Vacuum

April 29, 2013 Windstream outage

This map, compiled from traffic to this weblog, paints an approximate picture of the distribution of problems from today's Windstream outage. More official news (though sparse) is at the news.windstream.com site.

In the news:

From the WindstreamCommunications page on Facebook, about 4 p.m:

Service update: Our technicians continue to troubleshoot the issue in an attempt to resolve. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide another update in an hour.

From the Charlotte Observer: Windstream customers, company report outage

A number of Windstream Corp. customers in the greater Charlotte area are experiencing service outages affected by what the company is calling “a widespread outage affecting long-distance and toll-free call processing.” The outage occurred around 11:30 a.m., said company spokesman David Avery. Though the Arkansas-based company hasn’t stated how far the outage extends, posts on Twitter and Facebook suggest the outage is multi-state.

Twitter API changes cause obvious problems for developers

My Twitter feed is full of worry about the changes to the Twitter API. (Yes, that probably means I should unfollow a few people so that it gets back to the baseline of "I'm eating a sandwich".) Here's some of the notable problems that people see with the new rules, which are going into effect over the next 6 months.

From Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, "Interpreting some of Twitter's API changes" is a good overview of the challenges for a developer to comply with new rules while still innovating on their core application. His conclusion is stark:

Twitter has left themselves a lot of wiggle-room with the rules. Effectively, Twitter can decide your app is breaking a (potentially vague) rule at any time, or they can add a new rule that your app inadvertently breaks, and revoke your API access at any time. [...]

I sure as hell wouldn’t build a business on Twitter, and I don’t think I’ll even build any nontrivial features on it anymore.

And if I were in the Twitter-client business, I’d start working on another product.

The new App.net has grand designs to be a Twitter clone, based on three elements: a solid realtime engine for data, a well defined open API, and a subscription supported model (rather than an advertising supported model) for making the whole thing pay. Dalton Caldwell's manifesto is a worthwhile read, "Announcing an audacious proposal"

I believe so deeply in the importance of having a financially sustainable realtime feed API & service that I am going to refocus App.net to become exactly that. I have the experience, vision, infrastructure and team to do it. Additionally, we already have much of this built: a polished native iOS app, a robust technical infrastructure currently capable of handing ~200MM API calls per day with no code changes, and a developer-facing API provisioning, documentation and analytics system. This isn’t vaporware.

Not surprisingly, the alpha.app.net channel is full of want to be superstar application developers figuring out how their new idea could work in this new space.

There are two applications that I use that could be affected by this set of changes. One is Pinboard, which is a bookmarking tool that (among other things) reads and archives my Twitter stream. Pinboard's developer Maciej Ceglowski has a very funny, no holds barred Twitter account for Pinboard, where he among other things promotes his own service by retweeting posts from the accounts of his competitor Delicious. Here's his take on app.net:

I'd be sad if my Twitter backups didn't work.

The unusual Twitter client that I use which is most likely to run up against the new look-and-feel guidelines of the Twitter API is ttytter, a command line client written in Perl by Cameron Kaiser. It looks nothing like the official Twitter apps of any kind.

It's hard enough to insist on API and look-and-feel rules with applications that are user configurable; imagine what it must be like to enforce those rules when the application is delivered as relatively easy to modify source code. How can you make sure people don't break the rules if they can change their own code?

Twitter has some reasonable reasons to want to narrow the scope of what third parties can do with their service, but it's not going to come without a fight. Expect a tug of war between innovation and conformity, and it's safe to say that some of that innovation that comes at a high cost and low value to Twitter will be squashed out. I'll be particularly interested in the delicate balance between value provided by Twitter to advertisers (who pay directly) and social media marketers (who often ride for free) on the service.

Walking Around, a new urban walking game

I'm inventing a new urban game called Walking Around. I'm sure that someone else has invented it already, but reinvention is part of the process of creativity. Here's how it's played.

First, you play with a pedometer, which tells you how far you've walked during the day. There are a number of systems already for tracking your pedometer usage, including Walker Tracker, Steps, and a bunch of others. Use whatever system that gives you, or just a spreadsheet, to take care of the basic structure of making certain that you count steps daily.

Second - and here is what is novel, at least to me - is that there's a bonus structure in the game designed to award bonuses for when you have accomplished tasks. The first bonus award that I'm awarding myself looks at constructing a walk so that you make an orbit around the biggest possible chunk of territory; that is to say, repeated walks along the same path will get you zero bonus, but going out of your way on a detour will add to your score, and trekking through unfamiliar territory in a big loop is the best.

So far this is a pen and paper game and I haven't fully worked out the point structure. I have a notion that you capture territory every time you orbit it, so that you might win a park by going all the way around it, and you might win a political ward or precinct by capturing a loop around it. To simplify greatly, since I am trying to keep record of this in a small book, I'm just drawing a graph with destinations rather than tracking every street.

