Surfing the Luminiferous Ether

My reason for braving the “snowstorm” at Heathrow was to be at the JANET(UK) Networkshop conference. The organizers asked me to present an overview of current wireless standards in development. JANET(UK) is also a founding member of the OpenSEA Alliance, and has arranged for some UK universities to test the supplicant as we develop it.

I impressed (in the older sense of drafting somebody into service) Mark Tysom of JANET(UK) into taking pictures while I spoke. He captured me in front of my favorite slide in the talk, which shows the size of the 802.11n draft over time:

Several interesting vital statistics on the 802.11n draft can be found in this 802.11 working group presentation made by Bruce Kraemer, the long-time chair of TGn who has recently been elected the chair of the entire 802.11 working group.

The venue for my talk was the plenary session, which was held at The Barony Hall at the University of Strathclyde. The Barony Hall was previously a church, and is a wonderful venue for large audiences. As a speaker, it can be slightly intimidating, though!

(Thanks for taking photos, Mark!)

Earlier this month, I was speaking at the JANET(UK) Networkshop 36 conference. Unfortunately, getting there involved the new Heathrow airport, a slight snowstorm, and Terminal 5. After having lived through it, I’m not sure whether the “snowstorm” or Terminal 5 was worse.

When we landed, snow had halted most of the ground activities at Heathrow. Our captain said that it was as bad as he had ever seen the snow, and he noted that Heathrow does not have a lot of snow handling equipment. As a result, nothing was moving and our plane had to sit for a while.

We are not talking about a huge amount of snow. Chris Hessing, the chair of the Open1X Project, was traveling with me. Chris is from Utah. I think he put it best when he said, “If the grass is poking up through the snow, it doesn’t count.” Here’s a view out the airplane window:

It was cold out. Here’s the tail of a Jet Airways plane. On the dark blue tail, you can clearly see the internal frame melting the snow along the structural elements.

Nevertheless, everything had ground to a halt because of the snow. Several hours later, most airlines other than British Airways had recovered. BA blamed the snow, cancelled lots of flights, and blamed the weather. To deal with the crowd of people who needed to be rebooked, BA called in extra service staff. For example, here’s one of the major service desks at Terminal 5, dealing effectively with the wave of cancellations that occurred at 11 am:

I did try to speak to the person at the desk, and he told me that my problem could only be handled landside. BA computers cannot automatically rebook passengers on to the next flight, which meant that huge crowds were going landside to get rebooked, waiting in lines, going back through security, and getting cancelled again. By the end of the day, anecdotal evidence suggested that their lines were best measured in hours, with estimates as high as six hours.

The whole experience was awful. I did finally talk BA into a hotel room for the night after the second cancellation of the day. They had resumed operations the next morning, and I was on an early flight to Glasgow. However, in line for security, I overheard other passengers talking about how the computer system for luggage handling had crashed again.

I wrote more about my experience on FlyerTalk in this thread

To answer the most frequently asked question, my luggage arrived without any problems. Although T5 has been notorious for lost luggage, I did not have any problem. My best guess is that I checked in for my flight in San Francisco with American Airlines, so entering my baggage record into BA’s computers didn’t need to use the T5 luggage system.

On Wednesday, I read that the problems at BA had actually made Heathrow better for other passengers. With fewer BA jets trying to get on to the runways, the other airlines had an easier time getting out on schedule.

The bottom line is that if you want me to go somewhere in Europe, you had better have a plan that doesn’t involve British Airways. I was quite glad to hear that American is expanding code share services with both Iberia and SN Brussels, which should allow me to avoid Heathrow in the future.

Via Glenn Fleishman, I found this Sacramento Bee article describing a imminent deal between BART and Wi-Fi rail. (I tried the Wi-Fi Rail service, but wasn’t impressed.)

The article has two points worth noting. First, the initial trial will expand from the four downtown San Francisco stations to the big underground areas:

If a deal is struck, Lee says WiFi Rail will install the system on BART’s most heavily traveled underground routes – in Oakland, San Francisco and the Transbay Tube – within 120 days. Coverage for BART’s entire 103-mile system would follow.

The underground core of the BART system runs from the four downtown SF stations, the Transbay Tube, and the Oakland Wye (roughly West Oakland north to 19th Street and west to Lake Merritt).

