The Social Network of Wind Energy
2023-03-13
Wind is a key component of our present and future energy supply. Different stories about the technology are told for different reasons.
This draft essay is the basis of a lecture I was scheduled to deliver as part of the MSc in Consumer Psychology at NUIG on March 13th. My own position is, of course, pro-wind.
The Social Experience of the Internet
2023-02-20
In 2023, the internet is shaped by the companies that dominate it, the stories that they tell. Let's tell new stories, to create a better internet built for people.
This is a draft edit of a part of a couple of lectures I put together about the social experience of the internet. It's a complicated thing and not all the fault of corporations. State spying, misinformation and propaganda play their part. Politics also, and crime, of course. At the bottom, maybe self-interest, inequality and greed are behind all of these. As with other problems facing humanity, cf. climate and energy.
History of Computing
2022-09-29
A slightly hit-and-miss collection of links.
There are many super books on this topic. Andrew S. Tanenbaum lists a few - which I haven't read - in his book, Structured Computer Organization, in Section 1.2, Milestones in Computer Architecture.
Pre-1900s
- Build Your Own Astrolabe. St. John's College, Cambridge. Informative page built for the Cambridge Science Festival in 2010.
- Programming patterns: the story of the Jacquard loom. A nice overview from the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester.
- Who was Charles Babbage?. The Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minesota.
- Ada Lovelace, the First Tech Visionary. The New Yorker.
Early Twentieth Century Computing
- Alan Turing. St. Andrew's University. This is a good if dry account of his life. If you search for Alan Turing, you'll find others.
- I.- Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing. You can find his Imitation Game here.
- The Legend of John von Neumann. P.R. Halmos. The American Mathematical Monthly.
- The von Neumann architecture was described by John von Neumann in a draft report he co-authored called, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. You can find a copy of the report thanks to MIT here, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.
- Celebrating Penn Engineering History: ENIAC. The University of Pennsylvania.
NASA and Computing
Minicomputers
- DEC's Blockbuster: The PDP-8 from 1965. The Computer History Museum. This was a general purpose computer.
Unix, C and Unix-like Systems
- Homepages of Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, the original Unix and C developers.
- Berkeley Software Distribution at Wikipedia.
- The GNU Project. Main website of The GNU Projext.
- Linus Torvalds. Personal homepage.
- kernel.org. The Linux kernel's official website.
- The Linux Foundation. The foundation supports the work of Linus Torvalds and lead Linux maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman.
Universities and Research Institutes
(Selected.)
USA, West Coast
- Stanford University in Stanford, California. Close by Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino and Menlo Park, about 60 km south of San Francisco.
- California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. About 17 km from Los Angeles city centre.
- Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley. In Oakland, about 23 km to the East of San Francisco.
USA, East Coast
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about 4 km from downtown Boston.
- Harvard University, Cambridge, about 7 km from downtown Boston.
- Carnegie Mellon University, 5 km from the centre of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
UK
- University of Cambridge, Cambridge, about 90 km north of London.
- University of Oxford, Oxford, about 90 km west of London.
Chip Manufacturers
USA
- Intel, based in Santa Clara, California. Close by Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino and Menlo Park, about 60 km south of San Francisco.
- AMD, also based in Santa Clara, California.
- NVIDIA, famous for GPUs, also based in Santa Clara, California.
- Apple, Cupertino, close by Santa Clara, California.
Elsewhere
- ARM, Cambridge, close to the university, about 90 km north of London.
- TMSC, manufacturer of, among others, Apple's chips. Taiwan. Based in Hsinchu, about 73 km south-west of Taipei on the Taiwan Strait.
Personal Computing
Altair
- Altair 8800. Computer History Museum.
Atari
- Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell. How I Built This with Guy Raz. 2018.
- The Inside Story of Pong and the Early Days of Atari. Leslie Berlin, Wired. 2017.
- Atari’s Roller-Coaster Ride. The Computer History Museum.
IBM
- The birth of the IBM PC. IBM.
Microsoft
- The Road Ahead after 25 years. Bill Gates. This book, written in 1995 is worth reading through to get a sense of where Microsoft's thinking was in the 1990s and something about its history.
- Windows 95 ad.
- Windows 1.0 to 10: The changing face of Microsoft's landmark OS. ZDNet.
Apple
- Apple Macintosh Personal Computer, at the Smithsonian.
- The Founding of Apple Computers, Inc.
- Apple's famous 1984 advertisement for the Macintosh.
- This video of Jobs' retreat with his NeXT Team is a good one. The interested person will have no trouble finding material about Steve Jobs.
- Steve Wozniak Was My Computer Teacher in 1995. This is a nice article.
Sinclair
- The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread. Designed and built in Britain, in 1981 the ZX81 introduced many to home computing.
