Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Detroit suburban SMART bus transit routing in Google Transit

The Detroit area SMART bus system now has routing and schedule information in Google Transit. It gives bus numbers and times for rides across the metro Detroit area, and plans the next available trips for you.

With all of this data it now looks almost possible to schedule and plan transportation from Ann Arbor to large parts of metro Detroit on public transportation. Mind you it's a little roundabout, but you have two choices:

- take Amtrak Ann Arbor - Detroit - Royal Oak - Pontiac, 3 trips/day
- take the Michigan Flyer bus to Metro Airport, switch to a SMART bus, and connect to routes from there - allow plenty of time for transfers and to find your stops.

I haven't timed the last of these, but I'm sure it's at least three hours, maybe four if you get a bad transfer time. (ouch) But it does, indeed, look possible, perhaps even interesting in an adventure travel sort of way.

Technorati Tags: maps, google-transit, bus, annarbor, neogeography

Eulogy for Alfio (Auch) Vielmetti

My cousin Zorba wrote a eulogy for my great uncle Auch, who died last week at the age of 96. The whole thing is a bit too much to share right now, but there was one paragraph that really spoke to me about the sort of family I come from (and perhaps some insight into who I am)

In his later years Auch did a lot of walking. I mean a LOT of walking, some of it right below us when the weather was bad, and I am convinced that his amblings had a lot to do with the length of his stay with us. He walked every day to the library to read the [Wall Street Journal], he walked to the stores and the bowling alley, and also, You see, on a lot of his walks, he went to sundry houses and visited the sick and the infirm- just a stop in to see how they were doing- and to cheer them up he said. Now if he was on tear about the city council, I’m not certain how cheery it was, but you get the idea.

It's late now, and the weather is bad, but I'm inspired to go out for a walk.

Technorati Tags: walk, walking

relevance in social networks - a function of local density

This very interesting phrase gets exactly one search hit in Google, a use in the book "Network Analysis: Methodological Foundations" by Ulrik Brandes, Thomas Erlebach.

I'm getting my copy via inter-library loan (yay Melcat) and hope to dig through it. The relevant chapter is on "local density", which looks to have all kinds of NP-hard math about finding dense clusters, cliques, and inside networks.

What makes a portion of a social network more relevant than the rest of it? I.e., if you want to partition a network into an "interesting" part and a "less interesting" part, how do you cut it? This is then a property less of any individual ego and more a property of a subset of the group. Large networks have enormous (and computationally difficult) different ways they can be sliced up, so you have to have some heuristics that lead you to the right places.

On a network like the internet, where do you measure "local density"? Decide how much it matters that people are in the same place at the same time, and how much it matters that they quote each other all the time, and how much it matters that they sync up even though they are far apart.

"Network Analysis: Methodological Foundations (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)" (Springer)

Technorati Tags: proxmity, density, relevance

Yahoo leadership - nature abhors a vacuum

As GigaOM notes in Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight

Yahoo has a staggering 500 million users. However, it does a rather poor job of monetization. The vision that Yang shared at CES last week (“At Yahoo we want to be the most essential starting point for your life”) can come true if the key activities that we perform online are channeled through its My Yahoo service. And on the financial side, each of those activities needs to be backed up by a monetization model that takes full advantage of the traffic that Yahoo consistently manages to generate and preserve.

If you have an interesting network with a huge number of users and an awful way to monetize the traffic, people divert their attentions to other interesting networks with perhaps less users and much better ways to monetize traffic.  This is particularly true if the gating point for your interest and attention is your ability to fund day-in, day-out, constant attention to a project, and account or a campaign.

Jerry and Sue, you need to show some leadership.  Make it possible for me to make money on your network.  If you can't, I'll systematically divert my attention (and my clients spend) to other networks that perform better than Yahoo.  I'll happily take good ideas from Brad and Caterina and Stuart and Les and Susan and Joshua and put them to work somewhere that will generate good cash flow.  And I'll invite anyone who was laid off or who left Yahoo to join me on the Yahoo alumni network where we can figure out what's next.

