The Mattel Corporation, makers of Barbie, have produced an online poll asking people to vote on the next occupation of “teenage-fashion model doll” Barbie. Choices are “Environmentalist,” (although a doll made entirely out of plastic might be a poor spokesperson for this career), Surgeon, Architect, News Anchor, or, drumroll please: “Computer Engineer.”

Seriously.  Go vote for “Computer Engineer.” Whether you believe Barbie’s influence on young girls to be positive or negative, you cannot deny that there is an influence.  And Computer Engineer will go a long way towards correcting the “Math class is tough” version of Barbie.

But of course, Barbie wouldn’t be Barbie if she didn’t come with accessories.  In addition to the usual computer engineer accoutrements – laptop, pocket protector, jeans for crawling under desk, sneakers for getting around quickly, and a collection of slightly witty t-shirts (especially appropriate would be this one, for “self-rescuing princess”), may we humbly suggest the following:

• Spray-On QoS




• In this instance, QoS stands for “Quality of Suntan.”


• “Five,” her new pet cat.


• A freakishly monstrous third arm growing out of her neck.




• For the three-way handshakes, of course. 


• TCP




• Tea and Crumpets Party. With real lunch packets from Barbie’s new server.


• A Perl Necklace




• This gold-laced necklace extends to a small jewel containing a crystal image of a camel; with the words “#!/usr/bin/perl print "Hello, world!\n" wrapped around it.


• Plasma Sword (Lucas owns the trademark on “lightsaber.”)




• Because, let’s face it, there’s always a plasma sword hanging around a computer engineer’s office somewhere.


• Ethernet Hair Spray




• A geeky version of Aquanet to keep Barbie’s hair voluminous even at 3am in the datacenter.


• Barbie’s Dream Datacenter




• The entire 3-story Dream Datacenter is over 3 feet tall and fully furnished
  
• Realistic sounds like the humming of big iron and air conditioning, thousands of hard drives reading, and a diesel generator.
  
• Gourmet-style vending machine with plenty of storage comes with all the popular conveniences
  
• The third story has a portable ship container, removable for on-the-go complete datacenter play
  
• Raised flooring
  
• A password station and biometric scanner, which prevents cheap Barbie knock-offs from entering the facility.


• End User Ken

Of course, Barbie already has a leg up. We’re just getting into virtualization now, but Barbie has been living a virtual life in a virtual world since the 1960s.

Network World reports on a survey by security software vendor Symantec which talks about data center staffing. Specifically, half of the respondents said that their data centers were either extremely or somewhat understaffed.

And of course, there’s always the usual suspect to trot out – the economy – forcing IT workers to do more with less, with cutbacks and layoffs hitting IT hard. But there’s also another factor – that it’s not just that the IT staffing budgets are decreasing but also that the job of the network engineer is becoming complex, thus increasing the overall workload.

This is especially true in mid-sized enterprises where new technologies which can save money but which are extremely complex, like virtualization, WAN optimization, and cloud computing are being implemented at a faster rate than either smaller enterprises or larger ones.

Well, if you don’t have enough manpower in your data center, there are three solutions I can think of off the top of my head. The first is to hire more people. This may not be feasible given current budgets.

The second is to decrease workload. In short, taking the approach that instead of trying to do “more with less,” that it’s okay to do “less with less.” Five nines of uptime give way to three nines, and applications previously handled in-house are outsourced to a cloud services provider. There are some disadvantages to doing things this way, of course.

The third is to find a way to decrease the complexity of your network – perhaps by using management tools that provide a broad overview of the network and how the applications are performing. The only downside there is that if you don’t use these tools correctly, instead of making the job easier, an additional manager could just end up increasing the complexity of the network that much more.

All three of these solutions have the possibility of being disruptive – at least in the short term – and monitoring your network for those disruptions is the quickest way to get to the root cause of them.

Though CA Technologies and CA|NetQoS are vendors of aforementioned management and monitoring tools, I’m pretty comfortable suggesting that if you can hire more people, that it might be a good idea to do that first, if you’re making decisions about where to spend the budget money. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

First, no diagnostic, monitoring, or management tool can replace a network engineer with a good head on his or her shoulders. All a tool can show you is where the problem lies; the engineer has to come up with the solution.

Second, if you have engineers who know what they’re doing, they’ll be the ones to suggest the tools that they need, rather than buying tools first and then trying to train engineers on the proper use of the tools chosen on their behalf. A good engineer with a mediocre management tool is better than a mediocre engineer with the best stuff in the world, after all.

