A Tisket, a Tasket, I’ve Lost My TCP Packet

A gentleman today wondered if his expensive leased fibre line was causing packet loss, even though he compared it with an ADSL line from the server to the host. As Dennis Rockwell of BBN pointed out “What you have discovered is that your 2Mbps link is not the bottleneck; that lies elsewhere in your network path. The extra bandwidth of the fiber link cannot help this application”.

Dennis is correct. But how do you know where to look to fix the problem? Here’s a little story from a manager of international datacenters in Japan and the US to illustrate how complicated the issue can become…

Satire by Email

Last spring, I spoke with Larry Lessig about some of my work in scalable video production for community groups (see Massive Video Production Debut) with . His interest was in using the technique, not just for Berkeley alumni (Massive Video Production (MVP), Berkeley physics, and all that ) or business and marketing video (like MinutePitch), but for mass political communications movements. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I knew it could be done.

Turns out he was quite forward thinking about this. According to the San Francisco Chronicle today, “Interest groups, outspent nearly 16-1 and aiming to defeat the corporate-backed measure, e-mailed a cartoon mocking Proposition 64 to more than 200,000 Californians on Wednesday, hoping they’ll forward it to others and create an online stir”.

Problem is – if you don’t have the infrastructure end-to-end for production / email / deployment, the support on this will kill you. And people focussed on message don’t have time to learn everything about production and Internet streaming media. No cost to email doesn’t mean no cost to make sure people get your message. It’s more than just trying to email someone an ad and hope for the best. So how do you do on budget and make sure it’s good end-to-end?

Attention WalMart Shoppers – You Can Find Linux Computers Next to the Ironing Boards

David Einstein’s review pans the WalMart Linux PC, and deservedly so. With a slow processor, small disk drive, miserly memory, and no monitor, for $300 you could get a lot more system building it yourself. Admittedly, the kind of shopper WalMart is selling a Linux PC to is probably not “top drawer” when it comes to computers, so it may seem a good enough “bargain” to them. But it is a bad bargain nonetheless.

David is correct in noting that Linux / Unix systems don’t support as much software as Windows, especially for certain apps like Quicken, and support for printers like Epson has always been difficult. This is why the stats say 80% of the aftermarket Linux PCs have bootleg windows copies placed on them over Linux in Asia. This is to be expected as legacy apps are converted. In the meantime, it’s hard to compensate with open source without expert assistance, as in a company.

But it can be done. And here’s how to do it.

Partying with Mr. BIG in SF

Last night marked the launch of BIG (the Bay Area Interactive Group) and what a party it was. Over 525 people were packed the Mezzanine in San Francisco. I haven’t seen this kind of action since, dare I say it, the first Internet bubble. Are we in for a second Internet boom?

As Scot McLernon of CBS MarketWatch announced proudly in a kind of interactive theater on a platform in the middle of the floor, “Rumors of the death of the Internet are greatly exaggerated.” Sure looked it from the bodies swirling around the floor. John Durham added “It started right here in San Francisco, and we’re bringing it back”. Lynn Ingham, Advertising Age chimed in that putting on this party was like “herding cats” but it came together, while Brian Monahan of Universal/McCann said it all hinged around the “power of the brand”. All very obvious statements, yet immensely pleasing to the crowd. After such a miserable four years since the bubble burst in April of 2000, who could not be pleased?

So why did BIG start moving “big-time”? According to Jon Raj, Visa, there are a lot of “good indicators”. Highest in everyone’s minds – the IPO of Google validates the interactive marketing mechanism for ads on the Internet (see How Google Took the Work Out of Selling Advertising). BIG thinks that the continued high cost of TV / radio ads, coupled with the fact that more households are getting high-speed connectivity means we’re at a turning point.

From the Mailbag – Buffer, Buffer Where is the Buffer?

In my current article Buffer, Buffer, Where is the Buffer? in Byte, Jim S. sent me the following: 

Hi Lynne,
Nice article in Byte. It reminds me of the old days 
when you could read a good technical piece in the print Byte. 
Kind of a rare phenomenon today. 
But do you really mean to say that *all* security 
problems are buffer problems?

Thank you Jim for your kind words. Could you please tell the editor of Byte as well? That way, more articles like this come the reader’s way. 🙂

No, obviously security isn’t just buffer overflows. But these little bandaids are everywhere, and cause an amazing amount of problems for something so trivial.

For example, on Cnet today another buffer overrun afflicting Windows was announced. “Secunia issued an advisory saying a buffer overrun flaw has been found in Office 2000, and potentially also in Office XP, that could allow hackers to take over a user’s system. The company rated the flaw as ‘highly critical.'” Alas, these bulletins are all too common.

