Older blog entries for Grit (starting at number 15)

Work:

Been chasing TCP performance problems. We're sending lots of data over a Gigabit Ethernet switch. Unfortunately TCP's timing parameters are tuned for the wide-area; it's ridiculous to wait 500ms for SYN ACK and have a minimum RTT of 200ms when the other end really is less than 1ms away. Having a 1MB transfer sometimes be 11ms and sometimes be 211 ms or 511 ms is no fun.

Fortunately we're using Linux, and we're in a situation where we can just change the constants and recompile. Or, if necessary, we can use a different transport protocol--- but TCP seems to be good enough if tuned. (It's understandable, if a little annoying, that these numbers are compile-time #defines rather than dynamically adjustable variables.)

Fun:

I got a bunch of sample microcontrollers from Microchip and have been playing around with them. I wrote my own programmer (adding yet another to the hundreds out there) and have only ruined one chip so far due to getting +5V and +12V switched around...

I've using gpasm from gputils as the assembler; it's a well done open source tool.

My I2C "logic analyzer" is complete; I put a couple new pictures on my electronics page. My soldering skills have yet to noticeably improve.

Shopping:

I visited a couple more electronics stores in the Minneapolis area today. AEI Electronics was a little disappointing; they have a lot of audio stuff, but not many parts out and available. Even IC sockets were in the employee-only area; I prefer being able to look at what I'm getting. Plus they overcharged me for the sale items I got but didn't charge me for my resistors.

Midwest Electronics was about what I expected; they do mainly old computer stuff. I restrained myself from buying one of the stack of Sun workstations for $10. I did find a tube of 18-pin DIP sockets which didn't have a price tag, so they let me have it for free.

So it looks like ABC Electronics is the best so far--- unfortunately they're not open on weekends.

20 Feb 2004 (updated 20 Feb 2004 at 17:54 UTC) »

I put up a web page with pictures of my pitiful, pointless electronics projects. Oh, well, at least I'm having fun.

I have gained an amazing amount of respect for capacitance. Virtually every problem I've had has been solved by adding more capacitors.

I'm looking for a good microcontroller to start playing around with. I've been thinking of Microchip's PIC12F629/675 series, since they're (1) flash-programmable, (2) dirt cheap, and (3) have an inexpensive programmer: the PICkit "flash starter kit" ($36). I love living in the future--- who would have predicted you could get a 5 MIPS, 8-pin computer for under $2.00?

But, I would need to buy quite a bunch of them for the project I have in mind and link them together, which is a nontrivial exercise. Or maybe I'm just a wimpy, cushioned C++ programmer who just can't handle having only 64 bytes of RAM. :)

I have a couple of samples of the Dallas Semiconductor DS80C400, but no eval board. I really like this chip--- it's got onboard Ethernet, although it needs an external PHY and transformer which I don't have yet. It can net boot, which is my ideal in terms of programmability. (This is probably not a reasonable possibility, since I don't want to have to solder the LQFP package, unless I buy one of the pre-made modules.)

Any Advogatans have experience to share with either of these, or can suggest a favorite which doesn't require large up-front costs?

I've been playing with a Delcom Engineering USB I/O controller. USB just makes me happy--- control + power together, so no wierdo serial bit-banging or parallel printer connection necessary to interact with electronics, and no $$$ for a power supply.

I started out using Thomas Hargrove's libdelcom, but I wanted a more convenient interface. So, I've written a C++ library called libdelcom++, which I released last night under the GPL. (Woo! First freshmeat entry!)

I'm working on a companion library for talking to I2C devices.

P.S. SWIG rocks. If only it handled nested classes.

Wow, more than a year since the last entry.

The company I'm working for, Kealia, is being bought by Sun. I have mixed feelings about this, but on the whole it's a good outcome. Working with Andy Bechtolsheim has been an amazing experience.

Here's the only story I'm allowed to tell about Kealia. I've learned the hard way to never, ever contribute patches to an open-source project using an email address you care about. I submitted a two-line patch to VideoLAN using my work email address. They very kindly put me in their thank-you list. As a result, every email worm which scans local files for email addresses ends up dumping thousands of emails into my account. (MyDoom passed the 36,000 mark a couple days ago.) procmail can only do so much by itself...

(Yes, yes, I should be using Bayesian filtering, and I do at home. It's the disproportionate penalty that annoys me--- this email address appears virtually nowhere else outside of Kealia.)

I'm annoyed enough with the SBC ads about "we built the network and understand it, don't force us to let other people use it." But now that they're offering long distance, the "one bill" commercials make absolutely no sense.

I already get one telephone bill with both local (SBC) phone service and (Sprint) long distance. What are they trying to convince me of? Do they think I'm too stupid to know how many bills I'm paying? (I may be paying extra to have SBC bill me, but I could save $1/month by having Sprint bill directly to my credit card if I cared.)

9 Dec 2002 (updated 3 Feb 2003 at 04:43 UTC) »

The Star-Tribune hit the nail right on the head in their editorial about "kids.us." The question to ask is: who will use this? Who will it benefit? Certainly anybody doing Internet filtering today is not going to add "*.kids.us" to their whitelist. (Although if somebody announces such a plan I'd be interested in hearing about it.)

I'm annoyed that from a government perspective, 12-year-olds and 7-year-olds are equivalent in what they should be allowed to see.

I'm also worried that the failure of ".kids.us" would increase the pressure for a worse "solution", like a ".xxx" or ".prn" domain. Not that they would work, either.

9 Jul 2002 (updated 9 Jul 2002 at 03:33 UTC) »
lukeg: I appreciated your comments on TCP. One of the members of my research group (Sam Liang) is doing his thesis on "using TCP for everything". One of his papers, on extending TCP for multicast support, was accepted at Infocomm 2002.

