We ran into Luke Kanies, the founder of Reductive Labs, which develops the open source server and desktop automation tool "Puppet."

Puppet is designed to let you run system administrative tasks automatically on multiple systems – even if those systems use different operating systems. All you do is input the configuration you’re used to handling, and Puppet automatically configures the servers for you.

Below, Kanies talks about Puppet and open-source development for enterprise and system administration projects.

At the InnoTech conference yesterday, one of the speakers there was with Yahoo!’s marketing department, which drew my attention to Yahoo! Podcasts.

There are many non-technical people who really could use a solution that allows for easy podcast creation, embedding in blogs, and hosting. In other words, a “YouTube” for audio and podcasters.

But this isn’t what Yahoo Podcasts is. Yahoo Podcasts is just a directory of podcasts. And it’s shutting down at the end of this month, anyway.

For many of us, a podcast isn’t an onerous burden. Install Wordpress, install the podcast plugin of your choice, upload the podcast – that is, of course, assuming you’re familiar with FTP, Wordpress, Installing plugins for wordpress, and have your own hosting provider.

There are options, but most of them have caveats. Odeo is free, but limited, painful to use, and although a friend of mine uses them, I can’t figure out where you’re supposed to upload your MP3 file. Podbean is free for very limited services (5GB bandwidth/100MB hosting) but requires paying for the service after that.

It seems that there would be room in the market – especially for one of the major players, such as Yahoo! – to create an advertising-supported “YouTube -for Podcasts” with hosting, automatic file conversion, and embedded flash web widgets. But there is none. There are literally dozens of options if you want to put video on the Web – YouTube, and Google Video are just the basics. It’s gotten to the point where there are specialty video hosting services – “Helpful Video” for how-tos, “TeacherTube” for educational videos, “GodTube” for Christian religious videos and “JewTube” for Jewish religious videos. This all makes me wonder if God could create a Web site so bandwidth heavy even He couldn’t host it.

If you want to put audio on the Web, though – as far as I can tell, you have to host it yourself.
Which makes me wonder why.

First, is there a lack of demand? I don’t think so. While video producing is getting easier, it still requires expensive equipment and some video editing knowledge. With free tools like Audacity, podcasters can record with a $10 microphone plugged into the sound-card – that’s if their computer doesn’t come with a microphone already. Who hasn’t fooled around with SoundRecorder.exe in Windows, at the very least? Sure, YouTube may appear to the TV star in most of us – but all of us sing in the shower.

What I think may be scaring potential service providers from creating a site like YouTube for audio is – seriously – litigation.

YouTube has enough problems with litigation from major television companies – but they’ve managed to avoid it because of the nature of video and the artificial limitations placed upon it. First, a YouTube video that violates copyright does not give you anywhere near the quality of broadcast, SD TV. Heck, it doesn’t give you the quality of most pirated TV Xvid files! The compression introduces artifacts which make any illicit copies a poor substitute for the real thing. With a 100MB filesize maximum, the quality of the original file before transcoding probably wasn’t that good to begin with. Audio takes less bandwidth and thus requires less compression – meaning any streaming audio service will sound pretty darn good, compared to the CD or the digital music file sold by the record companies.

Secondly, YouTube’s 10 minute max-length limit prevents uploading 22 minute television shows. However, if an audio version of the service existed, 10 minutes is plenty for most songs – even “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” is pretty darn long – at around 8 ½ minutes. But for a talk show or an audio podcast – 10 minutes is very short.

And as we well know by now, the RIAA is very litigious in its “War on Fun.” What podcasting service would take the risk these days – when you can just wait for the labels to self-destruct and start your service up then?

Right now I’m helping friend-and-boss Pam with her side-project blog, built on WordPress, with PodPress. It’s somewhat technical and, while I’m glad PodPress has made podcasting much easier, I’m also dismayed that it’s still likely beyond most end-users. Hopefully, someone will finally create that killer Web SAAS project that bring podcast publishing to the masses.

Spent most of the day in the InnoTech conference in Austin, (thus the shortness of this post). I learned three things there: 1) I need to get a better cellphone, because everyone is texting each other and my phone can’t. 2) I’ve gone without a Twitter account for too long. 3) Users are beginning to expect more speed more quickly.

We’ve talked a bit before about how users aren’t objective – a switch from 200ms response time to 150ms response time is the best thing in the world – a switch from 50ms response time to 100ms response time is frustrating – even though it’s less than 150ms, objectively.

