rob.sh

The Right-Sized Tool: Building Software with 100% AI

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:00:00 +0000

An experiment in building a highly specific cycling data analysis tool without writing a single line of code myself.

Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Low FODMAP Biryiani

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:30:00 +0000

A recipe for biriyani, modified for those with dietary restrictions.

v3 Gallery

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 20:47:00 +0000

Updating the gallery on this site has been an on-again off-again project for a long time. Mainly because I was running in to some issues with Expose. This version is built as a project from the ground up: exercising my rusty front-end “skills” and seeing how some of the Gemini tooling can help with such projects.

The new gallery is at p.rob.sh/v3.

NANOG 90: Pondering Abstractions

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 22:12:00 -0500

I had the pleasure of giving the keynote presentation at NANOG90 - sharing some thoughts and lessons that we have learnt in the 10 years since we started the OpenConfig project.

This was a really enjoyable presentation to put together and give. It balanced being able to look back at what we’ve learnt, and also think about some important lessons that I wanted to share with the networking community.

Lessons from Career Coaching

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 11:27:01 +0000

In the autumn of 2022, I got an opportunity to attend an external leadership course. One of the things that it involved was some coaching sessions. I didn’t really think that talking to someone about work was something that I needed (and honestly probably didn’t understand what a coach did…), but engaged with it anyway.

Cue the start of 2023 — Google went through some big changes, and unfortunately, my health took another downturn. At the same time, I was personally struggling with balancing the work that I was doing leading a wider technical team (especially with layoffs impacting their direct management), driving an innovation project (which I was mostly doing out of hours), and keeping myself healthy.

Published IETF RFCs

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Over the years I have published a number of RFCs in the IETF. They are listed below.

As primary author:

RFC7684 - OSPFv2 Prefix/Link Attribute Advertisement
RFC7777 - Advertising Node Administrative Tags in OSPF
RFC7855 - Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Problem Statement and Requirements
RFC8355 - Resiliency Use Cases in Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Networks
RFC8370 - Techniques to Improve the Scalability of RSVP-TE Deployments
RFC8402 - Segment Routing Architecture
RFC8660 - Segment Routing with the MPLS Data Plane
RFC8662 - Entropy Label for Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Tunnels
RFC8665 - OSPF Extensions for Segment Routing

As contributor:

SailGP San Francisco

Sun, 07 May 2023 20:00:00 +0000

SailGP's event on the San Francisco Bay, May 2023

Reimagining Network Devices

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 11:28:50 +0000

Some reflections on the development of Software-Defined Networking, and how it has impacted the ongoing re-imagining of network devices that OpenConfig, and associated projects has driven.

Almost 10 years ago, there was a shift in the IP networking industry. The move towards SDN, and its adoption by hyperscalers as a means to break apart traditional network architectures had set the scene for disruption. The question of “how are we using SDN?” was on the lips of vendor and telco executives — and lead to many initiatives in the industry - both those that can be thought of “SDN” and those that were more incremental.

Big Pine Lakes

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 21:00:00 +0000

We spent a few days in the High Sierra, off the grid, hiking the Big Pine Lakes trails. Highly recommended.

I uploaded a gallery of some photography from that trip, including a few taken as we passed through Yosemite.

The gallery can be found here.

Lake 1: Big Pine Lakes Trail, High Sierra, CA.

NANOG 86: Emulating Network Topologies in k8s

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 16:00:00 -0800

Marcus Hines and I spoke at NANOG86 on some of the work that we’ve been doing related to emulating network topologies in Kubernetes, and how this relates to improving network testability.

The slides can be found here and there is a video on YouTube.

Photo gallery

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 18:41:00 +0000

A while ago, I removed my instagram account. Since then I have been wanting to find a way to share a photography portfolio. I’ve been taking more photos over the last few years, currently using a Canon R5 mirrorless, mainly with the RF 28-70 f/2 lense, but sometimes with the 100-500mm (again, sometimes with the 2x multiplier), 16mm f/1.8 prime, and 50mm f/1.8 prime.

I decided to use the rather excellent Expose to give a scroll-through experience rather than the usual “select a thumbnail”. Thanks to Jack Qiao for open sourcing it!

Brain Fog

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 07:55:00 +0000

I originally posted this as a comment on hackernews in response to a post about this article in The Atlantic. I have briefly shared thoughts in a few contexts about the chronic health conditions that I experience, and wanted to share something here as it was very interesting to me to see brain fog, especially that which has developed post-infectiously, discussed in this forum. I have looked for a community in tech that suffers from chronic health issues, especially outside of my direct company, and not really found one. If you happen to stumble upon this post, and would be interested chatting about it - I’m always open to such discussions.

Radio silence

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 19:45:00 +0000

For more regular updates, you can generally find me on instagram, or Héloïse on instagram.

Héloïse on Mt. Tam at Sunrise - October 2021

Blog Post Index

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 12:47:06 -0700

Michelin Stars for Celiacs: Angler, San Francisco: Not recommended

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:30:00 +0000

As some folks might be aware, I became allergic to gluten and dairy through the spring of 2019, and have been avoiding them in my diet since. Becca and I have not lost our passion for eating great foods, and visiting some of the fantastic restaurants in the cities we visit (although, in 2020, this has meant a lot of places in the Bay Area). One of the things that we’ve struggled a bit with is finding out how well some of the Michelin star establishments handle the gluten-free, dairy-free diet. This weekend, after a visit to Angler - down on the Embarcadero, here in San Francisco - we discussed that it’d be useful if there was more information available for folks that are celiac and interested in fine dining. So this is the first post – I’ll try and add some reviews of previous places we’ve eaten through the next few weeks.

Silence isn't OK: Black Lives Matter

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 21:30:00 +0000

I haven’t ever used this site to post anything about my political beliefs. I’m compelled to right now, because of what is happening in my adopted home country.

In a time where a great leveller has impacted everyone’s life, where circumstances beyond our control have impacted an aspect of everyone’s plans

we couldn’t use this time to unite and have compassion for all humans. The outrage at events in Minneapolis has spread across the US - and rightly so. In doing so, it has brought a major issue in our society to the fore. We shouldn’t need reminding that people should not be treated differently based on the colour of their skin, but it is something that our society has quietly chosen to sweep under the carpet, and ignore. It shouldn’t need to be explicitly stated, but it is essential that we say it out loud, and repeat it: Black Lives Matter.

