NEWS: Dude Tracks His Transatlantic Flight By Watching Internet Routing

GEEK: Dude Tracks His Transatlantic Flight By Watching Internet Routing

We have a new candidate for geek of the year: Todd Underwood who tracked his Lufthansa flight across the Atlantic ocean, using Internet routing as his guide.

Todd is the Chief Operations and Security Officer for Renesys Systems, so just writing about his plane's location isn't enough; he explains in great detail how he knew where he was, and why the technology is so cool.

The best part of Todd's blog post is his explanation of routing protocols and how the engineers at Boeing overcame what could have been service-crippling problems, including all sorts of really cool and useful graphics that even a level 010 geek can easily understand. In fact, if you grok and get excited by his story, you're probably on your way to being a level 1010 geek. If you understand what I'm talking about and are giggling right now, you're a level 101010 geek, and we're looking forward to seeing you at the meeting tonight. Excelsior!



(via reddit)

Oh dear....

oh dear

I'm not grokking anything here! I really can't criticize the guy, because I know how this happens to someone. I mean flying overseas turns into the game of finding new an inventive ways to waste time after you realize there's at MOST one movie that you actually want to watch.

You try you hardest to avoid the game...you read the Skymall catalog, you briefly consider buying something you don't need from the Duty Free catalog just becauee you'd save some money, you re-acquaint yourself with "water landing" procedures, hell, you may even read the barf bag.

After that, you get up...stretch...use the restroom...maybe look for the hot girl you saw get on the plane hours ago -- awwww..she's with her dad! Then it happens, you start tracking internet routing. See ya at the meeting...

"You got the wrong guy, I'm the dude"

Heh...

What is six times nine?

That story was fuckng awesome!

I'm just geek enough to understand why this would be interesting and exciting to professional geeks.

Apparently I'm far more of a geek than I thought. I got the joke, but I was far more interested in how you solve the latency issues with the satellite uplink. Are they running all of the outgoing stuff the entire distance from geosynch or is it piggybacked on the nav signals? If it's off the nav signals, what kind of broadcast are they using from the middle of the ocean? If it's going geosynch, they're talking about a half second to a second of lag for *every* up/down transaction.

[slaps self on forehead and screams LOSER!] OK, I'm feeling better now.

I understood it fairly easy, I wouldn't call him a geek though, its fairly related to his field of work and he made mention of the presentation of the technology by boeing which he may have seen or a friend may have seen and explained. Thats like me being a geek or maybe a lama for someone explaining a principle of Bhuddism in life and then me seeing and understanding it for the first time as it takes action in real time and getting excited. I don't know doesn't seem all that geeky to me but most of the 30 some members in the last generation of my mothers family work in the computer field some even for R&D.

Just because I don't understand a play in football doesn't mean my buddy who does is a pro footballer no?

Just my two shiny copper bits..

This is pretty cool.

+motherfuckin' 1 mofo

This has to be on the top 100 thing to do while bored on an airplane.

this is a seriously cool article. I'm getting a digital woody just reading it.

[Edited on Apr 30, 2006 2:49AM]