By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Heather Havenstein at ComputerWorld just released a story online about corporate blogging - about how corporate blogs sound less like re-hashed press releases and have started sounding - well, more like humans. More like people. More like… us.

July 30, 2007 (Computerworld) -- NetQoS Inc. is a vendor of network performance management software. But you'd be hard-pressed to figure that out from some of the online posts written by Brian Boyko, the Austin-based company's designated corporate blogger.

In April, for example, a Boyko post about the Interplanetary Internet project - which is designed to extend the Net into outer space - prompted Internet luminary Vinton Cerf to post a comment on NetworkPerformanceDaily.com, the NetQoS blog.

And over the course of several months this year, the blog gained national attention after Boyko posted multiple entries about the case of a Connecticut school teacher whom a jury convicted on charges of risking injury to a minor for allegedly exposing students to pornographic images that appeared on a classroom computer.

Well, thanks, ComputerWorld! I'm glad that you consider NPD a major driving force in the world of corporate blogging. Ah, the life of a blogger! Women want me, men want to be me…

More seriously, I figured I'd use this as an excuse to talk about some of the points in the article - not to disagree with them but just to give you my view. The main thesis of the piece, which I overall agree with, is a good place to start:

Companies such as NetQoS, which launched its blog nine months ago, are eschewing Corporate Blogging 1.0 tactics that often result in blogs being used merely to post static marketing materials as an extension of companies' Web sites. Now, a growing number of businesses are opening up their blogs to provide an outlet for the same kind of uncensored commentary and interaction that have made personal blogs such a popular medium on the Web.

I'm not sure I like the nomenclature of "Corporate Blogging 1.0." We're very much in "Corporate Blogging 0.9 beta" - those early efforts are probably best recognized as early alpha builds - if you're going for the version number metaphor. There is so much - so incredibly much for us to learn! I have trouble understanding why our story with Vint Cerf wasn't picked up by Slashdot when a "filler" editorial I did on Dungeons and Dragons was. I have trouble figuring out how one story on Slashdot netted over 100 comments, yet another story on Slashdot netted only 10, and neither of those stories got as many comments as there were on Slashdot, talking about the same story.

While I know more than most about this field on the theoretical level, what I know has not seen a lot of field testing yet, compared to more established areas of expertise, and there are going to be better ways to communicate with the audience that simply haven't been found yet - blogging is just so new.

And there is this paragraph, near the conclusion:

"It has to be a realistic discussion about industry trends and issues that are important, potentially even issues that are antagonistic or troublesome," Fishkin said. Otherwise, "you look even more ridiculous than if you never attempted it."

I'm not sure about that. I can look pretty ridiculous anyway…

That's "Sysadmin Appreciation Day."

If you happen to be a regular reader of Network Performance Daily that also doesn't happen to read at least one of the following: Slashdot, Digg, Network World, HardOCP, and numerous other publications, you'll be glad to learn that today is Sysadmin Appreciation Day.

Similar to Secretaries Day, SAD is a day, celebrated on the last Friday in June, when we remember the gifts of the people in the basement IT rooms, consigned to live a life away from the sun, who keep everything running but are almost never seen unless something goes wrong.

Sorta like shoe-maker's gnomes, only with routers.

The big problem with WAN Optimization and Application Performance Monitoring was that there simply wasn't a WAN Optimization solution on the market that preserved end-to-end performance data, nor a monitoring solution that would work in an optimized WAN.

This problem has been solved.

At Cisco Networkers in Anaheim, NetQoS gave a presentation to hundreds of attendees to make the announcement that we've been working with Cisco to develop a management interface for accurate end-to-end application response time measurement that works on optimized networks. (In addition to the people mobbing our booth, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, stopped by for a chat and review of what we do.)

Through integrated software on Cisco Wide Area Application Services devices (WAAS), TCP header information is exported to NetQoS SuperAgent (an end-to-end application performance monitoring module) before optimization occurs - preserving that information. Finally, IT organizations can accurately validate the results of WAN Optimization deployments.

