The Pros & Cons Of Task Managers

Task managers are tools that allow you to maintain organized lists of the things you need to do. Over the last couple of months, I have shifted my workflow to revolve around a task manager. That means that what I do each day is driven by the tasks that are on my list.

If the task is on my list, I perform that task until it’s completed or at least moved as far as I can move it. If something pops up that must be dealt with immediately but is not my task list, I create a task, complete it, and cross it off.

My goal is to not simply to get things done. I want to get things done, in the right order, on time, and without forgetting any of my commitments. My workflow tends to have many small details as well as unexpected disruptions each day I must react to. My task manager helps me control all of these things.

Control is an important keyword, because control of your day is what a well-utilized task list can provide. Nonetheless, there are both pros and cons to the task-driven life.

Pros.

  1. Maintain focus. In my world, tasks must get Continue reading

“Skyfall attack” was attention seeking

After the Meltdown/Spectre attacks, somebody created a website promising related "Skyfall/Solace" attacks. They revealed today that it was a "hoax".

It was a bad hoax. It wasn't a clever troll, parody, or commentary. It was childish behavior seeking attention.

For all you hate naming of security vulnerabilities, Meltdown/Spectre was important enough to deserve a name. Sure, from an infosec perspective, it was minor, we just patch and move on. But from an operating-system and CPU design perspective, these things where huge.

Page table isolation to fix Meltdown is a fundamental redesign of the operating system. What you learned in college about how Solaris, Windows, Linux, and BSD were designed is now out-of-date. It's on the same scale of change as address space randomization.

The same is true of Spectre. It changes what capabilities are given to JavaScript (buffers and high resolution timers). It dramatically increases the paranoia we have of running untrusted code from the Internet. We've been cleansing JavaScript of things like buffer-overflows and type confusion errors, now we have to cleanse it of branch prediction issues.

Moreover, not only do we need to change software, we need to change the CPU. No, we won't get rid of branch-prediction Continue reading

CI/CD For Networking Part 1

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment was traditionally reserved for the software development space. With the push towards infrastructure as code now making it to the networking space the idea of bringing CI/CD methodologies down to the network is gaining alot of...

New Google Cloud Course: Data Storage

As promised, last week we added another Google Cloud Platform course to our collection. The fourth in this series of Google courses, Google Cloud Platform: Data Storage, can be found on our All Access Pass streaming site and ine.com.

 

Why You Should Take This Course:

Google Cloud Platform enables developers to build, test and deploy applications on Google’s highly-scalable, secure and reliable infrastructure.

Whether you’re a developer or architect, this course will help you understand the basic capabilities and advanced features of GCP Data Services.

About the Course:

This course covers Google Cloud Platform Data Storage and Database Services. More specifically, it covers the features and functions of Google Cloud Platform Data Storage Services so that you can understand the GCP options available.

This course is taught by Joseph Holbrook and is 3 hours and 27 minutes long.

What you’ll Learn:

Students will dive into Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Spanner, Bigtable and why Persistent Disks are important. As an addedd bonus, we will also look at Data Transfer services such as Cloud Storage Migrator Service.

After taking this class students will understand what GCP Cloud Services can enable your organization around Data Storage and database Continue reading

Worth Reading: Antivirus as spyware

What does an antivirus program do? It scans every file in your device looking for *signatures*, and then uploads those files which match the signatures for further analysis by the antivirus provider. So hacking antivirus involves 2 steps: produce signatures for files you want to steal, and then exfiltrate those files. The hard work of scanning for those files is already automated by the antivirus program! —Henry Baker @RISKS

Traditional application performance management no longer sufficient

Understanding how applications perform has been somewhat of a mystery for IT departments since the advent of networked applications.The reason why it’s been so hard is that traditional management tools operate in a bottoms-up manner. That is, each infrastructure component is monitored, usually with its own management tool, and then the data is rolled up to some kind of manager of managers. Application performance management is inferred by trying to correlate the information manually. The problem is today there is far too much data to be analyzed using manual processes.Also on Network World: Manage user performance, not the network, with machine learning-based tools Nyansa takes a different approach. It provides a top-down view of the infrastructure, so application performance can be determined through the lens of the user instead of the infrastructure. Its Voyance product can be thought of as actual user performance management instead of traditional application performance management. Voyance uses machine language to interpret the massive amounts of data collected at the access edge, including wireless infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here

Traditional application performance management no longer sufficient

Understanding how applications perform has been somewhat of a mystery for IT departments since the advent of networked applications.The reason why it’s been so hard is that traditional management tools operate in a bottoms-up manner. That is, each infrastructure component is monitored, usually with its own management tool, and then the data is rolled up to some kind of manager of managers. Application performance management is inferred by trying to correlate the information manually. The problem is today there is far too much data to be analyzed using manual processes.Also on Network World: Manage user performance, not the network, with machine learning-based tools Nyansa takes a different approach. It provides a top-down view of the infrastructure, so application performance can be determined through the lens of the user instead of the infrastructure. Its Voyance product can be thought of as actual user performance management instead of traditional application performance management. Voyance uses machine language to interpret the massive amounts of data collected at the access edge, including wireless infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here

Building Our New Website: Improved search, speed, and an open issue tracker

As we continue to evolve our new website, I will provide more regular updates to all of you visiting our site. Today’s topics are: improved search; much faster speed; and an open issue tracker.