Why am I posting this? Here are a few of the things that I believe, that I want to explicitly state - as food for thought. I do not claim that these are novel ideas - they’re not. I don’t claim they are ideas that everyone will agree with. I just ask that you spend a little time thinking about them.

OpenConfig Public Projects

Sun, 17 May 2020 22:15:00 -0800

There are a number of public projects that we’ve been working on over the last few years in OpenConfig, and published from Google. It seemed like it might be worth giving a brief “hitchhikers guide” that glues together some of the different projects that we’ve published on GitHub.

Of course, the initial output of OpenConfig, which has motivated much of this ecosystem is the data models — which are publicly available on GitHub.

Moving to Google Cloud Run

Sat, 09 May 2020 23:30:00 -0800

Last night I moved this site from a VM in the UK to a static deployment in Google Cloud Run. It’s a neat service that can take a pre-packaged container and route HTTP and gRPC requests to that container. The concept of having immutable versions of infrastructure deployed, such that it’s clear what the deltas between versions were, and rollback is clearly nothing new, but it’s really nice that it’s quite so easy to deploy things on GCP this way now.

Swing

Sun, 14 Oct 2018 15:00:00 +0000

Inspired by Becca on the swing at Bernal Heights.
October 2018, spray paint on layered card.

Cryptocurrencies

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 22:30:00 +0000

The concept of having no central entity control currency seems attractive to a lot of people. However, trust in some decentralised entity means trusting the way that they operate their business - how they’re able to audit their code, and write bug-free software. The only thing I know about software is that it isn’t ever bug-free. To reduce MTBF, you implement things multiple times, in disjoint environments.

That said, the latest hack on a cryptocurrency/smart wallet I saw, made me wonder about their testing. How many bugs are they looking for, in terms of both their standard operating environment, as well as for security.

IETF98: OpenConfig Observations

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 09:00:00 +0100

Anees Shaikh and I put together some thoughts that we shared with rtgwg at IETF 98 in Chicago. The slides are linked below.

Migration of Site to Hugo!

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 09:13:13 -0800

Welcome to a new rob.sh, apologies for the outage. I needed to migrate the site to something that was lower maintenance.

I’m working on migrating the old rob.sh content to this new site, but it may take a little time to do so. Please let me know if there are specific articles from the old site that you’d like me to prioritise! The site now uses hugo rather than django. This means that I can avoid running a bunch of backend infrastructure.

FutureNet: Model-Driven Automation

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 10:40:00 -0700

Anees Shaikh and I presented at future:net talking about automation work that we’ve been doing in OpenConfig, and I shared some of the NMS implementation I’ve been working on recently. Slides are linked below.

OpenConfig and IETF YANG Models: Can they converge?

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 11:30:00 +0000

At IETF96 in Berlin, the chairs of the NETMOD working group, and Operations Area Director (Benoit Claise) published a statement to say “Models need not, and SHOULD NOT, be structured to include nodes/leaves to indicate applied configuration”. Now, this might seem a pretty innocuous statement, but it actually has a number of implications for the data models for network configuration and state that are being produced in the industry.

What is applied configuration?

The first question to an uninitiated reader might be, what is “applied configuration”? It’s not a term that has been in the common network nomenclature - and hence does need some further explanation. To define it, we need to look at the way that configuration is changed on a network element.

Lecture at Ecole Polytechnique: Taking Network Management into the 21st Century

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Mark Townsley and Jean-Louis Rougier again invited me to come and lecture at École Polytechnique this year. Their course there focuses on analysing the success of network protocols - using the (fantastic) framework laid out in RFC5218. Given that I’d spoken about SR for the last couple of years in my lecture there, and was giving a (slightly) updated version of the SR lecture at Telecom ParisTech for JLR’s ‘Future Internet’ course earlier in the week, I decided to shift the focus of my lecture at X this year to the management plane. Particularly, looking at some of the issues with SNMP, and how these have pushed adoption of alternative management approaches, and what this has fundamentally meant for the way that we build network management today. I then shifted to explaining what we are doing in OpenConfig, and how we might address some of those issues - again, using the framework in 5218.

OpenConfig Interfaces - Some Examples

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 23:23:00 +0000

I’ve talked a little on this site before about what we’re trying to achieve with OpenConfig. However, one of the observations that it’s easy to make is that YANG models alone don’t really achieve anything in terms of making the network more programmable. To make the network more programmable, we need to have tooling that helps us create instances of those modules, manipulate them, and then serialise the into a format that can be used to transmit data that conforms to the model to a device.

The right tool for the job: Choosing where to use RSVP-TE or SR.

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 22:45:00 +0000

I noted that at NANOG64 this week in San Francisco, there are talks (both from Juniper) about both SPRING/Segment Routing and RSVP-TE. These are both protocols/technology approaches (since one can’t really call SR a protocol) that I’ve been involved in the evolution of over the last few years. A question that I’ve been asked more times than I’d like is why we chose to look at a new approach (SR) rather than go with a technology that exists RSVP-TE.

Working with YANG Models - A brief intro to 'pyangbind'

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 21:00:00 +0000

Both the Hawaii IETF meeting (IETF91) and the subsequent meeting we had a few weeks ago in Dallas were somewhat YANG-heavy. Following work to move towards YANG as a standard modelling language for network configuration, and the subsequent IESG statement effectively deprecating SNMP as the way that we present network configuration - the IETF, and especially the routing area, has dived head-first into YANG.

Indeed, I’ve been occupied somewhat with some really great collaborative work with a number of awesome engineers from Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Level3, Yahoo!, Facebook, Cox, Verizon and others on the OpenConfig initiative. We’re trying to take an operator and use-case driven approach to developing YANG modules for both configuration and defining the schema for telemetry. This work has turned up a few times in the press, and I should probably write something separate about it in the near future.

However, one observation that a number of people have made, is that there’s really limited tooling available to work with YANG modules. We have (the rather excellent) pyang, which provides a validation tool for YANG modules and the corresponding JNC plugin that creates Java classes – but after that, options start to run pretty dry for what one might use, other than commercial products such as tail-f NCS. In some cases, the way that these modules work is also a bit esoteric, requiring quite a lot of care around what the YANG types are in the consuming code.

