from an aberrant year" became (by all accounts) a great wine. It's a nicely written piece...

Dual-booting Vista and Ubuntu / Linux

I recently decided to fresh-install my laptop, and decided this time I'd like to have it dual-boot Vista and a Linux distro (I chose Ubuntu 7.10 after playing with it for a while, but what I write about below should work with almost any current *nix distro).

The tricky thing was that I wanted to keep using Vista Bitlocker Drive Encryption (BDE), since my laptop has a TPM and having the drive encrypted means I don't need to worry as much about having my laptop stolen and all my data being up for grabs. BDE is a bit tricky to set up at the best of times, but luckily at work we have a Remote Installation Services (RIS) server that makes it a lot easier.

So, I booted my laptop, selected a network boot, and selected the Vista Bitlocker setup from the RIS menu. This re-paritions your drive and creates two partitions for Windows to use (one small one for the Bitlocker boot stuff, and the main one for your Vista install). I selected the manual setup option so I could create two more partitions for Linux to use (one for extfs3 and one for swap). Then The Vista setup trundled along and within an hour I had a nice Vista setup (with Office 2007 installed already - how sweet it that!?)

At this stage, BDE is not yet enabled on your Vista drive - you need to go into the control panel and enable it. But I knew I wanted to hold off until my Ubuntu install was done, otherwise when the Ubuntu install changed the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the hard drive, Bitlocker would "throw a wobbly". (Yes, that's the technical term)

The next step was to insert the Ubuntu 7.10 CD and reboot the machine from it. The Ubuntu install is very slick and went without any hitches. Now when my laptop rebooted, I was presented with the GRUB boot loader, which let me choose between Ubuntu or Vista.

Now at this point I should mention that I subsequently found out that this is not the best order to do things. This blog has incredible information, but sadly I only found out about it after I had installed Vista and Ubuntu. The preferred order is to install Ubuntu first, then install Vista... (That way the Vista boot loader is one sitting in the MBR) However, using the information from the afore-mentioned blog, you can quite easily get the system working even if you've installed things in the "wrong" order like I did.

The key pages to read for instructions are this one and this one. The modified steps I used, based on the info in these pages, is then:

• Step 1 – Install GRUB on the Linux partition (outside of MBR) (See step 1 here)
• Step 2 – Get a copy of Linux boot sector (See step 2 here)
• Step 3 - Boot into the Vista Recovery Environment (RE) using the Vista DVD / RIS server. You'll need to run bootrec.exe and tell it to fix the MBR record. (See this page for info)
• Step 4 - You should be able to reboot from the hard-drive and Vista will load automatically (there will be no option to boot Ubuntu since Vista doesn't know about it yet...) Log in to Vista, and...
• Step 4 - Set up Windows Vista Boot Manager to boot Linux. (See step 4 here)
• Step 5 - Enable BitLocker on Windows Vista (See step 7 here)

(I also removed Vista from the GRUB boot menu, since we're now using the Vista loader to boot into Vista. This is pretty easy to do, just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and remove the Vista entries form the end of the file).

Step 4 will take a few hours as it needs to encrypt the hard-drive contents, but once that is done you should be set...

Slate video blog

I don't normally go for the viral-video thing and don't subscribe to many video blogs (WineLibraryTV is the only one). Slate have managed to get me hooked, though. Their Slate V video blog is a great way to see the best videos doing the rounds, without having to dig through the dreck on Youtube.

Some recent highlights:

• Drunk History 2 and 2.5
• Tom Cruise / Hilary Clinton mashup
• "Ch-ch-changes" US Presidential mashup

Some ones that haven't made it to Slate, but that {A} introduced me to:

• "Charlie bit my finger"
• Harry Potter Puppet Pals - "The Mysterious Ticking Noise"

Some people are not picky

I noticed this ad while checking up on SA news:

Ubuntu 7.10 on Microsoft Virtual PC

File this under the "dear-god-it-shouldn't-be-so-hard" department...

It turns out that installing Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux 7.10 under Microsoft Virtual PC is a bit of a bugger. Luckily there are some helpful lads on the Web that have blogged instructions on how to fix things:

• This blog entry is pretty good but for some reason I had problems getting the "-- i8042.noloop" option to work after Ubuntu was installed on my hard drive - the boot would just hang.
• This one is a good 2nd source of info, and it covers topics like enabling the network card and sound in VPC, plus using the text console to edit your config (nice when the mouse doesn't work).
• There is also a good comment from someone called Dan that explain how to change the Grub settings "properly", and how you shouldn't really remove the usplash package.

Between these three I was able to get a system working. Good luck to you should you be attempting the same thing. Some of this should be fixed in newer versions of the Linux kernel so hopefully there will be less pain for others in the future :)

TV in a dry,dry season

There's not much decent on TV at the moment, mainly due to the Writer's Guild strike dragging on. You know times are lean when the most entertaining thing on TV is "American Gladiator" and "The Biggest Loser" goes from 1 hour episodes to 2 hours...

Further adding to my sense of ennui is news that Battlestar Galactica is now due bug in April, but there are a few glimmers of hope. Somehow they managed to get a new episode of "House" out this week (there are three new episodes scheduled). How did they manage that?

There are a few surprises though, like the new AMC series "Breaking Bad". This is a deliciously black comedy from one of the producer's of "The X-Files" (Vince Gilligan). The show stars Bryan Cranston (the dad from "Malcolm in the Middle"), and tells the story of a high school chemistry teacher that has a bit of a mid-life crisis and decides to cook crack. Great writing, photography, music and acting in the pilot episode really grabbed me. (And it helps that I am a fan of dark comedies). I'm hooked - the DVR is set to record the rest of the season (which sadly has been cut short due to the afore-mentioned strike).

