Scribblings
This is a collection of things I've written; theses, overheads for
talks, articles, papers and the like. Most are in pdf format, so
you might need to download Acrobat Reader to read them. (They run
from most recent to least recent.) I also have a more formal
looking publications list, which is usually
more up-to-date.
2015
- The slides from a presentation
at ICC 2015 about
the operation of the PLC priority resolution mechanism in
practice. It turns out you can do some pretty strange things
to the tone map mechanism!
- Asad and Zakia's cool idea for using
index coding in datacenters.
- The University made a video
of me talking about the summer time clock changes, and George
Hook also asked me a few questions about it.
2014
- Some slides from a short presentation
to the IEEE Study Group on Security, Reliability, and
Performance for Software Defined and Virtualized Ecosystems.
- Karl and I did some calculations on
power usage in Bitcoin.
- A more detailed paper
considering how to capture could interact with the MAC in 802.11.
- The slides from the recent results
session at ISPLC 2014.
These relate to some interesting results we saw when modeling the
PLC MAC, which also seem to have some practical side effects.
- A paper
by Cristina and myself simulating the performance of the
priority resolution mechanism in PLC. Presented at ISPLC 2014.
- Slides for a seminar that I gave in
NUIG about guessing passwords.
2013
- Brad and I had a look at the question, "Does putting a femtocell
in your house increase or decrease your RF exposure." Our
attempt to answer the question is in
this paper.
- I'm curious to know what happens if I link to an
encrypted word document
and an
unencrypted word document
from here.
- The FLAVIA project has just
wrapped up. The Wireless MAC processor which was developed as
part of the project is quite cool.
- Cristina, Boris, Jaume and I've written a
short
paper on applying some of the learning MAC protocol
ideas to beaconing in sensor networks. Cristina presented
this as a poster at WoWMoM
2013.
- Hessan has built a cool demo of the WiFi policing system,
which he presented at WoWMoM 2013.
There is also a
short
writeup of the system.
- A fun paper with Niall and Darren
about what you can learn by snooping on the backhaul of a
femto in a very unobtrusive way. I presented this at the
Traffic
Monitoring and Analysis Workshop at
INFOCOM
2013. The slides have some
extra plots included that we couldn't fit in the paper.
- A paper
on the cost to quality of doing a reinvite to change codec during
a call, and how you might manage that cost. Work with Haytham,
Mohamed, Brendan, Pat and Jonathan.
- A paper
with Haytham, Jonathan and Pat on predicting measures of VoIP
quality.
- A talk
at the HEAnet conference about Industry/Academic interactions.
2012
- Slides from a talk at Dunsink about
time keeping.
- A paper
with Wunan about how collision-free MAC schemes might perform
when there were some errors in the slot counting part of the
MAC. Slides are also available.
- This paper
with Josh is about trying to identify hash functions based on their
collisions. The Slides are also
available.
- A paper
with Minyu, Doug and Ken about how to apply the learning
ideas from our channel allocation algorithm to slot allocation.
The ideas follow on from some papers by Boris, Jaume and Cristina
about L-BEB.
- This paper
considers what might happen in WiFi if you tried to cause the capture
effect to reduce collisions. This was work with Paul and Hanghang,
presented at WoWMoM.
- Some observations of the leap
second in 2012.
- A paper
that describes a way to do rate control for 802.11, which tries
to do the right thing when faced with congestion and/or bad
channels.
- A paper
at the WWW 2012
conference about how passwords are distributed. Slides are also available.
- A paper with Peter, Doug and
Ramana about how to allocate channels in a WiFi network,
when the networks can't talk to each other.
- A paper
about how the scheduled part of the powerline MAC might
behave with voice. This was presented at the
ISPLC 2012
conference. Slides are
also available.
2011
- A paper
on dynamically adjusting the buffer size in 802.11. Should be of
interest to people concerned about buffer bloat.
- A group of us worked on a
paper
paper on fairness in WiFi meshes.
- My slides from a talk at
Ignite NUI Maynooth.
- My slides from a talk at
Dublin Ignite 8
where I tried to measure the speed of light. The
video
is also available.
- A short paper
on games and competing traffic at the
NetGames 2011
conference with Hanghang and Dmitri. There's also a
poster.
- A submission submission to the 2011
Copyright Review Committee.
- A paper
with Ian and Doug about how to keep cheating stations in line
in 802.11.
- A paper
with Kaidi and Ken about how the 6Mbps rate in 11g actually seems
to be less robust than 11Mbps.
- A paper
about doing some tests with a powerline communications testbed
paper with Brad.
2010
- Slides from a talk to the
UCD Mathsoc
about maths and wireless networking.
- Slides from a
Dunsink Observatory
open night talk, about time (as usual!).
- My slides from a talk at
MACOM 2010
about some of the assumptions made when modeling 802.11 networks.