To drive adoption of YANG and NETCONF for making the network more programmable – we need to make it easy to program the network. To this end, I started some work, with the aim of:

March 2013 - December 2014 on TfL

Fri, 26 Dec 2014 11:48:13 +0000

Oyster usage data from TfL for my Oyster card, March 2013 - December 2014. Data visualisation is with D3.js - mouse-over a station to isolate journeys to and from that location. Larger version.

RFC5218, RSVP-TE and Segment Routing.

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:30:00 +0000

After my presentation at UKNOF on SR, Mark Townsley asked me whether I'd be interested in presenting to his class at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, around the thinking (from an ops perspective) of delivering the 5218 concept of "net positive value" through the SR technology, and how the existing protocols that are available might measure up against the criteria that 5218 gives us to consider. We managed to co-ordinate logistics, and I presented to INF566 on Wednesday afternoon, which was a really cool experience. It's always nice to see how networking is taught, and hear from students in such a high-ranking uni. I've included the slides below for posterity - Mark filmed the presentation, so perhaps there'll be video at some point in the future!

SPRING Forward(ing)

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 08:00:00 +0000

I recently gave a talk at UKNOF relating to Segment Routing/SPRING and the operational challenges that we are trying to resolve through it. You can see it on YouTube below - or the slides are on this site - SPRING Forward(ing) - UKNOF27

Almost Two Years On: Where is SDN?

Sat, 10 Aug 2013 06:47:17 +0000

Almost two years ago I wrote a post on this site entitled Some Initial Thoughts on the SDN. Clearly, since then the SDN concept gained some more legs (and entered a new stage of the hype cycle) - so, where are we right now?

Firstly, I think its fair to say that the concept presented by Scott Shenker of having a single centralised computational element controlling COTS OpenFlow-speaking switches has fallen out of favour somewhat (based on the discussions with other network architects, engineers, and implementors that I have had). Somewhat as predicted, there are real challenges with this approach within high-scale, distributed networks:

Speed of Internet Innovation.

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:38:38 +0000

A question that came up at an event I was at yesterday: How will the time between the first (commercial) deployment of a telephony service, and a regulated universal service obligation for telephony compare to that of the time between the first (commercial) Internet services being deployed and a USO for IP connectivity (e.g., Broadband)?

Based on this, is the cycle time of the telephony regulatory bodies, and mechanisms through which changes are implemented within these bodies suitable for Internet services?

Answers on a postcard please.

Reinforcing the Kitchen Sink - Another BGP Presentation

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:48:08 +0000

On Friday, I presented at the Netnod meeting in Stockholm, Sweden - again about BGP error handling - this time presenting a bit of an update as to why this continues to be a problem for the Internet (and private BGP deployments) - and why this work is still really relevant. In addition, I tried to give an overview of what the solution space looks like. I’m not sure whether there’s video, but as usual, the slides are linked below!

Some Initial Thoughts on the Software-Defined Network (SDN).

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:42:35 +0000

At one of the Ericsson R&D days, Professor Scott Shenker - who's an academic at the University of California in Berkeley, presented on a concept that he calls the "software defined network'. Now, if you haven't seen the presentation - it's definitely worth watching (it's on YouTube, here), and provides quite an engaging look at the problem of network scaling from the perspective of academia, and especially in terms of a comparison to the more rigorous disciplines of computer science, like OS design.

Progress with Error Handling for BGP

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 22:08:14 +0000

It's been quite a while since I updated this blog, very lax of me, sorry!

The lack of updates appears more indicative of how busy I appear to have been since presenting the error handling draft work at NANOG (which looks to be the last post!). Since January, I've presented at the IETF in Prague, and then again in Qu�bec City - particularly on a number of aspects of the work that I've been documenting here for some time!

NANOG 51 Presentation

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:00:43 +0000

The video from the presentation I gave a NANOG, LINX and UKNOF has now been posted. You can find the video at the following URL - NANOG 51: BGP Error Handling or by clicking on the image below. The full slide deck is also on this site - here.

BGP Error Handling - Developing an Operator-Led Approach in the IETF

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 05:02:13 +0000

As I presented at UKNOF 18, I have now written an Internet-Draft to address the requirements of Network Operators for how BGP should handle errors in UPDATE messages. The draft can be found on the IETF site, and I'm currently seeking opinions as to whether this reflects the an operational consensus! If you're an Operator (DFZ, MSE or otherwise), it would be great to hear from you!

I'll be presenting the draft at NANOG 51 in Miami on Tuesday - if you're there, feel free to ping me!

LINX71 - 100GE in the Lab

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:32:57 +0000

I spoke at LINX71 about the testing that we (C&W) have been doing in the lab with 100GigE - we got a pre-production card and hence had a look at the technology for real. Thanks to LINX, the presentation video can be seen by clicking on the image below.

Once again, however, whatever LINX use as a presentation laptop didn't render my slides properly - even though I'd submitted PDF too! Hence the slides can be found on this site.

Ghent 6

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:13:31 +0000

I took some photos of the Ghent 6 day on the Grupetto trip out there. The full gallery is here, but some selected highlights are below:

BGP Error Handling and Enhancements Post IETF-79

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:41:46 +0000

With IETF 79 happening last week - I think one of the great things that's coming out of the IDR work leading up to the meeting has been that quite a few drafts have been written around the requirements that exist in BGP for better error handling. I've been vocal about this before, of course, so it's not that surprising that I'm (yet again) banging the drum for this cause, however, we are getting somewhere finally. To that end, I was wanting to air some views on a couple of the drafts that either have benefits to the operational community, or don't quite hit the mark.

Save Herne Hill.

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 21:24:38 +0000

Herne Hill is looking for support, it's both historic, and a fantastic facility in London. It'd be great to see more people supporting this! Here's the campaign page.

UKNOF 16 - Enhancing BGP - Video

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:45:18 +0000

Tom Bird of PortFast and Brandon Butterworth of Bogons do a great job of webcasting, and recording UKNOF video. Thanks to them, the video of the presentation I gave at UKNOF16 can be watched here. Or you can download it by clicking the image below!