Brent Hill, Google / Feedburner speaking in Ann Arbor, Dec 4 2007

A talk tonight, 12/4:

Ann Arbor SPARK Hi-Tech Tuesday: Google's Brent Hill Offers Everything You Want to Know About Blogs & RSS

What: Google's Brent Hill presents "Everything You Want to Know About Blogs & RSS"

When & Where: Tuesday, December 4, 2007, 5-7 p.m. at Google, McKinley Towne Center, 5th Floor, 201 S. Division, Ann Arbor

Purpose: As content syndication on the web proliferates, audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented. How do marketers leverage RSS feeds to deliver targeted marketing messages? And how do publishers measure and monetize their audience?

Presenter: Brent Hill is a team manager in the Global Media Solutions division at Google. Previously vice president of Advertising Services at FeedBurner, the market-leading feed management provider that was acquired by Google in 2007, Brent has worked in a variety of interactive marketing, e-commerce, and consumer services businesses. He frequently speaks at industry events on the topic of advertising in syndicated content, and his insights have been published in Advertising Age, Adotas, and DMNews. Brent received a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Bradley University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Information: Registration is free.

More infos: Brent Hill bio, June 2007 interview reported by Online Media Daily, 2006 interview at Internet Marketing Voodoo.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, google, goog, blog, rss, feed

NSFNET reunion, a perspective

I was at the NSFNET 20th reunion last week. Here's some notes after the fact.

I took good notes on URLs mentioned on delicious - look at http://del.icio.us/vielmetti/nsfnet to get the running commentary as I was trying to do it.

History is written by the winners, and thus the NSFNET history was written by the winners - the winners of the 1987 contract to manage it (Merit, MCI and IBM), and those who personally or corporately won out when the backbone was transformed from a research and educational network into a commercial one. The tone was primarily uncritical, self-congratulatory, and celebratory.

History is also written by those who collect and carefully store their papers, and there were several retired academics and network builders who were looking for long term institutional homes for the collections of maps, documents, email, standards and correspondence that they accumulated over the years. Those looking to produce a history would do well to look at collections like the Merit Network Inc. Records 1966-2002 at the Bentley Historical Library, which has not only all of the official publications from the time but also some amazing depth (60 linear feet) of printed correspondence, proposals that did not win, and other parts of the history some forgotten and some simply unspoken.

For a broader context of a part of this time, the Dot Com Archive at Maryland has an (as of yet sealed) collection of dot com era business plans from a failed law firm - again telling the story from the accumulation of documents, and not the selective memory of a few.

Thanks to everyone I saw there (cja, mayabe, dsobeloff, glee, srh) and especially to those who were young enough in 1987 to disagree with the networking orthodoxy of the time (because we had nothing to lose and everything to win).

Technorati Tags: nsfnet, 1987, party-like-its-198x, nethistory, merit, archives, ans, mci, ibm

Dave Mills on Routing in the Internet Swamp

I'm in DC for the NSFNET reunion - here's a deck from 1999 that Dave Mills put together on the view of routing in the Internet in the 1980s.

| View | Upload your own

Technorati Tags: routing, fuzzball, nethistory, elginpelican

NSFnet reunion, Nov 30-31 2007

There's a reunion being organized for people who worked on the NSFnet, celebrating its 20th anniversary. For details, see the NSFnet reunion planning site.

The NSFNET celebration event will be held on Thursday, November 29 and Friday, November 30, 2007, at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia. A summary agenda is available.

Event Planning Committee (with their NSFNET-era affiliation)

* Eric Aupperle, Merit Network
* Jordan Becker, ANS
* Rick Boivie, IBM
* Jane Caviness, NSF
* Darleen Fisher, NSF
* Doug Gale, NSF
* Elise Gerich, Merit
* Lawrence Landweber, UW-Madison/CSNET
* Barb Nanzig, University of Michigan
* Ann O'Beay, MCI
* Andy Rosenzweig, Merit (current)
* Doug Van Houweling, University of Michigan/Merit
* Al Weis, ANS
* Donald Welch, Merit (current)
* Karl Zinn, University of Michigan

TT60009: Merit Network Problems 08/16/07

If you are experiencing network problems connecting to or from sites located in Michigan, Merit's TT60009 has some details.

