Brian Trammell

This paper led to the Substrate Protocol for User Datagrams and Path Layer UDP Substrate BoFs at IETF meetings in Dallas and Berlin, respectively, and the path layer effort in general.

Shamelessly inspired by Alexander Calder, who I followed from Atlanta to Pittsburgh to Zürich, and inexpertly crafted from stuff I found at Migros, I present my first attempt at a mobile.

This is going to make me sound somewhat more libertarian than I actually am, but here goes: The most important duty of a state is its effective control over and responsible application of the monopoly on violence, delegated to it by its citizens, in the s…

So it hasn’t been all work: the weather (though it’s tragic today) has cooperated with my calendar on occasion, and I’ve had a few chances to throw the boat on the water.

I recently gave a full-day course on flow measurement at the University of Zürich’s IfI summer school.

Well, it’s official.

Putting aside the discomfort of being an immigrant in a mildly xenophobic land, and the hypothetical ballistic solution to Switzerland’s furr’ner problem, I’ll add my voice to the growing chorus of confusion and ask what, in reality, just happened.

In order to outline a more effective defense against Ausländer than the Masseneinwanderungsinitiative can provide, and with a deferential nod to Randall Munroe, I decided to do some back of the napkin estimates of what it would take to make Switzerland a…

Every time the Rovian Swiss People’s Party (often described as “extreme right” in the English-speaking press, though they’re really more nativist than explicitly fascist) manages to ram one of its populist cries for attention through the initiative proces…

Over the past couple of days, this article has been brought to my attention from multiple angles.

It’s a good thing that keeping the blog up to date wasn’t actually a resolution of mine for last year, because I did as well as, well, one usually does with one’s New Years’ resolutions.

One can debate the usefulness of the traffic-traffic metaphor in network engineering.

I’ve been reading Tom Standage’s “Writing on the Wall” of late, which I can heartily recommend.

The weather’s finally cold enough that there’s time to pour a cup of glühwein, put the feet up by the fire, and finish blog posts about all the being outside this summer that got in the way of posting stuff about being outside on the blog.

The QoF TCP-performance-aware IPFIX flow meter I’ve been working on, on and off, for about a year, now seems to produce halfway plausible results and hardly crashes at all anymore, which means it’s time to follow the path of real artists immemorial and sh…

Bear with me here for a minute, and this rant will get to the point.

So I complain about a lull in the news about the more-or-less complete compromise of the Internet by the National Security Agency et al, and then this goes and happens.

This is the fourth post I’ve started on the pervasive, indiscriminate, uncontrolled surveillance of electronic communications by the ministries of state security of the North Atlantic world.

Last Thursday, I sat on a panel with Swiss Telecommunications Association President Peter Grütter, Swisscom CEO Carsten Schloter, and Green National Councilor Balthasar Glättli, on the subject of network neutrality, and whether legal protection therefor is

The National Council of Switzerland1 is considering the addition of a guarantee of network neutrality into a forthcoming revision of Swiss telecommunications law.

I’ve learned, after something happens in America, to wait a few days, first for the inaccuracies inherent in the twenty-four-hour news cycle to be spun out, then for the inaccuracies introduced by the inevitable political spin to cancel each other out, th…

The Internet Society Switzerland Chapter’s inaugural national event was last night at the Käfigturm in Bern; in my talk, “The Open Internet under Threat” (which, as it turns out, was unwittingly inspired in part by a much earlier post on this blog; slides…

I’ll be giving a talk to the Internet Society (ISOC) Switzerland Chapter at a meeting in Bern, at 18:30 on Tuesday 27 November, entitled “The Open Internet under Threat”.

I’m not voting in the 2012 Presidential election.

The apparent secret to getting bagels that look like bagels: broil them slightly before boiling them, and add way more salt and a little sugar to the boiling water.

It’s bad form to draw generalizations about a place and a people from a tiny little sample of experience.

[][1] Bagels boiling, Wallisellen, 7 November 2011 The problem with taking a week in New York and coming back to Zürich is that you miss the bagels.

[ Dupont Circle, Washington DC, 6 October 2011 Perhaps it is hasty to simply dismiss the swamps of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers as blighted by the pernicious lies spewing forth from the numerous bullshit factories lining their banks.

On December 7, 1951, the New York Times – then as now as close to a paper of record as you’ll find in America – devoted a relatively limited amount of space to the tenth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy, which drew t…

I opened the NZZ am Sonntag (the Sunday edition of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the paper of record for German-speaking Switzerland) today to read of yet another threat from Switzerland’s current favorite comic-book supervillain: Starker Franken.

The New York Times ran a story last week, essentially detailing the Zürich Model: increase the usage of non-automotive transportation by simultaneously making public transit more attractive (through increased frequency and punctuality though e.g. transit-…

I’ve finally given up arguing politics.

Basically every Swiss city, town, village, train station, or particularly wide spot in the road has one: the hauptwegweiser (roughly “central trail sign”), which tells you where you can go from here on foot, and approximately how long it will take you if…

Zürich scares winter off by packing a snowman with explosives, lighting it on fire, and measuring the time until its head blows off.