Geek Vs. Wild

The Testing of Network Rockstar Challenge

The Anatomy of a TCP Connection

Illustrating TCP slow start and WAN Optimization Compression with Mr. Packet

The Engineer of Love

Mad Networks with Tim Framer

It's Official: CA acquires NetQoS

Time Warner Cable and Fox are having a bit of a spat right now over programming. That is, Fox is demanding increased fees for the use of Fox-branded content, including the Fox Network, FX, Speed, Fuel, Fox Movies, Fox Reality, Fox Soccer, and Fox Español.

Time Warner, so far, is refusing to pay those fees. Which means that, unless an agreement in the 11^th hour is agreed upon, Fox’s programming will not be seen on Time Warner’s 14 million cable-subscribing households starting on 12:00 A.M on Jan. 1^st.

Sadly, this will cut Carmen Electra off in her “New Years Eve Live” show.

To me – this is a no brainer. Time Warner has just been handed a foolproof excuse for getting rid of eight channels off their cable lineup. Analog cable television service consumes 2/3rds of the bandwidth of a typical coaxial cable – those eight analog channels can be repurposed for better VoIP quality on the digital phone offerings, better throughput on the cable Internet offerings, etc.

Would it hurt to lose Fox’s programming? Maybe in the short term. But if Time Warner plays it’s cards right, it can force Fox to return to the bargaining table without analog cable service – limiting it only to digital cable, saving the bandwidth.

Because here’s the real problem: Cable television is incredibly inefficient. Why would you allocate 235 different channels worth of bandwidth when you only watch one channel at any one time? Even a household might watch no more than six or seven channels at once. Ultimately, the best move for the cable companies is to find a way to transmit the programming on-demand, and just-in-time, over the same network technology that data and VoIP service runs on. But doing so requires weaning the content distribution model away from the 1950s era of “one channel, one network.”

I’ll admit that I don’t know much about the specifics of the "television business," but TW really needs to see itself as a “network business,” providing connectivity, not programming. In that respect, the goal for TW should be to make the most of their infrastructure, and that means starting a transition to all-data sooner rather than later. Fox just gave them the perfect excuse to start the transition.

Of course, they may still come to an agreement to preserve the status quo. Which just means that somebody else will get to make the first move towards the all-network television.

It’s that time of year again – the end of the year, when every technology guru with a keyboard and a blog puts together their top ten lists for the year, or in this case, for the decade.

Rather than duplicating their work, we’ve decided to take it to the next level. Behold:

The Top Ten Tech Top Ten Lists for 2010.

1. Network World: The top underreported tech stories of 2009


2. eWEEK: eWEEK selects its top ten storage stories of 2009


3. Network World: The top ten technology stories of 2009


4. Electricpig.co.uk: Top ten tech personalities of 2009, and ten to watch in 2010


5. Network World: Ten big cloud trends for 2010


6. Computerworld: Top ten IT stories of 2009


7. Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies: Ten emerging technology trends of the next ten years.


8. CNN: #%*@#! The top ten tech ‘fails’ of 2009


9. PC World: Top fifteen tech events of the decade – [Please read only the first two-thirds of this article. – ed.]


10. And finally: Newsweek: The Top Ten Top Ten Lists

Today’s blog post – not that there are many of you out there reading this in the “dead zone” between Christmas and New Years – but today’s post was going to be on the ridiculous travel restrictions that they put into place after the averted attack on Christmas, how taking away blankets weren’t adding to security and just making people uncomfortable. Its security theatre, I know, but security theatre is only theoretically worth something if it actually makes people feel safer.

Scanning people’s shoes doesn’t really help with security, but it does make people feel safer. The security measures put into place these past couple of days seemed arbitrary, and didn’t really seem like there was a reason to do it at all, except to make people uncomfortable. That, in turn, actively works against the façade of security theatre, making people feel uncomfortable knowing that the people who were supposed to be looking out for us didn’t know what the heck they were doing.

And I was going to write something or another about network performance – going to tie in the message that network security is important, but too often, it seems like a lot of corporate security restrictions are in place that don’t really make people’s networks more secure – but do slow down the network’s performance.