The article then quotes Wi-Fi Rail’s corporate counsel as adding 45 minutes to a workday:

“Take a BART rider who gets on at Walnut Creek and spends 45 minutes going to downtown San Francisco” and back, says [Gilles] Attia [Wi-Fi Rail's corporate lawyer]. By plugging in, “he’s added 1 1/2 hours to his work day.”

Mr. Attia works in Sacramento, so he may not have first-hand experience with BART. Assuming that I’ve got the bounds of the expanded Wi-Fi Rail deployment right, it’s not that big. Lake Merritt to Civic Center (on my commute) is 16 minutes. 19th Street/Oakland to Civic Center is 18 minutes. 19th Street/Oakland to Lake Merritt is only 5 minutes.

Since my initial report on the unreliability of Wi-Fi Rail a year ago, I haven’t found that the service in train cars has improved. Service is faster and more robust on the platform, but I still find the service on the train spotty.

January’s IEEE 802.11 working group meeting was held in Taipei. Towards the end of my time in Taipei, I wandered through the grounds of the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. In a small area with a statue of Dr. Sun, there was a neat view of Taipei 101, shrouded in the heavy wet fog around the city at the time.

One of my favorite things to do with my camera is just to go wandering. On my January trip to Hong Kong, I stumbled across the Graham Street Market, which is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) in Hong Kong. Out of everything I saw, there were two scenes that particularly struck me.

The first was at a seafood shop. As typical for the Guangdong region, much of what’s on sale is alive and kept in polystyrene water containers. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the aeration tubes. What really struck me about the photo, though, is the smile on the face of the woman helping a customer.

(As an aside, one of the reasons why I was shooting in black and white is because it doesn’t require me to color balance. Street market vendors use all kinds of lights, each of which has a slightly different color cast. Tungsten lamps are orange, fluorescent lamps have a sickly greenish cast, and the energy-efficient metal halide lamps that light streets the world over spread a yellowish light. Provided there is enough contrast, switching to black-and-white means that I don’t need to deal with the horrid color clash from all the lighting.)

The second scene, which I didn’t capture as well as I would have liked, illustrates the captivity of traffic to pedestrians. Only a small fraction of Hong Kong residents own cars because the government taxes automobiles very heavily and the transit system is possibly the best in the world. The street market is actually a street. As I wandered around, I noticed that trucks were making deliveries, but they sometimes had to move very slowly through single-lane streets that were choked with pedestrian traffic. At one point, I noticed a car moving slowly through the pedestrian crowd. It wasn’t just any car, either. I love the contrast of the immaculately polished white Bentley moving through a crowd of pedestrians.

In January, the IEEE 802.11 working group met in Taipei. The week before, I hosted a meeting for Task Group U in Hong Kong, a city that everybody should visit for its unique blend of traditional Chinese and Western culture.

I’ve been going to Hong Kong for over 15 years, though there was a gap of more than ten years between my first and second visits. In that time, one of the most notable changes is an unfortunate side effect of the rapid economic development in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and the entire Pearl River Delta region. Air pollution has become much more prevalent, to the point where it can often be hard to see across the beautiful harbor.

After the meeting one night, I took one of the Star Ferry’s Harbour Cruises with some of my fellow attendees. As we passed by the Central district, I noticed flashes of light coming from up high on Victoria Peak. At this point, I am so accustomed to the seemingly permanent haze that it took me a while to realize that the flashes were tourist cameras going off on the peak.

As the boat docked, I debated whether to head to the peak at 10 pm, since I was quite tired. My companions provided the needed encouragement, and I’m glad I went. By the time I made it up, many of the buildings had turned off their colorful night lights but it was still the best view I’ve ever had of the harbor:

I later spoke with my colleagues who live in Hong Kong, and they told me that a night so clear almost never happens. I feel very fortunate that I happened to be in the city at the time.

Yesterday morning, I was awakened at 2:08 am by the incoming text message indication sound from my phone. I am traveling in Europe and my local time is +10 hours relative to my home, so it was a perfectly reasonable time to send a message to me in California. As I stumbled across the room, I wondered which of my friends or colleagues I had forgotten to tell about my trip.