(Continued…)

Continue reading "Tracking The Optimized WAN: NetQoS Integrates with Cisco WAAS to Deliver End-to-End Application Response Time Reporting for WAN Optimization" »

By Brian Boyko

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of an academic paper not yet published, doing a comparative content analysis of the "Daily Show" and the network nightly news broadcasts. Not surprisingly, the "Daily Show" actually conveyed a similar amount of substantive material - that is, information without jokes - as the network news broadcasts.

But in that paper, written by Prof. Julia R. Fox, Glory Koloen, and Volkan Sahin at Indiana University-Bloomington, there was a passage that caught my attention.

"Although the two sources were found here to be equally substantive, are they equally informative? There is debate among scholars as to how well soft news shows, in which The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is categorized by some (Baumgartner & Morris, 2006), can inform their viewers…. the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election survey found younger viewers of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart answered more political questions correctly than respondents who did not watch that show ("Stewart's 'stoned slackers,'" 2004).

Experimental research may well substantiate this corelational survey data suggestion that viewers may actually process and remember substantive information presented on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart better than when it is presented on more serious sources of political information. When viewers see positive messages that are appetitively activated (in an approach mode towards the message) and tend to encode more information than when they are aversively activated while viewing a negative message (Fox, Park, & Lang, 2006; Lang, 2006a; Lang, 2006b; Lang, Sparks, Bradley, Lee, & Wang, 2004). Previous studies have found that political coverage is often negative… In contrast, although The Daily Show with Jon Stewart may also be negative in tone, the appetitive system is likely to be activated by the humor on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and by the audience's laughter, which may elicit emotional contagion (McDonald & Fredin, 2001).

Or, to sum up without the Ph.D. language: "Maybe the fact that Stewart is funny causes people to remember the important stuff more."

I too had read the "Stoned Slackers" article from CNN, and thought at the time that it was not particularly surprising that the Daily Show viewers were likely to know more about the election, thinking something along the lines that the Daily Show just attracted smart viewers - Stewart doesn't exactly do sophomoric humor on his show. But now I'm not so sure.

Certainly, the professors and teachers that I remember the most from are those teachers who used humor on a day to day basis to get their points across. Walter Lewin, professor of Physics at MIT embodies this idea - his class lectures have made it to YouTube, where he tells a student, quite matter of factly, that "So what I'm going to do now, Simon, I'm going to beat you with cat fur." Not that Prof. Lewin's classes are all laugh-riots, but I think the students paid attention and retained more of that information for that experiment than if he had just read from the text book.

Of course, especially in the technical fields, it's incredibly important to be able to learn new skills and tackle new problems. Today's darling language is tomorrow's obsolescence - COBOL comes to mind, although C++ programmers now find that they're migrating to AJAX and RUBY in order to produce the Web apps that are now in demand, rather than the console apps that were once king.

So why are technical demonstrations and technical skill-imparting meetings are often so painfully dull? If you want to impart information to be retained, it's usually best to add a bit of humor to the information. Even we've been doing this for a while at Network Performance Daily - making jokes in the Tuesday and Thursday link posts, adding humor where possible and appropriate. (Heck, I was even hired in part because I do have some professional comedy training.)

Certainly, many technical people aren't known for their comedy, and the only thing less funny than zero-humor content is humor content from people who aren't actually funny. But if someone in the IT department has this talent, it should be encouraged, not repressed due to a stifling corporate culture. Investors and clients will know you're serious from the job you do - and you can do a better job if you retain more relevant information.

Last Thursday, we put up a reader poll asking what type of content people would like to see on Network Performance Daily - and while we didn't get any sort of real representative sample, we did get enough people responding to get a very, very rough idea of why people read and what we should focus on in the future.

40% of you - as of Monday afternoon - wanted us to focus on covering Network Performance material - with other information secondary to this main goal. That's a huge chunk, and a majority. However, it would be rude to discount the 30% of people who want us to focus more generally on Enterprise IT, and the 30% of people who want us to focus more generally on technology.