As always, thoughts/comments/corrections most welcome!

This is also probably a good time to mention that my new work mail address is rob.shakir (at) cw.com

Cycling Video

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:46:02 +0000

Checking out a few videos that people have linked me to recently I thought that this piece was amazing - really great speed. It also looks like the 5D and 7D are really quite awesome at doing 60fps HD! The video presentation over at vimeo is really cool too!

PUSH PULL from Landis Fields on Vimeo.

Leaving AS5413

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 10:45:23 +0000

For information, and because it means that I have revoked a bunch of UIDs from my GPG Key I am no longer working at AS5413 (Vialtus, Daisy, GX Networks etc.) as of June 18th, 2010. It's been a good two years, but the company direction no longer co-incides with the direction in which I would like to go. I've enjoyed the projects I've worked on, been in contact with a lot of great people, and learnt a lot!

Ride Report: Paris-Roubaix

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:26:14 +0000

"L'Enfer du Nord" ("The Hell of the North"), "The Queen of the Classics", "A Sunday in Hell" - call it what you will, Paris-Roubaix is legendary for being a tough classic race. It stands at 255km in length, with 52.8 km of rough, French pavé (cobblestones) - starting in Compiègne (60km from Paris), and ending in the velodrome in Roubaix. A long, tough day in the saddle with endless dust when it's dry, an epic, iconic mud-bath when the weather turns bad.

Paris-Roubaix Sportive 2010

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:30:05 +0000

I’m planning to write a ride report up for this, but here’s some preliminary photos, and a link to some ride data.

Digital Economy Bill YouTube Questions

Sun, 02 May 2010 12:51:09 +0000

So, if we take a moment to look at the following responses to questions that the leaders of the three parties involved in the “Digital Debate” on YouTube gave, concerning the Digital Economy Bill:

Sure, we get some tired old rhetoric, as expected. However, the key point here is that both Labour and the Conservatives appear to believe that they've done the right thing with this bill. Combine this with the fact that Gordon Brown mentioned a broadband rollout as part of the few ideas that he could during one of the debates, and I think that it starts to become apparently that politicians do not understand the UK "Internet" industry. Where there can be comments as to who is being "looked after" by each party (Cameron even mentions that the bill is most important for the media producers (or 'rights holders")) - I think the problem here is that politicians in the UK fundamentally do not understand how this industry operates. I think increasingly we are going to see the UK fall behind in terms of what we can roll-out due to impractical over-taxation, and ideas such as those put forward in the DEA.

Looking simply at two issues:

Fibre Taxation - in the UK, if a business is to light up a fibre pair, as well as any standard taxes (e.g. VAT) that must be paid, then an additional VoA Business Rate is due on these fibres. This can be up to �500/pair/year outside of London, and �600/pair/year in the London metro region [source: Valuation Office Agency].

Let's look at what this does for the telecommunications industry in the UK, especially for small players. Since such a company probably does not have a DWDM system, then the relatively cheap fibre runs are now taxed quite highly, should such a company then want to start increasing their capacity, then the additional costs are inflated due to taxation. Where larger players might be able to split these rates over a large number of DWDM channels (up to 32 or 64) a smaller provider might only have one channel - and hence the cost of infrastructure or customer links for smaller companies is inflated, due to the fact that they cannot justify the CapEx required for such multiplexing systems. Even for larger players, this isn't encouraging large scale fibre build out. If tax is paid per route-KM for every FTT{H,P,C} deployment, then this adds an additional overhead (in avoidable taxation!) to any such roll-out. Hardly an incentive for a commercial entity to begin such a deployment! Alongside the CapEx, OpEx, and business rates you are required to pay - the UK government will tax you just for lighting up the infrastructure they are encouraging you to build! This alone is not helping with any of the three party's plans for any kind of broadband roll-out, especially to rural areas where there is no profit for commercial entities to roll out such technologies.
Digital Economy Act - Andrew Cormack of JANET (UK) gave an excellent presentation at UKNOF relating to the DEA. There are two key points here:
- The government (and apparently the Tories) believe that this bill being pushed through in "wash-up" was the right thing to do. Contrast this with the fact that they also appear to be stating that the digital economy (and communications that such an economy provides) is key for Britain. I agree it's key, we're a services based economy, and if more services can be provided utilising the Internet, then one of two things will happen. Either the UK will not be equipped to deliver such services globally, and the "Digital Economy" will mean that these can then be out-sourced to other countries - or the UK will be in a position to grow the services that it can deliver, with the considerable skill of the UK workforce, into both global and European markets. Any bill therefore, that affects the manner in which this "Digital Economy" (by which I'm now referring to ISPs and telcos), should therefore, one would have thought, justify reasonable debate by the fully attended (?!) Commons!
- Westminster appears to have no idea as to who they are legislating for. I am not against ensuring that the creative industries are able to protect their rights - however, this needs to be done in a manner that can be policed without damaging another industry. As Andrew said in his presentation the Government is unsure of how many ISPs are in scope - stating it could be 5, 10, 20 or 450. How can the impact of legislation be considered, if the Government cannot identify the scope? In addition, whilst many rights holders, I would imagine, will say "well, there is very little that is being requested of the ISPs here!" - the technical challenges of implementing mechanisms whereby specific IP addresses, and users can be located, within the timeframes that such complaints appear to take to be progressed, should be costed. I believe that most people within the xSP industry are not going to say "We don't care about your rights as a content producer", however, how can the Government expect our industry to pay directly to police this? We don't care that customer X is pulling data A, B and C - really, once it comes down to working in a larger ISP, we care about getting bit X to endpoint Z whilst ensuring any commercial guarantees that we have made for bit X.
Another concern following these points is that it appears that very few of the UK ISP industry are being directly consulted here. Whilst there may be involvement - it's not something that I have seen mention of particularly amongst smaller ISPs in the community. Government should remember that legislation such as this affects all enterprises within this sector, and hence should consider them. The role of incumbents within this country already affects the delivery of many services, we don't need further legislation to push things further into their favour.

