Vega-Lite: a grammar of interactive graphics

Vega-lite: a grammar of interactive graphics Satyanarayan et al., IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 2016

From time to time I receive a request for more HCI (human-computer interaction) related papers in The Morning Paper. If you’ve been a follower of The Morning Paper for any time at all you can probably tell that I naturally gravitate more towards the feeds-and-speeds end of the spectrum than user experience and interaction design. But what good is a super-fast system that nobody uses! With the help of Aditya Parameswaran, who recently received a VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award for his work on the development of tools for large-scale data exploration targeting non-programmers, I’ve chosen a selection of data exploration, visualisation and interaction papers for this week. Thank you Aditya! Fingers crossed I’ll be able to bring you more from Aditya Parameswaran in future editions.

Vega and Vega-lite follow in a long line of work that can trace its roots back to Wilkinson’s ‘The Grammar of Graphics.’ It’s all the way back to 2015 since we last looked at the Vega-family on The Morning Paper (see ‘Declarative interaction design for data visualization’ and ‘[Reactive Continue reading

Tokalabs Software Defined Labs automates configuration of lab test-beds

Network environments have become so complex that companies such as systems integrators, equipment manufacturers and enterprise organizations feel compelled to test their configurations and equipment in lab environments before deployment. Performance test labs are used extensively for quality, proof of concept, customer support, and technical sales initiatives. Labs are the perfect place to see how well something performs before it’s put into a production environment.The primary challenge of running a test lab is the amount of time it takes to provision the test environments. A network lab infrastructure might include switches, routers, servers, virtual machines running on various server clusters, security services, cloud resources, software and so on. It takes considerable time to wire the configurations, physically build the desired test beds, login to each individual device and load the proper software configurations. Quite often, lab staffers spend more time on setup than they do on conducting actual tests.To read this article in full, please click here

Spousetivities in Barcelona at VMworld EMEA 2019

Barcelona is probably my favorite city in Europe—which works out well, since VMware seems to have settled on Barcelona at the destination for VMworld EMEA. VMworld is back in Barcelona again this year, and I’m fortunate enough to be able to attend. VMworld in Barcelona wouldn’t be the same without Spousetivities, though, and I’m happy to report that Spousetivities will be in Barcelona. In fact, registration is already open!

If you’re bringing along a spouse, significant other, boyfriend/girlfriend, or just some family members, you owe it to them to look into Spousetivities. You’ll be able to focus at the conference knowing that your loved one(s) are not only safe, but enjoying some amazing activities in and around Barcelona. Here’s a quick peek at what Crystal and her team have lined up this year:

• A wine tour of the Penedes region (southwest of Barcelona)—attendees will get to see some amazing wineries not frequented by tourists!
• A walking tour of Barcelona
• A tapas cooking class
• A fantastic walking tour of Costa Brava, Pals, and Girona
• A sailing tour (it’s a 3 hour tour, but it won’t end up like Gilligan’s)

Lunch and private transportation are included for all activities, and all activities Continue reading

How Serious Relationships in College Can Help Your Career

It is extremely easy to find articles regarding how serious relationships in college can interfere with your studies and keep you from fully experience all college life has to offer. While it is true that some serious relationships cause a lot of upheaval and may have a negative influence on the college experience for some people, this does not hold true for all college students.

In many situations, having serious relationships in college can actually help your career once you graduate. Here are just some ways that serious relationships in college can help your career later.

5 Ways Serious Relationships in College May Help Your Career

You Learn Teamwork and How to Compromise

To make a relationship work, two people need to work as a team and both parties have to learn to compromise and communicate well. Teamwork, compromise, and communication are also important in any career you choose. Being in a relationship can help you learn these necessary skills that are as important to your professional life as they are to your personal life.

You Learn More About Yourself

Being in a relationship, whether that relationship is good or bad, you tend to learn as much about yourself as Continue reading

What’s So Sassy About SASE

MUST READ: The NTP Bible

A few months ago Johannes Weber sent me a short email saying “hey, I plan to write a few NTP posts” and I replied “well, ping me when you have something ready”.

In the meantime he wrote a veritable NTP bible - a series of NTP-related blog posts covering everything from Why Should I Run My Own NTP Servers to authentication, security and monitoring - definitely a MUST READ if you care about knowing what time it is.

Heavy Networking 479: Scaling Up Your DDoS Protection With Juniper Networks And Corero (Sponsored)

On today's sponsored Heavy Networking, we talk with Juniper Networks and Corero about how they've partnered on a unique solution to thwart DDoS attacks at the network edge using Juniper's MX routers and Corero's SmartWall Threat Defense Director (TDD). The solution can be used by service providers, enterprises, and in the cloud. Our guests are Ashley Stephenson, CEO of Corero; and Mark Denny, Product Manager, Senior Staff at Juniper Networks.

