Technical Debt (or Is Future Proofing Even a Good Idea?)

What, really, is “technical debt?” It’s tempting to say “anything legacy,” but then why do we need a new phrase to describe “legacy stuff?” Even the prejudice against legacy stuff isn’t all that rational when you think about it. Something that’s old might also just be well-tested, or well-worn but still serviceable. Let’s try another tack.

Technical debt, in the software world, can be defined as working on a piece of software for long periods of time by only adding features, and never refactoring or reorganizing the code to meet current conditions. The general idea is that as new features are added on top of the old, two things happen. First, the old stuff becomes a sort of opaque box that no-one understands. Second, the stuff being added to the old increasingly relies on public behavior that might be subject to unintended consequences or leaky abstractions.

To resolve this problem in the software world, software is “refactored.” In refactoring, every use of a public API is examined, including what information is being drawn out, or what the expected inputs and outputs are. The old code is then “discarded,” in a sense, and a new underlying function written Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Facebook Considers New Ways to Combat Disinformation

More moderation: Facebook is looking at new ways to moderate posts on its site to make it more difficult for election disinformation to spread, the New York Times reports. Facebook is looking at adding more “friction,” such as an additional click or two, before users can share posts, according to insiders in the company. The new measures were expected shortly.

Millions without access: About 63 percent of rural residents in Latin America and the Caribbean ­– 77 million people – have little or no access to Internet services, according to a study by the Inter-American Development Bank and Microsoft, Nearshore Americas says. By comparison, about 71 percent of urban residents in the region have access to the Internet.

Bracing for regulation: Residents of Nigeria are expecting the government to move to regulate social media after recent protests, Quartz Africa on Yahoo reports. “We must regulate social media in a manner that it does not become a purveyor of fake news and hate speech,” Nigeria’s minister of information Lai Mohammed said recently. “We will not fold our arms to allow purveyors of fake news and hate speech to use the social media to destabilize the country.”

Right to repair: Campaigners across Continue reading

You Want HPC And You Want Virtualization? Let’s Talk About It

HPC architects have continued to push the bounds of what is possible with computing, but the underlying architecture they have used has been fairly consistent – bare metal servers, which get bigger and faster over time. …

You Want HPC And You Want Virtualization? Let’s Talk About It was written by David Gordon at The Next Platform.

Making HPC And AI More Accessible To Enterprises

For more than a decade, as they have watched the amount of data they are generating stack up and technologies like artificial intelligence and analytics come to the forefront, enterprises have turned an eye toward high performance computing equipment and tools to help them get a handle on all of it. …

Making HPC And AI More Accessible To Enterprises was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Virtual consensus in Delos

Virtual consensus in Delos, Balakrishnan et al. (Facebook, Inc.), OSDI’2020

Before we dive into this paper, if you click on the link above and then download and open up the paper pdf you might notice the familiar red/orange splash of USENIX, and appreciate the fully open access. USENIX is a nonprofit organisation committed to making content and research freely available – both conference proceedings and the recorded presentations of their events. Without in-person conferences this year, income is down and events are under threat. If you want to help them, you have options to donate, become a member, or even talk to your organisation about becoming a partner, benefactor, or patron. Every little helps!

Back in 2017 the engineering team at Facebook had a problem. They needed a table store to power core control plane services, which meant strong guarantees on durability, consistency, and availability. They also needed it fast – the goal was to be in production within 6 to 9 months. While ultimately this new system should be able to take advantage of the latest advances in consensus for improved performance, that’s not realistic given a 6-9 month in-production target. So realistically Continue reading

Bob Metcalfe, Part 1 | Insider Stories from Early Silicon Valley

Podcast co-hosts Derick and Brandon explore the early days of Silicon Valley with Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet technology. 

Bob Metcalfe, Part 2 | Ethernet’s Impact and Your Own Personal Algorithm

A deeper dive with Bob Metcalfe on the lasting impact of Ethernet and the World Wide Web. What’s in store for the world next? 

Heidi Roizen | How Networking is Changing Networking

Brandon and Derick explore the connection between computer networking technology and people in this interview with venture capitalist and entrepreneur Heidi Roizen. 

Marc Andreessen | Time to Build

Join our hosts as they unravel today’s challenging culture with Marc Andreessen, creator of the first web browser and co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Installing FTP client (or any other Linux tool) on Cumulus Linux

Hello my friend,

Recently I’ve been engage in some troubleshooting with Cumulus and was looking for the way, how can I send the cl-support file from my switches directly to the vendor support bypassing downloading them to my laptop.

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• Operation and application of different transport protocols SSH, HTTP, gRPC
• Operation and application of management specifications: CLI, gNMI, NETCONF, RESTCONF/REST API
• How to use and manage everything above with Ansible, Bash, and Python

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Brief description

Let’s take a closer look into the issue. The Cumulus Linux is based on the Continue reading

Innovative Methodologies for Freelance Writers

Whenever anyone thinks about freelancing, they just imagine someone being by the beach relaxing and doing soft work either with their laptops or their mobile devices. And actually, this is the aim of freelancing. It helps one to freely work in their comfortable places. Freelance writers also have the choice to choose exactly when they would work and when they would rest. Nothing is forcefully put on them. They live a life of choice.

