Just going to write up something quick because I was spending most of the day out with the rest of the marketing dept. working on something fun, but I wanted to draw your attention to today’s strip of “Real Life,” a comic written by gaming geek (and trained chef) Greg Dean, the premise, of course, being that Greg gets to (cheer/cry/laugh/fume) about events in his real life.

I’ve been a reader of “Real Life” since the “Fuego” comic. (I named a tabletop RPG character "Fuego" after the comic. Fuego had no fire-based powers, but he chose the name because "it just sounds so cool.")

I’m copying today’s cartoon for you, and it explains why “fast” Internet isn’t always as “fast” as you’d expect, and it shows the difference between throughput and latency.

As we all know by now, today is the 40^th anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing, unless you are one of those few who choose not to believe the Mythbusters when they debunked the idea of a moon landing hoax. Then there’s my uncle Edward, who believes that the moon landing was faked from a soundstage located on the surface of the moon.

Today, the moon landing is humbling for those of us who think in terms of networks, routers, and switches – the Internet is amazing in its communication potential, but for all the good it’s done, it’s still essentially terrestrial. The furthest the network travels is to orbital distance – and only as a waypoint.

Because of the sheer distances involved, new technologies have to be invented and improved, like Vinton Cerf’s InterPlaNet; and just as the Apollo mission gave us digital watches, cordless drills, the joystick, the smoke alarm, and so many others, interplanetary Internet promises similar advances for computer technology – from improvements in security for electronic mail, to improved performance in communication challenged environments, like disaster recovery scenarios, the developing world, and the military at wartime.

In fact, it was earlier this month (July 7^th, to be exact) that the International Space Station turned on the first node in a permanent Interplanetary Internet, using a protocol known as “Delay Tolerant Networking” (DTN for short) and is designed with huge latencies and dropped packets from solar storms, or being on the wrong side of a planet, in mind.

And while astronauts typically have more important things to do, they can Twitter. (“OMGWTFBBQ - Houston, we have a problem. :-(”)

One interesting thing I just learned was that Apollo 11 had its own minicomputer on board – minicomputer in the 1969 sense of the term – because there was a 2.5 second delay between Houston and Apollo 11 due to speed-of-light issues, and that 2.5 second delay was far too long for the astronauts, hurtling around the moon, to gather, send, retrieve, and act on data. I suppose there are parallels to cloud computing here, but I’d rather not stretch it.

Anyway, that minicomputer was the first of ever smaller and smaller computers, rather than ever larger and larger computers which characterized pre-1969 computer development. Now we have computers the size of – actually, I don’t know how small computers are nowadays; I’d mention the iPhone, but you just know someone’s coming out with a cellphone twice as powerful at half the size a month from now…

Point is, today’s a day when we can look back at one of the most powerful technological and scientific triumphs with a sense of techie-geek pride. It was the nerds with pocket protectors that got us to the moon and back. And I’m proud of that.

For too long, network administrators, engineers, and architects have longed for a way to determine dominance within the IT pack.  Unfortunately, those efforts have been stymied without a quick and convenient way to determine IT knowledge on a quantitative scale, leading to unsatisfying substitutes like Guitar Hero or Halo tournaments.

Finally, we have solved this problem.  We present:

The Network Rockstar Challenge

Oh, yeah.  We went big and bold with that link.  If the Blink or Marquee tags were still valid HTML, we’d use ‘em.  That’s how awesome it is.

In fact, when we beta-tested the game among our own crew, things got so out of control that—well, I think you’d better see for yourself.

Gentlemen, Gentlewomen, and Gentlemiscellaneous, are you ready... to rock?

The last time we saw Ben Erwin, he was playing Ping Pong while explaining how to leverage Cisco’s NAM. Today, we went out into the woods and filmed his alter ego, “Network Survival Expert Moose Dentabling” out in the Texas wilderness, relying solely on what he can find inside old network gear for survival.

Really, I think it might just be that case of insanity that’s been making the rounds. We really can’t justify this other than we thought it would be cool, and it was 72 degrees with no humidity in the middle of February, so we were willing for any excuse to head out and still “work.”

So please enjoy “Geek Vs. Wild.” You can view it here, or you can check it out in full high definition at the YouTube page.

But while I’m on the subject – or rather off the subject, I wanted to mention a couple of things. First, when I was uploading the video to YouTube, I noticed this gem about a bunch of geeks who incorporated network monitoring (for fault) into their Christmas Lights setup.

