More magma…

Published on by

We have been planning a trip to Iceland (mostly to see the aurora) next year. I am now looking into tours that go near the volcano at Bárðarbunga and Holuhraun as well.

I think that land tours (I would love to stand next to the lava front) are out of the question, since the authorities have closed the area for ~18 miles around.

But there appear to be a couple air tours flying from Akureyri to Bárðarbunga, Holuhraun, and over the Askja crater for a little more than US$300 per person. The view from the planes can been seen in these Youtube Videos… I’m psyched.

A Memorization Tip

Published on by

I have given out this tip in past years to people in Revels North who’re preparing for the Christmas Revels show…

I found this trick for memorization in a wonderful book, Don’t Shoot the Dog, The new art of teaching and training, by Karen Pryor. It talks about modifying behavior — yours and others. (One way of modifying behavior is shooting the dog. But she talks about lots of other—usually more appropriate—ways to change behavior.) She tells about coaching, teaching, and maybe even making things better in your life. And it’s a fun read…

But back to memorization: The trick is to learn the last verse first, then the next-to-last, and so on.

Why? Because the usual way of learning the verses sequentially is enormously dispiriting. You struggle to get the words of the first verse. After a lot of work, you begin to be comfortable with them, so you attack the second verse. But you’re back at sea. It feels like such hard work. After the second verse, you hit the wall of the third verse. You despair of learning the words at all.

Instead, learn the last verse first. Then start learning the previous verse. After you get the new verse down, you can keep on singing, but they’re words that you already know. You’re drawn along by the familiar material. You feel competent and confident. You feel good.

Gettin’ my magma jollies!

Published on by

I’ve been following Rei, a blogger from Iceland, who is reporting on the Bárðarbunga/Holuhraun volcano as it continues to erupt. It’s way more impressive/scary than I originally thought. It’s huge, with fresh lava covering 37 square km, or about 2/3 the size of Manhattan, and the magma fountains are shooting 300 feet or more in the air.

Her recent posts have shown a lot of information about the volcano’s progress. The one from last Saturday contains the best view so far of the extent of the lava, and absolutely stunning views of the magma sloshing around. The video is second-to-last picture on this page.

See it here: Rei’s post with great volcano video

For a bit more context, you can read her earlier posts. This map shown on this link tells more of the story. The big volcano, called Bárðarbunga, is at the red dot in the big glacier. The magma has pushed about 70 km (45 miles!) beneath the surface to erupt at Holuhraun, labeled with “Eruption” below.

The good news is that the magma remained underground until it got to a flat sandy desolate location, instead of coming up under the ice and melting it (to make flood) or an ash volcano. The other good news is that the (poisonous) sulfur dioxide has mostly been blowing northeast, so it hasn’t seriously affected either Reykjavík or Akureyri.

CeroWrt 3.10.50-1 Field Report

Published on by

Comments on the CeroWrt 3.10.50-1 build that I installed on my WNDR3700v2 primary router:

  • Seemed to install and configure properly (I retrieved the updated version with the lighthttpd fix)

  • I used a local copy of config-cerowrt.sh (from https://github.com/richb-hanover/CeroWrtScripts#config-cerowrtsh) to configure the router to have my own DSL user/pw, SSID names, etc.

  • mDNS seems to work across subnets. (I don’t think that it worked properly for the last few CeroWrt releases)

  • The first time I looked, /usr/lib/CeroWrtScripts didn’t seem to have been updated with the latest from github.com (see link above). But I looked again (after a reboot, and running the config-cerowrt.sh script, and another reboot (maybe something else)), and the script matches the github version… Not sure how that could have happened.

  • Debloating seems to be working as expected. netperf-wrapper with RRUL shows a jump from 60 to 80 msec (normal on my 7mbps/768kbps DSL link). Here’s the plot:

speedof.me

Published on by

Doc Searls mentioned in passing that he uses a new speed test website. I checked it out, and it was very cool…

www.speedof.me is an all-HTML5 website that seems to make accurate measurements of the up and download speeds of your internet connection. It’s also very attractive, and the real-time plots of the speed show interesting info. (See below.)

Now if we could get them to include a latency measurement so people could point out their bufferbloated equipment.

Mayday.us – Bringing sanity back to campaign financing

Published on by

I recently joined Lessig’s citizen-funded MAYDAY.US campaign, an ambitious experiment to win a Congress committed to ending corruption in 2016, and we did something amazing: We raised $1 million dollars in 12 days. That’s a ton of money, but it’s not enough.

