The Last Day of TIP 2013

 

 

The first picture was just put there so the blog entry won't show another food picture for it's index entry.

The IPv6 workshop finished this afternoon and I went in search of a light lunch. There was a food truck parked across the street from the East-West Center called Made Fresh, and they had a wonderful collection of asian food. This is the chow mein with tofu with picture for Bobskoot. Still tasted basicaly like teriyaki but that may be difficult to get away from around here.

Today was the last day of TIP 2013 and, possibly, the last Joint Tech meeting for a while. The Joint Tech's were a technical meeting of network engineers from Internet², ESCC, regional networks, connectors and members. Most of those attending are network engineers or operators committed to provide high performance connectivity to education and research groups mostly, but not limited to, the U.S. Whenever the meeting is held in Hawai‘i, it is combined with the APAN meeting which adds in the Asia-Pacific national, regional and campus high performance network providers.

This afternoon, moto-vlogger (motocycle video blogger) @808yewtube, gave me a brief tour of the Hawai‘i outside of Waikīkī partly because the real flavor of Hawai‘i wasn't being reflected in my pictures/posts if I just stayed in Waikīkī. The color of the ocean was a beautiful dark blue and the weather was beautiful.

This is from what Google Maps labels as the Waimanalo Beach Park Lookout though the beach shown in this picture is Makapu'u Beach Park along the Kalanianaole Highway about 10 miles east of the Waikīkī area. Google Map fail.

The pictures don't do the area justice. The water was somewhere between green and blue and the ocean was very calm. Thank you @808yewtube for taking time out of your busy day to share some of your beautiful state. Far better than just hanging around Waikīkī or the University of Hawai‘i.

I liked the way the moon shown even with the bright sun. This is a lava outcropping at the lookout.

I catch the shuttle to the airport at 7:30pm for a red-eye to Anchorage and a morning flight back home to Fairbanks where it's -27°F today...

This evenings dinner was a seaweed salad (never had this version before) and the sashimi plate. Both delicious and in a little hole-in-the-wall place on a side street. There were some challenges as the menu, the specials board and signs were in Japanese. But fortunately, there were pictures in the menu for those who don't read Japanese.

I must admit that the sashimi was even better than Osaka's (and half the price!).

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TIP - IPv6 Workshop

All of today was spent participating in an IPv6 workshop. The other participants have a wide range of experience and exposure to IPv6 and from a range of institutions. The focus of the class is different from when I had last taught the workshop and is not campus centric as opposed to connector or regional network centric. Also, the workshop used to be more "hands on" which required shipping hundereds of pounds of gear around in travelling racks. Very expensive and somewhat problematic as we usually ended up repairing something when setting up.

Last night, I went out to dinner with my former supervisor and his significant other at the Himalayan Kitchen, a Nepalise and Indian restaurant. I had a very generous serving of lamb vindaloo with jasmine rice and garlic naan bread. No food picture unless I take a picture of the leftovers in the hotel fridge. They now live uphill from the University of Hawaii campus and picked me up at my hotel. They mentioned that this was the first time in a long time that they've ventured into the Waikiki tourist area. It was much quieter and relaxed once you get out of town.

This evening, a network engineer from Iowa and I went in search of dinner within walking distance, which meant that we would be in Waikīkī somewhere. He wanted to avoid a chain or anything else he would be able to find in Iowa. Along the main drag, everything was either a chain or somewhere which would have stretched anyones budget past the breaking point. A couple of blocks away from the main street, we found a non-chain Hawaiian steak house called Vit's Hawaiian Steak and their daily special was ono steak with shrimp. Tasted like teriyaki but it was fine. As with most meals, too much food was served and I ended up leaving some on the plate. Peter is also a rider and used to race sports bikes so there was a lot of good conversation.

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TIP - Day 4

It was a nice, sunny afternoon and since there were no evening activities associated with the TIP meeting, I walked back to the hotel from the university campus. It felt really warm so it was nice coming to what Google labeled as the Ala Wai Small Canal running just inland of the Waikiki tourist area. There was a nice breeze blowing and after miles of walking along side crowded streets, it was a pleasant change. Today was the end of the formal presentations for the Internet² section of the meeting.
Tomorrow, I will be participating in an IPv6 workshop presented by Nysernet. I had taught the old format workshops for I² many times and wanted to see what the new material was as well as the major changes they made to the hands on labs. Maybe I'll be able to teach this new workshop in the future. This will be a short post and it was really great to see everyone again. I picked up some completely new material and have a lot of new things to try when I return. They announced what the future technical meetings would look like and it will be a significant change from the existing format. I will reserve judgement on whether it is a good idea to change things....

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TIP - Day 3

This morning keynote was given by Ian Foster, the "father or grid computing" and by extension, the current hot topic, cloud computing. Many people may be familiar with Moore's Law which has been acurately describing the growth of computing power since the mid-60's but there are some other similar graphs describing the expansion of data in some other fields such as high energy physics, genomic research and astonomy that dwarf Moore's Law.

Much of the afternoon was spent in the IPv6 working group which in this case was a joint meeting with APAN and Internet². APAN had presentations from China, Japan and Malasia. This is a snapshot of the meeting room we were assigned for the meeting. After the mid-afternoon break, there was one presentation buy DREN which outlined his challenges in setting up an IPv6 only management network. This is an upcoming federal procurement requirement and he just wanted to see what worked and what didn't. Very enlightening.

