I was invited by Adam Lange and Adam Haertle to share my story in “rozmowa KONtrolowana” podcast (in Polish). I’d like to thank both of them and of course all of participants for invitation, leading it, questions and nice way to spend time in familiar, geeky environment :) now - just view/listen to it your favorite format :)
i posted quite emotional piece some time ago - on real world warriors that really don’t need to do anything more than they already did. despite that, they want more. publicity, fame and to achieve that - they use lies. it seems even poster hero of US - killed sniper Chris Kyle did a bit of lying himself. and it seems he was even warned specifically against it by his superior - that he can’t make false claims about number of medals he received....
how David defeated Goliath this story started in June of this year. one of Apple AppStore employees made an “error” while reviewing revision of Basecamp authors new app - Hey. David Heinemeier Hansson, one of the Basecamp founders, took it to Twitter David is not only Basecamp CEO, he’s author of series of great books on running teams and companies. he started to relay live on Twitter emails he and his employees exchanged with Apple Application Store team....
after last 13 years spent at Cisco Systems Poland, working in the “field” I decided it’s prime time for something new. something, that can challenge me and give back that sense of new adventure. having opportunity to spend all that time with great people, learning a lot and experiencing even more was great fun. i went through full country chain - from “simple” Systems Engineer, to Architecture Lead, Systems Engineer Manager, then Regional Sales Manager (driving 2/3rds of country business operations) and finally Country Systems Engineer Manager and CTO....
last couple of weeks were quite hectic. I’m working on rebuilding the BGP blackholing infrastructure (yes, that’s old site, along with old, expired certificate), along with some extras (like AS112 and RPKI services). the job is like 40% done, with scripts completely rewritten in Python, and the ‘only’ part missing being infra (virtualized and not-so-much) and WWW portal. at the same time, I’ve committed long time ago to new project with failure post-mortem analysis on our netdesign....
as it’s easy to notice, I did a site migration. instead of moving to WordPress however (which was original plan), i decided to follow more ambitious path, and deploy Hugo platform, supported by Go… and static page generation (yeah!). Hugo itself supports i18n, so it provides the most important functionality. it doesn’t hurt that this solution frees me also from continuous tinkering in PHP and SQL :)
…and in particular, often goes very badly. not only in life in general, but also in the IT world :) you probably have dozens of stories to tell, if not hundreds. someone configured the port badly, everything worked until it stopped … and when it stopped, it dragged the whole network behind. big time. whole data center. why do we make the same mistakes all the time? automation slightly improves the situation, but sometimes it may dramatically speed up things going bad....
i just realised, that there’s a port! you just need to install xhyve… and that’s it. you don’t need VMware or VirtualBox anymore. have a great virtualization!
all three books are great, and whole trilogy - delightful. they’re refreshing in style, and for me personally very similar to writings of Stanisława Lema (well, at least there where it’s close to intergalactic travels and technology) and Asimov. everything embedded into chinese cultural environment that i studied recently for professional reasons). some of that can be seen very clearly in long term (really long term) strategies mixed with tactical execution....
for the first time in a few years I took three weeks of vacation. …and this is starting to catch up with me :) i took few books with myself, but only some of them are worth mentioning - like ‘Hit refresh’ by Satya Nadella (though I have not read it yet) and ‘Now. The physics of time’ - I am in the process and it is fascinating to read....
if you build motto for your company vision, and it’s blunt like, for example, ‘don’t be evil’… people may notice when you decide to remove it. ‘do the right thing’ doesn’t sound so convincing and blunt. while the ‘don’t be evil’ is left in the last sentence of ‘Code of Business Conduct’ that employees need to accept, it’s softer and flattened. sign of new times?
it should be. it’s kind of tricky to get right and may feel a bit like an abstract concept. random values should be random (unless you’re talking about Debian randomness). so, let’s try that - take a cube in hand and throw it three times. what’s the probability that you’ll get three times the same number? small, but there is one. similar experiment - your friend throws coin ten times, and eight times there’s eagle....
NASA spent recently a lot of effort (and i suspect - money) to find Fortran proficient developer to rewrite code working still on Voyager. ideal candidate was found finally at NASA. this begs a question - how much you can do in Fortran having 64kB of RAM and less than 3W of power? it’s completely different task than our typical computers, not to mention bad practices they learn to junior developers due to abundance of hardware resources....
it’s hard to disagree with Bruce’s article. would blockchain-based solution be the best approach here for accounting? accounted access to data, accounted transactions … something must change. we can’t deal properly with data.
how bad our current patent system needs to be broken, to allow building companies just to do business on patent trolling? we see more articles about it but capitalsm doesn’t care. even when law enters the game, there’s often nothing that can be done having SDN in mind, and developers influence on how todays internet works, i’m thinking what we’ll be doing in couple of years (and how pitfully unprepared are companies today to defend any sensitive data - financial, biological - in “web 17....