It might have been a good post, except that CBS reported a half hour ago, as I was half-done with the first draft of this post that those in-flight restrictions have, in fact, been eased.

So, just when I get all worked up and annoyed over the FAA doing something that is, in my opinion, stupid, they go ahead and do something smart to correct it, and it just throws off my day.

So, to try to bring this all back to the beginning again, this is probably how a lot of people in enterprises feel when dealing with network performance problems. No matter how quickly the problem gets fixed, the user only remembers that there was a problem – not that it was fixed quickly. This is why you need to be proactive about network performance, and prevent problems, not just repair them.

July 2009

Baseball moves from Fault to Performance

I was working on a proposal for combining IT and baseball into a professional competitive sport I call “Packetball.” If any of you out there knows Hal and Hank Steinbrenner’s phone number, can you let me know in the comments section?

The State of Network Management

We recently put together a report with Ashton, Metzler & Associates, trying to gauge the state of network management today. After our best efforts, we have learned a few things.

For example, the state of network management is not Ohio. That’s the Buckeye State.

After checking the 50 states of the U.S., the six states of Australia, and the 31 Estados of Mexico – even broadening our definition to include Canadian Provinces – we still couldn’t find the state of network management.

August 2009

Unified Communication Monitoring Options

NetQoS Option B consists of the NetQoS End User Brainwave Frustration Monitor, mounted on each end-user.  When unified communication problems cause sufficient frustration, they send signals to the NetQoS Unified Shock Collar System, worn by all NOC staff.  This sends out an uncomfortable but not harmful reminder to the NOC staff that there’s a problem with communications, and they will hurry to fix the problem. Or they will be eaten by a dinosaur. (See Figure 1)

September 2009

The Bittish Invasion.

Today at midnight will mark the release of “The Beatles Rockband.” In case you’re not familiar with “Rockband,” or it’s predecessor, “Guitar Hero,” I would like to congratulate you on your recovery from the deep coma that you have been in since 2005. Welcome to the future, where a common pastime is pretending to play famous songs with fake instruments in time with little buttons on a computer screen. 

Also, Michael Jackson is dead, the Sopranos is no longer on TV, and instead of “blogging” we all do something called “twitter” now. Welcome to Hell.

Entrepreneurs on LastDay

Now, the Obama plan is both controversial and the coverage and interpretations are steeped in misinformation.  I’ve known supporters that believe that the plan will give them a free robot and puppy, and detractors who fear that they’ll have to install a crystal in the palm of their hands that will start blinking when they reach “lastday.”

October 2009

Packets that stay crunchy, even in milk…

Though it hasn’t made a decision one way or another, Kellogg’s, makers of “Corn Flakes,” is looking into the possibility of laser-etching individual corn flakes with the Kellogg’s logo for the U.K. market, in order to prevent it from being confused with competitors – most notably store-brand corn flakes…

It’s almost a good idea.  I mean, you could do that… or – and this is crazy, I know – but you could simply put the logo on some sort of cardboard box or plastic packaging, and then sell the corn flakes inside the box.

The Blue Screen of Deathly Hallows.

The more I think about it, I wonder if Microsoft doesn’t suffer from some sort of “Star Trek” curse, with every other operating system release decent, and the rest, doomed to mediocrity, with 95, 2000, XP, and 7 as “Wrath of Khan,” “The Voyage Home,” “The Undiscovered Country,” and “First Contact,” respectively. Okay, maybe 98 doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with ME and Vista, but neither does “Search for Spock” deserve to be lumped in with “The Final Frontier” and “Generations.”

November 2009

Listen to the Wombat.

And finally, I’m not sure if this is a REALLY bad idea, or a REALLY good one from “140Mandak262Jamuna.” I also wonder if this has already been tried…

• Collect the amount of water pumped reported by each sensor as a trace between 9:30 AM and 4PM on the days the market is open. Find the correlation between this trace and the S&P500 index with a two minute time lag. See which sensor has a correlation coefficient more than 0.05. Use that info to come up with a trading strategy to buy and sell the exchange traded fund IVV. Propose a project find the leading indicator sensor for more securities like QQQQ, Diamond, XLF, XLU, XLV, XLP and the stock ANSS. …. Build an empire under you. Watch the cash flow of the company. Just before it goes bust, put all this experience in a resume and get a job in the ultra high speed trading division of Morgan Stanley.

