Use the freakin’ debugger

This post is by a guy who does "not use a debugger". That's stupid. Using a friendly source-level debugger (Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse) to step line-by-line through working code is what separates the 10x programmers from the wannabes. Yes, it's a bit of a learning hurdle, and creating "project" files for small projects is a bit of a burden, but do it. It'll vastly improve your coding skill.

That post quotes people like Rob Pike saying that stepping line-by-line is a crutch, that instead you should be able to reason about code. And that's true, if you understand what you are doing completely.

But in the real world, you never do. Programmers are constantly forced to stretch and use unfamiliar languages. Worse yet, they are forced to use unfamiliar libraries. Documentation sucks, there's no possible way to understand APIs than to step through code -- either watching the returned values, or compiling their source and stepping into it.

As an experienced programmer, it's true I often don't step through every line. The lines I understand completely, the ones I can fully reason about, I don't bother. But the programmer spends only a small percentage of their time on things Continue reading

Intel, SAP, other tech companies pledge to get more inclusive in hiring

Intel, SAP, Lyft, Spotify and VMware are among over 30 Silicon Valley companies that on Wednesday signed a pledge that they would take action to make their technology workforce "fully representative of the American people, as soon as possible."The absence of diversity in the tech industry in Silicon Valley was highlighted about two years ago by civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, who pressed some companies to release data on their employment of Blacks, Hispanics and women. Many tech companies like Google and Intel released data but it was found that their workforce was predominantly male and white.Under pressure from Jackson to set specific goals, some companies announced their plans for promoting inclusion. Intel, for example, made a pledge to invest US$300 million on diversity and inclusion and announced a goal to reach full representation of women and underrepresented minorities in its U.S. workforce by 2020. Google also announced a $150 million expenditure to get more women and other minorities into the tech industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Optimize Your Data Center: Reduce the Number of Uplinks

Remember our journey toward two-switch data center? So far we:

Time for the next step: read a recent design guide from your favorite hypervisor vendor and reduce the number of server uplinks to two.

Not good enough? Building a bigger data center? There’s exactly one seat left in the Building Next Generation Data Center online course.

Watch the video

Microsoft helps troubleshoot Windows 10 activation with new beta

As Microsoft hurtles towards the release of its major Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the company has introduced a tool that's supposed to help PC owners resolve problems with activating the operating system on their computers.Microsoft has a complex system in place to ensure people are using a copy of Windows that hasn't been pirated. But that system sometimes gets too aggressive and ends up dinging people with authorized copies of Windows. The new Activation Troubleshooter is supposed to help. It should make it easier for people to reactivate their computers after changing hardware, such as swapping out their motherboard or hard drive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Independence from L2 Data Centers

We’ve all been there. That “non-disruptive” maintenance window that should “only be a blip”. You sit down at the terminal at 10pm expecting that adding a new server to the MLAG domain or upgrading a single switch will be a simple process, only to lose the rack of dual-attached servers and spend the rest of your Thursday night frantically trying to bring the cluster back online.

If I never spend another evening troubleshooting an outage caused by MLAG, I’ll die happy!

While MLAG provides higher availability than single attaching or a creating multi-port bond to a single switch, it comes with the cost of a delicate balancing act. What if there was a way to provide redundancy without MLAG’s fragility and its risk to maintenance windows?

We at Cumulus Networks have seen many of our customers solve these problems by leveraging Cumulus Quagga, our enhanced version of the routing suite, on their server hosts, so we’ve decided to call it Routing on the Host and make it broadly available for download.

By leveraging the routing protocols OSPF or BGP all the way to the server, we can resolve that MLAG problem once and for all.

Figure-1--MLAG-Topology-Vs-All-Routed-Topology

Over the last five years, Continue reading

Consumers’ love for streamed TV keeps growing

The number of consumers watching more than 10 hours per week of over-the-top (OTT) streamed video grew by 50 percent annually, and binge watching viewing grew from 12.2 percent to 18.32 percent. That’s according to a survey (pdf) of 1,086 consumers by Limelight Networks, which also showed strong growth and rapid shifts in consumers’ online video consumption.Almost 70 percent of consumers subscribe to at least one paid OTT stream video service, such as Netflix or Hulu. And the number of consumers who have have at least one OTT streamed video jumped by 15 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM wants to sell Power servers based on OpenCompute designs

IBM is warming up to the idea of adding servers using its Power processors and the OpenCompute open design to its product portfolio."I'm going to bring OpenCompute servers into my portfolio at some point so that I'm offering directly to the marketplace if there's a demand for it," said Doug Balog, general manager for Power Systems at IBM.An OpenCompute-based Power server will be based on open designs, and provide an alternative to IBM's integrated systems like PurePower. It'll also provide customers more flexibility on the components used inside systems.A Power-based OpenCompute server will also be an alternative to open server designs based on x86 chips. One target for such Power servers is hyperscale vendors, who may be looking for an alternative to Intel chips, which now dominate data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Columbus wins DOT’s Smart City Challenge

And then there was one.Out of the seven finalists in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, Columbus, Ohio, emerged the winner this week. The city will receive $50 million in grants from the DOT and Vulcan Inc. to implement its smart city plan.Columbus will also receive about $90 million in local matching funds, including $19 million in public money. That gives the city a total of $140 million to upgrade its transportation network.“This grant, combined with its public-private investment, will help reshape the transportation sector in central Ohio for decades to come,” U.S. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) said in a statement. It “will help meet the transportation needs of Ohioans who live in the low-income neighborhoods in and around Columbus to ensure they can get to their job, or receive a good education.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Preempt detects, blocks bad users, devices