Based on a
paper
with Ken and Kaidi which is to appear in Transactions on
Networking.
- My slides from a talk at the conference on
Computational
Intelligence and Games about detecting cheaters in online
gaming. This is work with Dmitri and Laetitia and the
paper
is also available.
- My slides from a talk at
Google about TCP tweaking and
tuning. There's also a bit about the other research going on at
the Hamilton Institute.
- A paper
with Kaidi and Ken about the assumptions used in a lot of
802.11 models. To appear in Transactions on Networking.
- My slides from a talk at
Dublin Ignite 4
about seeing the wood for the trees.
The video
is also available on YouTube.
- A paper
with Hanghang and Dmitri about Quake 4 traffic in a WiFi
network.
- A paper
about using LDPC codes with variable power allocation, with
Vijay and Hanghang.
- Some You Tube videos about using Dummynet on FreeBSD.
2009
2008
- Morning Ireland
asked me to
explain
why the New Year was to be delayed.
- A paper written with Josh Tobin, from
EC2ND comparing different ways to look up IPv6 flows. The
slides are available too.
- Another talk at
Dunsink Observatory
Open Night about time.
- Some instructions
for using the IPv6 address analysis scripts that I used for
producing this paper.
- A paper
about which of the assumption often used in wireless modeling
actually hold.
- Slides from a talk about TCP and
wireless at UCD's Wireless Future workshop.
- I gave two talks at HEAnet's
IPv6
and IP addressing management Workshop. One on firewalling IPv6 and one on
IPv6 deployment in TCD.
Note that videos of the talks are available from the workshop
page.
- A paper at the
RIA Colloquium on Emerging
Trends in Wireless Communications about measuring channel
quality. The poster is also
available.
- A paper
with Tianji, Doug and Ramana about flow fairness in wireless
mesh networks.
- A paper showing some of the things
you can learn by looking at IPv6 addresses. Please let me
know if you're interested in trying out the code. The paper
will be presented at PAM
2008. The slides are
available.
- A paper
about where TCP timeouts actually seem to come from in WiFi networks.
This will be presented at WinMee
2008. The slides are also available.
- A paper
with Ramana and Doug about how to get certain types of
fairness in multihop 802.11 networks with TCP. To appear
in Comms Letters.
- Not written by me, but by Ian Dangerfield, who did a
thesis
on Wireless Network Measurement with me.
- A paper
with more details on how to aggregate frames for high physical
rate wireless LANs. To appear in Transactions on Networking.
2007
- Slides from one of the
SAGE-IE lightening talks on the crazy traceroute (ICMP
quotations) project. A paper
and poster have some
more details.
- Another talk at
Dunsink Observatory
Open Night about time.
- A paper
with Domenico, Doug and Dina about how well some of the 802.11
error measures we'd been considering work in practice.
- A
paper
for Mathematical Methods of Operations Research
with Ken about
what happens when you make the packets you are queueing
distinguishable.
- A
letter to the editor of
;login:
based on things that came to mind after reading the August 2007
editorial.
- Slides to my SAGE-IE talk
on my limited experience interviewing sysadmins. Unfortunately
the projector didn't work out, so these slides are new even
to people who attended the talk.
- Unfortunately, I didn't manage
to find a reference to "hoodie" in time for the
BBC
wordhunt program. However I did manage to find
this cartoon (drawn by
Emma Haugh)
from a school magazine later. I
sent it in and it
used
by the OED. (From the
acknowledgments
it seems someone else beat me to poll dance.)
- My effort to contribute to the
the
BBC
wordhunt using Google
Groups to search Usenet. I've done something similar
for references to early Irish
web pages.
- A paper from
WiNMee about experimentally
assessing how voice capacity of 802.11 networks can be improved
by choosing the right buffering and TXOP.
Slides are also available.
- A paper on checking out if the
assumptions used to model 802.11 seem to match up with
the real world. This was presented at
PAM 2007.
The slides are also
available.
- A study of ICMP quotations
by Matthew Luckie
and myself. From
PAM 2007.
The poster is
also available.
- More work on the location of 6to4
relays routers with Mónica Domingues and Carlos
Friaças.
- A time talk for the nice people at
the UNLIKELY
SOCIETY.
- A letter to the Irish Times
pointing out some front page news is actually a combination
of old news and advertising.
- Slides from a quick intro to IPv6
for Stefan
Weber 2BA5 CS class.
2006
- Some slides about difference equations
from a Irish Maths Olympiad training session in NUIM.
- Slides from an applied maths seminar in
UCC. The slides are based on
a set by Ken Duffy.
- A paper
on estimating the Hurst parameter for long range processes,
to appear in Physica A. Also a note
on a similar topic in Computer Communications Review.
- A paper on how
one might estimate the packet error rate in 802.11 from the MAC
layer.