But at InnoTech, the emphasis placed on rich media like video and sound, as well as the expectations of speed elsewhere on the Web may make that a little moot. If a user is used to waiting 15 seconds for a YouTube video, they may not be as willing to wait 30 seconds for a database – SAAS is especially affected by this.

Our expectations are that things are getting faster.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

There's an essay that's going around some of the top news sites, called "If Wishes were iPhones, then beggars would call," about the idea of 3rd party tools on the iPhone.

The main point of the article is this:

Apple has been unwaveringly clear that the iPhone is theirs. Not yours, not Ambrosia's, not J. Random Hacker's. You may own the hardware, but you only have a limited license to use the software, and an ongoing contract to use the network. If you don't like those terms, your only recourse is to shop somewhere else to begin with….

I don't understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want.

I don't know what it is either; I just know that it exists. It is the urge in all mad scientists to go grave robbing for old, discarded technology that can be put to new use, to twist and mangle things into doing what they were never designed - or ought never - to do, to cackle with glee as we defy the laws of man, God, and nature to raise our voice up to the heavens, and scream against the thunder, "LIFE! GIVE MY CREATION LIFE!"

My first computer was built in 1996 - back in the days when IRQ conflicts were a serious problem and required setting jumpers to modify - by a family friend from old discarded PC parts that would have otherwise ended up on a rubbish heap. We dubbed it "Frankenstein."

The end result of all this stuff is an entire geek subculture, only starting to show through - of hardware hackers. In two weeks, for example, the Maker Faire is coming to our home town of Austin where people make stuff by breaking stuff - there's an entire sub-exhibit on taking old children's toys and making them into strange instruments - called Circuit Bending. There's a few displays which show off the capabilities of the Arduino, an electronics prototyping board which can be configured for a variety of purposes. And on the networking side; demonstrations of how to build your own Beowulf clusters.

But that's the geek mentality. Create. Invent. Remix.

Apple's whole business model is stifling those tendencies in exchange for providing a simpler product - and that's not a bad thing for Apple, because they get to sell to the 90% of the human population that aren't geeks and don't want to bother with figuring out new and exciting ways to do things. They even stopped carrying a mid-range tower line of computers. But if you notice, Apple sticks well to the consumer side of the market, not the enterprise side - sure, they have the Xserve, but they really haven't followed up with other entries into the enterprise market since its introduction.

In enterprises we've seen a trend over this past decade from big, proprietary system management frameworks to individual tools that work together, and I think that can be attributed to the Frankenstien Syndrome. Even Cisco is breaking up their IOS into different modules. We here at NetQoS sell all our products individually, even though they all work together through the NetQoS Performance Center Web portal. We even made it a clear goal to allow third-party Web applications - any third party Web application - to work with the NetQoS Performance Center. Figure out a way to map network slowdowns to Google Maps? Go ahead, we won't stop you.

Because it's important to harness - not stifle - those geek tendencies which make geeks so well suited for enterprise networking.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

For many years, Slashdot has been the gold standard of technical news online; the most successful blog that pre-dates the word "blog." (By about two months, actually…) It has been a haven for the geeky and the nerdy and a cultural meme over the past decade. We spoke to the creator and editor of Slashdot, Rob Malda, (also known as CmdrTaco,) previously as part of our coverage of Slashdot's Firehose. Now, as Slashdot reaches its 10th anniversary, we speak with him again about the Web site's past and its future.

How would you compare your experiences from 1997 to 1998 - that first year running Slashdot, compared to running the site today? (This post from January 1998 is fascinating and it showed how quickly the site grew!)

Rob Malda
--Credit: Derrick Story/O'Reilly Network

I guess the difference is that back then it was a hobby. I'd do it in my living room instead of going out at night with friends. Now it's a job - I do it in an office with my friends. Of course back then there were no business pressures except my time. The hardware was simple (one machine sitting under my desk!) and the software was almost entirely written by me. These days I manage a good number of people to accomplish essentially the same stuff.

You've mentioned that the coolest story was the day you proposed to your wife. What was the lamest?

We've posted like 80,000 stories... I'd never be able to choose from among the thousands of lame stories which one is the lamest. ;)

In 1997, posting a bunch of short articles with links in reverse chronological order was rare and novel. Nowadays, there's an entire blogging industry. How do you feel about Slashdot's role in the evolution of blogging; and consequently, the role of Slashdot in advancing Western Civilization. (I'm only half kidding about that last one.)

