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I just finished reading two books of the author mentioned in the title of the post. Fermat’s Last Theorem Code Book highly recommend reading both of them during break from work :)

there’s a lot of discussions around the net neutrality, as obviously the subject is currently still pretty hot. from the one side we have enormous amount of money from advertising business, spend in interesting, devious and - tempting way. from the other side, we have the ideal information society, in which all information are free from filtering, and available for all willing to read. we point to China, Iran or Saudi Arabia as bad examples, filtering all that their citizens can view using the Internet - but we all use google. the same Google, that for the two PCs, depending on their source IP, browser, operating system - and what’s more interesting - depending on your cookies and your google profile (you logged off, right?) - show different answers for the same query. personalization? but using your own money, dear internet user :) i highly recommend reading this book, and before it arrives, read this and this. ...

I’ve took a CCDE practical earlier today, and for the second time I’m pretty clueless how it went, however I have a strong feeling that it was similar to my first take: no go. this time I’ve spent 7 hours, not 5, to do the test, however most of the time I was trying to answer questions based on the small set of information provided. again I’m under strong feeling, that the set of information was not enough to judge on some of the questions, not to mention the effect Russ White describes as “you’d be confused for the whole time”. it basically boils down to the fact that you answer a question from the design that’s clearly up to the explicitly given scenario information, just to notice that couple of questions forward, the design, topology or set of “going forward” information is different. confusing, to say at least :) ...

seventh edition of PLNOG just finished, but what’s more - we just did deliver also first edition of new project - EURONOG. during last three days we’ve had a lot of presentations, discussions, Q&A sessions and discussion panels. see you during next conferences!

…but about everyone that hates it. i can highly recommend you two Scott Berkun essays: on substantive discussions without attacking people personally on choice - wise one - of president; it needs to be of course aligned to polish political model, but it has wider applicability :)

all interesting and worth reading. as usual during summer holidays i’ve tried to catch up with my reading queue - it’s been interesting two weeks: rework - great book for every company owner and destined for big things - previous version of the book - getting real can be read online managing humans - of Rands in Repose blog author; a lot of useful observations and tips for dealing with humans in IT world; you can however skip being geek - most of the content can be found either in ‘managing humans’ or in blog; Stephen Greys Operation Snakebite, Gregory Feifers The Great Gamble, Doug Beatties Task Force Helmand and finally Bing Wests No true Glory - bunch of good books about Iraq and Afghanistan; it’s unbelievable how people tend to make the same mistakes even when previous generations documented them very clearly; Metro 2033 and Metro 2034 - great reading, each of them took me just one day and night; Scott Berkuns Myths of Innovation - wonderful; Born standing Up - Steve Martins biography, tells compelling story about Steve himself, but also about world and America; Richard Wisemans 59 seconds - very practical book worth reading and applying to your daily routines - follow up can be found on You’re not so smart blog; well. now it is time to get back to OSPF and EIGRP. it seems i failed last CCDE exam :) ...

Google sponsored a interesting project some time ago and shared the open font project with community. it’s not a news per se, but today while looking at one of the blogs I’ve browsed through sources and found out about it :D the concept is pretty simple and I recommend you to have a look at it (I’m using them already as you can see).

after experiencing massive hardware problems with MacBook Pro, i immediately fell into series of mysterious SSD failures. i’m baffled with the state of the (pro) electronics market. first, there was OCZ Vertex 2. my MacBook Pro couldn’t properly work in SATA3 mode despite the fact that Intel controller could. so i moved then to OCZ 2 working on slower SATA bus. it died after week, silently and ultimately. well, RMA submitted, disk will travel to Netherlands and then they’ll send me back working one. i immediately started search for some other, stable solutions. my next best option - Intel 320 announced firmware problems and tried to convince PC owners that it wasn’t happening ’too often'. ...

as i was visiting US for extended period of time, i decided to pull the trigger and in Apple Store bought myself new, shiny 17" MacBook Pro 2011. what’s ridiculous is that when you compare prices in Poland vs US, i’ve paid around 4,5k PLN (around 1000$) less than I’d pay in Poland - even though, Apple doesn’t import such high end configs to Poland. unbelievable, 1/3 of the cost of the whole machine! ...

“Cisco eats in own dog food” or as you may elite-write-it: c15c0 d06 f00d. we announced participation in ISOC IPv6 day as a first vendor. some parts of our infrastructure serve IPv6 natively, but that’s a great opportunity to test it at scale - including hardware and software for systems that’s used for our internal and Customer services. among other things we’re testing AnyConnect 3.0 with native IPv6 support (public version is going to be available in couple of months), ACE 3.0 service cards for load-balancing, and firewall systems (ASA-SM service cards and ASA 5585-X). ...