Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Stuff I'm reading, late May edition

Had a great 3 day weekend, with all my daughters in town; we took my granddaughter on a nice hike in Roy's Redwoods Preserve in Marin County.

  • 1200 Feet Long, Loaded, Under Tow
    The vessel used for this exercise was CMA CGM’s Centaurus, an 11400 TEU container ship measuring 365 meters, or approximately 1,200 feet.

    The purpose of the towing demonstration was to test the capability of existing tug assets within San Francisco Bay to connect to and tow an ultra-large container vessel.

  • A Short On How The Wayback Machine Stores More Pages Than Stars In The Milky Way
    Playback is accomplished by binary searching a 2-level index of pointers into the WARC data. The second level of this index is a 20TB compressed sorted list of (url, date, pointer) tuples called CDX records[2]. The first level fits in core, and is a 13GB sorted list of every 3000th entry in the CDX index, with a pointer to larger CDX block.

    Index lookup works by binary searching the first level list stored in core, then HTTP range-request loading the appropriate second-level blocks from the CDX index. Finally, web page data is loaded by range-requesting WARC data pointed to by the CDX records. Before final output, link re-writing and other transforms are applied to make playback work correctly in the browser.

  • How the Neighborhoods of Manhattan Got Their Names
    For an island of only 24 square miles, Manhattan sure has a lot of neighborhoods. Many have distinct monikers that might not seem intuitive to the lay-tourist, or even to a lifelong New Yorker. Here's where the names of New York's most famous 'hoods came from.
  • Slightly More Than 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism
    By Conor Friedersdorf
  • Cisco Goes Straight To The President To Complain About The NSA Intercepting Its Hardware
    Chambers goes even further than Cisco's counsel, decrying the NSA's tactics and the damage they're doing to his company's reputation.

    “We simply cannot operate this way; our customers trust us to be able to deliver to their doorsteps products that meet the highest standards of integrity and security,” Chambers wrote. “We understand the real and significant threats that exist in this world, but we must also respect the industry’s relationship of trust with our customers.”

  • Cisco's chickens come home to roost
    I wanted to point out that there's a difference between whining about how your government does something, and building a secure ecosystem.
  • Queueing Mechanisms in Modern Switches
    Cell-based fabrics solve this problem by slicing the packets into smaller cells (reinventing ATM), and interleaving cells from multiple packets on a single path across the fabric.
  • Troubleshooting Riverbed Steelhead WAN Optimizers
    A group of Riverbed TAC engineers have worked on an internal troubleshooting document to kick start new TAC engineers. It describes the design of the Steelhead appliance, the working of the optimization service and the setup of optimized TCP sessions, installation and operation related issues, various latency optimization related issues, on how to use the various CLI tools to troubleshoot and how you can deal with the contents of the system dump.
  • Microsoft’s Most Clever Critic Is Now Building Its New Empire
    When Alchin offered him the job, Russinovich didn’t take it. But after several more years spent running his Sysinternals site–where he published a steady stream of exposés that, in his words, “pissed off” Microsoft and other tech outfits–he did join the software giant. The company made him a Microsoft Technical Fellow–one of the highest honors it can bestow–and today, he’s one of the principal architects of Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing service that’s leading the company’s push into the modern world.

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