Rubenerd

For those of us in the IT industry, the reappointment of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister of Australia has most significantly seen the resignation of Stephen Conroy as Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

The bad

I’m pretty confident I share the views of many people in Australian IT when I say his departure is a… mixed blessing. On the one hand, Mr Conroy proposed one of the more absurd and overreaching online censorship schemes in the world, something which even the government of my second home in Singapore would have blushed at. I was relieved beyond all reasonable belief when the plan was [effectively] scuttled, though was more than a little nervous it could have reared its ugly head again at some point.

The better

On the other hand, we also had a person who spearheaded the National Broadband Network, a fibre-optic backed node-to-door system that would have finally pulled Australia kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Having grown up in advanced, digitally connected Singapore where communication infrastructure is a government priority, coming back to Australia was like pulling the engine from my laptop and attaching a horse. Paltry download quotas (heck, download quotas at all!), shaky connection quality and ridiculous provisioning times only made me feel for people in Australia attempting to use it to support their businesses, medical needs and education. It really is embarrassingly bad.

It’s with these mixed feelings I bid farewell to Senator Conroy from his post, and wish him well in the future. I hope he’s learned some things from his constituents and the IT community, and continues to be an advocate for future investment, rather than slapping on a band-aid and claiming one of your ministers invented Australian internet. Oh Abbott, you terrify me.

Isn’t it amazing how a small hiring decision can spark a whole discussion in the news media that ultimately doesn’t prove anything?

2012: They’re hiring PostgreSQL developers!

Remember when it looked as though the relationship between SalesForce.com and Oracle couldn’t get any frostier? Julie Bort writing for Business Insider in 2012:

Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff are taking their growing rivalry to the next level. [..] On Friday, Salesforce.com announced it wants to hire 40 to 50 people next year to work on a “big project” using the open-source database PostgreSQL—a big threat to Oracle’s core database offering.

Since this hiring revelation, speculation has been rife that SalesForce were preparing a monumental rewrite of their system to run on PostgreSQL. It’d likely be possible; Postgres increasingly has many of the enterprise features that make Oracle so appealing, such as concurrent revision control.

2013: They’re moving off Oracle

Throughout this year, the speculation only kept growing, bubbling as it were like a rather lovely supposition soup. Larry Dignan writing for ZDNet earlier this month:

Salesforce has been increasingly looking into PostgreSQL, an open source database, and hiring people who could provide some alternative to Oracle. The rationale is clear: Salesforce needs to diversify away from Oracle’s databases and potentially rearchitect for the future.

2013: They’re… not moving off Oracle?

Well, it appears this rearchitecting will come from a familiar place. Chris Kanaracus writing for IDG:

In a coming together of rivals, Salesforce.com and Oracle have signed a nine-year agreement under which the companies will integrate their technologies and Salesforce.com will make a significant investment in Oracle products for its cloud computing platform.

Salesforce.com, long a user of Oracle’s database, will standardize on Oracle’s Linux OS distribution, Java middleware and Exadata server platform, as well as continue to use Oracle’s database, according to the joint announcement on Tuesday.

I would love, love to know how that went down. One can imagine Beinoff and Ellison butting heads until the last minute, or cackling at the idea that they’d convinced the media of an elaborate rivalry of a former protogé and his teacher. Or maybe it was a far more boring—and typical—business arrangement with concessions made and bridges rebuilt.

In any case, SalesForce will be remaining a thoroughly Oracle shop. For a largely database-driven system with hardware and software requirements and a large, entrenched Oracle codebase, you can see how they’d argue it’d make sense.

To quote myself in 2010:

Decided to archive this news graphic [shown above] here for posterity, might be funny to look back on in a few years. Was lifted from the ABC News website on the 25th [..]

I wouldn’t say “funny” would be the term I’d use, but there you have it. As Spock said in the first reboot movie:

I have no further comment on the matter.

Depending on who you speak to, Software as a Service is the fastest growing of the four letter cloud acronyms of which we’re all so fond. Still, there are some barriers to its wider adoption that still need be to be addressed.

The genesis for this post was this article in Forbes. Sean Jacobson highlights what he sees as some of the more pragmatic business problems with SaaS adoption in enterprises:

• Finding the “right” partners for an early stage SaaS company.
• Most startup entrepreneurs have little or no experience formulating deals.
• Many companies focus on what’s in it for them, versus the mutual benefit.
• It can be difficult to prioritize among various business development opportunities.

He makes some compelling cases, though I think he left out the elephant in the room that’s so simple to describe it only needs one word. Pretzel. That was clearly the wrong word, let me try again.