The work is in some ways a reaction to all the numerous wierdo protocols people build--- either explicitly or in an ad-hoc manner on top of UDP. A lot of times people set out to roll their own and end up duplicating a lot of TCP's features that they initially thought they didn't need. There is also a very real sense that TCP might be the only protocol we get to use; anything else is going to be even harder to deploy, harder to get through firewalls, might not be allowed by router ACLs, doesn't work with NAT, etc.

Real-time delivery is the biggest problem people seem to have with TCP. (Unless they're trying to load up their entire multi-gigabit link with a single TCP flow...) Sam's design provides a way around this, that is probably good enough for most applications. Check out his TCP-RTM paper if interested.

Framing is a big issue; the approach we've been thinking about lately is to use application-layer framing (which is necessary for the reasons you mention), but to change TCP's behavior to respect write() boundaries. Thus, an individual TCP segment (and a read()) contains bytes from no more than one application-layer frame.

I think you've nailed it on the head about "Worse is Better": TCP may often be not quite the right thing from an end-to-end perspective, but it's so much easier (and better engineering) to use what's already there than try to come up with something better from scratch. I'd argue (donning my asbestos suit) that the same thing can be said about IPv6 and NAT: one looks better from an e2e perspective, but a solution which just fixes NAT's problems will be a lot easier to deploy (and not necessarily violate the e2e argument, either.)

2 Jul 2002 (updated 2 Jul 2002 at 06:55 UTC) »

*sigh* So much verbiage, so little code.

I finished editing my papers on domain name policy for the class I took this spring. They're up here in a variety of formats. One still to go.

I also wrote a medium-cool short paper on denial-of-service attacks against the domain name system, which I submitted to HotNets. Not going to make that one publicly available for now, but if you're interested, drop me an email.

Congratulations to Marissa, whose short story "The Handmade's Tale" is an honorable mention in the 2001 Year's Best Science Fiction anthology!

The president of the Business Software Alliance wrote this spirited defense of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in today's San Jose Mercury Times. Not too surprising given the BSA's support of the bill when it was in Congress. (Why the Merc's "My View" space is being used for the opinions of a professional mouthpiece from Washington, D.C. is an entirely different issue.)

I sent in the following response, which probably won't see the light of day, given that I expect a hailstorm of righteous indignation from other Bay Area geeks:

    Robert Holleyman's article on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act tries to justify the law's existence by claiming its necessity for the protection of online content. But the DMCA does not "[extend] traditional copyright protections to the digital world", as Mr. Holleyman claims; it creates an entirely new protection. Online content was already legally protected by existing copyright law.

    The so-called "anti-circumvention" provisions of the DMCA instead seek to provide legal protection to copy-protection and access-prevention devices and technologies. These technologies are not about "piracy"; they are about control, as aptly demonstrated by the example of the protection scheme used for DVDs. There are plenty of ways to copy a DVD: you can make a copy of the entire disk, protection and all, or use a digital video camera to record the movie off a screen. The encryption on a DVD disk does not prevent this copying; it prevents playing the disk on unapproved devices. Such control must necessarily interfere with "fair use" of copyrighted content, since the circumstances in which use of a copyrighted work is legal are far broader than can be allowed by a fixed technology.

    Judge Whyte's opinion does in fact state that the DMCA does not prevent circumventing use restrictions. But I find it incomprehensible that the tools to do so are illegal even while the act is not. Does "fair use" apply only to those technologically savvy enough to build their own tools? Congress's disclaimer of any attempt to impair fair use rings hollow. It is as if owning VCRs were legal but selling them were not. (Remember VCRs? The technology that was supposed to destroy the movie industry by making copying easy?)

    Mr. Holleyman's claims that the DMCA is responsible for the growth of Internet usage is nothing short of ridiculous, given that most Internet content is not protected by any technological protection measures. Employment services, bookstores, news, games, magazines, media sites, and auctions all offer value on the Internet without the need for anything beyond a simple password authentication. In fact, wasn't the movie industry just testifying before Congress that they needed yet more protection before releasing online versions of their movies?

    The nightmare world supporters of the DMCA paint for us already exists. Movies such as "Attack of the Clones" are available for download on the Internet before they are released in the theater. The DMCA is neither effective at preventing copyright violations, nor necessary in order to combat them. Instead, it shifts more power into the hands of content producers--- taking it away from those who write software, manufacture consumer electronics, or want to make fair use of legally purchased media.

Chalst: I agree that having persistent URLs and domain names is usually superior to ones that might change without warning. It's possible (and common) to have both coexisting, though.

The TLD issue is one I'm still trying to resolve in my head. I guess if I have a point to contribute, it's that there is no reason for a new TLD unless you are unhappy with the allocation policy that exists in existing ones. ".museum", for example, has a set of requirements you have to meet to register in it. But I'm not convinced that this sort of extra hurdle actually adds value to the name.

If we have enough such "set-asides" to keep everybody happy (although whether that's possible is another issue), then there are probably going to be enough so that their mnemonic value is too small to be useful. If I'm looking for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, do I look at sfmoma.com, sfmoma.org, sfmoma.museum, moma.sanfrancisco.museum, sfmoma.art, sfmoma.pictures, sfmoma.sculpture, sfmoma.photo, sfmoma.mus, moma.sf.ca.us, etc.? (Although I do like what .museum does--- if you guess wrong, it dumps you into a list you can search through.)

So, if we can't make people who want to try random URLs (and those that want to catch their attention) happy, does "sfmoma.museum" give more confidence in the result of a search engine than "sfmoma-museum.org" does? Perhaps.

Anyway, I hope to have an argument which make sense in the paper I'm writing.

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