(Not that we don’t want you to buy the best stuff in the world - which, if you haven’t guessed our particular bias, is our stuff…)

I’d like to call your attention to this Network World article called “Stop inventing mobile phones.” To be brief, there’s a huge market for mobile phones – the physical devices that is – and the operating systems and applications for them. But in this rush to develop a better box, it often seems that the infrastructure to operate them – the network – hasn’t kept up with that innovation.

Does this sound familiar?

It often seems like we come up with the applications first, then try to develop the infrastructure to support it – not just in mobile technology but in all of technology. The car was built before the highway system, for example. RealPlayer tried to show video back in the day of the 56.6k modem.

But as Network World points out, there are so many competitors in the crowded mobile phone marketplace. This is great for innovation, but all of these mobile phones have been hamstrung by a lack of innovation in the mobile infrastructure.

Generally, it’s not a good idea to deploy apps until you verify your network can handle them.

ComputerWorld is saying that “IT job statisfaction plummets to all time low” in an article by Patrick Thibodeau.

Hagan said there is a lot of pent-up dissatisfaction in the IT workplace, as well as a backlog of people who normally would have moved to a different job in a stable economy. The recession has resulted in "unnaturally low attrition levels," he said.

I’ve just handed in my two weeks notice.

No, that’s not a hypothetical or hyperbole; I really did. January 22, 2010, will be my last day at CA|NetQoS.

Thing is, I’m not dissatisfied with my job here. I’m actually quite satisfied with it. When you talk about carrot and stick motivations – there’s no stick.

I’m taking another job because that job allows me to do something I’ve wanted to do my entire adult live – live and work in another country. In this case, specifically, I’ll be working for a startup called TemplateDigital.com, and living in Tauranga, New Zealand. CA|NetQoS always required (with good reason) that I remain here, and telecommuting wasn’t an option.

Even so, over the past three years, what I’ve been able to do here has helped me – I’ve been very happy here, and I think that the main factors in why I’ve been happy comes down to two things: the freedom to try new ideas, and a culture that rewards learning new skills. Because of this, I’ve been doing more work with video production and editing. I think my writing’s improved as well.

It is these improved skills and this risk taking, in fact, that allowed me to land the new job; but also kept me happy at this one.

Over on Slashdot, where they’re discussing the article, a prevailing thought has been that a few people are happier as contractors than they are as full time IT professionals. There are a variety of reasons, but one of them is the freedom of risk-taking and the ability to drive one’s own learning.

Anyway, I have to start packing, so the rest of this article will be written by the Marke-Tron 3000™ blog-posting robot, who we’ll have to rely on until we can line up a replacement.

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The Consumer Electronics Show is about to begin in Las Vegas; and it’s interesting to see some of the technologies that are coming out – and speculate on how they might impact the enterprise IT environment.

First, there’s the Phone Wars, heating up with Google coming out with the Nexus One, which is an open smart phone, compared to the current market leader, the Apple iPhone, which is a closed smart phone. 

It looks (to me, anyway) like Apple’s making a similar mistake to what they made in the 1980s and early 1990s – they’ve created a closed-down product and priced it at a premium, while competitors are creating much more open products which start out as expensive but become less so as the technologies mature.  This openness allows Google to take more risks with offering services related to the Web and leveraging cloud computing.  (After all, a smart phone has a teeny-weeny little processor in it – you don’t want to do any heavy number crunching on that!)

Still, the iPhone has one main advantage over Nexus (and RIM’s BlackBerry) – the iPhone has hardware encryption that cannot be turned off, and applications are tightly controlled.  In short, it’s more secure, making possible inroads into enterprise markets.  ReadWriteWeb has a few pieces of advice from their coverage of the Nexus One that IT managers can follow to secure it for use with an IT network – especially on government networks or defense contractor networks.

• Make sure that the device can be locked and swiped of its data if a user loses their Nexus One.


• Make sure Exchange ActiveSync is installed on the device so permissions for accessing data can be set up according to the policy set by the enterprise.


• Provide the ability to configure the device to remotely provision application clients and device interfaces used to reach the application source (e.g. Wi-Fi, VPN).


• Allow for PKI support that allows Android devices to receive and ingest digital certificates. The use of certificates helps automate connectivity to enterprise applications via Wi-Fi, VPN and web by making authentication transparent to users.

There’s also the impact of the Cradlepoint 4G routers – devices that essentially convert and route ambient city-wide 4G WiMax signals to the more prevalent 802.11n signals which more standard WiFi network interfaces can use.  The idea is that people who have WiFi, but not WiMax, on their laptops can use 4G service, as well as enable someone to pay for one 4G connection, and transfer that to multiple boxen – roommates, for example, or even small businesses. 