Ultimately, we think this is a good mix, and while we haven't done any content analysis studies to back it up, I'd say that most of the stuff we do for Network Performance Daily roughly falls into that ratio - 40% Network Performance, 70% Enterprise IT (total) and 100% technology.

Of course, as I said, this isn't a representative sample, so we're going to continue to leave the poll up in a sidebar so that readers can continue to let their voices be heard.

Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Since we started Network Performance Daily, we had a number of goals that we wanted to achieve with it. I think we achieved some of them – but now Network Performance Daily has grown beyond what we imagined it would be. While we try to keep focused on IT, some of our biggest stories – Wafaa Bilal, Julie Amero, and others - have been a bit off that original path.

So what I was hoping to find out was – where do you – our readers, think we should go from here?

We put up a poll here so that you can give us feedback – and, of course, there’s always the comment section for more detailed commentary.

-- Brian Boyko
-- Editor, Network Performance Daily

Wafaa Bilal is a man being driven slowly insane, and I think I may have had something to do with it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story - which we've covered previously - Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal has locked himself in a room for 30 days with a paintball gun, which can be aimed and fired from an Internet Web site, by anyone who wishes to do so. He's done this primarily to make a point about distance, technology, and humanity - the idea that we are sending real bombs into a "conflict zone" from the safety of a "comfort zone" and how that makes us more likely to inflict pain, suffering, and death.

But his original plan might have been more than he bargained for. The article I wrote made it on the social news Web site, Digg.com and A-list blog, BoingBoing, where it was elevated to the front page. Network Performance Daily got over fifty thousand unique visitors from that exposure - I have no idea how many then went on to Wafaa's site. From the machine-gun sounds on his most recent video diary, I suspect quite a few.

Wondering what this might look like from a network perspective? Here's a video of experimental NetQoS' network monitoring technology that gives you an approximation of what that Digg/Slashdot effect looks like.

(The data for this video is provided by NetQoS' network monitoring software.)

While we hope to have an interview dealing with the technical aspects of Wafaa's "Digging," - and they are considerable - up soon, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the human aspects. Wafaa has been putting up a video journal of the days inside the locked room as his time inside progresses. And on day 14, well - you can just see for yourself below what happened.

Wafaa is visibly shaken, and things have quickly become "insane." If Wafaa's intention was to create a microcosm of conditions in Iraq - a model, in effect, of what it is like to live in the combat zone, then what have I, and Network Performance Daily, become in this model? Certainly, Wafaa wanted attention for the project - and I don't doubt that's ultimately what he believes will do the most good - but through this exposure, I have to ask myself whether or not I'm acting in a manner consistent with journalistic ethics (Yes, this is a company blog, but we don't hide that, and I do take ethics very seriously). Ultimately, I must report the truth while seeking to minimize harm. Instead, through our promotion of the project, Wafaa Bilal was hurt physically and harmed emotionally - possibly endangering his mental health as well.

And in Wafaa's model of a war-torn country inside four walls, I've become part of the war. I've become the media hawks who overtly or tacitly call for the war, by promoting the site and giving people access to that virtual battlefield.

So yes, even I fit into this model that Wafaa has cooked up… and ultimately, the experiment is not occurring inside those four walls. Like Douglas Adams' penned fictional character "Wonko the Sane," Wafaa has locked himself "outside" of the real world where the insane people who cause people lasting pain for a few brief moments of pleasure. The experiment is truly not in the Chicago Art Institute, but everywhere but there. After all, it is not Wafaa who pulls the trigger on that gun. It is us, outside of the "asylum."

Later on, I hope to talk to Jason Potkanski, who helped set up much of the networking backend for Domestic Tension - but before I did so, I wanted to be able to get that off my chest.

By Brian Boyko, Editor, Network Performance Daily.