The reason I feel the need to mention this, is that it aggravates me whilst seeing responses such as the above. Politicians cannot absolve themselves of blame for such issues being pushed through in what I feel is quite an undemocratic manner. I'm still not sure who I am going to vote for - but as far as I see it, the huge lack of understanding of the industry within which I work will mean that whoever is in power during the next Parliament will likely not be in the right place to make legislation that actually takes into account how this industry works. Because of this, the UK's economy will suffer - which is a great shame.

Tour of Flanders Photo

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:51:39 +0000

After ordering from the official Tour of Flanders Sportive photographers, I got a photo of me on the Bosberg.

Feel the burn!

UKNOF 16: Enhancing BGP

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:12:10 +0000

After a late programme committee request, I presented on “Enhancing BGP” at UKNOF 16. The presentation was intended to be an update on the current drafts in the IDR working group, and give some encouragement to operators to get involved, and contribute.

I’ll put the video up when the Tom at PortFast and Brandon of Bogons have done their excellent job on it. For the meantime, the slides are linked below.

There's also a good add-paths presentation that John Scudder and Dave Ward gave at NANOG here

Error Handling in BGP (Again!)

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:04:33 +0000

It looks like, once again, there's another attribute flying around the global BGP table causing Quagga instances to crash (if based on 0.99.9 - I believe the bug is fixed in 0.99.10). This relates to the 2007 draft that introduced AS_PATHLIMIT - see ietf.org - draft-ietf-idr-as-pathlimit. This attribute is actually relatively interesting, from an operator's point of view, where control that is more granular than setting the common no-export or no-advertise communities does not suffice.

Pictures from the Ronde Van Vlaanderen

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:33:44 +0000

A couple of weekends ago, CS Grupetto rolled out to Flanders for the Ronde van Vlaanderen sportive, and to catch the race live. The sportive was brutal, lots of “power climbs” (although I’m not so sure that I can say I ‘powered’ up most of them - the Muur and Koppenberg and I have unfinished business), in rain, hail, and gusty winds. The pavé brings a new definition to bike control, and in the wet it’s quite an experience.

The point of this post is to link to my photos, that were snapped as the pros showed us how it was done (in the dry!) on Sunday:

CV Update

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:52:19 +0000

I am currently actively interested in new opportunities due to changing circumstances with my current role. I’ve therefore uploaded a current curriculum vitae to this site.

Juniper PSN-2010-01-626 (AS4 Again!)

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 07:55:37 +0000

I’ve had a couple of mails relating to this PSN, which again references the research that Andy Davidson, Jonathan Oddy and I did last year. It seems that some of the sources of the initial mailing list posts we made are gone (particularly the merit.edu one that is referenced from both Juniper’s site and most other places). For that reason, I’ve included both the mails that we sent to NANOG/C-NSP/J-NSP last year here.

Grupetto Start to the Year

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:31:42 +0000

A lovely, albeit slightly chilly, start to 2010 with the Grupetto this morning. About 90km out to Windsor and back to London on one of our normal training routes. Mark also kindly took some photos, a few of which feature me.

Lots more similar rides to come whilst training for Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders.

Happy New Year!

Visualising MPLS-TE Networks

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:54:04 +0000

For all network deployments, there is a requirement to present information relating to both topology, and various utilisation statistics to some human operator. In many cases, this process has become so ingrained in network requirements that there are almost ubiquitous solutions to the visualising data - for example, link utilisation is almost always presented via some framework or tool powered by RRDTool. Other tools, such as network "weathermap" diagrams linking this utilisation information into an overview of a network topology are also seen in many NOCs. In most cases, the problem of visualising data relating to a flat MPLS or IP network is solved for most common deployments.

Network Updates and Opportunities

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 12:06:52 +0000

A quick personal post to break the silence here!

I’m currently very interested in hearing about any UK or EU-based network engineering or architecture opportunities that are out there, especially in SP networks that run MPLS with TE. If anyone has some such opportunity, or knows of something that they think might suit me – please drop me a mail to rjs@rob.sh for a copy of my CV.

An outline of my CV is available on LinkedIn.

I’m hoping to find some time to put some technical articles together that can be posted here in the near future.

LINX 65 Presentation

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:01:49 +0000

Further to my previous post - I presented this issue at LINX65 - video and slides can be found below.

Video
Fixed Slides - LINX’s PowerPoint install seems to have corrupted my slides on the day.

Comments and feedback are most welcome.

32-bit AS numbers introduce a new BGP flaw.

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:23:59 +0000

Last Friday, Andy Davidson, Jonathan Oddy, and I pushed out some research that has some quite worrying repercussions. Whilst I’ve heard from a lot of people privately about this matter, there’s a big flaw here, and as Andy posted on his blog (which is much more informative than mine, I think!), this is a big problem.

The reason, I think, that we’re getting limited public discussion of this exploit (I hesitate to call it an exploit, it’s a flaw really, because it’s actually a result of the RFC that the problem exists), is because the implementations of 4-byte AS support that are out there already are generally not standards compliant. Let’s run down the list:

More Di2 Stuff

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 21:45:18 +0000

Following getting my roadbike back out for the first time in a while (been really busy since moving to Ealing!) I figured I’d look at if there’s anything more about Di2 floating around. It seems the more I see of this system, the more I want it. Perhaps Orca with Di2 is something for 2009?

I've also started tracking my rides (mostly fixed, mostly to and from work at the moment) on this site, if there's any interest, I was pondering publishing the code/a webapp to upload other people's rides. I find that MotionBased is really tedious! Comments/emails welcome on this subject.

Removing BGP from a VRF under 12.2(33)SRC2

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:04:59 +0000

I had a bit of a weird problem last night – when trying to remove BGP from a VRF on a 7600 running 12.2(33)SRC2, I tried:


ar01.tn5(config)#router bgp 65302
ar01.tn5(config-router)#no address-family ipv4 vrf SRC2-TEST
ar01.tn5(config-router)#exit
ar01.tn5(config)#exit

One would expect that this would stop BGP redistributing the VRF routes for the VRF SRC2-TEST. In fact, what happens is that the VRF starts reporting ‘debugging-style’ messages:


ar01.tn5#sh run vrf SRC2-TEST
Building configuration...