Second, you’ll notice in the video that we used the iPhone “Campfire” app. For $.99, it was worth the laugh, but I had a heck of a time getting it onto the iPhone. See, the iPhone only allows you to sync to one computer at a time. You used to be able to hook up an iPod via USB to any computer and then use that to play music directly from the iPod, provided that you had iTunes. Not anymore – if I wanted to install the “Campfire” app, I would have had to delete all the songs on my iPod so that I could “sync” with the new computer.

Why couldn’t I have just bought the application and downloaded it over the 3G network? Because Apple/AT&T prevents the installation of applications over 10MB in size over the 3G network in order to preserve that bandwidth. A smart move, but combined with the sync problem, it created a major headache.

Why did you do that, Apple? Why can’t I use my iPhone at work and at home?

Eventually I did have to erase my iPhone music, which ticked me off, naturally. It just goes to show that you can be overzealous regarding security (in this case, the technology securing me from accessing the music I own), and overzealous regarding network performance and end up with ticked off end users.

First off, congrats to Nick Carr – we’ve talked with him (and disagreed with him!) often on the blog and we’re thrilled that he managed to go toe-to-toe with Stephen Colbert on last night’s show.

And, thanks to the Colbert Report’s online presence, here’s an embedded player with that interview.

Although the book plugged is “The Big Switch,” the majority of the interview talks more about the implications of dwindling attention spans due to the Internet’s “hyper” hyperlinked nature – a topic not covered in “The Big Switch,” but instead in the cover article Carr wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”

The idea, as we’ve mentioned before, is that Carr believes the end result of the attention getting behavior of the Internet is that it will “scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

During the interview, Colbert made a play of ignoring Carr to check his iPhone. Now, that that does happen in real life, but I’d say that’s more an indication of individual rudeness then of culture spinning on a dime over the concept of hypertext.

The same criticisms that Carr makes of the Internet could be made of the newspaper – you’re trying to read one thing but it’s broken up, put next to all these other interesting articles, and ads designed to catch your attention… with all these… analog gewgaws, how is one supposed to be informed?

We’ve mentioned before that the limits on network performance limit the ability to communicate complex thought back when the Atlantic Monthly article first came out. But, we missed an opportunity to get less academic, more practical, and closer to the issues in a corporate network environment.

While we disagree with Carr’s diagnosis that the Internet causes short attention spans, (I’m a pro-blogger at a tech company, raised on Nintendo and MTV – I’m the poster-child for the 21^st century digital boy, and still I managed to summon the concentration to read the book Nick Carr wrote…) we do agree that human attention spans are short.

When I worked at a supermarket retailer, back in the early 2000s, as I’ve mentioned (and complained about) we were using a java-based networking app that took one to two seconds to input each number and move to the next field, and processing the entire report took minutes. The network performance was absolutely horrible, and as I pointed out before, we would have mentioned it in the hopes of having the performance improved somehow, except that we all realized that our jobs were essentially superfluous anyway and that we could all be replaced by a very small shell script that could parse the orders as they came in instead of printing them out and having us enter in all of them by hand.

Of course the lot of us at the data entry farm had CNN.com, Slashdot, and All Your Base Are Belong To Us and Hamsterdance open while we waited for the pages to load. (It was a simpler time back then.)

Of course, if we didn’t have outside Internet access, we could very well have distracted ourselves offline with desktop toys or conversation. We did that often anyway – as I said, it just took forever for those fields to come up.

I’ve also heard, second and third-hand, stories of other companies who are shocked to find that employees are going on to do other tasks while they wait for reports to generate, fields to come up, and pages to load – so if you’re honestly worried about dwindling attention spans, it might be better to not curse Google or the Internet, but to go in and actually improve things where you can.

Recently, we did an unscientific (and really, I cannot stress that word enough) but real-world test of performance using the Ono plugin for BitTorrent client Vuze/Azureus. Our results were inconclusive.

David Choffnes, the author of the Ono plugin, responded to the test in our comments section of that article:

Regarding your results, it is difficult to run controlled experiments because even when you download the same torrent, you're doing it at different times with necessarily different swarms. My research group's evaluation is not limited by this, and we showed that performance improves *on average*.

Also note that if Ono doesn't find any nearby peers, it can't help your performance. You can see if Ono found nearby peers (and is using them) in the "Ono" plugin view … Also, the plugin's effectiveness is limited by the fact that "only" 180,000 users have installed Ono. The more people use it, the more likely you'll find nearby peers.