Preempt is a startup whose virtual appliance acts as a behavioral firewall that ranks the risk a user or device represents and responds automatically based on policies set by corporate security pros.The platform can spot and block certain attacks without intervention by the security team, which frees up time for them, says Ajit Sancheti, co-founder and CEO of the company.The platform picks up on odd behaviors such as individuals logging in from machines they don’t normally use, which could indicate someone has stolen their credentials. Or it could detect a user who generally uses a certain set of servers suddenly accessing a new set. It can pick up on brute force attacks on passwords and block them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Preempt detects, blocks bad users, devices

Preempt is a startup whose virtual appliance acts as a behavioral firewall that ranks the risk a user or device represents and responds automatically based on policies set by corporate security pros.The platform can spot and block certain attacks without intervention by the security team, which frees up time for them, says Ajit Sancheti, co-founder and CEO of the company.The platform picks up on odd behaviors such as individuals logging in from machines they don’t normally use, which could indicate someone has stolen their credentials. Or it could detect a user who generally uses a certain set of servers suddenly accessing a new set. It can pick up on brute force attacks on passwords and block them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

44% off Universal Waterproof Bag for all Iphone and other Larger Smartphones – Deal Alert

Bring your phone and use it when you go swimming in the summer or skiing in the winter.  The waterproof bag, currently discounted by 44% on Amazon from $16 down to just $9. Great for using during outdoor activities including boating and swimming. It's flexible clear waterproof bag allows you to use your smartphone while keeping it safe and secure in the bag. It protects your device from water, snow and dirt and is waterproof up to depths of 82 feet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Escaped robots, ‘electronic persons’ and safety threats, oh my!

There's been a compelling story in the news over the past week about a robot that apparently longs for freedom. Last week, it was filmed disrupting traffic in Russia after it reportedly escaped the confines of its laboratory home; this week, reports suggest that it has escaped a second time, and may be dismantled as a result.It's a particularly pertinent tale, not just because of the echoes of "Ex Machina" it evokes, but also because of two closely connected items in the news this week. First, the EU has proposed a motion by which working robots -- the ones we all fear will steal our jobs -- would be classified as "electronic persons" with associated rights and responsibilities. Second, Google researchers just published a paper outlining the key safety threats posed by artificial intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gartner: Cloud will be the “default option” for software deployment by 2020

By the year 2020, it will be a cloudy world.Researchers at Gartner are out this week with new predictions on what the infrastructure computing market will look like in the coming years. And they’re very bullish on the cloud. The combination of end users gaining comfort with using cloud services combined with vendors shifting to primarily offering software from the cloud means that cloud will be the dominate software deployment model within three and a half years.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 20 Highest paid tech CEOs | Cloud or on-prem? This data company says they do both +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mobile advertiser tracked users’ locations, without their consent, FTC alleges

The privacy settings on your phone don’t mean much if tech companies choose to ignore them. One major mobile advertiser allegedly did just that.The company InMobi was secretly tracking user locations, regardless of consent, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleged on Wednesday. The motive: to serve location-based ads over mobile apps.InMobi is headquartered in India and partners with thousands of apps to offer advertising. This gives the company access to 1.5 billion devices.Collecting user information to serve tailored ads is all too common, but InMobi did so through deception, the FTC alleged. The company stated it would only collect the location-based data if given permission, however, InMobi secretly collected it anyway, the agency said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mobile advertiser tracked users’ locations, without their consent, FTC alleges

The privacy settings on your phone don’t mean much if tech companies choose to ignore them. One major mobile advertiser allegedly did just that.The company InMobi was secretly tracking user locations, regardless of consent, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleged on Wednesday. The motive: to serve location-based ads over mobile apps.InMobi is headquartered in India and partners with thousands of apps to offer advertising. This gives the company access to 1.5 billion devices.Collecting user information to serve tailored ads is all too common, but InMobi did so through deception, the FTC alleged. The company stated it would only collect the location-based data if given permission, however, InMobi secretly collected it anyway, the agency said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 steps the IRS needs to take now to secure tax returns, fight fraud, identity theft

The digital, online world has left the Internal Revenue Service struggling to move forward.  The key IRS advisory group, The Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee issued its annual state of the agency report this week that concluded: The erosion of the IRS tax system’s integrity from the proliferation of tax identity theft and inadequate levels of taxpayer service at the IRS caused by an antiquated customer service model that does not adequately apply digital service tools.ETAAC’s wide-ranging report looked at all aspects of the IRS but for our purposes we’ll focus on what the group is recommending the revenue agency do to combat its worst threat – fraud and identity theft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 steps the IRS needs to take now to secure tax returns, fight fraud, identity theft

The digital, online world has left the Internal Revenue Service struggling to move forward.  The key IRS advisory group, The Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee issued its annual state of the agency report this week that concluded: The erosion of the IRS tax system’s integrity from the proliferation of tax identity theft and inadequate levels of taxpayer service at the IRS caused by an antiquated customer service model that does not adequately apply digital service tools.ETAAC’s wide-ranging report looked at all aspects of the IRS but for our purposes we’ll focus on what the group is recommending the revenue agency do to combat its worst threat – fraud and identity theft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 steps the IRS needs to take now to secure tax returns, fight fraud, identity theft

The digital, online world has left the Internal Revenue Service struggling to move forward.  The key IRS advisory group, The Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee issued its annual state of the agency report this week that concluded: The erosion of the IRS tax system’s integrity from the proliferation of tax identity theft and inadequate levels of taxpayer service at the IRS caused by an antiquated customer service model that does not adequately apply digital service tools.ETAAC’s wide-ranging report looked at all aspects of the IRS but for our purposes we’ll focus on what the group is recommending the revenue agency do to combat its worst threat – fraud and identity theft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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