Searching our content

For all of you who contacted us saying “I can’t find anything” on the site through the search box (the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the screen), we’ve got some great news – it should now work!   We tried two different search solutions for all our content before we moved on to a third solution that we find works well. Please do let us know if you are still having challenges finding content.

Speeding up the site

The site should now be much faster! We recently deployed some caching servers in front of our site and the speed should be dramatically improved for most all of the pages. This was very important to us as we want to provide the best user experience.

Tracking open issues

If you do find anything wrong with the new site, we have an open issue tracker on Github. You can visit the repository at:

https://github.com/InternetSociety/web-site-feedback

and the actual list of Continue reading

Getting Started: Adding Proxy Support

Getting-Started-with-Tower-Adding-Proxy-Support.png

Getting Started with Adding Proxy Support

There are many reasons why proxies are implemented into an environment. Some can be put in place for security, others as load balancers for your systems. No matter the use, if you have a proxy in place, Red Hat Ansible Tower may need to utilize it. For a more in-depth look at what we will be doing in this post, you can visit our docs specifically on Proxy Support within Ansible Tower here.

Adding a Load Balancer (Reverse Proxy)

In some instances, you might have Ansible Tower behind a load balancer and need that information added to your instance. Sessions in Ansible Tower associate an IP address upon creation, and Ansible Tower’s policy requires that any use of the session match the original IP address.

To allow for support of a proxy, you will have to make a few changes to your Ansible Tower configuration. Previously, this would have been done in a settings.py file found on your Ansible Tower host, but as of 3.2 you can now make these changes in the UI. To make these edits, you must be an admin on the instance and navigate to Settings, and then Continue reading

Community Report: Indigenous Connectivity

The 2017 Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS) was the start of a critical conversation about how Indigenous communities can connect themselves to the Internet on their own terms. But it was just the beginning.

An extraordinary community of people came together: Indigenous-owned Internet service providers, community network manager/operators, researchers and policy makers, and Indigenous leadership. Their conversations outlined the benefits the Internet can bring to Indigenous communities, including self-determination, culture and language preservation, economic development, health, and education. These conversations are captured in the Indigenous Connectivity Summit Community Report, which also describes the unique challenges Indigenous communities face to gain sustainable connectivity and recommendations to address those challenges.

We hope that this report serves as a springboard to further Indigenous connectivity in North America and beyond. You can take part by visiting the Indigenous Connectivity page!

The post Community Report: Indigenous Connectivity appeared first on Internet Society.

Google’s Vision for Mainstreaming Machine Learning

Here at The Next Platform, we’ve touched on the convergence of machine learning, HPC, and enterprise requirements looking at ways that vendors are trying to reduce the barriers to enable enterprises to leverage AI and machine learning to better address the rapid changes brought about by such emerging trends as the cloud, edge computing and mobility.

At the SC17 show in November 2017, Dell EMC unveiled efforts underway to bring AI, machine learning and deep learning into the mainstream, similar to how the company and other vendors in recent years have been working to make it easier for enterprises …

Google’s Vision for Mainstreaming Machine Learning was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

How Apple Fumbled the Voice First Future

 

Xerox fumbled the future when it invented and then ignored the personal computer. With the Macintosh, Apple created the personal computer the Xerox Alto might have been.

Apple is also fumbling the future—the Voice First future. Voice First simply means our primary mode of interacting with computers in the future will be with our voice. When Apple bought Siri it had a solid 5 year lead in voice control. Now Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant have not only caught Siri, but they’ve surpassed her.

The story of how Apple is fumbling the Voice First future is passionately told by Brian Roemmele in a great interview with Rene Ritchie in his Vector podcast Why Siri needs to be a platform.

Brian covers a lot of ground in the interview, but there are a few main themes: Voice First is the Future; Apple Fumbled Voice First; Engineering First Cultures Suck at Product; Apple Needs to Lose the iPhone Tax and Build Siri as a Platform.

In each section I paraphrase quotes Brian made in the interview to explain the theme. I think you'll find it fun and provocative. Brian is an interesting guy.

Voice First is the Future

IDG Contributor Network: IoT, AR and AI – How this year’s CES announcements will affect IT infrastructure in 2018

The latest and greatest innovation in tech was on display this month at CES, with top brands showing off the newest, hottest gadgets, appliances and machines. Where in years past we’ve seen the introduction of IoT devices or smart assistant capabilities, this year we saw the convergence of IoT, augmented reality and artificial intelligence, with Alexa-enabled smart mirrors, new AR headsets with smart assistants and connected ovens. What’s more - Samsung vowed again that all their products with be IOT compatible by 2020. These AI-enabled connected devices, along with the rise in augmented reality, require significant data and computing capabilities. Their introduction and adoption will drive the need for real-time computation to the edges of the internet, which will decentralize enterprise cloud deployments. DNS solutions that offer intelligent traffic management and high velocity automation will enable organizations to deliver the user experience expected for these technologies.To read this article in full, please click here

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