This evening, there was a reception sponsored by Brocade. It was a good opportunity to meet some new people as well as continue some conversations that were begun earlier in the day. This event was held at the Moana Surfrider which is a much fancier hotel across the street from the Sheraton. And it was right on the beach. The food was pretty standard hotel hors d'oeuvre and not bad but nothing really stood out as spectacular.

I was planning on taking some photos of the sunset but the sun went down so quickly, I kind of missed it. This was a shot through the bushes separating the reception area from the beach. The sun must drop straight down as it was dark within minutes after this picture was taken.

The mountain peak in the background is Diamond Head giving a slightly different view. After the reception were two more meetings which lasted until almost 11:00pm. It was a long day.

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TIP - Day 2

Today was the "official" start of TIP (Techs in Paradise) and the ESnet welcoming statement included some interesting information on some upcoming projects and their data needs. Up until now, most of the focus has been on the data requirements of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Switzerland and trans Atlantic connectivity. There is a project in Australia and South Africa called the Square Kilometer Array that is projected to generate 700 gigabytes/sec of raw data which could be processed down to 0.1 terabits/sec of data to be stored and distributed. Kind of hard for me to comprehend that volume of data. There were other projects mentioned that would also generate LHC-like volumes of data but this one sort of stood out as over the top.

In the middle of the talk, I was reminded (by my phone) that I was missing an audioconference. I had forgotten about the additional one hour time change from AKST but the calendar app didn't. The Japanese garden outside of the East-West Center seemed like a great place for an audioconference and the building blocked out most of the road noise. I'm not at all sure of what kind of tree this is but it is unlike anything we have back home. I couldn't get any closer as it was just across the creek shown in the first picture.

This stand of golden bamboo also helped block out ambient noise though it must have been home to a pile of birds from all of the chirping coming from within. Today was a great day to meet new people from all over the world as well as renewing friendship with some that I've known for years. At one of the breaks, a CS faculty member from a university in northern Malaysia came by and talked about their challenges and successes.

At the end of the day, there was a reception catered by the culinary arts students from the Kapiolani Community College. The school is on the flanks of Diamond Head and there was a wonderful view of the ocean from the balcony. It had been raining most of the day starting at about 11 and here the sun is just breaking through the clouds around sunset. It was an absolutely beautiful campus at a great location.

I'm told that this is Diamond Head but I'm not really convinced. On the GoogleMap image below, we are located right about top/center of the image and I think we are we are looking towards the rim of the crater. I didn't know that Diamond Head was part of a crater either. But maybe the name refers to the whole crater rim rather than just the peak visible from the beach area. The food at the reception was okay, not bad just not spectacular. The menu did include some stereotypical Hawaiian fare such as roast pork and a lot of asian food including three kinds of sushi.

I arrived back at the hotel at the late hour of 8:00pm ready to crash. I must be getting old. There were many still trying to adjust from EST, which is 5 hours ahead, and they had a good reason to be exhausted. One of the other attendees from an unnamed northeastern location mentioned at dinner that he would be fine with getting a job handing out towels at the beach here rather than put up with any more snowy winters.

Just because there should be at least one food shot, this was the cold noodle bowl that I had for dinner last night after the connector meeting. Cold ramen with chicken, cucumbers and tomatos. Like last nights meal, it was very tasty. They also had one dish which I had to try just based on the name. Pan fried cheese gyoza or dumplings. In addition to the normal filling of cabbage and ground pork, there was mozzarella cheese. You still used the same soy sauce w/vinegar dipping sauce. It sounds weird but was very good. A surprising combination.

A colleague from Pennsylvania who has visited and commented here, has a technology focused blog and I'm interested in seeing what he is going to post regarding this meeting...

Tuesday Afternoon Update - Shuman's TIP 2013 blog post.

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TIP - Day 1

I walked from the Sheraton to the East-West Center and it started out fairly pleasant since the sun was still below the mountains. It was pretty humid but at least it didn't feel too warm. With all of the crosswalks and getting lost on some of the small paths on the University of Hawai‘i campus, it took about 45 minutes to get here. The first half day session was on the new Internet² outsourced VoIP service. It was led by the ITEC group at Texas A&M. They also taught the former open source SIP workshops that I had attended in the past which was the basis of the VoIP solution currently deployed in Barrow. This is the view of the Japanese garden through the windows of the tutorial venue. Kind of difficult to stay focused on the material.

The afternoon tutorial that I had signed up for was an overview of Software Defined Networking (SDN) using OpenFlow presented by Marist College. The presentation was made by a CS faculty member and three of his students and included software they had written to simplify the deployment of the technology through a grant they received from IBM. They were a little time constrained due to another tutorial using in the same room. I wish I had the time and energy needed to pursue this area of computer networking.

SInce this meeting includes APAN, the Asia Pacific Advanced Network, there are a lot more attendees than at most of the Joint Tech meetings with the number I heard was 450 attendees. They actually had to close registrations unless you were already selected for presenting or leading a working group meeting.

After the afternoon session, I walked back to the hotel with a fellow attendee from the University of Iowa. He was also a rider. It was much warmer and much more crowded. This is the street in front of the hotel, I had an hour or so before the next meeting here at the hotel so I went for a short walk and picked up a some souveniers for the family back home.

The beach across the street from the hotel is really crowded and I think that this tiny strip of sand is labled Waikīkī Beach. It does not look like a very pleasant place to spend much time. There were a number of sailboats moored a short distance offshore and there was no surf at all. Lots of surfboard rentals but no waves on the water.

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