Commodore
- The Smithsonian has a summary of the Commodore 64. The Commodore 64 was built by Commodore Business Machines in Pennsylvania from 1982 until 1993. It had an ecosystem of some 10,000 programs and was relatively affordable, about $1,500 in today's money.
Dell
- How I Built This with Guy Raz. Dell Computers: Michael Dell. 2018. This is a nice interview.
The Internet
- ArpaNet. DARPA.
- The birth of the Web. CERN.
- Tim Berners-Lee on the Web at 25: the past, present and future, Wired, 23 August 2014.
- The History of Wikipedia. First edit in 2001.
- Google, Our Story. Google.
Getting Started with Netflow
2022-07-21
Some notes about getting started with Cisco Netflow.
Netflow
Overview
NetFlow is a feature that was introduced on Cisco routers in the mid-1990s.
Routers and switches that are Netflow enabled can collect IP traffic statistics about interfaces. This Netflow data is forwarded as soon as its generated to a Netflow collector, usually a server running analysis code.
Version 5 is supported across the Cisco router range. In addition, Version 5 uses bandwidth the most efficiently of all Netflow versions.
Flows
A flow is a sequence of similar network packets all going in the same direction. Packets in a flow are similar in that the values for seven important packet descriptors are the same. The seven descriptors make up a tuple - a list of the seven descriptors - that identifies the flow.
The seven descriptors are: (i) the ingress interface, i.e. the SNMP ifIndex, (ii) the source IP address, (iii) the destination IP address, (iv) the IP protocol, (v) the source port for UDP or TCP, or 0
for other protocols, (vi) the destination port for UDP or TCP. Type and code for ICMP and 0
for other protocols, (vii) the IP Type of Service. This is the second byte of the IPV4 header.
IBM has detail on the Version 5 data formats.
Packet Tracer
Cisco's free Packet Tracer software allows you to create a simulated network and to experiment with configuring infrastructure devices (routers, switches etc.) for Netflow logging. You can learn how to set up a Netflow generator that will export Netflow to a collector. This is super.
There are limitations:
- The built-in collector software does not seem to allow access to the raw Netflow data.
- It does not seem possible to export data from Packet Tracer.
- The Python version running within Packet Tracer is missing libraries and runs only a subset of Python code.
- You must register for Cisco's training programme to download the software.
Still, Packet Tracer allows you to understand how to set up a network and to get a Netflow collection system working.
Netflow Generator
- Paessler has an old but working spoof Netflow 5 generator. Install this and start sending Netflow to a collector.
Netflow Collector
- There is a nice Python Netflow 5 collector code at codestacking.blogspot.com. The first program on this page works well. For testing, you can create a UDP socket at 127.0.0.1 and port 9001, for example.
Datasets
Netflow datasets for testing:
- NetFlow Datasets for Machine Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems. This is a very nice paper that makes use of large open Netflow datasets. The .pdf is here.
- Machine Learning-Based NIDS (Network Intrusion Detection Systems) Datasets. The NetFlow V1 Datasets are a good starting point, in particular NF-UNSW-NB15; this NetFlow-based format of the UNSW-NB15 dataset is labelled with its respective attack categories. You can download the NF-UNSW-NB15 dataset here.
References
- Wikipedia Netflow Article.
- Cisco's Netflow website.
- Cisco's note about routers.
- Godfred Fairhurst's note about how routers work.
- SolarWinds note about Netflow Version 5.
- Netflow Version 5 data format from IBM.
- Cisco Packet Tracer.
- Paessler spoof Netflow 5 generator.
- Netflow version 5 collector in Python.
- NetFlow Datasets for Machine Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems.
- Machine Learning-Based NIDS (Network Intrusion Detection Systems) Datasets. The UNSW-NB15 dataset is labelled with attack categories.
App Deployment
2022-06-01
Some draft notes for multi-tenant app development and deployment using PostgreSQL, Node.js and Express or Apache.
Be sure to check the latest version of the appropriate documentation if things go wrong - these notes were made using some now out-of-date versions of software.
Dispatch Down is a Problem for Ireland
2021-02-20
Notes about dispatch down in Ireland. Dispatch down means removing a power generator from the grid for good reasons.
Starting in Small Wind
2012-07
Some recommended reading. Updated 2022. Since this note was originally put together, the small wind industry suffered a major reversal and many companies no longer exist.
Begin with Paul Gipe's Wind Works. Paul Gipe, a respected wind worker, journalist and writer, has several good published titles. If you are looking for an introduction to small wind, his Wind Energy Basics will be a sound first investment. (Wind Works has been down for a while now, unfortunately. As of November 2022, Paul Gipe is in the process of rebuilding it.)