How Uber Charges You Money, But You Get No Ride

I spent part of last week in Seattle, a city known for its frequent rain. While caught in some weather with my lovely wife, we felt that grabbing an Uber was preferable to walking back to the parking garage. Being on the road, we weren’t prepared to handle a steady downpour.

I fired up the Uber app for the first time in a long time, as I’m not in need of Uber services very often. Hmm. Things had changed since the last time I hailed a ride. Some major GUI changes had happened, along with the app requesting an upfront commitment of a little cash before requesting a pickup. Um…okay. That’s new, but that makes sense. I suppose the cash commitment means that fewer people would cancel their ride after the driver accepts it, and that’s fair enough.

Here’s where it gets ugly, though. We’d hailed a ride during a rush hour in Seattle. There were a lot of cars on the streets. While it wasn’t gridlock, it was busy. An Uber driver accepted my request, and then a few moments later, I get a call. More or less, the driver said, “I’m not that close to you, and it’s Continue reading

How Uber Charges You Money, But You Get No Ride

I spent part of last week in Seattle, a city known for its frequent rain. While caught in some weather with my lovely wife, we felt that grabbing an Uber was preferable to walking back to the parking garage. Being on the road, we weren’t prepared to handle a steady downpour.

I fired up the Uber app for the first time in a long time, as I’m not in need of Uber services very often. Hmm. Things had changed since the last time I hailed a ride. Some major GUI changes had happened, along with the app requesting an upfront commitment of a little cash before requesting a pickup. Um…okay. That’s new, but that makes sense. I suppose the cash commitment means that fewer people would cancel their ride after the driver accepts it, and that’s fair enough.

Here’s where it gets ugly, though. We’d hailed a ride during a rush hour in Seattle. There were a lot of cars on the streets. While it wasn’t gridlock, it was busy. An Uber driver accepted my request, and then a few moments later, I get a call. More or less, the driver said, “I’m not that close to you, and it’s Continue reading

Technology Short Take #87

Welcome to Technology Short Take #87! I have a mix of newer and older items for you this time around. While I’m a bit short on links in some areas, hopefully this is outweighed by some good content in other areas. Here’s hoping you find something useful!

Networking

  • Vincent Bernat has a really in-depth article on IPv4 route lookup on Linux (and one on IPv6 route lookup as well).
  • Ivan Pepelnjak has a great article that tries to get to the kernel of truth in the middle of the intent-based networking hype.
  • Jason Edelman of Network2Code also has a post on intent-based network automation with Ansible, in which he breaks down the idea of intent-based networking (IBN) and how tools such as Ansible or NAPALM can make it possible.
  • From the Department of “Sitting in my Inbox for Way Too Long”, I wanted to point out a company that I ran into back in May of this year at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. The company is VirTool Networks (catchy, eh?), and their product (VirTool Network Analyzer) is aimed at providing some operational visibility into OpenStack virtual networks. I saw a demo of the product—it looks quite handy, Continue reading

Self-Driving Networks with Kireeti Kompella

A while ago I got a kind email from Kireeti Kompella, CTO @ Juniper Networks, saying “A colleague sent me an email of yours regarding SDN, the trough of disillusionment, and the rise of automation. Here's a more dramatic view: the Self-Driving Network -- one whose operation is totally automated.

Even though Software Gone Wild podcast focuses on practical ideas that you could deploy relatively soon in your network, we decided to make an exception and talk about (as one of my friends described it) a unicorn driving a flying DeLorean with a flux capacitor.

Read more ...

NAT- Network Address Translation types and configurations

Today I am going to talk about the NAT which stands for Network Address Translation of the IPs in your network. NAT is one of the most important topic of the network space and is used in almost all the enterprise networks. With the help of NAT you can save your IPs from the public domain.

Now question is Why we are in need and the purpose of NAT ?
What kinds of NAT is there, we are using ?
How configurations looks line if we are using the NAT in our networks ?
How it helps me in my network ?

I knew we have multiple questions on NAT and i also knew that many of you guys already knew about the NAT, the concept and the configuration part. This post is generally for the new comers in the network space who really want to understand the basics of it. Lets start from the beginning why and where to start from.