Trust

I’ve made no secret of my reservations about aspects of cloud computing. There’s nothing inherently insecure or untrustworthy about the technology, but its broad application in contemporary end user systems leaves a lot to be desired. PRISM and other government surveillance systems are largely made possible by incomplete or flawed cryptography, either by [perceived] necessity or choice.

From a cloud provider’s business perspective, you can’t fault them. Well okay, I regularly do, but still. Consumers seem more than happy to trust their data with services that regularly leak their data. To them the priority is UX and—to a certain extent—fashion.

These priorities won’t fly in the enterprise. Or at least, in an enterprise with an informed CIO!

Companies need assurances their data will be kept private, that they’ll be informed of breaches. This goes beyond SLAs or other agreements an enterprise may enter with a cloud provider, it gets to the very core of the provider’s business. Can I trust this provider unequivocally with my data? Are their business priorities in line with mine?

Cloud computing is getting quite a battering with the revelations about PRISM, and continued leaks of user data from Facebook, Google and so on. Lets take this opportunity to address this root issue once and for all.

Photo of SalesForce characters by Timothy M. O’Brien. I’ll admit I think the No Software guy is cute, but that huge smile on the other is a little unsettling!

This has to be among the best uses of “meanwhile” of all time. Read the whole government release if you have a spare minute or two, but here are my favourite sections:

Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today (June 23) on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel. [..]

Meanwhile, the HKSAR Government has formally written to the US Government requesting clarification on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies. The HKSAR Government will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong.

What a day! On what should be a rather fabulous occasion to reflect on the birth of such a wonderful person, both Clara and I had an exam for a subject we were more than a little nervous about. It was raining continuously. With my broken ankle I couldn’t even give her a proper standing cuddle, let alone buy her flowers or a cake. We were unable to hang out in the evening.

And yet, today still made me feel so indescribably lucky. We hugged, shared some poorly wrapped gifts (my bad!), had some mochi and hot Chinese tea. Those were lovely, but mostly I felt lucky for being able to share in her day in a way only her special person can.

I couldn’t have imagined as we all sat celebrating her 20th birthday on that cold winter night in 2012 that I’d be doing the same thing next year as her incredibly lucky (and thoroughly undeserving!) boyfriend. I wouldn’t have believed it if you’d told me, though I would have blushed at the prospect :’).

Happy Birthday Clara ♡. I can’t think of a more fitting use for my 5,000th weblog post! We’ll have a proper one without the exams and shattered ankle soon, I promise (^_^).

Shortly after posting my post about the Cisco Discovery Protocol, I remembered CDP stood for something else in the field of technological technology. That’s right, it was also the model number for the world’s first commercially available CD music player!

From the Polish Wikipedia, which is also the source of the image by Atreyu:

Odtwarzacz CD Sony CDP-101 był pierwszym urządzeniem tego typu na rynku konsumenckim. Jego premiera miała miejsce 1 października 1982 roku. Cena w dniu premiery na rynku japońskim wynosiła 168 000 jenów.

And people say they don’t learn anything from my site.

CDs seem so recent, relatively speaking, and yet there it was years before I was even born. Go figure.

This evening, I find myself doing some last minute studying for my Routing and Internetworks CCNA exam scheduled to take place at UTS tomorrow. I don’t plan on being a network engineer, but it’s a prerequisite requirement for some interesting visualisation and security subjects. How’s that for an endorsement?

Of all the topics I’ve covered this evening, there are a few interesting tidbits that I’ve learned, which I’ve decided to pass on here for what they’re worth.

Continuous Data Protection

In the context of Cisco networking, and from my own personal experience, CDP refers to Continuous Data Protection. Unlike more traditional forms of backup that rely on taking snapshots of data at certain times, CDP systems write multiple copies of data to differing locations as its being changed. While this can potentially introduce latency, the promise is a backup that is continuously made current.

For a time in the early 2000s, I used a system similar in function to a CDP. I want to say it was a PowerQuest product, but I can’t recall. Never mind, point was each time I made a change to Drive C on my Windows 2000 tower, it made a duplicate copy on another hard drive. Rather than just being client software, it introduced a mass storage driver that made the copy transparently. It was pretty neat.

Such a system isn’t without its own unique set of challenges. If data is corrupted on the original source, these changes will be reflected in the backup. I experienced this personally, whoops. More sophisticated, “true” CDP software can deal with this.

I’m sorry, I’m being told by my publicist that CDP isn’t CDP. I’ll try this again.

Content Delivery Platform

In the context of Cisco networking, CDP refers to Content Delivery Platform. Unlike content delivery networks which are used to deliver largely static content around the world, CDPs are PaaS systems that rely on client side technologies such as JavaScript to dynamically load assets into pages.