Last week, the cartoon strip Dilbert, penned by Scott Adams, did a series on corporate blogging, in which the pointy-haired antagonist tells the hapless technical writer that he wants to write a blog - then orders the tech writer to write it for him. To add insult to injury, he says that the blog doesn't sound authentic enough and that in order to make it sound authentic, conversational and human, the technical writer should write the blog in the voice of Mark Twain.

Needless to say, the Dilbert fictional blog is a failure.

So I figured that it would be a good opportunity to explain a little bit about this corporate blog to the readership and explain to you how we do things, lest our image be confused with that of the Pointy Haired Boss and his Mark Twain blog.

First, Network Performance Daily is the corporate blog for NetQoS. Its most basic function is that of house organ. We talk about things we're working on, give you info on key upcoming events, etc.

But the site is more than just a house organ. We have the opportunity to provide relevant, in-depth news as it happens, and while there are many business tech publications, no one is really focused in on network performance.

Network performance is, after all, a niche of enterprise computing, which is a niche of network computing, which is a niche of computing, which is a niche of technology.

But then again, this is the Blogosphere, famous for what Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, calls "the long tail." If people out there weren't aware of everything that went on with network performance, well, there's no reason why we couldn't share our expertise and insight with them. This blog gives us the opportunity to communicate with our customers and the public at large. It also gives us the opportunity to provide some level of education and, yes, evangelism, for the concept of network performance and measuring end-user quality of service, rather than worrying solely about uptime. Many people don't understand how important network performance is to their organization. Most don't know how to measure the performance of their networks in ways that are meaningful to their end users.

And of course, even we don't have enough to say about network performance over the WAN every day, so we bring in topics of concern to the entire IT community and generally report on what's interesting in the field of IT. Though we haven't taken a position on Net Neutrality, we do know that whatever the end result of that debate turns out to be, it means a paradigm shift for network performance. We reported on Julie Amero because we believe that knowing what content is flowing over networks is the network engineer's responsibility. Right now we're talking to Adrian Hooke at NASA about Interplanetary Internet. It's amazing what we've been able to accomplish and I'm very proud of it.

But getting back to the Dilbert comic that prompted this bout of navel-gazing…

First, anyone in our company can submit a blog post at any time. I do, in my capacity as editor, help them flesh it out and get it ready for publication by helping to take their first drafts - or transcribed interviews - and put them into a readable form. No offense, but we have some very smart, technical people who write in a stilted, mechanical style that often confuses, rather than enlightens. Other times, I interview people outside the company who have expertise in a particular area and write an article on that.

So there's the full disclosure: I may edit for grammar and help people get their points across, but unlike Dilbert's fictional blog, if you see a person's picture or byline up on the post, they were the author. No one pretends to be someone else.

The blogosphere is a new medium - in fact, my job title at NetQoS is "new media specialist." So we don't always know the right course of action, don't always have a battle plan, and many times we're just playing it by ear. But we knew one thing from the first day: You can't fake authenticity.

By Brian Boyko, Editor, Network Performance Daily.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Vint Cerf is the creator of the Internet. He co-designed the TCP/IP protocol when he was working at DARPA, and currently serves as the chairman of ICANN. Of E-Week's Top 100 Most Influential People in IT, he ranks at #20. Among the geek set, he is the stuff of legend.

So I was honored to find out that he posted a reply to one of Network Performance Daily's Tuesday links, where I made fun of the idea of an Interplanetary Internet [additional info at Wikipedia] - an idea that Mr. Cerf has been working on with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I was also humbled because that reply was:

Re: Space Internet - You have completely misunderstood the design. We DON'T use TCP or even IP for the long haul. We use DTN - see RFC 4838 and also www.dtnrg.org for details. We use the TCP/IP protocols for onboard spacecraft and also in low delay environments on the surface of planets but DTN for the interplanetary components.

So, on one hand, Vint Cerf read what I wrote. On the other hand, he pointed out - correctly - that I dismissed the idea of Interplanetary Internet far too quickly.