One last point -- even when Ono doesn't dramatically improve performance, it encourages better "Internet citizen" behavior. Why transfer data from halfway across the world when you can get the same data and (potentially better) performance from peers nearby? Ono makes it easier to do the latter, which should eventually help everyone using the Internet.

Ono is part of Aqualab, a Northwestern University computer science project researching large-scale distributed computing. Choffnes, a doctoral candidate, will present his findings at SIGCOMM next month, and his paper on the subject can be found here – which is great if you like trigonometric functions in your technical literature.

There’s also a telling paragraph which may explain why we got the results we did for our tests (other than just the random variability of different BitTorrent swarms), instead of a massive throughput boost.

In our analysis, we compare statistics from peers located by Ono (referred to as Ono-recommended peers) to those from all peers selected at random by the BitTorrent protocol, which also includes those located by Ono.

In Network Performance Daily's analysis, we compared statistics from peers located by Ono combined with peers selected at random from the BitTorrent protocol, against only peers selected at random from the BitTorrent protocol.

To determine the cosine similarity value for a peer, Ono must be able to compare its ratio maps with those of other peers. The latter information can be obtained in a number of ways: through direct exchange between peers, from distributed storage and from trackers. Ono currently supports the first two options. With direct exchange, when two peers running the Ono plugin perform their connection handshake, the peers swap ratio maps directly… Though Ono enjoys a large user base, it is still a small fraction of the total BitTorrent population. Thus Ono also attempts to perform DNS lookups on behalf of other peers that it encounters, to determine their ratio maps. This enables Ono to perform biased peer selection over a much larger set of peers, including those not running the Azureus client. From both direct exchange of ratio maps and DNS lookups, our Ono clients locate over 180, 000 peers per day using our CDN-based approach.

When Ono determines that a peer has similar redirection behavior, it attempts to bias traffic toward that peer by ensuring there is always a connection to it, which minimizes the time that the peer is choked. Due to limitations of the Azureus plugin API, we are currently unable to bias other aspects of peer connections, e.g., the bandwidth allocated to each connection.

In addition to Ono, Aqualab also does other projects that are designed for improving Internet performance in a number of other areas. Choffnes’s advisor, Dr. Fabian Bustamante, has been working on "sustainable scalability in distributed systems,” called the 3R project. Many P2P and internet VoIP systems are built in a way that routing is controlled at the application layer, and that in order to identify better paths and faster throughput, the application probes the network environment repeatedly, as the application has no quick way to determine whether a particular peer or node is performing well except by trying to connect to it. The 3R project seeks to decrease probing by re-using the view of the network gathered by long-running, ubiquitous services.

While enterprise networking and Internet networking are two different beasts, performance advances in one usually lead to advances in the other, and with cloud computing promising to make enterprise networking a hybrid of LAN, WAN, and Internet connectivity, these advances remain important.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Two-story tall monstrosity of metal automatically finds application performance problems, destroys problems at source.

AUSTIN – April 1, 2008 – As network teams seek to ensure continued application performance according to the service level agreements entered into with backbone network providers, it becomes harder to make sure that you get the service you are contractually entitled to receive.  To solve this problem, NetQoS^® Inc. has launched NetQoS Destructobot v1.0, an automaton designed to seek and destroy network performance problems.  Integrated laser arms give the Destructobot™ advanced troubleshooting capabilities.

“NetQoS Destructobot is the only flesh-rending robot that unites application performance monitoring metrics with a warped, blasé attitude towards human life,” said Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing for NetQoS. “This new network performance tool includes automatic and on-demand investigations to speed problem diagnosis and enhanced trend reports to aid planning for future deployments, all with a complete lack of anything resembling a human soul.”

NetQoS Destructobot v1.0 Capabilities:

Automatic and On-demand Problem Termination: Destructobot v1.0 troubleshoots faster by automatically investigating when a performance threshold, such as a certain number of retransmissions, is exceeded. The robot master can also initiate an investigation on demand at any time. Destructobot, not knowing human limitations, will not rest in either case until the problem is located and terminated.

No network overhead:  Unlike some solutions, Destructobot v1.0 will not harm network application performance, or through inaction, allow network application performance to come to harm.

Advanced Reporting:  Destructobot provides enhanced abilities to analyze where unused resources can be re-allocated, including information about how much metal is in a human body and how that metal can be used to increase throughput and decrease latency.  These reports, which include per-capita statistics and can be provided within ten seconds of deployment, are especially useful for negotiating contracts with service providers. 