My publicist is now threatening me with hammerspace. I will attempt to correct this.

Cisco Discovery Protocol

In the context of Cisco networking, CDP is the Cisco Discovery Protocol. Network engineers realised their profession was lacking in acronyms, and settled upon one not used by others in the industry.

As the name suggests, CDP allows for the discovery of Cicso (and a few select other) devices on a chosen network. CDP frames can include the sending device’s hardware and software platform, hostname, addresses of connected networks and other identifying information, such that a topology of connected devices can be built up.

Notice I used the term “frame”? A unique aspect of the protocol that piqued my interest was its operation on the data link layer of the TCP/IP stack. By not using layer three packets, CDP can exchange information between devices using IP, IPX, NetWare… I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say Token Ring as well. I made a Token Ring network out of old computers out of interest in high school, with a few other nerds and Mr Dunham’s assistance. Is that something you should admit?

Unfortunately, as with EIGRP, CDP is a Cisco proprietary protocol. The very idea of a network company releasing a proprietary protocol seems so weird and foreign, but there you have it. Curiously, alternatives aren’t covered in the CCNA course material, how odd ;).

The security conscious side of me was also more than a little disturbed at the prospect of such information being broadcast, though the same CCNA course material claims it can be disabled. An exploit that could remotely turn on this feature against the wishes of a network administrator would be a fun hack problem.

Feeling a bit homesick for Perl with all this C++ I’ve been writing of late, so I did this. It even forces me to put a newline just like my beloved Perl print function.

#include <iostream>
void print(const std::string message) {
   cout << message;
}

Now that I think about it, we could even bring a touch of home to my Ruby side:

#include <iostream>
void puts(const std::string message) {
   cout << message << endl;
}

I giggled incessantly when writing these, due perhaps to sleep-deprived, broken-ankle, exam-anxiety induced state.

Alternatively, I could have just done this:

#include <string>
#include <stdio.h>
void print(const std::string message) {
   printf(message.c_str());
}

But we all know how much C++ folks love when we mix in C stuff that has a C++ equivalent. I think I’ll stop now. #fallsasleep

Photo by Thomas Guest on Flickr.

As I walked home late Sunday evening, I stepped on a manhole cover near Hornsby train station. Next thing I knew, I was somewhat shorter than I used to be, and had an “inverted ankle” to prove it. Preliminary reports suggested people in Quito could hear my scream.

The initial pain was horrifying, but after sitting for a short while I felt strong enough to limp home. It was only when I sat in my computer chair and resumed studying for my exams that I noticed the ball on the side of my foot had begun to swell horribly. Even then, it didn’t hurt too much.

At the risk of over-dramatising, I stood up. The equivalent of all the pain I’d ever experienced concentrated itself and shot down to that one point in my foot.

Fortunately my sister Elke was at home, and was able to bundle me up into a taxi and get me to Accident and Emergency at Hornsby Hospital. The taxi driver was a sweetheart, and the overworked nurses, doctors and triage staff couldn’t have been nicer. They all made what turned out to be a horrifying experience that much more bearable.

Elke kept me company in the waiting room in person till 2am, and Clara kept my spirits up on The Twitters with her DMs. As did many of you on Twitter as well, which I really, really appreciated (^_^).

Fancy new equipment

The X-rays showed I chipped of a small piece of bone in my ankle, which proceeded to damage some of the muscle and tendons. When I was a teenager I was involved in a hockey accident which caused a hairline fracture in the same place, no doubt that didn’t help!

What I wasn’t expecting was the equipment I’d get. When I was 14 they put my foot in a cast, but this time the orthopedic surgeon fitted me for a fancy new Cam Walking Boot. Essentially, this boot keeps your foot and ankle locked in position, and transfers your weight away from the heel. I’m still using crutches for now, but the promise is I can use this to walk later in the recovery stage without hurting my foot, pretty sweet! Technological progress is marvelous.

Wanting some sympathy much?

Why post this? For two simple reasons. If you fuck up a part of your body, don’t be all macho and think you can sleep or walk it off. See a doctor, get yourself checked out. You’re not doing yourself any favours if you don’t.

Secondly, I wish they’d had these Cam Walking Boots when I fractured my ankle the first time. The difference in quality of life is indescribable.

And thirdly, whether tongue in cheek or not, many people have suggested I sue the council or the telco who owns the manhole that left me in this state. I’m not after that, but I will be writing a letter to the council to make sure nobody else suffers a similar fate to me. Perhaps at some point I could write a pro-NBN post and discuss how I’ve personally felt the effects of Australia’s crumbling telecommunications infrastructure!

Bother, that was three reasons! Carry on.