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Russ
Worth Reading: Inside the Social Network Data Center
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Worry
"The first thing, when one is being worried as to whether one will have to have an operation or whether one is a literary failure, is to assume absolutely mercilessly that the worst is true, and to ask What Then? If it turns out in the end that the worst is not true, so much the better; but for the meantime the question must be resolutely put out of mind. Otherwise your thoughts merely go round and round a wearisome circle , now hopeful, now despondent, now hopeful again—that way madness lies.
" C.S. Lewis —
On being different
The METNAV shop at McGuire AFB was hard to miss, if you could get into the right area, and you know what you were looking for. Out across the flightline, across the old 18 runway, and across a winding series of roads, a small squat building sat — no antennas or other identifying marks. Just plain, white, one story, with a small parking lot and a few trucks, either camouflaged or USAF blue. Driving into the parking lot, you’d find an odd collection of vehicles, but many of us drove 4wd’s of some sort. A good number of the pieces of equipment we worked on were only reachable through off road routes. If you owned a 4wd vehicle, the fateful pager call at 2am didn’t require a trip to the shop, across the flight line, old runways, and in the winter piles of snow pushed up against the sides of the airplane routes, to get a truck usable to reach the failed piece of equipment.
In the line of cars, you would see one that was, well, different. This particular car was, in fact, the subject of a number of discussions in the shop — you’d almost think our little Continue reading
Self-Control
"Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. … We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake. … We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society.
" Michael Lewis/Boomerang —
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Worth Reading: Understanding the Threat
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Commercializing Community
C.S. Lewis used to say that for each new book he read, he would read two old books — books written before he was born, preferably. The point to this seemingly odd reading habit was to avoid the blind spot — every age has a blind spot, a obsessive passion around which everything else must fall or be crushed. Much like ages, each profession also has a blind spot of the same sort.
Technology is no exception.
So what is the blind spot of the technology world? I would say it’s human nature. Engineers have a very bad habit of making people into manipulable objects — for instance, “the soul is software, and the body is hardware.” The analogy might be a good one, but it’s also, like most analogies, decidedly not the whole story.
This belief that we can build a community based Continue reading
Worth Reading: Open Container Project
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Highlight: Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture
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False Dichotomy
Last week wasn’t a good one for the cause of network engineering. United Airlines grounded flights because of a router failure, the New York Stock Exchange stopped trading for several hours because of a technical problem, and the Wall Street Journal went off line for several hours due to a technical malfunction. How should engineers react to these sorts of large scale public outages? The first option, of course, is to flail our arms and run out of the room screaming. Panic is a lot of fun when you first engage, but over time it tends to get a little boring, so maybe panic isn’t the right solution here.
Another potential reaction is to jump on the “it’s too complex” bandwagon. sure, a lot of these systems are very complex — in fact, they’re probably too complex for the actual work they do. Complexity is required to solve hard problems; elegance is choosing the path with the least amount of complexity that will solve the problem. Far too often, in the engineering world, we choose the more complex path because of some imagined requirement that never actually materializes, or because we imagine a world where the solution we’re putting in Continue reading
Mailing List
I think I’ve finally fixed the mailing list to send an email of the posts here twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) — an attempt at balancing between spamming people and providing information about what’s going on at ‘net Work. Sign up here if you’re interested (the bottom half of the page).
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Review: Being Logical (Logical Thinking)
Being LogicalThis review is a little off the beaten path for most engineering blogs, perhaps — but I consider logic to be one of those “must have skills” for engineers. Being able to pull an argument apart, to understand the concept of a syllogism and the flow of logic, along with the various logical fallacies, adds greatly to your ability to write and process arguments for and against technologies and solutions (as well as in larger life). For some time, I’ve been looking for a concise description of the formal logic system I’ve encountered in philosophy a number of times, and a description of the many logical fallacies I’ve encountered in everyday life. Being Logical comes as close to fulfilling my desire for such a book as any I’ve encountered in my search.
Although this book is a trim 129 pages, it covers logic on a wide scale. The problem space is divided into five part; part one is preparing the mind for logic, which includes learning to observe, matching ideas to facts, matching words to ideas, and being mindful of the origin of ideas. It’s fair to note, at this point, that this first section Continue reading