- A talk at the
ILUG
AGM
about Network Research I'm involved in and Linux.
- A talk at
Dunsink Observatory
Open Night about time.
- Probably the final
update
on the AAAA lookup problem given at
RIPE
53
(presented by Dave Wilson on my behalf). The slides mention
this document.
- An answer sent to the
New Scientist's
Last Word page in response to a question about ancestors.
- A paper on an interesting relationship
between buffering and throughput in 802.11 networks.
- A paper
about how to combine aggregation and fragmentation in high
speed WLANs, presented by
Tainji at
WoWMoM 2006.
- Will people never learn how many week
days are adjacent to the weekend!
- Three papers on wireless. The first
about measuring the delay performance of voice was presented
at WiNMee and the
slides are available.
The second is about extending
some of the one-hop wireless models to multi-hop networks.
It was presented at RAWNET.
The third is about extending
nonsaturated 802.11 modeling to 802.11e. This was presented
at WiOpt, the
slides are available.
- An article about how our web server
was flooded, that links in with some of the NTP abuse
stories. This article originally appeared in USENIX ;login:
April 2006, Volume 31, Number 2.
- Slides from a talk about FreeBSD
security features that I gave at the
UKUUG spring conference.
- Slides for a talk given by Niall
and me at SAGE-IE about
DNS. There were lots of interesting comments during the talk,
some of which are listed at the end of the slides (starting
on slide 33).
- Slides for my talk about Time in
the Modern World as part of the
Light & Time lecture
series at the National
Museum. (In the questions after this talk I was asked
did we have Double Daylight Savings. I said that I thought
that we did, but I may have been mistaken as at least one
book said that Britain did but Ireland didn't. I'll check
further.)
- Slides from a seminar at the
Computer Lab
in Cambridge about measurement experiments with WLAN.
- Notes on the leap second
introduced at the end of 2005 (there are also some other
time related notes).
2005
- Slides and the
paper from EC2ND conference about
using the IPv6 flow label for firewalling, written by Orla
McGann and me.
- A paper
with Doug, Peter and Anthony on using 802.11e to improve TCP
performance.
- Slides for a talk about TCP tuning
and research to
Amazon in Dublin.
- Slides for a talk about wireless to
DUCSS.
- Slides for a fill in talk about
congestion control at the HEAnet
conference. (Generated from Powerpoint, so they're a bit big.)
- Slides
and
handouts
for a tutorial at the HEAnet
Conference by
Niall Murphy and Dave Wilson. We'd prepared the tutorial with the
intention of the three of us giving it, but I had to give the talk
above.
- Text and slides
on the relationship between guesswork and entropy from the
IT&T conference.
- An article
in
;login:
about
FreeBSD security features.
- Slides from my talk at the
HEAnet workshop on IPv6.
- Slides from our presentation at
the SIGCOMM
E-WIND
workshop. Our
paper
is available too.
- I gave a talk at the DNS
OARC workshop about acting as a secondary to the root zone.
Slides are available.
- Slides from a
paper
at Wirelesscom'05
about increasing the number of voice calls that can be supported
at a wireless access point.
- Not written by me, but Orla
McGann, who did a
Master's
thesis on IPv6 packet filtering with me.
- Another update
on the AAAA lookup problem given at
RIPE
50
(presented by Dave Wilson on my behalf).
- A question about rhubarb sent to the
New Scientist's
Last Word page.
- An article
in Cisco's
Internet Protocol Journal
about the AAAA lookup problem. (Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2005).
- A preprint of a paper about how to
model nonsaturated traffic in 802.11 networks. A revised version
of the paper is to appear in IEEE Communications Letters (Vol. 9, No. 8, August 2005).
- A preprint of a paper about modeling
competing stations in 802.11 for the Resource Allocation
in Wireless Networks conference in Trento, April 2005.
- Niall Murphy and I have written a
book about IPv6
Deployment/Network Administration published by
O'Reilly. There's
also a blog to go
with the book.
2004
- I helped with the simulation code and results for this
DIAS
technical report with Ken, Eugene, Yuri and Nikita.
- A lunchtime talk to the
HMI about time.
- A quick introduction to DNS.
- Slides from a short talk about the
use of wavelets to detect long range dependence in network
traffic.
- Slides
giving an update on the AAAA lookup problem at RIPE 49.
- A preprint
of a paper about studying the solutions of dilation equations
by looking at one end of them. This is to appear in the
International Journal of Wavelets, Multiresolution and
Information Processing (Vol. 3, No. 1, March 2005).
- Slides from a short talk about layering
and encapsulation in networks, in order to explain what
port scanning is.
- Slides
for a talk to the RIPE
DNS working group about the extent of the problem with AAAA
(IPv6) DNS lookups.
