Engineering Sense
Why didn’t they ask Evans?
For those who haven’t read the famous Agatha Christie novel, the entire point revolves around a man uttering these words just before dying. Who is Evans? What does this person know that can lead to the murderer of the man on the golf course? Bobby and Frankie, the heroes of the story, are led on one wild goose chase after another, until they finally discover it’s not what Evans knows but who Evans knows that really matters.
Okay… But this isn’t a blog about mysteries, it’s about engineering. What does Evans have to do with engineering? Troubleshooting, as Fish says, is often like working through a mystery novel. But I think the analogy can be carried farther than this. Engineering, even on the design side, is much like a mystery novel. It’s often the context of the question, or the context of the answer to the question, that solves the mystery. It’s Poirot straightening the items sitting on a mantelpiece twice, it’s the dog that didn’t bark, and it’s the funny footprints and the Sign of Four.
Just like the detective in a mystery novel, the engineer can only solve the problem if they can Continue reading
Worth Reading: Shareholder Value
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Worth Reading: Security and the IoT
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Worth Listening: Optical for the Campus
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HL: The Art of Network Architecture
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Good Works
C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady
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Review: The Craft of Research
The Craft of Research
Booth, Colomb, and Williamns
Engineers don’t often think of themselves as researchers. After all, what does writing a bit of code, or building a network design, have to do with research? Isn’t research something academic type folks do when they’re writing really long, and really boring, papers that no-one ever reads? If that’s what you really think, then you’ve come to the wrong blog this week. 
In fact, I’d guess that a good many projects get off track, and a good number of engineering avenues aren’t explored, because people just don’t know how to — or don’t enjoy — research. Research is at the very heart of engineering.
Even if it’s never published, writing a research style paper can help you clarify and understand the issues you’re facing, and think through the options. Reading IETF drafts, software design specs, and many other documents engineers produce is depressing some times.
Can’t we do better? Of course we can. Read this book.
This book, while it does focus on the academic side of writing a research paper, is also a practical guide to how to think through the process of researching a project. The authors begin with a Continue reading
Worth Reading; The Great Man Theory
A note to remember — I don’t agree with everything I put up as a worth reading article. There are some good things here, and some bad. Watermelon seeds are meant to be spit out, though, not eaten with the sweet red stuff. And don’t even get into the rind.
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Highlight: Why Your Presentations Stink
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Worth Reading: Expert Versus Nonexpert
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It’s About Time
I guess I’m semi-famous. Or maybe I’m a moderately sized fish in a rather small bowl. Whatever the reason, a lot of people reach out to me for career advice. Which is okay, of course — I make it a personal policy to answer every email that’s addressed to me, individually, that I receive. It only takes a minute or two, after all, and it drives me nuts when I send an email to someone that seems to go into a black hole. I try not to be the person that drives me nuts.
So a couple of times a week, I open my inbox to find either an email or a message through some social network (the only social networks I actively use, by the way, are Twitter and LinkedIn, so if you friend me on Facebook, or send me an invite to something else, I’m not likely to accept) asking some variation of a couple of questions. The one I want to address in this post is probably the hardest to answer.
How can I become an architect/really good engineer/really good writer/really successful/etc.?
The snark inside me just wants to answer, “just change your title on LinkedIn, that’s Continue reading
Worth Reading: Access Control with Segmentation
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Worth Reading: Outsourcing
This is a point that many people don’t get — if all businesses are data businesses (and they are, despite the constant refrain I’ve heard throughout my career that “we don’t make technology, here, so…”), then all the data, and all the analysis you do on that data, is just like the famous Coke recipe.
Know data, know your business. No data, no business.
It’s really that simple. When will we learn — and take this idea seriously? And when will we realize this rule applies to the network as well as the data in many cases?
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Understanding Rowhammer
As I learned in my early days in electronics, every wire is an antenna. This means that a signal in any wire, given enough power, can be transmitted, and that same signal, in an adjacent wire, can be received (and potentially decoded) through electromagnetic induction (Rule 3 may apply). This is a major problem in the carrying of signals through a wire, a phenomenon known as cross talk. How do communications engineers overcome this? By observing that a signal carried along parallel wires at opposite polarities will cancel each other out electromagnetically. The figure below might help out, if you’re not familiar with this.
This canceling effect of two waveforms traveling a pair of wires 180deg out of phase is why the twisted is in twisted pair, and why it’s so crucial not to unbundle too much wire when punching down a jack or connector. The more untwisted the wire there is, the less effective the canceling effect is around the punch down, and the more likely you are to have near end or far end crosstalk.
If you consider one row of memory in a chip one wire, and a second, adjacent row of memory in the Continue reading
Worth Reading: Learning from Chambers
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Worth Reading: Commoditization of the Black Market
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