Support for Distributed Environments: For customers with multiple locations to manage, a distributed configuration is available through the Destructobot Army option.

When the product was announced, there were some skeptics, such as Dr. Smith of Alpha Centauri Adventures, who said “I don’t see how this ludicrous lump of latency sniffing lasers will help me.”

However, two minutes interacting with the Destructobot demo and Dr. Smith became quite impressed with its capabilities.

“I’ll use this in my network!” Dr. Smith said. “I’ll use a thousand of them! Just call it off!”

“Destructive robot based technology is becoming mainstream in enterprise NOC centers and in military applications, and we plan to use NetQoS Destructobot to ensure that our customers are getting optimal performance, or else,” said Michael Funke, director of application development and monitoring for Wily Industries, Inc. “In addition, the Destructobot provides us with one platform that not only manages our network, but also crushes all those who oppose us along the WAN.” 

NetQoS Destructobot, a recent winner of the Popular Mad Science Product of the Year Award, is available now at a starting price of $40,108. The NetQoS Performance and Domination Center portal is available to customers at no additional cost with the purchase of one or more NetQoS product modules.

Visitors to the United Nations may view a demo of Destructobot’s awesome destructive power at 12:00 noon on April 4^th. For more information about Destructobot, go to http://www.netqos.com/solutions/destructobot/index.html

Today marks the official start of the South by Southwest (SxSW) Festival in Austin - for readers outside of Austin, SxSW is a combination film, music, and technology festival. Despite its increasing commercialism, the week-long traffic slogs, and the temporary 50 percent increase in man-purse slinging hipsters, SXSW is the premier forum for new music showcases, and the film and digital conferences have attracted some notable and useful panelists. SxSW is one of the reasons Austin is at the top of so many "best cities" lists.

Additionally, tomorrow marks the start of the Austin BarCamp "un-Conference," which is what you get when you try to "get the anarchists to organize" a tech conference. BarCamps are open, participatory workshop events which focus on open-source technologies, and early-stage Web applications.

Of particular interest to network engineers and those interested in Web application performance are these particular events:

BarcampAustin: Usability: Will Users Wait?
Saturday, March 8, Time To Be Determined, GSD&M, 828 W 6th Street., Austin, TX.

Elizabeth Gibson and Lin Howe, AT&T User Experience Design, want to talk about how long of a delay will users tolerate before becoming frustrated or dissatisfied and abandoning the website? Is there anything that can be done to help mitigate a bad user experience?

SxSW: Catching up with Accessibility: The Basics Quickly
Saturday, March 8, 10:00am, Room C, Austin Convention Center

Shawn Henry of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative will demo how accessibility design can be incorporated into Web sites to allow people with disabilities or people using ways of accessing the site other than the traditional Web browser.

We'll demo how accessibility makes your website available and more usable to people with disabilities; to people using mobile phones, PDAs, and other such devices; to people with low bandwidth connections (which is more of a problem than many are aware of in the U.S. and throughout the world); to seniors, an increasingly important demographic; and others.… This session runs through the easy things and the most important things you can do now to get your project up to speed on accessibility.

SxSW: Crunching and Streaming: Online Video Distribution Challenge and Opportunity
Tuesday, March 11th, 10:00am, Room 19AB, Austin Convention Center

Brendon Mills, CEO of RipCode, Todd Bryant, CEO of Netcast HD Inc., Jeff Kramer of Policyot Labs and others talk about digital video distribution.

Video compression is critical technology for media convergence, and the growing demand for online delivery of high-quality, preferably high definition, video is driving significant innovation in the areas of compression and distribution. This discussion focuses on the significant challenges and opportunities associated with the evolution of online video delivery.

SxSW: Take Municipal WiFi Back
Tuesday, March 11th, 3:30pm, Room 8, Austin Convention Center

Rich MacKinnon of the Austin Wireless City Project, Silona Bonewald of the League of Technical Voters, and others talk about the problems with top-down municipal wireless projects in San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and takes a look at the viability of Muni WiFi.

Grassroots approaches to WiFi have focused on leaving the bureaucracy behind, but face challenges in terms of expanding their reach and gaining momentum. Top-down municipal networks promise ubiquitous coverage but have run up against formidable barriers concerning cost of construction, cost of maintenance, and implementation. Both have a goal of eliminating unlawful WiFi "piggybacking" that opens up millions of Internet surfers to dangerous invasions of their personal privacy. Stop by this panel to find out the latest about attempts to bring safe, secure and ubiquitous WiFi coverage to our cities.