The post Heavy Networking 479: Scaling Up Your DDoS Protection With Juniper Networks And Corero (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Fundamentals of MPLS LSPs

One of the items that often trips folks up with MPLS is the concept of label switched paths or LSPs. We’ve talked about them extensively before in many of the blog posts here and I’ve described them a couple of different ways. Many people look at an LSP as a sort of unidirectional tunnel. In fact, most network diagrams aiming to describe an LSP often show it just as that – a tunnel. It’s an easy thing to visualize especially when you start talking about nested tunnels or LSPs inside of LSPs, but I also think it can be rather confusing. This becomes even more confusing when people start talking about end to end LSPs or how a service label is the same end to end as traffic traverses an LSP. What does that mean? Where does an LSP start or stop? Is it really a tunnel? How far can an LSP reach? What if we run different label distribution protocols? In this post, and perhaps the next, I hope to address these questions as well as talk about how we can solve some of the common problems that are often encountered with LSPs.

So let’s dive right in and Continue reading

Cisco’s Kip Compton on How to Manage Application Complexity

Verizon Fuses 5G Mixed Reality Advancements to The Edge

Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum

Software skills are set to play a more prominent role in Cisco’s network engineering curriculum. The company is launching a new coding-focused certification track, as well as giving its existing certifications a major revamp to address software-defined networking (SDN), automation, the Internet of Things, and other emerging technologies that are changing the job requirements for today’s network professionals. "They’re not trying to turn network folks into developers, but they are certainly trying to make it easier for us to do our job," says Dan Groscost, solutions architect at Computer Design & Integration, an IT services firm based in New York, N.Y. Groscost holds a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) certification, and he’s in the final stages of his Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) Route/Switch certification.  To read this article in full, please click here

Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum

Software skills are set to play a more prominent role in Cisco’s network engineering curriculum. The company is launching a new coding-focused certification track, as well as giving its existing certifications a major revamp to address software-defined networking (SDN), automation, the Internet of Things, and other emerging technologies that are changing the job requirements for today’s network professionals. "They’re not trying to turn network folks into developers, but they are certainly trying to make it easier for us to do our job," says Dan Groscost, solutions architect at Computer Design & Integration, an IT services firm based in New York, N.Y. Groscost holds a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) certification, and he’s in the final stages of his Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) Route/Switch certification.  To read this article in full, please click here

Red Hat Shields IBM’s Woeful Q3

PostgreSQL Connection Pooling: Part 1 – Pros & Cons

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, ‘threads’ were a programming novelty rarely used and seldom trusted. In that environment, the first PostgreSQL developers decided forking a process for each connection to the database is the safest choice. It would be a shame if your database crashed, after all.

Since then, a lot of water has flown under that bridge, but the PostgreSQL community has stuck by their original decision. It is difficult to fault their argument – as it’s absolutely true that:

Locked Up By Lock-In

When you start evaluating a solution, you are going to get a laundry list of features and functionality that you are supposed to use as criteria for selection. Some are important, like the ones that give you the feature set you need to get your job done. Others are less important for the majority of use cases. One thing tends to stand out for me though.

Since the dawn of platforms, I believe the first piece of comparison marketing has been “avoids lock-in”. You know you’ve seen it too. For those that may not be completely familiar with the term, “lock-in” describes a platform where all the components need to come from the same manufacturer or group of manufacturers in order to work properly. An example would be if a networking solution required you to purchase routers, switches, access points, and firewalls from a single vendor in order to work properly.

Chain of Fools

Lock in is the greatest asset a platform company has. The more devices they can sell you the more money they can get from you at every turn. That’s what they want. So they’re going to do everything they can to keep you in their ecosystem. Continue reading

Weekly Wrap: AWS Makes It Rain, Extends Credits to Open Source Projects

Learn Scrum and Six Sigma and prepare for your PMP exam with this $29 bundle

Whether you’re interested in managing a team or you just want to better communicate your goals with your colleagues, project management skills will come in handy. Many people learn how to manage a team on the job, and while hands-on experience is invaluable, learning a structured approach to project management will make your team much more effective. If you want to learn the skills necessary to keep your team running at peak efficiency, this $29 bundle is for you.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD CPUs Will Power UK’s Next-Generation ARCHER2 Supercomputer

AMD has picked up yet another big supercomputer win with the selection of its second-generation Epyc processors, aka Rome, as the compute engine for the ARCHER2 system to be installed at the University of Edinburgh next year. …

AMD CPUs Will Power UK’s Next-Generation ARCHER2 Supercomputer was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

Usage-based billing with NetFlow and sFlow

The post Usage-based billing with NetFlow and sFlow appeared first on Noction.

You Cannot Have a Public Cloud without Networking

Listening to (some) industry evangelists you would believe that there’s no future in being a networking engineer. After all, all workloads will move into the cloud, and all clients will connect through a universal 5G network… but even if that utopia eventually comes true, you can’t get away from the laws of physics (and the need networking infrastructure).

TL&DR: our new online course will help you master the shiny new world. You can register right now or keep reading ;)