December 2009:

Cisco and Australia’s National Broadband Rollout

The Kevin Rudd-led Australian government has put forward a Fiber-To-The-Home, or as the Australians call it, “Fibre-to-the-Home” initiative, including an open-access network which supposedly will provider 100Mbps connections to 90% of Australian homes and businesses.  This is presumably in order to diversify the Claudia Black based-economy, which, sometime in the 1990s, became Australia’s primary export.

January 2009

Sign-up for NetQoS Symposium ‘09

For NetQoS employees, the Symposium is also known as “Free Polo Shirt Day.” Once a year at Symposium, we release a flock of polo shirts into the wild, as a symbol of hope that someday there will be peace among natural and synthetic fabrics. (Of course, any polo shirts that we catch, we get to keep – and polo shirts are notoriously bad sprinters – so you’ll probably see us all decked out in NetQoS branded polo shirts on the Symposium floor.)

February 2009

Unified Communication and the Bouncing Grey Lady

Those of us who work closely with the Web – bloggers, Web designers, media professionals – are aware of CSS, which removes content from layout, and RSS, which removes content from context. How far can we be from a society in which all content is completely removed from any sort of context or layout? A society where everything is abstracted? Where you could download the model of a basketball, and print it out on a 3D printer. Or even, if you wish, have the New York Times printed daily on a basketball, if you so chose…

I don’t know if I’m ready for that world. I’m not sure I want my news to bounce.

Fight on, my mosquito friends! For Microsoft!

The headline still read: “Bill Gates Unleashes Swarm of Mosquitoes on Crowd.”

It wasn’t the Onion.  This was too weird to be the Onion.  Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, and certainly one of the most well known, decided that in order to make a point about empathy, he would release a jar of mosquitoes at a talk he gave at the TED conference on malaria in developing nations.

Now, I’m all for Bill’s charity work; and you have to admire a guy who uses the money he’s made towards good deeds. But I’m a little bit worried that Bill Gates may have finally decided to make the full-fledged leap from eccentric billionaire to evil genius.

March 2009

You can’t manage an economy you don’t measure.

I wish that we could claim moral superiority in our own tech world, but I don’t think we can.  Too often, silos persist in IT where protective individuals try to keep their own jobs secure by being the only person who can understand and interpret the data.  It’s the same kind of thing, and I’d say it’s “just as bad,” except that while it may be counter-productive, it hasn’t yet blown up an entire civilization’s economy.

Yet.

In the meantime, here’s some handy links from Amazon:

· Blazer PT-4000 Pencil Butane Torch.

· Speeday Series 60” Pitchfork

And for the kids:

· Angry Mob Playset

April 2009

Time Warner brings tiered caps to Austin.

That sound you’re hearing is the screaming of my soul being crushed.

All great journalists can maintain complete objectivity in the most trying of circumstances. I am merely a good journalist.

Well, I’m adequate.

Why is Australia’s Channel 7 making our jobs harder?

According to the news report, a report where the anchor freely admits that he “doesn’t know how this Internet business works, I thought it just went through the air,” I “learned” the following things:

· By 2012, the Internet could get “full.”

· The Internet is about 13 years old, and it hasn’t broken down once. (For those counting, that means the Internet was invented in 1996.)

· The Internet is probably “the most perfect machine we’ve built as humans.” (It clearly outshines, of course, the lever, inclined plane, wheel and axle, screw, wedge, or pulley.)

· The problem with The Internet being “full” is not the pipes, because “the pipes are fine.”

At the risk of insulting Australia Channel Seven’s news staff, this is frozen concentrated stupid juice.

May 2009

A week and a half til’ Interop Vegas.

The “Bottom Issues Affecting Application Performance” are, as usual, Wombat attacks and an oversupply of AOL CDs.

Webinar on ROI with Forrester Consulting Tomorrow

For those who choose not to attend, tomorrow, at 1:00 EST, I will be personally calling each of you individually, and telling you all the spoilers for the new Star Trek movie.  So, the only way to avoid knowing what happens to the crew of the Starship Enterprise, thus ruining your enjoyment of the film, is to attend the Webinar.