% Topology SRC2-TEST::VPNv4 Unicast::base is currently being deconfigured.
% Topology SRC2-TEST::VPNv4 Unicast::base is currently being deconfigured.
% Topology SRC2-TEST::VPNv4 Unicast::base is currently being deconfigured.
% BGP context has not been initialized properly.
% Topology SRC2-TEST::VPNv4 Unicast::base is currently being deconfigured.
% BGP context not been initialized properly.
% Topology SRC2-TEST::VPNv4 Unicast::base is currently being deconfigured.
% Topology SRC2-TEST::VPNv4 Unicast::base is currently being deconfigured.
Current configuration : 340 bytes
ip vrf SRC2-TEST
 description :c=CORE:x=rjs test for ar01.tn5 issues:
 rd 5413:1020
 export map EXPORT-MAP-SRC2-TEST
 route-target export 5413:1020
 route-target import 5413:1022
!
!
ip route vrf SRC2-TEST 10.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 Null0
!
router bgp 65302
 !
 address-family ipv4 vrf SRC2-TEST
  redistribute static
 exit-address-family
end

And you then can’t get rid of the BGP from the VRF. It turns out the fix for this is to remove the VRF itself – or, rather than removing the address-family itself, remove the contents of the address family. I’m not entirely sure that this is designed behaviour – and I couldn’t seem to find any further results for it. I guess it needs to be put into TAC as another Cisco weird.

Building the RIPEDB server

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:03:52 +0000

It took me a few hours over the course of this week to build the RIPE whois server for some internal projects – given that there seems to be a very limited amount of documentation for the build process, and threads on mailing lists, I’m going to post this here. I hope that it gets picked up by Google.

The first problem that is encountered is that the libtool that is included with the whois server does not support ‘modern’ tags, such as –tag=CC. This looks to be because the included libtool is somewhat dated. This can be easily fixed by using the system libtool:

Site Updates

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:26:45 +0000

Not that I am expecting a large number of people to have anything to say about what I post on this site - but I just added a comments system using the Django FreeComment system. The contrib comments module seems to have a load of features - and did just about everything I was hoping of it! There’s an excellent tutorial on the Django wiki.

Feel free to tell me I’m posting rubbish at any time :-)

IPv6 - It Doesn't Just Work.

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 06:13:15 +0000

I was reading an entry posted by Brett Carr on Nominet’s techblog today entitled “ipv6 It just works”. Unfortunately, for IPv6, and for the sentiment behind this message (IPv6 can be run pretty easily!), in my experience, IPv6 - it doesn’t just work!

It’s easy to dismiss the previous sentence, given that many networks aren’t designed to run IPv6, and there’s kit out there that’s just not IPv6-capable yet. When building the AS29636 network, we specified that IPv6-capability was one of the things that would be a requirement of the kit that was going into the new network, not just something that we’d like to have. We work to a similar specification at my current employer, - which ensures that we can deploy IPv6 within a pre-agreed timeframe once we have some commercial drive for it (either from customers, or for business continuity reasons). I think that this is the best way for a SP network to be a the moment - there’s no revenue in having IPv6 deployed (generally), but there might be lost revenue when a customer comes to your network with IPv6 as a requirement in their RFQ…

Returning to the reason that I started writing this post - the problems for IPv6 deployment don’t just come from the fact that your hardware doesn’t necessarily support it, and it isn’t just that running IPv6 on your kit might have financial implications for the software licensing that you’re going to be deploying (the arbitrary Cisco requirement for advipservices for IPv6 is a completely separate post). There are going to be issues where you don’t necessarily expect them - which can be hard to debug, where IPv6 “should just work”, it doesn’t.

Without mentioning any specifics of a case that was brought to my attention in the last couple of weeks - a customer was having problems getting IPv6 traffic flowing across a layer 2 ethernet circuit. The expectation of this circuit that you can put ethernet frames onto it (and it doesn’t really matter what the ethertype is, just that they’re valid ethernet frames) - and they are going to be punted down the link, to whatever you terminate the L2 circuit on. With IPv4, this not working would be a disastrous failure - the product just wouldn’t be working. However, this particular circuit was not passing frames that contained IPv6 packets. As it turns out, the carrier’s equipment in the path contained a firmware bug that was causing the frames containing IPv6-packets to be dropped - and hence, no neighbour-discovery, and no traffic flow between the two ends of the circuit.

This is just one isolated case - but the question is, where else in your network do you have a problem like this one? How much kit that may, right now, be considered something that shouldn’t be interfering anywhere above L2, is going to exhibit this type of problem? How much load is this going to cause your NOC? How much time liasing with circuit suppliers, and telcos is going to be spent actually deploying IPv6 on your network? I think these questions are starting to form a basis of why SPs should be startng to roll out IPv6 onto your network now. The lack of transition plan from IPv4 to IPv6, and the fact that IPv6 hasn’t had widespread deployment testing across many platforms and transmission media mean that deploying IPv6 in a rush across your network isn’t necessarily going to be as easy as you’ve thought.

Whilst I applaud the fact that Nominet are ensuring that they’re going to be ready to run the UK ccTLD with IPv6 nameservers, and that their infrastructure is ready - I don’t think that IPv6 is going to be quite as easy to deploy as Brett found in his blog post.

Why I'm excited about Di2.

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:03:12 +0000

There’s a bunch of stuff online about the Shimano Dura-Ace Di2. And there’s a lot of comment online, people saying that they feel electronic-shift is unnecessary, and over-complicated.

I’m mostly interested in why I might want to ride Di2, and I think there’s a bunch of reasons that I would want to, despite all the negative comments that are flying around! So, the big thing that I see as an advantage in the system is the fact that it adjusts on a per-shift basis, this is really handy for those of us that really just want to ride our bikes! Sure, I don’t mind cleaning, and tuning my bike, but there’s some periods when I just want to be riding it, it’s what I love, it’s why I own the bike - so to me, if I get auto-adjustment that means that every shift that I’m doing is accurate, between the times that I either tune my bike up myself, or get it looked over then this sounds great! Cable-stretch is pretty annoying sometimes, and does mean that I end up having some rides where my gears might feel a bit squidgy, or over-tight. This is a problem that could be solved by tuning my bike more often, of course, but really - I just want to ride.