Though this makes it seem like freelancers have it simple and basic, it is one of the things lots of people don’t understand in the freelancing world.

Issues Faced by Freelance Writers

One of the main issues is that freelancing isn’t a consistent job. This means you could get a lot of jobs in a week and the next month you could get nothing. Getting to a point where you’ll be constantly getting gigs is quite difficult too. There’s a lot of competition in this career choice that is quite rewarding. But it is a sensitive issue if you think about it. It can get quite frustrating too.

What Makes Things Get this Difficult?

For one to succeed in the world of freelancing, you need to Continue reading

New Content: VMware NSX-T 3.0 Update

When VMware NSX-T 3.0 came out, I planned to do an update session of the VMware NSX Technical Deep Dive webinar along the lines of what I did for AWS Networking a few weeks ago. However, it turned out that most of the new features didn’t take more than a bullet or two on an existing slide, or at most a new slide.

Covering them in a live session and then slicing-and-dicing the resulting recording simply didn’t make sense, so I updated the videos in summer 2020 (the last batch was published in early August).

New Content: VMware NSX-T 3.0 Update

When VMware NSX-T 3.0 came out, I planned to do an update session of the VMware NSX Technical Deep Dive webinar along the lines of what I did for AWS Networking a few weeks ago. However, it turned out that most of the new features didn’t take more than a bullet or two on an existing slide, or at most a new slide.

Covering them in a live session and then slicing-and-dicing the resulting recording simply didn’t make sense, so I updated the videos in summer 2020 (the last batch was published in early August).

Virtual consensus in Delos

5 Top Digital Transformation Trends Driving Network Transformation

Resizing Windows to a Specific Size on macOS

I recently had a need (OK, maybe more a desire than a need) to set my browser window(s) on macOS to a specific size, like 1920x1080. I initially started looking at one of the many macOS window managers, but after reading lots of reviews and descriptions and still being unclear if any of these products did what I wanted, I decided to step back to using AppleScript to accomplish what I was seeking. In this post, I’ll share the solution (and the articles that helped me arrive at the solution).

My first stop was this blog post by Ethan Banks. I tried replicating the AppleScript he used, but couldn’t get it to work. I’m still running macOS 10.14 “Mojave,” so perhaps his code was specific to macOS 10.15 “Catalina.” I moved on, never realizing there was another section to his post that had the information I needed (and would eventually find). Let that be a lesson to be sure to read the entire post next time.

Moving on, I arrived at this post. OK, this used a different mechanism than Ethan’s post. I tried it, and it sort of worked, but it didn’t create the window geometry Continue reading

Jinja2 Tutorial – Part 6 – Include and Import

Quick personal vpn – wireguard with aws

I have written about wire-guard previously about how easy it is to set-up a personal vpn

https://r2079.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/wireguard-server-and-qr-code-scan-in-the-mobile-app-its-that-simple-to-set-up-a-vpn/

What is the issue: I have never explained the use-case clearly in that post, let me try to re-attempt the write-up again

you see, on a personal basis I need to access few websites which are hosted in India, issue with these websites is that they dont allow any traffic external to the country

There are many browser based proxies out there which can do this task just fine and also paid services, my problem is that when you are exchanging user/password information and financial transactions over these proxies you don’t know how exactly all this data getting exchanged and transmitted

Few Tips from my experience before i get into the post :

-> you need to change ubuntu instances ipv4 forwarding so that it will forward packets through the instance also nats it

root@ip-172-31-34-66:~# cat /etc/sysctl.conf | egrep -i ip_forward
net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
root@ip-172-31-34-66:~# 

-> Make sure you dont start routing everything first, take public DNS’s and test the system with allowed_ips in the configuration file else you will loose internet access and if not done correctly you will Continue reading

Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends

We’re excited to announce the expansion of the Network Analytics dashboard to Spectrum customers on the Enterprise plan. Additionally, this announcement introduces two major dashboard improvements for easier reporting and investigation.

Network Analytics

Cloudflare's packet and bit oriented dashboard, Network Analytics, provides visibility into Internet traffic patterns and DDoS attacks in Layers 3 and 4 of the OSI model. This allows our users to better understand the traffic patterns and DDoS attacks as observed at the Cloudflare edge.

When the dashboard was first released in January, these capabilities were only available to Bring Your Own IP customers on the Spectrum and Magic Transit services, but now Spectrum customers using Cloudflare’s Anycast IPs are also supported.

Protecting L4 applications

Spectrum is Cloudflare’s L4 reverse-proxy service that offers unmetered DDoS protection and traffic acceleration for TCP and UDP applications. It provides enhanced traffic performance through faster TLS, optimized network routing, and high speed interconnection. It also provides encryption to legacy protocols and applications that don’t come with embedded encryption. Customers who typically use Spectrum operate services in which network performance and resilience to DDoS attacks are of utmost importance to their business, such as email, remote access, and gaming.

Spectrum customers Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Trap of The Premature Senior

Here’s another riff on the “when you’re the smartest person in the room, change the room” theme: The Trap of The Premature Senior by inimitable Charity Majors. Enjoy!