Well, there is a lot of content on the intertubes every day.

Slashdot's role is to act as a content filter for all of it. To sift through a thousand rocks and find a dozen nuggets. There are a number of ways to do this task- you can have a single person do it, or let a thousand people vote on it, but we use our own particular method which I think has a lot of advantages. Individuals have taste. They can prevent mob rule. They can enforce editorial or stylistic standards. As for Western Civilization, I choose not to limit us to this hemisphere.

Well, that's kind of my question - to take the metaphor further, when you started searching for the nuggets, there were few places that did. Now you've got a gold rush of hundreds of thousands of bloggers - not even including the social news sites. What do you feel Slashdot's role is - how did your being first to the gold mine influence those who came after you?

Our role is to be a content filter worth having. There's more content now than there was in '97, so there's more need for good filters with integrity and a sense of what matters. We still do that today just as good as we did then, and by many measures, better than anyone else.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Rob Malda on Ten Years of Slashdot" »

Have you ever thought to yourself: “Gee, I really wish there was some way to get a bunch of news from a variety of sources compiled in the same place, where people vote on what they believe to be the most newsworthy stories of the day.”?

Well, if you have, then you’ll probably be happy to know there are now 27 billion Web sites which do exactly that. (How you missed them for so long, I’ll never know.)

Network Performance Daily is proud to announce its adventurous venture in to this horribly overcrowded marketplace with our own “Social News” site catering specifically to enterprise networking – The Pipe @ Network Performance Daily.

Want to share a story with the world? Submit it. Like someone else’s story? Digg Er…Drip it up! Comment on the news. Comment on comments on the news. Comment on comments on comments on the news. Wacky Recursive Commenting Fun for the Whole Family!

We even have an introductory video for you:

In the end, there’s no experience like going to see it for yourself. Check it out at http://thepipe.networkperformancedaily.com.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

A couple of months ago, KEYE-TV in Austin, Texas (where this blog is based) did a story on the Texas Legislature. That story found its way to YouTube and got to the front page of Reddit, which is where I heard about it.

In the Texas legislature, when it's time to vote on a bill. Texas has an electronic voting system - Congressmen press one of three buttons on their desks to register a Yay, Nay, or Abstention, and that vote is shown on the electronic board at the front of the chamber.

What the video shows is that representatives - both Democrat and Republican - are actually voting more than once on bills. They rush around like it's a free-for-all, pushing not only their own buttons but, it seems, as many of their colleagues' buttons as well - voting up to four times on the same bill.

Rep. Debbie Riddle (R-Tomball) justified it as saying that since there's no bathroom breaks or breaks for lunch, that it's a matter of necessity - despite the fact that it's clearly against the House's own rules.

But the idea of politicians voting more than once on a bill came as a shock to many people - including myself. This is because, though the Lege, (as we call it here in Texas) is monitored on cable TV, the view changes and does not actually show the members voting when they do. It took a different type of monitor - the KEYE-TV crew - to actually show what's really going on.

It's a matter of deploying the right monitoring equipment in the right places at the right times - a matter of making sure you have the ability not only to view all of the information from end to end but to be able to drill down and see what's going on with individual instances. This is why monitoring is so important.

Or rather, if you just looked at this from a "fault" perspective - those red and green lights in the Lege still lit up fine. If you didn't actually see what happened when the legislators on the floor, you'd have no idea anything was amiss with the legislature's performance.
Louis P. Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, famously remarked: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."

The same can be said of network monitoring - you need to know what's happening on your network, otherwise things that look fine on the outside may actually be all screwed up.

Special Editorial Comment
By Brian Boyko, Editor, Network Performance Daily.
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Since we started this blog in October of 2006, I've been consumed with three questions: 1) "How can I help inform my readers?" 2) "What would my readers like to read about?" and 3) "Can't anybody find me... somebody to love?"

I still can't find the answer to #3, but I think we've done a very good job with the first two. And this is the 300th post on Network Performance Daily.

Yay us!

In all seriousness, we've covered some amazing stories over the past 300 posts. And just like the "Golden Girls" got suddenly nostalgic whenever there was a writer's strike, we thought we'd take a look back at some of the events of the past year.