Finally, there’s the expansion of the VUDU service.  VUDU is an on-demand Internet movie rental service – you hook up a box to your TV, and voila, you can rent movies from it.  It’s branching out, however, as it’s now going to be available built-in to multiple TVs, and will have internet “applications” for specific sites – Flickr, Pandora, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Stock Tracking, etc.

Because of technologies like Vudu, we’re starting to see the – well, not the beginning, because we’re too far in – but the “beginning of the middle” of the TV/Internet convergence. 

It seems less like “news” and more like an eventuality, but Skype is putting forward an HD version of its software. In addition to two-way video teleconferencing at 720p on computers, Skype is teaming up with LG and Panasonic to produce TVs with Skype built in – including webcams and connection – no computer required.

I had a feeling this was coming back in October 09, when Lifesize announced its “Passport” product that would allow you to hook up Skype to a 720p TV. I would not be surprised if much of the technology that went into the passport ended up in the new LG and Panasonic TVs.

Obviously, higher resolution Skype means higher bandwidth needs for Skype on your network. Well – eventually. See, most Webcams aren’t high-definition, and so you’ve got a little bit of time before HD webcams hit the market. They’re not cheap either – HD requires larger sensors to produce an image with the same amount of light as SD, so early HD webcams are going to be around $100 USD or more; compared to $15-20 for a cheap webcam.

What we have here is a similar kind of network disruption technology that occurred when YouTube went high def; only this time, instead of sucking down only bandwidth, Skype’s conversations are also latency based. So, if you’re not using Skype for business, you’re going to want to keep it out of the latency sensitive class of service; and if you are using Skype for business, you’re going to want to make sure it has the bandwidth it needs in the higher level QoS without it drowning out your other latency sensitive apps.

We’ll try to get more details on Skype’s codec and bandwidth requirements soon.

There’s a joke about how Bono, once, while performing at a gig, asked for total silence, then, slowly, started clapping his hands. Once. Then Twice. Then three times. And, still clapping, he said to the crowd: “Every time I clap my hand, a child in Africa dies.”

At which point, the crowd yelled back in unison: “Then stop doing it, you evil son-of-a--!”

We wouldn’t normally be talking about Bono except that he’s recently written an editorial in the New York Times talking, in part, about intellectual property, taking the stance that:

“The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files.”

The comparison isn’t apt. The movie industry is actually doing quite well, despite the fact that the filesize hasn’t been an issue for either copyright infringers or legal downloads. (High definition instant streaming, after all, is a reality.) And I have never heard of anybody pirating a newspaper – their problems are coming from entirely different sources altogether. Television advertisements are going down, yes, but that’s mainly due to digital video recorders that allow you to skip commercials and increased competition from video games and the Internet – not TV piracy.

Users on various social media sites (such as Reddit.com) are angry at him because they feel it’s a bit of a conflict of interest to have Bono, a major holder of intellectual property (in the form of his stake in Elevation Partners as well as his U2 songs) writing an editorial in the New York Times calling for tracking of content online.

In fact, he cites China’s efforts to track online dissent as evidence to show that content can indeed be tracked online – simultaneously arguing for a totalitarian approach to network control by the state while completely missing the point that even a totalitarian approach to network control by the state doesn’t catch every dissenter or file sharer.

Musicians are angry at him for arguing that “the young, fledgling songwriters” (whom Internet distribution has actually served the most) “can’t live off ticket and t-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us,” when the realities of the music business is that unless you are huge, like U2 or Bono, you typically don’t get any money off of the albums, and live entirely off of ticket sales and merchandising.

(You could chalk the latter up to ignorance; but when you have a podium as large as Bono’s, and a forum as great as the New York Times, it behooves you to do some research before speaking with authority.)

But this should also make network managers angry as well. First, he suggests that the “reverse Robin Hooding benefits… rich service providers.”

You know, I don’t see it. Legal streaming video, like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, Skype, etc. are more than enough incentive for people to buy high-throughput and high-bandwidth packages; copyright infringement, if anything, increases the amount of traffic on the network, which leads to (slightly) lower profits for the ISPs – and in some cases, leading to poorer network performance. Look at Comcast’s use of the Sandvine solution to send forged RST packets. If copyright infringement helped, rather than hurt, ISPs, this would have been a move that made no sense for Comcast to take. (As it is, they found a different solution – but to the same problem.)

In fact, finding ways to decrease the impact of copyright infringement on network performance is a big motivator for many enterprises – not just the ISP.

But you knew that. The point is that Bono is speaking to people who don’t.