The plan is to raise $12 million in 2014, and use it to make fundamental reform of campaign financing the major issue in five congressional races. Then we’ll apply what we learn from those races to 2016.

We’re raising $5 million more by July 4, and I’m asking my readers if you can help us get the rest of the way there. So my question is: will you help?

Visit Mayday.us

New CeroWrt Router scripts

Published on by

I posted a set of scripts that people can use to test, configure and debug their CeroWrt router installations. CeroWrt router firmware is a test bed for learning about and eliminating bufferbloat.

The scripts are available on Github at https://github.com/richb-hanover/CeroWrtScripts. They include:

  • betterspeedtest.sh – a script that emulates the famous (but limited) speedtest.net. This script is better because it measures ping latency during the download and upload, and tells you how bad (or not) the bloat is in your network/router.

  • netperfrunner.sh – a script that emulates the RRUL test suite. It runs on the CeroWrt router (or your laptop) to measure the latency under heavy load.

  • config-cerowrt.sh and tunnelbroker.sh – two scripts for configuring a CeroWrt router to a consistent state after flashing new firmware.

  • cerostats.sh – a script that collects a number of configuration and operational stats that is useful for debugging.

Net Neutrality & Whitehouse.gov petition

Published on by

There’s a Whitehouse.gov petition posted about Net Neutrality. It’s a little bit of a rant, but I agree with its punchline: No bandwidth modifications of information based on content or its source.

This relates to a comment from Philip Greenspun’s blog (How many times do we have to pay for the same internet service?) If I’m paying my Internet Service Provider (ISP) to provide bits from the Internet to my home, and content providers pay an ISP for getting their bits into the Internet, what’s the problem? Why do the ISPs ask to be paid more for certain content, say, from Netflix?

The problem is that most ISPs (cable company, DSL/phone company, etc.) seriously underprovision their facilities. If every home subscriber ever attempted to use the service (at 3 megabits/second or 7, or 15, or 100, or whatever) that the ISPs advertise, there would be dramatic slowdowns. The ISPs simply don’t have sufficient capacity in place. The “easy out” for the ISP is to brand Netflix and other content providers as “bandwidth hogs” and using “more than their share” of bandwidth.

Two questions come from this:

  1. If, Netflix, say, did pay more, would my ISP promise to provide great service that didn’t slow down? (I wouldn’t bet on it. They don’t like to promise anything…)

  2. Why shouldn’t we consumers treat these bandwidth claims as false advertising? ISPs take our money while promoting a service that they know they have no ability or intention of providing. Wouldn’t that be a fun class-action suit? 🙂

In any event, you can read and sign the Whitehouse.gov petition at http://wh.gov/lwhFt They got almost half the signatures they need in a week; they need another 60K signatures by 24 May to get an official response from the White House. The more publicity on this issue, the better.

LibreSSL fork of OpenSSL

Published on by

A small team of well-known developers from the OpenBSD team is working on a fork of OpenSSL, to be named LibreSSL.

This group is going through the OpenSSL source code base and removing old/ancient distributions, reformatting the code to KNF (Kernel Normal Format), removing dead code, fixing bugs and improving the package documentation.

They’re aided by the freedom to abandon old cruft that will never again be used, but there’s a certain amount of enjoyment to be had in reading snarky commit comments such as:

ASN1_STRING cleanup - realloc has handled NULL since I had a mullet
and parachute pants ...

and

This only works on systems where calloc() does the integer overflow
check, but if your system doesn't do this, you need to ask your vendor
WHY THEY ARE 10 YEARS BEHIND IN BEST PRACTICE?

and

I'm glad to know that Ultrix CC has a bug optimizing switch() statements
lacking an explicit `case 0:' construct. But Ultrix has been dead for more than
15 years, really. Don't give it any reason to move out of its coffin.

and

12 years ago, old_des.h was used to provide compatibility with libdes.
The man page says "Compatibility des_ functions are provided for a short
while" and indeed even the original commit message says "The compatibility
functions will be removed in some future release, at the latest in
version 1.0." So here we are, a short while later.

Now I've only been an OpenBSD developer for 11 years, one year less than
this header has existed, but in that brief time, I've learned a thing or
two about deleting obsolete code. It doesn't delete itself. And worse,
people will continue using it until you force them onto a better path.

(To read more from the complete check-in history, see OpenBSD CVSweb)

I, for one, am glad to see a dedicated team look at this code base with the freedom to make it better, smaller, and auditable. I wish them the best, and have thrown a few simoleons into their kitty.