The IETF is meeting in Chicago this week and I am participating remotely via Meetecho. The remote participation service is improving every IETF it seems, saving me from a lot of long distance traveling hassle during the semester. While the people providing the remote participation service do a wonderful job, I believe a big part of this working well for me is that I know many of the regular contributors good enough from prior meetings I attended in person so that I can extract many soft signals just from the voice stream.

It appears that there are many motivators that instructors use to make students follow and even enjoy the material taught in computer networking courses. The really strong motivators seem to fall broadly into three categories:

• Competition and games between students or groups of students.
• Implementation of real-world protocols and systems where students build something that can be used (by them) afterwards (in principle).
• Trapping students into developing wrong solutions can be a tool to make them think critically and to make them realize the need to adopt a clear methodology.

The last one seems to be especially strong. I will try some more of these in the near future.

I am enjoying a Dagstuhl seminar on Using Networks to Teach About Networks where people talk about their experience with modern teaching methods such active learning, flipped classrooms, online learning, peer reviewing, and learning analytics when teaching computer networks. (Some people even talk about using blockchains to maintain student records.) And then there are of course discussions about what do we teach students and why and which tools people have found useful for student labs.

I heard some terms I did not knew before. A new one, for example, was sandwich classroom, i.e., a flipped classroom turning into a preparation phase, the classroom discussion phase, followed by a post studying phase (often using the same material used in the preparation phase).

The Flamingo project has been evaluated ’excellent’ four times. It was a great piece of teamwork to achieve this outstanding result. I enjoyed sitting in a review meeting today with the feeling that there is hardly anything that can go wrong. Lets see whether we manage to keep the Flamingo spirit alive.

Looking back, I think the highlights were the meetings where we discussed the research projects of our PhD students. The project meeting in Kloster Eberbach last year followed by a visit of DE-CIX was one such highlight. But I liked all the meetings where we had time for technical discussions and for getting to know each other better.

The last report for the Flamingo project has been submitted today. The final project review will take place next week and hence it is getting time to say bye bye to the Flamingo project. I truly enjoyed the four years of the Flamingo project.

About 10 years ago, we became Jacobs University Bremen and as a consequence of the name change we had to transition DNS names from eecs.iu-bremen.de to eecs.jacobs-university.de. In order to not break things unnecessarily, we kept serving the eecs.iu-bremen.de zone but now the time has come to shut it down. We received DNS queries for eecs.iu-bremen.de after turning it off for a while but after some weeks queries for the retired zone seem to stop.

I have always been a fan of static web pages. When I started to think about a personal web page in 2005, I ended up using NanoBlogger as my content management system since it allowed me to write blog posts in a terminal (over ssh) using my favorite text editor, it did not require much on the server side, and it was a rather cool shell script hack. The world moved on since 2005 and content management systems became really big and also quite usable (I can edit content on them easily even without my most loved browser plugin It’s All text! that allows me to edit HTML textboxes in my favorite text editor).

The Internet is everywhere. As educated citizens of the modern information age, we believe we know what we are doing when we sign up for online Internet services. But we (too) often ignore the fact that we also collectively work towards a world where without the Internet, we are nowhere. Back in a day, before the digital revolution, people were buying and thus owning content, nowadays we get content streamed but we do not own it anymore. Or, even more interestingly, we buy (and hence “own”) content in formats that can only be accessed if we are online. And it does not stop with just content. Nowadays, people deploy advanced home automation systems and many of them depend on cloud backends for regular operations. Just recently, I prepared a document for a meeting (in which I participated online) and only an unexpected downtime of my Internet uplink revealed that the recommended text formatting tool requires to be online to use it. These often hidden mashups are showing up increasingly in tools where one would not expect them. This is worrying me since these hidden mashups create a complex network of dependencies that lead to new and unknown risks through the possibility of cascading failures. Perhaps it is a good idea to pull the plug occasionally just to see what all stops working if the Internet is not everywhere anymore.

Every runner knows that variations are important; running always the same route at the same pace is not only boring but also ineffective from a physiological point of view. I am neither a fast nor an ambitious runner - I usually run distances around 10 km (sometimes less, sometimes more) and I do three runs per week. I prefer to run a mixture of new routes and well-known routes. I enjoy exploring unknown areas by running through them and I am used to travel with running shoes in my luggage.

I am using computers since the early 1980s and I am ‘on the Internet’ since the late 1980’s. Back then, it was clear that computers had limited character sets and hence I started to write my name in a format that computers could deal with easily. Hence I have two ’names' on the Internet and in fact a couple of additional ones that were created by software doing bad transformations and humans mixing writing styles.