Freelance Propaganda

Back from Boston

Dashed over to Boston for the meeting of the Wireless Grids Research Group. It’s a long drive just for a night but Ian and I had plenty to chat about and I didn’t fall asleep and kill us both (yay!).

David Clark gave the keynote speech in the morning and talked about the future of the End-to-End principle. He described something he is calling “The Knowledge Plane” in which the policy logic is separate from the network logic. I’m not 100% convinced that I understood the entire proposal but one interesting bit was the suggestion that we need a high-level way to specify networks that we’d like. One suggestion was that a network designer could specific that the network would route along the chain of military command, then software would design such a network. In this sense the Internet we have today is only one possible design—-the key would be being able to describe and negotiate policies at points of interconnection. Food for thought.

The other speaker of note was Jock Gill who gave a speech on the potential value of Open Spectrum to the US and world economies. He was hassling our “Issues Map” stating that the open spectrum balloon is too small and is a much more central issue in the vision that we are trying to express. I didn’t think it appropriate to point the fingers at the profs in the room who advised me to change the large balloon from “Open Spectrum” to “Spectrum Management” at our first meeting. the other interesting thing about Jock Gill’s speech is that it was actually a written speech, by a working political speechwriter. His intention was to lend to Open Spectrum the political credibility it needs to push to the next level.

Much of the discussion after that revolved around the need to have a ‘spectrum playground’ and Lee mentioned that he had been close to getting agreement from three southern states to open up sizeable portions of their land to a spectrum playground. But then came September 11. There is talk of Tonga or Jamaica coming to the party. Jamaica is, of course, closer to the action. Bob Frankston had plenty to say on this and seemed very buzzed to get going on just doing software radio.

I presented the application demo ideas that our group at SU had suggested—-the distributed recording of gigs one went down the best. In fact one of the Profs mentioned the he knows the Dead and that we should approach them for testing and publicity. Sounds like a project right up Doug and Dave’s alley.

I then returned to Syracuse and knocked myself out smoothing out and finishing Lee, Bill Lehr and my submission to Computer Networks journal. Sure the latex style files make it look nice but my eyes where so blurry after working on it for 12 hours (after the drive back from Boston and precious little sleep) that I’m far from sure about typos and logicos. Oh well I’m sure that we’ll be hearing from the reviewers before long.

Now it is on to the Game Theory exam. Which I had to email the Prof for another copy of since I lost mine. Damn embarrassing that.