Let's start with one of our earliest posts, Manish Chacko's "God Help The Help Desk"

Imagine a man walking into a hospital, saying that he doesn't feel good, and doctors around the country are immediately called in, starting with the cardiologist, who rules out heart trouble. The man is next wheeled to a podiatrist, who rules out any problems with his feet.He's then wheeled to a gynecologist (But I'm a man... Ma'am, I'm a doctor. I think I should make that determination - and only after the tests come back.) If your diagnostic process is trial by error, you're not, technically, diagnosing.

Remember this post from Carol Shiraldi, on "Why enterprise developers (generally) use Java and game programmers (generally) use C++"?

Gaming programmers are performance-oriented to the extreme, because if you release a game and it's slow, no one is going to use it no matter how cool it is or how many features it has. Other programmers often code first for functionality, and at the end of the cycle, start to worry about performance issues. Game programmers need optimized performance from the get-go. This means game programmers are willing to forgo certain things. For example, the enterprise side of the software world was very quick to move to Java when it first came out, but the game programmers didn't.

The first time I knew this blog would be big was when we got on Slashdot for our series on Windows Vista TCP/IP stack, including Ted Romer's "Vista's 'Next Generation' TCP/IP Stack and the Enterprise," and again for Steven Maercklein and Zack Belcher's "Vista TCP/IP Promises and Perils".

There was also the day that Lowell Heddings, of Dzone, asked us "Aren't routers boring?" and we responded.

Routers are designed to be boring. You don't want any one router to get "interesting" because it's probably having a host of issues - buffer overrun, CPU pegged at 100%, memory, etc. Like a war zone, it's a good day when nothing happens. In the networking world, it's a good day when no alerts are sent concerning any one router.

Probably I'm most proud of our coverage of the Julie Amero case, including this interview with Herb Horner. Without overstating our role in her eventual exoneration, I'm glad that we were able to help get her side of the story out in the blogosphere.

Our most controversial post has to be Jim Sampson's "Ten years of pushing for Linux adoption in the workplace (and why I gave up.)" With over 100 comments, it certainly was an eventful day.

We've been on BoingBoing, Slashdot, Digg, but sometimes, there's just something about when your story gets on Fark... as it did when we first announced Netcosm.

Another story that got on Fark was when Wafaa Bilal gave an interview regarding his art project in which he was confined to a room with a paintball gun controlled by people on the Internet.

We've had our share of experts and celebrities chiming in, from Linden Labs' Joe Miller talking about VoIP in Second Life, to the day we were "schooled by Vint Cerf," the day we interviewed the man who invented the flying car, and when I got to speak to a teenage-geek-hero of mine, Rob Malda, a.k.a. CmdrTaco, editor of Slashdot.

Of course, to top it all off, ComputerWorld decided to interview us for a story they were doing on corporate blogging.

What a long strange trip it's been.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

I'm supposed to be a technogeek, right? Up on the latest and greatest gadgetry. I get called on international radio morning shows to talk about the latest trends, I'm a professional blogger - a career that didn't exist half a decade ago, I'm a smart dude with all the latest tech toys, doing viral videos with my $100 flash-memory vidcam. I'm 100% Web 2.0'n, YouTubein', Facebook Friendin', RSS Feedin', Linuxin', Twenty-First-Century-Digital-Boy.

But my cellphone is about four years old and I don't use it for anything other than making phone calls. No texting, no Web browsing. It just makes phone calls. And I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon.

My friends - especially those who live overseas - all wonder why I don't yet have an iPhone, the "wundertoy" of the century. The answer can be found in Cory Doctorow's post for Information Week. In short, the iPhone sucks on purpose. Sure, it's slick looking, has a beautiful interface, and provides a great playlist. But, does it live up to its full potential? Hardly. And you have vendor lock-in to blame.

It's possible to use a song in your iTunes library as a ring tone, but someone at Apple decided they wouldn't let you. It's possible to use the iPhone on multiple carriers, or to not lock-in customers for two-year service agreements, but someone at Apple decided, for whatever reason, they wouldn't let you. It's possible to switch out SIM cards so that you'd be able to use the iPhone internationally, but - well, you get the pattern by now.

This is where VoIP comes in.