By the moons of Qo'noS , I will do it, I swear. 

Do not tempt me.

June 2009

Axia NetMedia chooses NetVoyant to handle SNMP metrics, flying polar bears.

Axia NetMedia corporation, which runs the Alberta SuperNet, had deployed NetQoS® NetVoyant for their device performance monitoring needs.  SNMP based metrics are important when at any moment, your network can be attacked by the varied hazards of Albertan life.  For example, flying polar bears who take out network links.  (It could happen.  Calgary still has its ski jump from the 1988 Winter Olympics, and if Coca-Cola commercials are anything to go on, bears like extreme sports.)

According to the New York Times Bits Blog, professor David Anderegg of Bennington college suggests that the words “nerd” and “geek” are “damaging, like racial epithets, and should be avoided.”

Yet the meaning of words often evolves as the social context changes. I noted that in Manhattan’s elite high schools being called a “cool nerd” is a compliment… Perhaps that’s true in a handful of ZIP codes around the country, Dr. Anderegg conceded. But in most of America, he said, nerds and geeks are people to avoid. The connotations are a bit different: a geek suggests a person with special expertise, while nerd suggests social ineptness. And neither are cool.

I disagree with Anderegg, but not because he’s fundamentally wrong.  Being called a “geek” or “nerd” in school, where social acceptance and “coolness” are everything, it is a derogatory remark, designed to designate the victim’s “otherness,” and as such, retain the bully’s inclusiveness. 

And it’s true that in some areas of the country, and in the world, “geek” and “nerd” never grow beyond that derogatory meaning.

But in the adult world – in the world that you and I inhabit, “Geek” and “Nerd” both have complimentary and derogatory meanings.  Among practitioners of the mystic arts of information technology, “geek” is high praise – and indeed can be just as much of a word of inclusion among engineers, administrators, and architects as it was a word of exclusion in high school. Same with “nerd” in higher academia. 

The point is that over the past 20 years, in part because we nerds and geeks have lead the greatest advances in social and cultural change with the advent of the personal computer and the Internet, we have turned those words to our own advantage; those who use them as derogatory only show their ignorance when they do so.  And those who do so after a certain age also show their immaturity. 

Indeed, “nerd” and “geek” may not belong on the playground; but we must not let our language descend into a form which is only fit for schoolchildren. I will continue to use “nerd” and “geek” and use them as compliments and accolades for my friends and colleagues. 

And if “nerd” and “geek” are not complimentary in the society where you live, then your society is backwards and wrong. And I invite you to come to Austin, to San Francisco, to New York, to Seattle – to anyplace in the world that recognizes that there is beauty in the seeking of knowledge and the diversity of ideas.

Here’s another word: “Gay” has a derogatory meaning and a second, neutral one.  But no one is asking gay people to stop calling themselves gay because there are bigots and idiots out there that seek to demean the word by associating a defamatory meaning with it.  Anderegg’s argument would also apply to the banning of “gay,” – which is a word that is a badge of pride for many people.  Banning it would be giving a victory to the idiots.

And so would banning “Nerd” and “Geek” – for the same reasons.  Banning “Nerd” and “Geek” would do more to enforce in the minds of children that being a nerd or being a geek is somehow wrong, and somehow something to be avoided. 

That couldn’t be farther from the truth.  “Nerd” is a badge of pride.  As is “Geek.”  And anyone I know and care to spend more than five minutes with would be proud and honored to be called that. 

Now, I may be wrong about this. Dr. Anderegg has a Ph.D. in psychology, while I’m just some nerd…     

We just announced our 9th annual symposium, for May 2-5, 2010 at Barton Creek Resort.  You can find out more about the Symposium on the “Symposium 2010” page. 

Later that same month, in May 16-20, there’s CA World 2010 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, which is, if I recall correctly, where contestants on the Amazing Race reality TV show had to rappel face-first from the roof of the casino to the bottom.  We’ll be doing something similar, only instead of “rappelling face-first” CA’ll be discussing IT Management. 