- My submission to the Commission on Electronic Voting
regarding the secrecy and accuracy of the electronic voting
system proposed for use in Ireland's local and European
elections. Some of the other submissions have been collected
by the ICTE.
- Slides from a talk about NTP to
SAGE-IE.
2003
- Slides
from a short talk at the HEAnet
networking conference on the basics of the IPv6 protocol.
- A technical
report on what happens if you tell your name server to
act as a slave for the root zone, rather than using the
traditional hints method. An
updated
version of this was presented at the Internet Measurement
Conference 2004.
- Slides from a talk at RIPE 46 about IPv6
deployment.
- The slides from a short talk to the
IAHPC about IPv6.
- Slides for a talk on forensics given at
SAGE-IE.
- A talk about IPv6 deployment in TCD
given as a Doolin Technologies
tech talk.
- I wrote a section on randomness for the
FreeBSD random device
man
page, in order to point out that randomness means
different things to different people.
2002
- An updated version of my Geometry Tidbits
talk, from the 2002 IMSA meeting.
- My slides from a talk on 802.11 (wireless) to
SAGE-IE.
- I gave a revamped version of my time talk
for National Science Week.
- A talk on the links between maths
and computers for the TCD Maths and Physics open day.
- Some correspondence with the Economist
about a poster of theirs.
- A report on 802.11b networking in
Dublin written with Niall Murphy and Ken Duffy. We also
have a map showing the
locations of the locations of the networks we found.
Originally this report lived
on Engima's server.
- The paper Ian and I wrote for
the Usenix ATC, about filesystem optimisations in FreeBSD.
The overheads
for the talk are available. I also gave a variation of the
talk at the ILUG AGM,
the overheads are also
available. (The overheads ended up upside-down for reasons
I don't quite understand - if anyone knows now to flip
Postscript or PDF files, please let me know...) The extra
material relating to the paper is available from my CNRI
page.
- A paper
by Wayne Sullivan and me about the links (or lack thereof)
between Guessing and Entropy. The mathematical results of
this paper appear in IEEE Transactions on Information
Theory (Vol. 50, No. 3, March 2004).
2001
- Overheads from a talk at the 2001
DIAS Winter Symposium about the link between entropy and
guess work. I also gave updated versions of this talk
in NUI Galway and
DCU.
- Overheads from my presentation at
BSDconEurope 2001 about recent enhancements to UFS.
- An answer to one of the `Last Word'
questions in the New Scientist.
- Overheads from a talk about time-keeping
given to the TCD Astronomy, Maths and Physics societies.
2000
- Overheads from a talk given at the
Irish Maths' Students conference in Maynooth and again to
the TCD Mathsoc. The talk was about Simple Mathematics
and Computer Graphics, so be warned that the overheads
are quite big 'cos they contain various examples of computer
graphics.
- My Ph.D. thesis which was about solving
dilation equations.
- Overheads from a talk, Self Affine
Tiles and Dilation Equations, at the DIAS Easter Symposium.
- Overheads from a talk about the
Open Source thing, given to secondary school students at
the Maths and Physics open day in TCD.
1999
- Overheads from a short talk given at
the DIAS Christmas Symposium on 2- and 3-Refineable
Functions.
- A draft of a paper published in the
Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications (Volume 8,
Issue 3, 2002) on Solutions of Dilation Equations and
Fourier-like Transforms.
- The courseware from when I taught part of
the 561 course (Computer Architecture for Scientific HPC).
- A short report describing an OpenMath to
LaTeX converter which I wrote for Richard Timoney as part of the
OpenMath ESPRIT project.
- A paper published in the Irish
Mathematical Society Bulletin (Number 42) describing An
Unusual Construction of the Fourier Transform.
1998
- Overheads from a talk to the TCD Mathsoc about
randomness.
- An article for the Irish Times advocating
free unix.
- An article for the TCD computer
newsletter about various versions of free unix.
- A proposal and some
notes for a two day Unix Admin
tutorial which I gave.
- Overheads for a talk given at Charleville Library
as part of Science week in 1998. It was supposed to be about the dark
side of the Internet, but I ended up talking to a load of primary
school children who were supposed to be doing their homework.
1997
- My M.Sc. thesis entitled Fourier Analysis,
Multiresolution Analysis and Dilation Equations.
- Overheads for a introduction to wavelets given
as a society talk at NUI Maynooth.
- Overheads for a talk on the history of the
Internet, given to secondary school students as part of the Maths and
Physics open day in TCD.
- Overheads for a talk on constructing the Fourier
transform at the 1997 DIAS Easter symposium.
- Overheads for a talk I gave at the Mathematics
Intervarsitys describing Fourier analysis and wavelet analysis.
1996
- Some notes on networking in Java that
was part of a 1 day summer course run by Tim Murphy. I believe
networking in Java has changed a little since.
1995
- The report describing a ray-tracer I wrote as part
of a final year course.
1992