Why we required NAT:

Its a kind of shortage of the public IPv4 address space has forced the all of us to think harder about alternative ways of addressing networked hosts. Network Address Translation (NAT) therefore was introduced to overcome these addressing Continue reading

Cisco Intersight brings cloud management to compute

I don’t think anyone would argue with the premise that data centers have increased significantly over the past decade. Data centers used to be orderly, as each application had its own dedicated hardware and software. This was highly inefficient, but most data centers could be managed with a handful of people. Then something changed. Businesses were driven to improve the utilization of infrastructure and increase the level of agility, and along came a number of technologies such as virtualization, containers and the cloud. Also, organizations started to embrace the concept of DevOps, which necessitates a level of dynamism and speed never seen before in data centers. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Intersight brings cloud management to compute

I don’t think anyone would argue with the premise that data centers have increased significantly over the past decade. Data centers used to be orderly, as each application had its own dedicated hardware and software. This was highly inefficient, but most data centers could be managed with a handful of people. Then something changed. Businesses were driven to improve the utilization of infrastructure and increase the level of agility, and along came a number of technologies such as virtualization, containers and the cloud. Also, organizations started to embrace the concept of DevOps, which necessitates a level of dynamism and speed never seen before in data centers. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mastering file searches on Linux

There are many ways to search for files on Linux systems and the commands can be very easy or very specific -- narrowing down your search criteria to find what just you're looking for and nothing else. In today's post, we're going to examine some of the most useful commands and options for your file searches. We're going to look into: quick finds more complex search criteria combining conditions reversing criteria simple vs detailed responses looking for duplicate files There are actually several useful commands for searching for files. The find command may be the most obvious, but it's not the only command or always the fastest way to find what you're looking for.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Supercomputing Advancing Too Fast for Key Codes to Keep Pace

The high performance computing world is set to become more diverse over the next several years on the hardware front, but for software development, this new array of ever-higher performance options creates big challenges for codes.

While the hardware advances might be moving too quick for long-standing software to take optimal advantage of, for some areas, things are at a relative standstill in terms of how to approach this future. Is it better to keep optimizing old codes that could be ticked along with the X86 tocks, or does a new architectural landscape mean starting from scratch with scientific codes–even

Supercomputing Advancing Too Fast for Key Codes to Keep Pace was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Project Jengo Strikes Its First Targets (and Looks for More)

Jango Fett by Brickset (Flickr)

When Blackbird Tech, a notorious patent troll, sued us earlier this year for patent infringement, we discovered quickly that the folks at Blackbird were engaged in what appeared to be the broad and unsubstantiated assertion of patents -- filing about 115 lawsuits in less than 3 years, and have not yet won a single one of those cases on the merits in court. Cloudflare felt an appropriate response would be to review all of Blackbird Tech’s patents, not just the one it asserted against Cloudflare, to determine if they are invalid or should be limited in scope. We enlisted your help in this endeavor by placing a $50,000 bounty on prior art that proves the Blackbird Tech patents are invalid or overbroad, an effort we dubbed Project Jengo.

Since its inception, Project Jengo has doubled in size and provided us with a good amount of high quality prior art submissions. We have received more than 230 submissions so far, and have only just begun to scratch the surface. We have already come across a number of standouts that appear to be strong contenders for invalidating many of the Blackbird Tech patents. This means it is Continue reading

Some Static Site Resources

Over the last few days—prompted perhaps by my article with some additional information on my site migration—a few folks in the community have reached out to me to share some resources they thought I might find useful. In turn, I’d like to share them with you, my readers, in the event you might find them useful as well.

This is (clearly and obviously) not a comprehensive list, but here’s what folks have shared with me over the last few days:

  • Josh Habdas shared this link with me; it’s a write-up he did that involves the use of a Ruby-based tool called s3_website. The main problem I have with this write-up is that it hides too many of the details, preventing (in my opinion) some of the valuable learning that can come from such an effort.
  • This article by Ricardo Feliciano of CircleCI does expose some of the gory details, and might be useful for those considering the inclusion of a CI/CD pipeline in their blogging workflow (like I am).
  • Finally, I found this post describing how to build a multi-region S3+CloudFront setup that would protect your site in the event of a single S3 region being unavailable.

I’ll update this Continue reading