So – really, not very similar at all, really.  But just as exciting!

One of the key selling points of Amazon’s EC2 capacity is its ability to turn CAPEX costs into OPEX costs.  Or, for those of us who didn’t major in business in college, to pay for computer hardware with the “Pay For Services” budget, instead of the “Buy Stuff” budget. 

This is generally a good thing – but now Amazon’s trying something else that might lower costs even more, while selling Amazon’s cloud computing overstock – they’re going to auction off unused virtual server capacity.  Since the server capacity changes with supply and demand – so would the price, theoretically. 

Here’s how it works.  You bid a price, and if the price is more than the “spot price,” you pay the spot price.  If the spot price rises higher than your bid, however, your instances are terminated.  According to Network World:

Since Spot Instances can be terminated without warning, once a customer is outbid, they shouldn't be the only source of capacity allocated to enterprise applications that need 24/7 uptime.

No kidding.  I could see the Spot Instances being used for some additional oomph in computational tasks, but I wouldn’t want any sort of persistent application running on that thing.  I’d hate to wake up one morning to find out that my company can’t get e-mail because “whurleybird3289” outbid me by one cent…

On the other hand, there are plenty of applications that could use that oomph – video cluster rendering, astrophysics models, the B-Movie Idea Generator (used by Revolution Studios, mostly…)

Ultimately, the entire idea seems to embrace cloud computing’s core competence: low expense, while exacerbating its core drawback – low(er) reliability.

There’s also another problem – security.  Recently, a Zeus/Zbot Trojan which used a compromised EC2 virtual server for command and control – the first of its kind. 

"This is the first instance that we're aware of that EC2 has been compromised to be used to distribute malware," [Don DeBolt, Director of Threat Research for CA Internet Security Business Unit] said. "So it certainly should raise awareness. Anytime that you use a cloud-based service or a host infrastructure or applications, that increases the complexity of what you're trying to do. And if the access and application controls are not maintained securely, then it opens it up to potential compromise."

Cloud computing is great, but there are drawbacks and not being able to control every element of your network performance is one of them. 

The Kevin Rudd-led Australian government has put forward a Fiber-To-The-Home, or as the Australians call it, “Fibre-to-the-Home” initiative, including an open-access network which supposedly will provider 100Mbps connections to 90% of Australian homes and businesses.  This is presumably in order to diversify the Claudia Black based-economy, which, sometime in the 1990s, became Australia’s primary export.

One of the decisions for the network, which is a public-private partnership, is that it would only provide physical and data link layer – network layers would have to be provided by companies that wished to use the network (presumably for resale,) and Cisco Australia/NZ CTO Kevin Bloch criticized this choice, because there were only one or two companies that could afford to roll out their own Layer 3 services – cutting out smaller network providers from the new network completely. 

"So we are absolutely going back to the future and making a deeper incumbency than we've ever seen before if we don't open this up and really look at what happens in the points of interconnect that's where it's going to hurt. Everybody seems to be skirting over the issue."
While Cisco stood to gain more by selling additional networking equipment to access seekers, Mr. Bloch said it was not in the national interest to choose the path NBN Co had chosen.

Later, however, Cisco’s Australia/NZ Vice President Les Williamson, said that Bloch didn’t speak for the entire Cisco company with his remarks; that while the remarks were made “in good faith,” they didn’t take into account the industry consultation process – specifically, Cisco’s role in the Communications Alliance, which promoted the “Layer 2” strategy. 

In a statement to iTWire, Williamson clearly sought to mend its relationship with both the Government and the NBN Company.
"Cisco supports the federal government’s NBN vision and strategy as well as the process it has created in order to realise this critical initiative," he said.

Australia’s broadband initiative is one of the Rudd Government’s largest initiatves, and a promotional video for the NBN created by Alcatel-Lucent include claims that the NBN program “is not just about faster Internet,” but that “The NBN is the foundation on which we will build an entirely new way of life.”

To make the point, the promotional video whacks a stick-figure upside the head with a stop sign, presumably a punishment for his NBN-related ignorance, and explains that Bob, a sheep farmer, will be able to throw sheep into his computer monitor and have them appear on the other end of the network connection.