DatCat Workshop in San Diego [18 Mar 2007|04:59pm] [ music | The Shins - Wincing the Night Away ] Monday through Wednesday I attended the first "DatCat Community Contribution Workshop" (or DCC1). DatCat, or the Internet Measurement Data Catalog, is an online resource for networking researchers. People can search for data to poke around in, or they can contribute their own data for others to use. The idea is that DatCat will enhance networking research because it enables reproducible research and the sharing of well-documented data. DatCat is a CAIDA project, i.e. the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis. I am sort of in charge of making our network traces available to others, so I was invited to come to DCC1. Not only was I invited, they paid for my travel and lodging! (Or, at least, they promised to reimburse me.) Anyway, the workshop went OK. I managed to submit a small portion of our data to the catalog. In doing so, I discovered that the timestamps in these data are weird, due to a known bug in the software we used to capture the traces. So, I wrote a well-documented script to fix up the metadata descriptions. I gave it to the people at CAIDA in case they can use it, so hopefully that will be useful to them. I would really like to work for CAIDA this summer. For me, while the workshop was good and I definitely endorse the idea of the DatCat, my favorite part of the workshop was getting to know the people at the workshop. There were some really great people, both those who work for CAIDA and those who do not. post comment

Extraworkshop Activities [18 Mar 2007|05:16pm] As I mentioned earlier, my favorite part of the workshop in San Diego was meeting everybody there and getting to hang out with them. Monday and Tuesday nights both started off with CAIDA paying for a dinner. Monday we went to BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse. It was delicious, and the beer was pretty tasty too. People began to walk back to the hotel, leaving a core group of 4 of us there (Teemu, Wolfgang, Rob, and me). We decided the night shouldn't be over, so we called a cab. Teemu and Wolfgang had scouted the area out on Sunday, so they decided we should go to downtown La Jolla, to the Bull & Bear. (Our hotel was in La Jolla near the UCSD campus.) We sat outside on the street. I loved the fresh air. We were very near to the sea, but all I could smell was a fresh floral (hibiscus?) scent, even though the only flora in sight were palm trees. We eventually caught a cab back to the hotel, where we quickly decided the night still wasn't over (it was only midnight or so). We went to a gas station, bought a few Heinekens, and went to Teemu & Wolfgang's room. Wolfgang drunk-dialed (or attempted to dial) several conference attendees, managing to wake up Daniel, from Italy, who was surprisingly patient. Tuesday evening we went to the Rock Bottom Brewery for a catered meal and some delicious beer. We had the run of the upstairs, including the billiards table. Then, like Monday, several of us (the original 4, plus my roommate Alessio and Keith) went back to the Bull & Bear. We kept trying to convince Wolfgang, a serious ice-climber, to climb the palm tree near us. He wouldn't do it unless I did it first, so I climbed maybe 8 feet before giving up. (It was too big!) Wolfgang tried it too, to our cheers, but didn't get much higher. We got done and noticed our forearms were totally scratched up. We met a girl, Alisha, walking her dog down the street, and invited her to sit with us. Her dog, a poodle named Peach, was fairly old, and he would sometimes get cranky and bite her. We talked about dogs for a while. It's fair to say she and I hit it off, though the guys exaggerated it greatly. They decided to call a cab and sneak off, leaving me behind with Alisha. We left the bar and walked a bit. We met a really interesting homeless guy named Andy. He was surprisingly smart and intelligent, and we talked with him for at least half an hour. I really wanted to see the ocean, since I hadn't seen it yet that trip, so we walked down there and walked along the ocean-front sidewalk for a while. We talked a lot about life, love, happiness, dogs, and philosophy, and really had quite a good conversation. But, it was getting late--and chilly--so I called a cab and left. The guys teased me endlessly about hooking up and whatnot, but nothing happened, not even a kiss. Just wanted to set that straight. ;-) Monday evening we joked about creating a "beer" dataset to submit to DatCat. Tuesday, we exchanged a few emails, perpetuating the joke, quietly snickering as we read the latest email. People eventually learned about our joke, and it became a real dataset. One of the guys in charge even approved it! Check it out! (From left: me, Rob, Wolfgang, and Teemu.) Ah, good times! 2 comments|post comment

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