(This is of course not an official announcement of anything, etc etc; "the information in this post is historical and may have changed since the date of the posting")

For more information:
- ITCS Service Status outages page: "Service Degradation"

This also affects some voice traffic from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor to the Dearborn campuses, Wayne State University, library and school systems statewide including the Ann Arbor District Library, and transit systems like the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority that share connections to Merit.

UPDATE August 21 2007 from the si.all list:

I’m sorry to be the harbinger of bad news, but there appears to be a repeat of last week’s network problems, caused by a switch failure at Merit – you may find it difficult or impossible to reach sites outside of UM.

Merit is working on it, but there is no time estimate of repair.

UPDATE Thu Aug 16 21:46:31 2007

As of 8:20 PM, EST, Thursday, August 16,2007, the Merit backbone network alerts have cleared and network services have started to return to normal operations. Merit's Network Engineers are performing additional diagnostic testing to ensure the stability of the backbone. We expect the Merit backbone will returned to normal operations by 10:00 PM, EST.

A detail report and further communication will be provided to the Merit Community, tomorrow, Friday, August 17, 2007.

If you are currently experiencing any network performance problems please contact Merit's Network Operations Center (NOC) immediately.

On behalf of all Merit staff, we apologize for the inconvenience this service issue has caused your organization. We at Merit continuously strive to provide the highest level of service to our Membership and regret this service issue.

UPDATE 17:24:16 8/16/07

The network is experiencing a continuing problem within the 10gig core routers. This does not appear as a total outage, but as a general slowdown as traffic seeks alternate routing around the switch that has the problem at any point in time.

The first event occurred at about 11:00 PM Wednesday Aug 15. At that time an Extreme Networks router processor card shutdown at the Ann Arbor site. The router was restarted and appeared to be functioning properly. Since then at least three other Extreme networks routers have exhibited the same symptom. Two of the routers also shutdown their 10gig interface cards. The issue has moved from router to router (not always the same router) and sometimes requires more than one restart for recovery.

At this point engineers from Extreme Networks are one the phone with Merit reviewing the console and log dumps from the routers. This does not appear to be a known problem with the routers.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

some excerpts:

11:22am

SCOPE: Merit Regional Network.

STATUS: The hardware failure previously experienced has
resurfaced.

The problem has been escalated with our vendor and Merit
lead engineers are working with them to resolve the issue.
Sites may lose connectivity or experience difficulty
reaching internet sites.

There is currently no ETR. Updates will be provided as
available. Thank you for you patience while
we resolve this matter.

07:15am

SUBJECT: Merit Network hardware failure.

SCOPE: Merit Regional Network.

STATUS: A hardware failure in the Ann Arbor area resulted in
Merit member and affiliate sites being unable to
reach some destination within and external to Merit
Network. The problem was compounded because it also
caused some routes to be rejected by external network
providers. The hardware problem has been corrected and
most routes are again being accepted.

START TIME: Thursday, 15 August 2007, 22:32 EDT

a2b3 lunch non-summary August 16, 2007

We had about 35 people for lunch at Eastern Accents. The question of the day way "what event is on your calendar" - here's the results in the simplest most basic format w/links to Arborwiki for detail pages.

in the rough order of the events

tomorrow procrastination

every Thursday a2b3 lunch at Eastern Accents (arrive early to avoid a line)
every Friday coworking at Pure Visibility in the a.m.
Saturday music event at Great Oak Cohousing starts 11am
Saturday Facebook event in Chicago
this weekend Ypsilanti Heritage Festival
Monday deadline for "stick around Ann Arbor" story
Tues UPA Generational Design in Livonia (carpool available)

Aug 24 Dexter Cider Mill opens. Fresh, hot donuts.

Aug 28 Leaders Connect / Connect Ann Arbor event
Aug 30 Lansing-Mackinaw City bike ride

After Labor Day back to school, 1st day kindergarten
1st weekend September AAUW book sale at WCC

Oct 13, 20 Ruby conference sponsored by Ruby user group
mid Oct MyReggae launches

Oct 27 ArbCamp - Bar Camp Ann Arbor at WCC Morris Lawrence building

Nov 30, 31 NSFNET Legacy 20th reunion in DC area

when this note shows up on Facebook I'll tag it with some people and we can generate the corresponding events there.

thanks all for an awesome lunch.