Already, we have pocket-sized computers that we carry with us - Palm Pilots and Blackberries. Despite the lukewarm acceptance of Microsoft's "Origami" initiative, ultra-mobile computing isn't that far off.
Desktop computing took off because it was a general purpose device. You can play games with it. You can send messages with it. You can write papers with it, you can draw, you can compose music - you can do all those things with the right software on general hardware. That's the big draw.

So when the iPhone comes out, for all intents and purposes a semi-powerful computer that you can hold in your pocket, the first thing Apple does is lock it down so that you can only do what Apple says you can do. It turns a general purpose device into a limited purpose device.

Additionally, despite setbacks in getting municipal WiFi off the ground, I can't see, for the life of me, the possibility that wireless access points will decrease over the next decade - only that they're not increasing at the rate that we'd like. It won't be long before Wi-Fi coverage overshoots many of the major phone carriers cellular networks - it has to, because the cellphone companies have chosen non-interoperable standards and done their best to lock people into them. Wi-Fi, on the other hand, generally pushes out the same bits, no matter where you are in the world. So while AT&T may have deep pockets, the larger number of smaller pockets putting out Wi-Fi spots around the world will move faster and change with the technology instead of trying to halt technological change in order to milk more money out of an obsolete business model.

Companies such as Skype have already laid the foundation for VoIP's replacement of the cellphone network. Companies such as OpenMoko are working on the hardware aspect of cellphone computing. I'd be surprised if these two industries weren't already talking to each other about creating a "chocolate and peanut butter" solution which will make VoIP over WiFi the killer app of the cellphone, and cellphone connectivity the killer app of VoIP over WiFi.

It's an idea that Cisco had a while back. Remember the brouhaha over the "iPhone" trademark? Well, it turns out that Cisco put out the "Linksys iPhone" a while back - a phone designed to make calls over Skype. At $120 from Amazon - with only Skype fees to pay after that, this is a technology which fills a need. The only problems are that it is currently overshadowed by the Apple product of the same name, and that, for right now, the cellphone companies do have better network coverage. That won't last long though.

The big elephant in the room is that no one really likes the cellphone companies. Indeed, a great part of the AT&T/Apple deal was Apple banking on the goodwill of the Apple corporate brand name. And so all it takes to upset the apple cart of their market share is for someone to offer a product that offers everything - including the same or better call quality - that the cellphone companies do, and not "suck on purpose." (Oh, and maybe a slick looking slim-line case with chrome accents.) When that happens, VoIP is going to take off not just for enterprise networking but for personal computing - and VoIP monitoring becomes that much more important for providers to ensure call quality, and network administrators to make sure that VoIP traffic doesn't interfere with business.

Tired of playing Salieri to Microsoft's Mozart in the office suite area, IBM has been making a few aggressive moves into this market as of late.

The company recently decided to back open-source Office competitor, OpenOffice.org, dedicating engineers to working on the OpenOffice project - much as they dedicated engineers to working on Linux years ago. This is beneficial to OpenOffice.org if only because many of the features that OpenOffice.org have not yet implemented have already been solved with IBM's relatively less successful Lotus suite - from access to the visually impaired.

Of course, the move to back OO.o is a major turnaround from IBM's policy 18 months ago, when they said they had no plans to contribute to OO.o.

This shift in strategy is perhaps a response to Microsoft's aggressive stance towards making its OOXML document format a standard, (recently rejected,) as a way to enforce vendor lock-in. Recently, IBM announced combined OpenOffice and their in-house "Eclipse", called it "Lotus Symphony" and is now offering the Beta free for SuSE, Red Hat, and Windows users - with the main selling point being that there's no vendor lock-in with the Symphony product.

From the Symphony.lotus.com Web site:

How is Lotus Symphony different?

You're in charge! Lotus Symphony is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard-which means you're not locked into proprietary file formats, software licensing agreements and upgrades. Finally, free tools and freedom of choice!

For the end-user in a corporate environment, the big deal is that IBM, unlike the OO.o team, can offer support and services for Symphony rollouts and maintenance. That may be music to the ears of those pushing for adoption of open-source application suites in their own companies to save costs, who can now justify that they will be able to get support for those same applications.

Once they do so, IBM can then turn around and sell them the not-so-free Outlook/Exchange competitors, Lotus Notes and the associated backend products. Irwin Lazar at Collaboration Loop points out this is a similar strategy to Apple using the iPod to drive Mac computer sales.

Those interested in finding out more about Symphony can take a look at ZDNet's review of the Symphony suite.