Russ
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Reading
"Reading takes a long time, though, don’t you find? It takes such a long time to get from, say, page twenty-one to page thirty. I mean, first you’ve got page twenty-three, then page twenty-five, then page twenty-seven, then page twenty-nine, not to mention the even numbers. Then page thirty. Then you’ve got page thirty-one and page thirty-three — there’s no end to it. Luckily Animal Farm isn’t that long a novel. But novels . . . they’re all long, aren’t they. I mean, they’re all so long.
" Martin Amis, Money —
Worth Reading: Why Hardware Still Matters
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The Pie Problem: Growth and Ratios
Why does it seem life goes faster as you get older? There are several reasons, of course — a primary one being it always seems there’s more you need to do and less you want to do, as you get older and take on responsibilities. I know that the last 17 years, since my first child was born, has often felt like a runaway train. But there’s another reason — a set of problems I’ve been working on with my younger daughter a lot because the math is easy, but the concept is hard.
It’s all in the ratios. To give an example, a teacher I once spent a lot of time listening to would often pose this to his friends:
You’re around 50. That means you’ve been given 2600 weekends so far, and you have about 1500 weekends left (give or take). What did you do with the weekends you’ve already lived, and what do you plan on doing with the 1500 you have left?
The math is simple — what’s the average life expectancy, how many weekends are there in a year, etc. But the problem is really all about ratios. The older you get, the less percentage Continue reading
IT/IT: Network scale is more than size
“Judge me by my size, do you?”
I’ve had several discussions with people over the years about the concept of scale in the world of network engineering. Most often, when network engineers think of a “large scale network,” they used to mention large service providers. Now they tend to think of some large cloud provider. But is scale really about size? I’m not much into the backflipping Yoda of the later Star Wars movies, but I would argue scale is much more about backflips than it is about being big.
So what is scale about? In the networking world, scale can be given the shorthand services x size. Standing in a huge data center with rows and rows of racks and blinking lights, it’s easy to forget about the services part of that equation.
A useful way to understand this is consider the services offered by a pair of networks, one large, and one small. The typical cloud provider’s network might contain thousands of nodes in a single data center — something more than 1000x10g (or 10,000x1g) ports on the edge is moderately sized in this world. What services does such a network — within the network itself — Continue reading
Worth Reading: More Leaky Routes
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Consequences Teach
"The sad consequences of cruelty, injustice, violence, deceit, and laziness teach us to be gentle, just, moderate, faithful, and industrious. The experience is lengthy, but it is efficient.
" Raoul Audouin — http://ProvidenceandLiberty
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Worth Reading: Don’t be so Surprised
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Worth Reading: Politics and Technology
[P]re-acting to something that hasn’t happened yet is nonsense.
Refusing to learn from people you don’t agree with isn’t a particularly modern vice, but in our world of information overload, where there are so many voices that we can choose to listen only to people we agree with, it does create a particularly modern narrowness of mind.
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Why I Support Certifications
I’m betting that I could take my certifications off my resume and still have a fair chance at finding a job. It’s a guess, of course, and I’ve never tried any sort of an experiment towards finding out, but the point is this: at some point in your career, certifications should become just one more thing on an excellent resume, rather than the focal point of your resume. Given this, why do I still support certifications? To answer this question, I need to back up into the certification development process a bit.
One of the strangest “mind trips” I’ve ever encountered was working with the “psycho’s” (psychometricians, really, but you know how engineers are with long words) through the entire CCDE/CCAr process. The two things we were challenged constantly were:
- What does the minimally qualified candidate look like?
- How do you intend to test for that skill?
Both of these are hard questions.
The first question we turned into a simpler one (again, you know how engineers are): Why do I care? When someone would suggest a particular question or skill, they were immediately met with the counter — Do I care? If I were a designer working on a Continue reading
Worth Reading 06:19
Much as I’ve been trying to keep up on interesting stuff to read on the right column, I still seem to have built a long list of bookmarks! Having nothing better to do on a Friday morning, I’m dumping them on your.
So there! 
I’ve posted in the past on the problems of the IT job market. Primarily I think it’s too much about “what narrow set of skills do you have,” rather than, “are you a good engineer,” and I think we engineers are as much to blame as anyone else for this. “Yeah, but do you know about the latest gobberfubble embedded fingernail pick API??” we say with pride, trying to find something we know about the person we’re interviewing does. Interviews shouldn’t be about making yourself feel better about your technical skill — they should be about finding a good engineer for your team. Okay, I’ve ranted long enough — it’s time for Infoworld to take over on this score with more practical advice.
The Midyear State of the IT Job Market.
By the way, I know my response to the esoteric game won’t work for everyone, but whenever someone gets me into this position of Continue reading
Anger
"I suppose that when one hears a tale of hideous cruelty anger is quite the wrong reaction, and merely wastes the energy that ought to go in a different direction: perhaps merely dulls the conscience which, if it were awake, would ask us, “Well, what are you doing about it? How much of your live have you spent in really combating this?”
" C.S. Lewis —