Someone commenting on WIRED has some different thoughts to me - feeling that the battery, and motors are prone to failure - of course they are, everything is. Gear cables snap now already, and derailleurs get worn, and bent. However, I guess with cable systems, I can bend my derailleur back and adjust the tension myself to ride home - the question here is, will Di2 be this flexible? I can get over it if not, because, how often does this really happen (only once, for me)? The battery life of the system shouldn’t be difficult to get right - it should last for a while, and I don’t mind carrying a spare battery, I carry spare tubes already.

There are limitations, sure - however, there are limitations of everything. But, I quite fancy it. �1600 for a groupset isn’t what I’m going to be spending just yet - but once we’re down a bit to more suitable price, then I’d really like to give it a go. Maybe on a ‘09 Orbea Orca - the shape is just bang on:

Rollapaluza Best

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:00:21 +0000

As mentioned previously, my new Rollapaluza best time. Not really posted for that reason, but mainly due to test out the new IXUS 960IS I have been given!

1st Shoreditch Invitational Bike Polo

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:50:34 +0000

A week or so ago, I spent a very enjoyable day watching some great bike polo - again with my camera. Enjoy the photos!.

I also managed to knock my Rollapaluza quick-rollers PB down to 22.16s :-D

Rollapaluza XI

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:33:51 +0000

More cycling event photos - a bunch of images from the Rollapaluza XI race last night at the Kingpin Suite in Bloomsbury. Lycra skinsuits meets cycling campaigns meets drunken cyclists. Beer, rollers and endorphins - what more do you need? (Click the image for the full gallery).

Grass Track Racing

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 23:19:23 +0000

A couple of Sundays ago I went up to watch the grass track racing in Hackey, arranged by Hackney CC - finally got a moment to upload the photos! Full gallery is here, selected others below!

Handy vim tip

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:48:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a number of bits of code recently, and have found that it’s not entirely practical to check into RCS or SVN for every change that I’ve made. I really like to work by committing when I’ve finished adding a feature to a script, or a project. Hence, I’ve been using the vim “set backup” option. However, this has some limitations, and hence I decided to have a look at what .vimrc could do for me.

Big crash.

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:26:36 +0000

Don’t swerve when people pass too close. There are many parked cars.

I sustained broken teeth and ripped muscles.

I now have this:

Other Cyclists.

Tue, 27 May 2008 17:22:24 +0000

Please make sure you understand hand signals. And don’t try and half wheel other people, it causes crashes!

Snapped chain. Bent chainring. Bent crank spider. Bruises. Damn.

IRO Mark V

Sat, 17 May 2008 14:49:34 +0000

Figured I hadn’t posted a new picture of my bike for a while!

Rollapaluza

Thu, 15 May 2008 17:19:45 +0000

I went to go and do some roller racing earlier this week, at a pub called the Horseshoe in Clerkenwell. The Rollapaluza guys were being filmed, and running a free-for-all race. First time on the rollers, I managed 23.48s, which turned out (once a couple of people had disappeared) to be good enough to get me to the quarter finals. clefty from LondonFGSS took a few photos, so I figured I’d post them here:

Bread Recipes

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:34:29 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with home-baked bread of late, and have been trying some recipes that haven’t worked out so well. So, now I’ve found a good recipe, I figured I’d put it somewhere that I can find it.

Simple Wholemeal Loaf

500g wholemeal bread flour
7g sachet dried yeast
1.5 tsp salt
175 ml tepid milk
175 ml tepid water

Mix together the flour, yeast and salt, and add the milk and water. Mix to form a soft dough, adding a little more water if it seems too dry.
Lightly flour a surface, and turn the dough out onto it. Knead for ~10 minutes until the dough is smooth, and elastic.
Grease a loaf tin (well!), and pop the dough into it. Cover with a tea-towel, or greased clingfilm, and leave aside for 1-1.5hrs to rise.
Brush with milk, and dust with flour, then bake in an oven at 220 degrees C, for ~15 minutes until pale golden. Leave to cool.

I found that it worked out pretty well, and wasn't too heavy!

A Sad Day

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:06:27 +0000

At lunchtime today I was told via IRC/e-mail that Chris Orme, of Datahop passed away after a flight back from a peering conference in Florida. I’ve worked with Chris in the past, and despite having some differences of opinion, found him to be a great guy to work with. We had a disagreement about some contractual matters, and Chris was man enough to apologise to me in person at the LONAP 10th Birthday event. I was happy that we’d resolved our differences, and we exchanged contact details again. I was looking forward to working with him in the future.

This blog post doesn’t really have much relevance to anyone else, other than to say that my thoughts are with Chris’ family, and his girlfriend, Nat. I’m hoping that someone can suggest a cause that Chris cared about, so that donations can be made in his memory.

Rest in peace, Chris.

ic.ac.uk fetchmailrc Settings

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:08:52 +0000

Imperial College are currently implementing changes so that you need to access either POP3 or IMAP with SSL enabled, I figured since they didn’t list Fetchmail in their new site, then I’d post my configuration (.fetchmailrc) here in case anyone else uses it:


poll icex.imperial.ac.uk 
    proto pop3 
    user "USERNAME" 
    password "PASSWORD" 
    is "LOCALADDRESS" here 
    ssl 
    sslfingerprint "7D:E8:74:1F:E8:B1:E6:15:A6:0C:02:2B:BA:89:BE:4D"

Enjoy.

Commuting Bike Stolen

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:19:25 +0000

My Pinnacle Mean Streak 2.0 was stolen today from outside my flat (Pigott Street, E14). It’s a black, rigid mountain bike. The wheels are 26", WTB rims, Shimano hubs. The groupset is Deore, and it’s got mechanical disc brakes.

I locked it to a lamp post with a steel D-lock whilst I went upstairs, since my bike was greasy, and needed cleaning. It was nicked in the hour between 19:30 and 20:30.

The frame number is 1K26102739. If anyone sees it around, I’d really appreciate it if you could let me know via e-mail.

A Social Experiment

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:23:19 +0000

Let’s see how many people read the rubbish I post here.

I have 40cm less hair.