You've probably already seen the video below. 2.6 million people already have.

Obviously, the material covered is amazing and it's an ingenious hack - the fact that the rig consisted of some cheap goggles, LED lights, and a $40 kid's toy hooked up to a PC made it even more impressive.

NetQoS is working on our own user-interface initiatives. Network management software can be hard to grasp - it's a complicated subject - and so the user interface for our products have to be designed with human interaction and ease-of-use in mind. Network engineering is hard, we don't want to make it harder. This is why we've spent a great deal of time working on the interface of NetQoS Performance Center - and we've been pushing the boundaries of network monitoring UI design with our Netcosm project in the NetQoS Performance Labs.

This reminded us that it was probably a good idea to check in with Dr. Jon Schull, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who specializes in human-computer interaction and asked him what he thought about the video. Dr. Schull had previously helped NetQoS get the "Netcosm Immersion Experience" up and running at Cisco Networkers in 2007, and we wanted to get his input on this development.

"My main thought was: 'Johnny Lee has done it again,'" said Schull. "If you look at his Web site, you'll see that he's done half a dozen really interesting hacks involving the Wii and another half a dozen involving other things. He's a very interesting and creative guy. This particular one is… is just cool!"

"I don't know how likely it is for us to see this in [gaming] practice, just because I think increasingly the Wii is a social gaming platform, and this is mostly a one-person interface. But, these are the early days and I can see that people are already thinking of ways to have this work for more than one person."

It seemed impressive in an industrial age of multi-person programming teams and high-tech equipment costs, that this was all done with relatively cheap consumer-level equipment.

"There's this other movement that's going on - and this work is exemplary of it," explained Schull. "If you look at Make: Magazine and Instructables and a Web site called 'Hack-a-day' you'll see there's this whole emerging sub-culture of people who are… getting to interesting new results faster by disassembling and reconstructing things from consumer products than by trying to develop these new technologies from scratch."

"I guarantee you there are people who are making those systems right now - they're going to Home Depot, they're getting the goggles, they're getting the Infrared LEDs, and they're having some fun with it. A couple months later, someone's going to sell a kit, and a few months after that, someone will have found a distribution channel for a retail product… That $40 Wii remote contains an accelerometer, a Bluetooth transmitter, an infrared camera - there's an amazing amount of hardware in that $40 item. Eventually someone will put them together in a new device which is optimized for new uses."

Schull pointed out that these new uses are usually found and implemented within months, rather than decades.

"Within weeks, [of the Wii release] you had people figuring out how to hack the Wiimote to use with computers… There are already on the market designed for PCs which are clearly Wii knock-offs. It took less than a year for those commercial products to come out. I think you'll see things like this within six months because Johnny Lee's video has been traveling like crazy. Off the top of my head, it's usable in games, looking at 3D models of architectural sites, 3D models of medical anatomy. There are some major applications - and those latter two could be six-or-seven figure products."

"Another venture of this sort is the whole Multi-touch phenomenon. You've certainly seen the iPhone now, where you can use more than one finger, and you can rotate and drag and move images around by laying hands on them in a way that wasn't possible two years ago. Just two years ago, we saw another set of videos taking the world by storm by a guy named Jeff Han, who demonstrated all the things you could do with multi-touch interfaces. It was approximately a year before it was part of an Apple product."

Schull's work at Rochester University of Technology in Interface design has helped him to design a product like this himself - a large room called the "Collaboratorium" which consists of multiple projectors in a large, enclosed room with a camera that can be controlled remotely. We asked him what was more difficult for innovators - coding the software and hacking the hardware, or just coming up with the vision for new and innovative ways to interact with computers.

"The funny thing is, I think the hardware and software problems are pretty straightforward right now. The social - and market issues are really the tough ones… We haven't seen a room-sized head-tracking stereoscopic multi-touch environment for cheap. Not because you couldn't put one together for cheap, but because it'll be another 6 to 12 months before they get integrated, and then you have to deal with the packaging. No, the real challenge is going to come from defining some come of human interface device standard which will let these things work by themselves or in combination without having to rewrite software for each configuration."

Considering that we at NetQoS have been experimenting with new and interesting user interfaces for network monitoring software, we'll keep an eye - and two infrared light beams - on this technology.

Do you see a use for head-tracking 3D software in your enterprise? Tell us about it by leaving a comment!

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" »