For more info, check out the show's blog here.

Geek humour

Geek humour
Originally uploaded by Mr Snootyhamper

This image was part of someone's email signature at work.
Can you guess which famous poet and playwright inspired this?

It's a small world (sort of)

When I was a kid, my first PC was a pretty crummy 4.77 MHz XT. Some of my friends were very cool and had fast AT machines with sound cards (mostly Sound Blasters), and I was very envious, especially when my friends and I discovered MOD files (tracked music).

MOD files originated on the Amiga computer, I believe, and allowed you to play complicated multi-track music on low-end PCs by mixing different samples of instruments, voice, etc. and doing clever things like changing the pitch. Some of the MOD files were very impressive, especially those by a tracker call U4ia. A blog post I stumbled on has some basic info about him, and reminded me about the first MOD-playing program I used - ModPlay.

By then I had upgraded to an AT machine (one with a Turbo switch - "Who would want to ever turn that off", I wondered?) ModPlay could play music through the PC speaker, but the quality was not very good, and at the time I couldn't afford to buy a Sound Blaster card. Luckily for me, ModPlay came with instructions on how to build your own simple D/A converter, which connected to the parallel (printer) port. For the cost of a few IC's, resistors, and capacitors I was able to build a pretty decent 8-bit "sound card", which I hooked up to the cheap "all-in-one" stereo we had at home. The sound was incredible - better than most of my friend's sound cards! :)

I was interested to see that the author of ModPlay (also named Mark) now works as a Security Response Lead at RedHat. That's pretty similar to what I do now, so once again the Web leads around in strange circles...

The Case of the Weird Copenhagen

Almond Copenhagen
Originally uploaded by Mr Snootyhamper

Yesterday {A} an I were out and about and stopped off at Tully's (a local coffee chain). I noticed this odd-looking copenhagen in their pastry fridge and felt compelled to take a picture :)

This reminded me of the "real" copenhagens from my childhood in SA, especially the ones my mom used to get for her coffee shop in Cape Town. I think she got hers from a nice little bakery in town called French's, and they looked more like this...

Now that's what a copenhagen should look like! For extra yumminess you could get these toasted - they'd be cut in half and toasted on one of those large flat-top sandwich grills and then covered with butter. Ahh....

A nice poem (snippet)

I caught NPR's Writer's Almanac today and liked the poem that was read at the end, A Color of the Sky by Tony Hoagland. The last two stanzas especially appealed to me:

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

Great movies abound

The past few weeks have been very good in terms of movies - this time of year is usually packed with Oscar contenders, so almost all of them are on by want-to-see list.

I saw Charlie Wilson's War last weekend and enjoyed it. Tom Hanks is great (as usual) and the movie moves along at a brisk pace despite covering lots of ground. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, so the dialogue is beautiful. The film's "message" is serious, but the rest of the film is quite light an entertaining, so it almost suckers you into the final punch.

Another surprise highlight was Walk Hard. I went into this movie expecting nothing - maybe just a few laughs. What a pleasant surprise! There were some laugh-out-loud moments, some great songs (spot-on parodies of several decades of music), jibes at pop culture, and movies about musicians. (It helps if you've seen movies like Walk The Line or know a bit about Elvis, Johnny Cash, The Beatles...)

The most recent film was There Will Be Blood which I saw this past weekend. I went in to the movie in an unusually good mood which I think helped me appreciate the film more :) The film is unusal to say the least - don't expect a standard period piece or rags-to-riches story showing the benfits of hard work and determination. Go in expecting an artistic, gripping, gritty and startling film that sucks you in from the first few seconds. (A jarring note on strings announces the start of the film without any fanfare, and your nerves are instantly unsettled...) The first 20 minutes take place without any dialogue, but are still totally engrossing. When Daniel Day-Lewis' character finally did speak I found myself grinning and thinking "This is going to be reallllly good".
(OK, to be honest, I was telling myself that about 5 minutes into the film:) )

Kudos to Johnny Greenwood for the amazing soundtrack, Paul Thomas Anderson for (another) brilliant film, and Daniel Day-Lewis for a great performance!

PS: Stay for the credits and listen to the incredible closing music from Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major (Op.77)

New Year's Resolutions

I don't usually post these for all the world to see, since that makes it extra embarrassing when I fail to accomplish them. Several friends have taken the plunge, though, so I feel more inspired this year - so here goes!

1. Get all the wedding and honeymoon planning done, and then remember to have fun!
2. Exercise more. It's actually quite fun! Specifically, I'd like to:
• Go to gym 3+ times a week
• Find a good yoga class and go at least once a week
• Hike more in the summer, go backpacking at least once
• Ride a bike to/from work spring-fall
3. Lose some weight. 10-20 lbs would be nice. Should be easy if #1 is done. My goal is to lose 10lbs a month which means I should be done by end of Feb. :)
4. Meditate 3+ time a week for at least 30 mins.
5. Take dancing lessons (enough so that by July I can dance well enough to feel confident)
6. Take French lessons and get my vocab and grammar back to the point where I can hold a basic conversation and read news, etc.
7. Keep in touch with my friends in far-away-places more often.
8. Make more of an effort to socialize with friends. Have them round for dinner, drinks, movies or poker more often - once a month or more.

Happy Tweede Nuwe Jaar!

Yes, it that time of the year again! The Kaapse Klopse are doing their annual parade in Cape Town today - sadly I'll have to rely on the web to get a sense the spectacle.

So far I'm having a tough time finding pictures, so I'm using one I found for last year's post.