Some idea sources:

Riverwalks Ann Arbor is a book of walking loops along the Huron River, written by Brenda E. Bentley.

Lake Trek is the weblog for  Loreen Niewenhuis who wrote A 1000-Mile Walk on the Beach about her circumnavigation on foot of Lake Michigan. I don't think I'm going to beat that top score.

Tom Graham wrote about Walking The World, and his quest to walk every street in San Francisco, in 2005 for SF Gate; his web site is SF Walking Man.

The AADL Summer Reading Game has points for reading books and badges for doing various other tasks, and the gamers there know how to make a game that will make you read. There should therefore be points in my Walking Around game every time you complete part of a circuit that connects to a library.

All City New York is the work of Moses Gates, whose game board includes the challenge of visiting all of the census tracts of New York City. Thanks to Ruth Kraut for the link. 

In Tacoma, Brian Kerr is getting bonus points in his version of the game for elevation.

Now pardon me while I connect some dots in my game map.

 

Mark Segal, National Security Agency, 3/30/2011, noon, at University of Michigan School of Information

Open to the public, lunch provided. From the news release:

Mark E. Segal, deputy director, Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences at the National Security Agency, will present a talk on “Computer Science Research at the National Security Agency” on Wednesday, March 30 at noon in the Ehrlicher Room, 3100 North Quad.

Prior to joining NSA in 2007, Segal worked in the telecommunications industry for 18 years. He has conducted research in the areas of distributed computing, dependable systems, information assurance, and multimedia systems. He holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in computer and communications sciences from the University of Michigan.

 

Edward Vielmetti's grandmother's cousin, Katharine Swift, worked for the National Security Agency.

Egypt disconnects from the Internet

 

Image credit: Arbor Networks.

From the Renesys blog, "Egypt leaves the Internet"

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

Renesys has tracked other widespread Internet routing disruptions; the comments on that site are good.

The BGPmon blog is tracking this from the routing perspective, "Internet in Egypt offline".

One ISP that appears to not be down is Noor.net, at least as of Friday midnight EST.

For another network perspective, Netcraft is tracking reachability of Egyptian government sites that had been attacked by Anonymous.

News coverage

The Guardian has a live blog, Protests in Egypt.

Al Jazeera has comprehensive news coverage, under the headline Anger in Egypt.

The New York Times has new Egypt cables from Wikileaks, Cables show delicate US dealings with Egypt's leaders.

They show in detail how diplomats repeatedly raised concerns with Egyptian officials about jailed dissidents and bloggers, and kept tabs on reports of torture by the police.  But they also reveal that relations with Mr. Mubarak warmed up because President Obama played down the public “name and shame” approach of the Bush administration.

 

Anon_VV Anonymous 

Everything ██is█████ ████ ████fine ███ █ ████ love. ████ █████ the ███ Egypt ███ ████ government ██ #jan25 #Egypt #censorship

 

study for the ham radio exam

An online study guide should help.

Should I ditch my smart phone?

I have a shiny phone with more computing power than the first computer I ever owned.  I also have a shiny brick, because the phone isn't working now, and when I took it back to where I bought it they gave me a phone number to call to fix it.  (I call it my BrickBerry.  It's so bricked, it doesn't even play Brickout.) There's nothing worse than talking on the phone, trying to fix your phone.

Get in touch, free of charge: Just dial 611 from your T-Mobile phone or call 1-877-453-1304. Customer Care representatives are available from 3 a.m. to 10p.m. PT, daily. Automated account help is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You can either call Toll Free # 1-800-937-8997 or we here in Technical Care web chat can assist you.

I am tempted to go back to the worst possible phone that could possibly work.  I had an old, old Nokia candybar-style phone, which at one point I called my "WAP phone" because I had to wap on the side of it to get it to work.  Yet it did work, and it made lots of phone calls, and it seemed cheap at the time.  And it was cheap - it had a monochrome screen, only the most rudimentary games, no camera, nothing.  Cheap but reliable.  

JVM Error 517

An unrecoverable error on the phone.

T-mobile policy for this error is to ship a replacement phone.

An inconsistency has been detected in the VM persistent object store.

Smart phones aren't cheap, but increasingly they don't seem all that smart either.  Shiny, yes; futuristic and wonderful, sure.  But smart, not so much.  Does your phone remind you of what you need to do, when and where you need to do it, but not so naggingly that you turn it off?  Probably not.  Does that smart phone make you look smarter when you're walking down the street punching buttons on it?  Not so sure. Twittering from the bus to let the planet know which bus has squeaky brakes?  Uh huh.