…resent encryption. in particular those that were caught red handed doing mass surveillance of its own and foreign citizens. it’s worth to read this article to understand how PR (written by Camerons speech author) is trying to turn everyone using security and encryption to those helping terrorist. it’s enough today to name somebody ’terrorist’ and suddenly every option is on the table. interrogation, wiretapping, dropping bombs or simply investigating without any specific reason is fair call....
…discussions were already covered on my blog. arstechnica just published A/B/X test of Ethernet cables capable of suspiciously “enriching” sound and as you can imagine… there’s no difference in those priced at 340$ vs those priced at 2.5$. it’s good laughing experience to compare this review and the one provided by this fraud, that’s trying to say over his fake so called ’test’. please read comments as well - there’s interesting one, where one of the commenters mentions that 0=0 and 1=1 in digital processing, while the author (again, fraud) still claims there’s a big difference....
Life is unfair. And the unfairness is distributed unfairly.
…this is how you should build lean IT systems. in particular, I like this quote: And the new login system, which MPL launched in February 2015, is remarkable. It is faster and it is cheaper than the old one: The old system responded to requests somewhere between two and 10 long seconds; the new one takes 30 milliseconds, on average. The old login system cost $250 million to build and would have required another $70 million annually to stay online....
…are of course one of the worst and evil habitats in this world. treating passengers like cattle during the entire process of boarding and exiting the plane (let’s not skip the “joyful” stage of buying a ticket, let alone attempting to modify it later) has become - generally - a new standard today. a few months ago I had the opportunity to fly back and forth in Poland on two different days - Monday and Wednesday....
i’m ten pages into an ethernet-phy manual and i’m pretty sure the internet is impossible bike
twitter and facebook admit, that at least 10 percent of the user base is likely bots. it’s “official” data, but that article shows, that this estimation may be way undersized. it seems that next dot-com bubble slowly grows and should burst soon. we’ve been discussing this for years now, but it seems the valuation of seemingly worthless, virtual companies producing software is growing year by year. 3 billion dollars for company that builds (poor, by the way) headphones - Apple buys Beats Electronics....
while looking through recent IETF meeting notes i found interesting idea - splitting OSPF area zero without incurring outage. it’s very interesting idea for flawless, in-service migrations. on the other side, another OSPF concept that I was afraid somebody will bring up is… enabling FlowSpec capabilities. oh my… also, overlay networking effort is gaining grounds, with architectural choices as well as security. it’s interesting how much longer it will take....
…on the performance of virtualized network stack different cloud providers. plus - couple of slides and some speculations about how AWS is built.
…people using dialup connections. those poor people stay need them to take advantage of restricted Internet services provided by AOL. a year ago at that time, still around 2.6 million of US citizens were connecting to internet that way. …and you think that your 1Mbps upstream link is not enough? ;P
it’s better not to know, how thick the wall is. you may have too short run. anonymous
quite recently i described my own new workstation. it has dual Xeon processors, and today i decided to upgrade memory from 128GB to 256GB (yeah, i use to run a lot of VMs). so below you can see the outcome - 256GB RAM, 2 physical CPUs, 16 cores, 32 threads: great advantage of having such beast at your disposal is that you simply can run everything thrown at it. it’s quiet, it’s effective and it also doubles as great gaming station....
don’t start your php upgrade at 2:40 in the morning. as you’ll stay awake until 5am :)
Jennifer Lawrence phenomenon (i can’t quite get Hunger Games popularity, but i love Silver Linings Playbook. how you should do proper conference badges (oh yeah, we’re learning!), Department of Defense outsources to private company management of their own images and movies archive for 10 years, RSA accepted 10M$ of bribe from NSA to promote weaker encryption algorithm and last but not least - DARPA vision of autonomic SkyNet network from eightees....
Christmas are coming, and traditionally that means good time of the year to push people to buy things they don’t need. in Poland, companies generally don’t care what Customer wants. and don’t listed in the process of ignoring him/her. why are companies selling services choose not to listen? they don’t care? i was talking about this paradox during Cisco Connect, but in reality i was just repeating what everyone sane enough to think shouts left and right - we want customized offer, not something off the shelf....