Furthermore, one of the things that I wrote in that article was that it would take about a month and a half for a triple-handshake connection between Earth and Mars. This was, quite frankly, due to a dumb math error on my part. The actual time it takes, based on an Earth to Mars distance of 400 million km, and a speed of light of roughly 300,000 km/s, is roughly 1,333,333 milliseconds - or 22 minutes - 66 minutes for a triple handshake. High latency indeed, but not the two weeks per pass I had originally thought. (Never again will I make fun of the probe that crashed into Mars because of problems converting imperial measurements to metric.) The post has since been strike-through corrected.

I can only say that "a little knowledge is dangerous" and led me to make poor news judgment.

So I offer a personal apology, to Dr. Cerf, to the people at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and most importantly, to the readers. Following Dr. Cerf's links has led me to some information that I now find both very interesting and very relevant to people following networking and network performance.

RFC 4838 for Delay-Tolerant Networking Architecture and www.dtnrg.org are indeed very good sources of information about this protocol.

There are many benefits of adding interconnected networks to space technology. According to this Cisco press release, those benefits include improvements in interoperation and security with ground components, as well as additional flexibility in space design.

But the practical applications of the DTN protocol go far beyond space applications as the system is designed to be used among performance-challenged environments. Performance challenged environments include disaster recovery scenarios, the developing world, and various military applications.

The DTN protocol is designed to work with very large delays, including natural propagation delay, such as, for example, the delay between Earth and Mars. DTN is designed to work where standard Internet fails, by using variable-length messages instead of limited-sized packets, by using storage within the network to support store-and-forward operation over multiple paths and long timescales that do not require end-to-end reliability. This requires that space routers have the ability to retain data over a much longer period of time than a standard router, and to be able to retain that data even after a reboot. The DTN protocol also has added security (the last thing you want is Ernst Stavro Blofeld hacking into your spaceship-to-shore communications) and built in classes of service.

Applications that use DTN will also be designed to minimize the number of round-trip exchanges (and hopefully some of those development techniques will make their way into WAN environments.)
So the high-latency, low-reliability environment of outer space requires new protocols and new ways of thinking. And I can't think of anyone else more qualified to develop that protocol than Vint Cerf. After all, he's already got experience in the protocol development area.

Mr. Cerf also directed me to Adrian Hooke at NASA. I plan to ask him some questions about the technology later this week, and look forward to sharing that information with you in a future post.

Netcosm may look like a video game. But it’s not. It may have explosions and fire, but while it looks like Space Invaders, it isn’t Space Invaders.

Netcosm is an experiment in network data visualization designed to provide a “low cognitive burden” visual metaphor. In other words, it is meant to be as simple to understand as a child’s toy, it is not meant to be a child’s toy.

Still, many people talk about how they’d love to “see the network packets fighting” or would like to see it turned into a game.

I’ll admit that when I first saw Netcosm, it did remind me of the games produced by British game publisher Introversion, which include “Darwinia,” a game about a AI computer simulation, “Defcon,” a global thermonuclear warfare simulator inspired by the 1983 movie “WarGames,” and “Uplink,” about network computer security. All of these games have a “retro” feel to them.

So we’d like to throw this out there: “If you were going to turn Netcosm into a video game, how would you do it?”

DISCLAIMER: This does not mean we’re planning to do such a thing, but it does set the imagination afire. For example, if you could turn network administration into a game you can also turn it into a training simulation. Repeated “playings” of simulated scenarios can help network pros recover faster when the same situations happen in real life. And of course, it would be a hoot if tomorrow’s network administrators and engineers became familiar with the tools of enterprise networking through games played as teens – while people today have to start working for an enterprise before they have any “hands on” experience with enterprise networking.

We’d love to get your thoughts on this.

While we had the chance, we also wanted to thank TechCrunch, Kotaku, and Fark.com for linking to us. The YouTube video has almost 49,000 views, and over 6,000 unique visitors have come to the NetQoS site in the past week.