The answer was “none of them.” T-Mobile had sent me a text message with the following contents:

Free T-Mobile Msg: Use your T-Mobile HotSpot account at Starbucks for years to come with no additional charges. Learn more at hotspot.t-mobile.com.

As I have often said before, T-Mobile knows where I am. Their roaming database knows that I’m in Europe because I’m attached to the Vodafone Greece network. Therefore, the T-Mobile network is perfectly capable of knowing what time it is where I am. Sending me text messages in the early hours of the morning is just aggressively stupid customer service. At 2 am, I do not care about how long I can use the hotspots at Starbucks, and in fact, coffee is not something I remotely want to consider.

(Early morning disturbances from the phone were the driving force behind the time zone processing feature I developed for my home PBX. Read part 1 and part 2 of the Linux Journal description.)

If anything, this text message is yet another illustration of why I can’t wait to get an OpenMoko phone. The first thing I’ll do is develop a “turn off ringing and text messages within the hours of X pm to Y am” feature, so that I’m not bothered by this ever again.

Earlier this week, we published our technology road map for the Open1X supplicant. They are now available for download in either PDF or Microsoft Word.

In the discussions that the project team held, our biggest goal was to get the supplicant running on as many platforms as we could. The first step is the common desktop operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux). However, there’s a long term trend at work with computers infiltrating everything. When I first started doing wireless LANs, it was something that was nice to have for laptops. In the past several years, we’ve seen 802.11 go from an esoteric data link to the most obvious way to connect a plethora of devices from laptops to game devices (the Xbox and PSP both have 802.11) to phones (I carry a Nokia E61) and PDAs.

Each time a wireless LAN interface gets put into a device, you need the entire protocol stack complete with all the security protocols. Wireless security protocols can be complex, and expertise hasn’t kept up with the wide diversity in available products. Often, a product will have a wireless LAN interface that lags behind the rest of the product in functionality.

One of the best examples of the “wireless feature lag” is our #1 feature request. Everybody who’s interested in our work has asked us to port the supplicant to the iPhone to get better interoperability with wireless LANs. Most university networks require user credentials (WPA-Enterprise) instead of pre-shared keys (WPA-Personal), but the iPhone lacks that feature. Back in October, there was an iPhone SDK announced, with details to follow in February. We’re waiting to see what features the SDK will bring, and hope to start working on an iPhone shortly. (If you’re interested in 802.1X on the iPhone, sign the on-line petition.)

I recently upgraded to an HDTV set, and I am finally displaying the HD recordings on my MythTV system in HD glory. Like most of my tasks with MythTV, though, it wasn’t just a straightforward connection to the HD set and away we go.

MythTV assumes that the display device has 100 dots per inch of resolution, even though TVs do not. The Sony KDS-50A3000 is a 50″ set with a resolution of 1920×1080, or about 44 dots per inch. (Interestingly, this isn’t all that different from the 40-45 dots per inch of the small standard definition TV I had been using with MythTV.)

The nVidia graphics display drivers calculate dots per inch based on the EDID information. In the case of the KDS-50A3000, it calculated a value of 30 dpi. The resulting font was so tiny I could barely read it with my nose pressed up against the screen. The MythTV wiki describes using the DisplaySize directive to get to the magic 100 dpi. Once I put in the appropriate directive and restarted X, the fonts in the Myth front end were nicely readable.

Catching up on my blog reading, I found a post where Richard Florida writes about immigration in the heartland. He relates a story from when he served on a panel in 2003 for the governor of Iowa on the future of the state’s economy, where a conference attendee stated:

I’m the son of Mexican immigrants, both low-skilled. I’m also a recent graduate of Grinnell College[one of the most respected small liberal arts colleges in the country]. Of my graduating class, only five of us have decided to stay in state of Iowa.

I’m a not-so-recent graduate of Grinnell. Many of my peers pursued graduate school, and many left Iowa for the workforce. A large number of graduates stayed in Iowa, where the career office’s connections were strongest. When I graduated, the career office pushed me to stay in Iowa, and didn’t seem to want to help me leave the state. I find it highly improbable that several years later, only five of roughly 300 to 400 graduates would stay in the state, so I wish there was a bit more context given for the number five.