The trap, perhaps, is confusing "smart phone" with "smart person".  Does a smart phone make you smart?

One possibility is to ditch phones with contracts entirely and go to a prepaid plan, which means that every call would cost something and I've have to be smart about how to use my phone.  That turns out to be easier now that I have Google Voice, which gives me more tools than ever to not answer my phone but still get a message to me.  Google Voice lets me direct any call to any phone, and thus the cell phone simply becomes another selectable destination to originate or terminate calls on the same number.

Other people's take on this:

My monthly bill says buying a dumb phone would have been smarter.

twitter mutual friends: exploring mutual and reciprocal relationships

I put up a little project on github last night, twitter mutual friends.  This is the page that should serve as the reference point for it.

I started up the effort while trying to make sense of the "follow or don't follow" decision when someone follows you.  Certainly following everyone blindly is a bad mistake, but ignoring new followers is a bad mistake too, and sometimes you just need to prune back the following stream to leave room for new voices.

The existing Twitter feedback for these is very limited, based almost entirely on numerical counts.  I thought I could do better by examining what kind of mutual relationships already existed between me and other people and to see if I could characterize folks based on who else they followed to know at least which part of my life they might have found me by.

Thus, the twitter mutual friends effort.  The simplest version of this downloads two friend lists, and looks for overlap.  The list of overlapping ids is walked through, noting who the overlapping people are, what their last twitter was, how many people they in turn were following, and the like. 

You could look either at friends, followers, or mutual friend/follow pairs; you can derive things from the text of recent tweets from mutual friends, or their follow counts, or other second derivatives of mutuality or reciprocity.  At some point there's a nice visual of all of this, as well as some good textual analysis ("trending words in our mutual followers").  But as a start this is just an effort to get beyond simple counting and into network views of twitter.

DTE power outage on 25 April 2009 is worst in Oakland County, Michigan

DTE Energy is Detroit Edison + Michigan Consolidated Gas.

This is a clipping from the DTE power outage map pulled at 11:15pm on Saturday, 25 April 2009.  If you have a network connection, you can get your own copy (as a PDF) from their web site.  The color coding at a glance is simple: outage intensity goes pale blue, pale yellow, bright pink, bright orane, and angry red.  No angry red on this map.

The Oakland Press has news of Oakland County, so I'll defer to them for details.  The power outage story they wrote has a byline credit to Jerry Wolffe

There were at least 120,000 DTE Energy customers without electricity in Southeastern Michigan, said utility spokesman Scott Simons.

The utility, which has 2.2 million electricity customers in the state, is calling in repair crews from other parts of the state and other states, Simons said.

It will take at least a “couple of days” to restore power to customers, he predicted.

Damage from the storm in Oakland County was extensive.

Damage extends to St Clair County - this report from 8pm Saturday from Bob Thomas, twitter user @btcomp

Power out in much of St. Clair County, Michigan (Port Huron) running generator to cycle refrig and freezers until 11pm & off till morning.

I know that the Kensington Metropark lost power part of the afternoon because the kids did not get to do the scheduled sheep-shearing; still a fun time.

Brighton, MI was hard hit in the first wave of storms, with soccer games cancelled or cut short and kids running for cover, per a conversation with a friend who was one of those who ran for cover.

Lansing Give Camp had a complete power outage, per @jayharris:

Weather fail at #LansingGiveCamp. Complete power failure. Coding comes to a halt. Epic Fail of all Epic Fails.

but subsequent accounts via twitter make it look like they abandoned their original venue and split up to a variety of locations that did have power and wifi and carried on as planned.

Thanks to Lansing Center and @ehart67 for helping out #LansingGiveCamp with relocation.

All in all a typical summer thunderstorm with trees down, some dislocations and network failures, and quite a few adaptable people.

IPv6 over social network; a Facebook application for routing packets over friend networks

noted on Geert's blog

IP over Social Network is a Facebook application which allows any Facebook member to create its own IPv6 virtual router for free and build an IPv6 network over the Facebook Social Network!

Once you have created your virtual router by installing this free application, you can then add up to 12 interfaces (i.e. links) connected to your other friends’ routers. IPv6 packets can then be exchanged over those links and of course, like in all IP networks, can be routed to any destination over the network (including a special gateway to the IPv6 Internet of course)!

The next step, of course, is NNTP over IPv6 social network, so that you can use Facebook as infrastructure to do netnews; the sheer complexity of it all will ensure that whoever manages to figure it out will meet some niche demographic.

Thanks to Eric Vyncke for putting this all together; he managed to simulate a pretty good chunk of a Cisco router as a Facebook application, in case you need to learn how to configure a router there's a command line for you to try out.

be my frend

route my packits pleez