Infrastructure. Information systems.
Going through my filing archives I came across this paper
In 1987 HPLabs in Bristol, where I was a MTS, was cisco Systems’ first international customer. The connection to Palo Alto was via a 64 Kbps satellite link, a single hop from Goonhilly in Cornwall, UK to Vallejo in California.
Comments and discussion is at the Internet Old Farts Club group on Facebook.
Science fiction and fantasy blog post notes
At a recent talk, I mentioned reading science fiction for entertainment, as well as for perspective on how the future might come out; and I was asked for a reading list. This isn’t a list of books; that’s on my todo list. Meantime, here’s a list of significant authors, and some other recommendations and relevant references.
NASA has a ‘foresighting’ panel which includes science fiction authors. Report : https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/nasa-futures-public-report-may-2023-anonymous-tagged.pdf
Science Fiction author list
Charles Stross blogs at https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/
John Scalzi blogs at https://whatever.scalzi.com/
Kim Stanley Robinson on ‘Ministry for the Future’ https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/24497348-ministry-still-riding-the-heat-wave
Jo Walton
Alistair Reynolds
Richard Morgan
Iain Banks (aka Iain M Banks)
Vernor Vinge
Neal Stephenson
William Gibson
Ann Leckie
Ursula Le Guin
Fantasy author list
Terry Pratchett
Neil Gaiman
Marc Andreesen posted his SF author list in 2007, before Andreessen Horowitz was founded. Some of the authors listed above were new to me then.
References
Tim Bray on William Gibson on AR goggles in 1993 https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/02/02/Vision-1993
Charlie Stross https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2098599-six-science-fiction-novels-you-should-be-reading
https://www.pwc.com.au/digitalpulse/science-fiction-explore-business-innovation.html
It’s just over a year since we moved to the New Town in Edinburgh. Time to collect some of the images from the year.
Reflecting the Georgian buildings in a large puddle next to the railings for Queen Street Gardens. 29 October 2023
North Edinburgh has many good walking paths, many of them converted from the railway network which used to connect Granton and Leith with the city. This is the Great Junction Street bridge over the Water of Leith. 9 November 2023
This is the new terminus for the tram service, which now runs from the airport to Newhaven. We often walk by one or other of the railway paths to Newhaven harbour, then along to the tram stop to return to town. 27 June 2023
Newhaven harbour, taken from the lighthouse. A few pleasure craft and small fishing boats moored; it’s also where the tenders from the big cruise ships come in. 13 April 2023
The Port of Leith takes much bigger ships. This is the Apache II, a pipe laying vessel. 7 January 2023
If you follow me on Blipfoto you will have seen these images before. It’s the most benign social media place, supported by membership fees, with no advertising. It’s possible to build a community of friends who are mutually interesting and supportive.
Quoting Henrik Karlsson “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”
Somewhat more specifically, we are looking for ways to work on distributed systems. Could be systems design, software development, or technical market opportunity analysis. Or something we haven’t found yet.
A decentralized social media service is one angle of approach; the Activity Pub protocol might benefit from some rethinking of the server implementation with the goal of enabling large scale. There’s a discussion of Takahē , which has different goals, and mentions of other server implementations here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33731739 This focus on Activity Pub is of course prompted by the dramatic changes at Twitter under its new master, and the consequent increase in users and server implementations of Mastodon.
Bruce Davie discusses what is meant by decentralization in this context “Mastodon and other applications in the fediverse are organizationally distributed. Each instance of a Mastodon server is run by a person or group who gets to make their own decisions both about how to run the service technically and on the policies that will apply to the instance.”
Quoting Kiernan Christ writing for Lawfare “Policymakers should be aware of the Fediverse, even though it currently has a much smaller user base than any mainstream social media company. Regulations developed to deal with the negative consequences of Big Tech may be ineffective or incompatible with decentralized services.”
Lawfare blog https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-earth-fediverse 9 May 22
Bruce Davie https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/01/mastodon_activitypub/
Guide to Mastodon https://github.com/joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon
Henrik Karlsson https://escapingflatland.substack.com
More about Mastodon https://tidbits.com/2023/01/27/mastodon-a-new-hope-for-social-networking/
On Mastodon
We moved again at the end of October 2022 much closer to the city centre. Daily notes have been going into Blipfoto.
Gathering some of those views
https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3045975706145130731
December 2022 From Corstorphine Hill, West of the city
https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3044159536643443636
November 2022 Looking towards Fife at Granton
https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3000306967081127692
November 2022 The Water of Leith, at the Shore in Leith
https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3042711671236722909
July 2022 Shows three major bridges over the Forth Estuary; the railway bridge, the first road bridge, and the replacement, called the Queensferry Crossing (the one with three visible towers and the white cable)
Cunning Systems 