Orientation
Quick — can you OODA? Last week we talked about the general idea behind the OODA loop; this week we’ll cover the last three steps and wrap up.
Orient is the second step: once you’ve made a set of observations, you need to decide what it is you’re actually observing. To help this make sense, let’s take a look at a simple optical illusion — you might have seen it before.
Do the blue squares look square, or… ?? If you’re like most people, the squares don’t look square at all — but they are. Remember the blue or gold dress? In both of these situations, we face the same sort of problem: our ability to perceive is often influenced by the context.
This doesn’t, as some people try to say, mean that our senses are all just a jumbled up mess, and the entire world is disconnected from our brains — you must be careful in life not to make the hard or odd case the rule by which all other cases are measured. Every measurement system has its limits; that doesn’t mean the measurement is useless or generally untrustworthy.
So what we must do, as network engineers, is to Continue reading
Getting Inside the Loop
Metadata doesn’t just apply to data science or protocols — it applies to engineering life. Think about the concept of epistomology — the study of how we know what we know — or the concept of hermeneutics — the study of how we understand communication — and you can quickly see that stepping outside what we are doing to examine how we are doing it is a common human experience (see Lewis’ Meditation in a Tool Shed as another instance).
But how does this apply to the engineering life? It’s called process — now, before you click off the page, scurrying away in shock, process isn’t a bad thing. In fact, process can be a good set of “guard rails” in the way we live our lives, something to remind us not to run off the road (like positive thinking signs), or even physically/mentally “bump” us in the right direction.
This week I’d like to kick off a short series on one process I learned in the US Air Force, and have used in many ways over the years — the OODA Loop. Originally developed by USAF Colonel John Boyd, and designed to help pilots deal with Continue reading
A Neutral ‘Net?
This week I’m going to step off the beaten path for a moment and talk about ‘net neutrality. It appears we are about to enter a new phase in the life of the Internet — at least in the United States — as the FCC is out and about implying we should expect a ruling on Title II regulation of the ‘net within the United States in the near future. What the FCC’s chairman has said is —
- The Internet would be reclassified as a Title II communication service, which means the portions within the United States would fall under the same regulations as telephone and television service.
- “comma, but…” The ‘net infrastructure in the United States won’t be subject to all the rules of Title II regulation.
- Specifically mentioned is the last mile, “there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling.”
A lot of digital ink has been spilled over how the proposed regulations will impact investment — for instance, AT&T has made a somewhat veiled threat that if the regulations don’t go the way they’d like to see them go, there will be no further investment in last mile broadband throughout the US (as Continue reading
Job Advert
Just another advertisement for a Network Engineer…
Friends May Come and Go…
We overuse the word “friend” in our world — especially the technical world. We tend to call anyone we’ve ever met a friend. In this environment, friends come and go almost constantly, flowing through our lives like the leaves in a brisk fall wind. The depth to which Facebook and LinkedIn dive into our personal relationships — reminding us of birthdays, telling us who’s having a work anniversary, telling us when we should say the right thing at the right time to keep the “friendship” alive and current. But this somehow robs the concept of friendship out of, well, friendship. There’s no sacrifice, not even any effort — you have to question the value of “friendship” on these terms. It almost seems that social networking has made us less social, and less attuned to real friendship.
How do we live in this world?
I would first suggest reviving the concept of being intentional about friendship. Rather than just letting people fall into and out of our lives, we need, particularly as engineers, to decide to hold on to some friends, to intentionally make these people a fixture in our lives. We need to be careful not to make these choices Continue reading
But Does it Work?
When I was in the USAF, a long, long, time ago, there was a guy in my shop — Armand — who, no matter what we did around the shop, would ask, “but does it work?” For instance, when I was working on redoing the tool cabinet, with nice painted slots for each tool, he walked by — “Nice. But does it work?” I remember showing him where each tool fit, and how it would all be organized so we the pager went off at 2AM because the localizer was down (yet again), it would be easy to find that one tool you needed to fix the problem. He just shook his head and walked away. Again, later, I was working on the status board in the Group Readiness Center — the big white metal board that showed the current status of every piece of comm equipment on the Base — Armand walked by and said, “looks nice, but does it work?” Again, I showed him how the new arrangement was better than the old one. And again Armand just shook his head and walked away. It took me a long time to “get it” — to Continue reading
Leaky Abstractions
Much of our life, as engineers, is about building, manipulating, and using abstractions. For instance, C is nothing but an abstraction on top of the actual register set provided by a particular processor. HTML is nothing but an abstraction for formatting and display (a markup language), implemented in — well, C. There is a lot of power in such abstractions, of course. Without them we couldn’t build operating systems, applications, browsers, web pages — or networks.
Ethernet is an abstraction of electronic signals (anyone remember Manchester Encoding?). IP is an abstraction of every physical layer in the world. TCP is an simulation, or abstraction, of a reliable connection oriented link over (completely unreliable) IP. HTTP is an abstraction of a flow of information, a stream, between two computers. It’s all abstractions — as the philosopher might say, “it’s abstractions all the way down.” So what’s wrong with this?
All abstractions are leaky. What do I mean when I say abstractions are leaky? Let’s turn to the originator of the phrase, Joel Spolsky:
Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There’s leakage. Things go wrong. It happens all over the place when you have abstractions.
This is the Continue reading
On Losing
When I got off the phone, I knew I’d blown it. I’d gotten so wrapped up in the discussion on eVPNs that I might have crossed over that magical line between, “this is a really neat technology,” to, “this technology will solve world hunger.” It brought back to mind my first “real fight” in the world of technology, a long ago argument between two network operating systems (Novell Netware and Banyan Vines).
At the time, I was a buck sergeant in the USAF assigned to the Small Computer Support Office. We were building a new base backbone, and trying to decide what network operating system to standardize on as an organization (as a base). The decision had come down to two options — Novell Netware and Banyan Vines. I was in the camp that wanted Vines. In fact, I’d written two papers (long’ish, on the order of 80 pages each), going through the positives and negatives in each direction. I’d been to a number of meetings, and we had small networks set up running both in our lab. In the end, though, I lost. The technology I was advocating for wasn’t chosen by “the powers that be,” and so Continue reading