ICTP-SDU: Lowbandwidth Optimization Techniques
I am currently back in Trieste, with my good friends Marco and Carlo, and this time the topic is Bandwidth Optimization. More info here: ICTP-SDU: Lowbandwidth Optimization Techniques
I've given lectures and had lab sessions on Traffic Shaping, and Bandwidth Monitoring, as well as some very basic linux firewalling stuff.
There's about 40 colleagues here from all over sub-saharan africa, as well as Bolivia, Cuba, India, Rumania and probably a lot of countries i have missed.
There are some amazing participants, and some brilliant lecturors here.
Richard Stubbs from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is a fountain of wisdom on overall strategies fro managing bandwidth in a large university setting (12,000 students) with way too little bandwidth (about 18 Mbit/s).
Olatunde Abiona, from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, adds another experienced voice to the fray, and is another new acquaintance for me to add to my growing list of gifted tehnology trainers.
Duane Wessels is just teaching a class on Web proxying with Squid, and for those of you who don't know who Duane is, take a look here. Duane is the original author of Squid, which in turn is the most widely used web proxy anywhere. He also wrote one of the definitive guides on webcaching, and he happens to be a great teacher too.
Les Cottrell from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, was here until this morning, and he is an authority on ultra-high bandwidth applications, as well as being one of the brains behind the pingEr project, which measures latency over time to as many universities as possible, and uses it to estimate the quality of connections around the world.
Of course this is just a small sample of the great people that have made it to Trieste. Many of the lectures are on-line in QuickTime format here.
In any case, This is the first ICT workshop I've done since coming back from Africa Source 2 last winter, and it's a timely reminder of how much i've missed this type of work.
Let me just repeat this here for future reference. Just in case, i end up forgetting...
I love to teach at technology workshops, especially when some of the participants are from the developing world and have developing world problems. It is what I do well, it is my passion, and in this world I have found some of the most intelligent, fascinating and fun friends a person could ever ask for.