Update:

Django

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:11:42 +0000

Since I’ve got a few moments, and I’ve decided to actually write down some rants rather than deciding that I can’t be bothered to - I’m going to use some space to single the praises of Django.

I’ve been using Django for a couple of years now - since around the autumn of 2005, and as such, feel that I’ve got a pretty good grasp of how the framework works. I haven’t really hacked around that much with the innards of Django (although I did propose a patch), however, what I really like about this framework isn’t particularly the internals, but just the whole philosophy that there seems to be in terms of building a web application.

crontab hacks

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:52:55 +0000

30 23 28-31 * * [ "`date +%m`" != "`date +%m --date=tomorrow`" ] && /Users/rjs/bin/monthEnd.py 2>&1 >/dev/null

Pretty handy for running on the last day of the month - and should work on Linux.

RFID Presentation

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:33:30 +0000

For anyone interested, the slides for my RFID presentation are here.

RFID Basics!

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:28:50 +0000

So, at the moment, I’m writing a presentation about the operation and the security implications of RFID. During the course of the random searches around the internet, I’ve found that there’s a lot of really, really cool work going with respect to RFID. Even more great than the output on the subject is who is studying it. Lots of really cool observations are coming out of the open source friendly community - some of the best presentations on the subject are from presentations at CCC. Along with projects like OpenPCD, this output is pretty cool!

However, that’s not really the point of this post. During the course of reading around, I’ve found that whilst there’s a lot of information around - there’s also a lot of FUD that surrounds that information. My presentation is trying to give people (with some physics background) a simple idea of what RFID is, and particularly how it works. Given that I’ve already done a quick summary of how RFID works, I figured I’d blog about it, so that I can add to the mush of material that you just can’t reference online.

I’ll discuss a high frequency system - since cards such as MIFARE (which e.g. Oyster uses) work at around 13.56MHz. The RFID system consists of two elements - the reader, and the tag. Tags come in a number shapes - active, passive, and semi-passive. Really, it’s the passive tags that I’m interested in. The image below shows the anatomy of a (simple) passive tag. It’s composed of an antenna - running around the card, an IC, and a substrate that they’re both attached to.

This was a fun ride.

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:33:56 +0000

View Larger Map

Asterisk on OS X

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 13:19:14 +0000

Last time I tried to run Asterisk on OS X it was on Panther (10.3), and it really failed to work. It seems since I last looked, things have come a long way. When rearranging how my personal VoIP was configured, I was looking for a simple SIP proxy - however, the only one I could find immediately was Java based, and lacking on a few features that I wanted. Hence, I decided to check out if there were any better Asterisk packages available. I found the packages over at mezzo.net, and wow. Not only does their Asterisk build work properly (Voicemail, IAX2, and SIP-wise at least), it comes with some really nice modules. For example, the res_bonjour module announces your Asterisk server out over your local LAN as a Bonjour service - definitely useful if you’re trying to work out whether there’s a facility for VoIP outgoing calls for something like calling out straight from Address Book. However, the best thing here is app_notify.

iPhone SDK

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:37:15 +0000

I finally got myself an iPhone - and am loving it. It’s great how I can now sync my calendars, and address book to my phone without having to worry at all about having six clones of each event on my calendar (which of course, makes it rather difficult to tell what I’m actually meant to be doing that day). However, a topic that has come up a couple of times in discussion with a few friends is that of the iPhone SDK. I feel that the big question here is, “Do Apple have enough incentive to make a fully featured iPhone SDK?”.

With a friend moving to work at a VoIP start-up that deals with having a client on mobiles that allows SIP calls to be made, the big discussion we have been having is whether the iPhone SDK will allow a VoIP client to be implemented on it. My initial feeling on this is, no - not initially. It’s been documented in a number of places that Apple are taking call revenue from the networks on each iPhone that is sold. If this is true, then it would be against Apple’s interest to actually allow a functional SIP implementation make it onto non-hacked iPhones - since they’re going to lose money if users start making their calls via SIP rather than via the cell networks (this assumes that Apple get revenue based on all calls - not just based on the actual contract worth).

However, I can’t say that I’m sure of this - Apple may only be taking their cut from the revenue that is generated from the subscription fee on each iPhone - rather than the additional calls, and in this case, they might feel that allowing users to utilise VoIP when they’re in a hotspot area would be another cool feature that the iPhone can offer. They might also feel that a lot of the iPhone users aren’t savvy enough to be using SIP very often - I guess something like Skype from hotspots (or iChat for voice, or Google Talk…) might be more popular with the less tech-savvy userbase. It’s hard to call really.

Alternatively, Apple might just wait until the networks stop paying them revenue, and roll the SDK with better network support then, increasing sales on a device that they’re no longer making such revenue on.

Either way, the iPhone really just slots in where a phone should, it works with wireless and a mobile-data mechanism without having to think about it at all (although I’d like an 802.1X implementation). Calendar data syncs, Mail accounts sync, my Music syncs, my contacts sync - it integrates with my (primarily Apple based) digital life very well.

I’m impressed with my iPhone - roll on the SDK so that I can start making it do even funkier things!

Linking against GSL With Xcode

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:21:02 +0000

Further to the previous comment, you can also link against GSL from within an Xcode project:

Create an Xcode "C++ Tool" project from the command line projects options.
Within the project Ctrl+Click on the project name, and select "Get Info"
Use the Spotlight-esque search at the top of this window to search for Compiler, and select the "Other C++ Flags" text box.

Into the box enter

-I/opt/local/include -L/opt/local/lib -lgsl

leave the

$(OTHER_CFLAGS)

existing input there.

Linking against GSL on OS X 10.5 Leopard

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:22:43 +0000

Since I’m taking the Computational Physics module in my third year at IC, we’re using some libraries like GSL to provide “better-than-default” random number generators and such like. It turns out that those of us using a Mac don’t get GSL installed by default with Xcode, or under OS X - and unlike Windows and Linux - there’s no instructions on the course site. Here’s a really quick way to ensure that you can link against it:

New Look

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 01:17:07 +0000

As it turns out - it’s pretty easy to code up a very basic blog application and integrate it with your existing flat-file site in Django. In fact, it fits very nicely into the 20 minute gap that you’re taking to try and make sure that you can sleep!

There’s also some semblance of a design here now.