Worth Reading: MPTCP and Multiple APs
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Worth Reading: Shifting Storage
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Good Enough
Looking at my desk in the late 1990’s, that little haven where I came in early in the morning, and left ealry’ish in the afternoon, you’d see a catalog rack. Only it wasn’t full of catalogs, it contained a full set of the latest Cisco IOS documentation. We whined when a new version of the docs came out that wouldn’t fit in the catalog racks we already owned, and ordered another one. There was a bookcase on the side which contained the documentation from the last two or three versions of the IOS code, and then every hardware manual I could find. Another stack of books would be lying in a corner, the “quick reference” stuff that wouldn’t fit in one of the catalog racks. All over the walls were pieces of paper, carefully crafted shortcut sheets, shared around the TAC, pinned up. Given the nature of cubicle walls, we either bought special cubicle clips, or we made to do with various sorts of push pins. Just a few years later, the ISO auditors came along and made us throw it all away. Every last scrap. The dumpsters were filled to the max. Extra dumpsters were brought in, and we Continue reading
Saving the Web, Saving Community (Heavy Topic Warning)
Is the ‘web losing it’s populist (and/or democratic) spirit? Hossein Derakhshan, at least, thinks so. he argues that the ‘web is dying because the hyperlink is dying —
Much could be made of the argument that Hossein is just feeling the effects of being disconnected for six years. After being put in prison as a political dissident six years ago, he reappears on the scene only to find out the world has moved on without him. There are several points in his article that might indicate this — that he felt like Continue reading
Worth Listening: Data Center Migration
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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