I used the essay to illustrate that a one size fits all solution like a buffer can have larger implications than my “engineer” in the introduction realized, and that his solution may not be a solution at all. There’s a lot of sloppy thinking nowadays, and that doesn’t help in a more competitive global economy. I’d like to see fewer unemployed obsolete engineers and scientists, and more innovation and critical thinking. So I write these essays. I hope it helps. And I hope you continue to enjoy them.

Where’s the Simplicity in Web Services?

Martin LaMonica wrote an interesting piece in Cnet lamenting the lack of “simplicity” in web services today. According to the article “Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML and director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, said recently that Web services standards have become ‘bloated, opaque and insanely complex.'”. I think Bray is being far too kind.

One the the criticisms we had with the Unix operating system kernel (BSD or System V – it didn’t matter which) while creating was the continual problem of managing a “bloated kernel” into which everyone wanted to throw their special cool thing whether it belonged there or not. When we introduced modularity in 386BSD Release 1.0 however, the reduction in complexity was not easily visualized by traditional kernel programmers used to a monolithic design, and also relegating them to a piece of the pie instead of the entire pie seemed to a few more vocal critics as “demeaning”. Web services is facing the same bias, only this time from companies anxious to have their particular widget inscribed in the annals of orthodoxy even if they are so odd that they actually belong as a special case module.

So where’s the simplicity in web services? We’ll get it when we get out of low-level design and understand the architecture better (see William F. Jolitz’s article Web Services and DataCenter Environments in the April 2003 edition of Dr. Dobbs Journal article for more information). The key is architecture in design first. This is the only way you get reliability, scalability, and security from the get-go.

Unlike kernel design, web services don’t even have an established user base yet, while people have made use of ad hoc Internet solutions using databases, scripts, and HTML / XML successfully. So perhaps, like OSI could not displace TCP/IP, web services will also “eat themselves into the grave” before they ever achieve acceptance.

Digerati Watch the Guy with the Glasses, Women Entrepreneurs Listen to the Voice of Experience

Well, last Friday was the “invite-only” conversation with Bill Gates of Microsoft and John Hennessy, President of Stanford University, at the Computer History Museum. I must admit, even if it was invitation-only it sure seemed everyone was invited – even me!

Matt Marshall in the San Jose Mercury News notes today that even Frank Quattrone joined the crowd to hear Gates speak. I didn’t notice him myself – there were just too many people with multiply colored labels and press tags everywhere. But since I got the invite to that event myself, does that mean I’m a “friend of Frank” too?

I’m sure many others will cover the discussion, so I’ll mention the other stuff. Did anyone there notice how “non-networking” the crowd was? I spoke briefly to a few people, but really – no one was talking to anyone else. Instead of a “happening” event, it was more like going to a funeral. Not really fun or upbeat. And I had my cool purple jacket on and everything.

Second, we weren’t allowed to wander about the museum before the talk. Now, wandering about among the old computers is actually my favorite part of visiting the Computer History Museum, especially when people are not very sociable, because the computers give everyone something to talk about. But alas, no wandering. Guess I’ll have to wait until the Vintage Computer Faire.

On the other hand, I had a lot more fun hearing Margaret Heffernan talk up her new book The Naked Truth last Weds night at Golden Gate University’s San Jose campus. Margaret is a very enjoyable many-time CEO and Fast Company columnist who has a lot of very interesting things to say about the experiences of women in business. But don’t just take my word for it – watch her for yourself as she discusses women, networking, and business.

I know everyone will be talking around the water cooler today about the guy with the glasses, and that’s OK. But it’s just too bad only the guys get the mainstream press coverage, while an experienced businesswoman and columnist gets all but ignored – but I guess that’s what Margaret’s talking about.

I Just Want to Watch the Movie!

“Why is it so hard to just watch a movie?” I hear that a lot from otherwise happy folks who think that installing multimedia on their PCs and Macs means everything should work. But then it doesn’t – not even for SJ Mercury News reporters. Think the reason management brain-damaged the staff PCs is to keep them from watching rival SF Chronicle’s mp4 stash on company time?

As more and more of the industry turns to Internet video, making it difficult for reporters in the press to view it does climb the heights of absurdity. For example, a reporter friend of mine wanted to watch a few of the events videos on the Forum for Women Entrepreneur site with the possibility that he might be able to write a piece on women entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. And that is just grand with me too, since I’m one myself, so I was all ready to help. Actually, I didn’t think it would take much of my time, since lots of women and men have already viewed those little events videos. “It’s a no-brainer” I thought, as long as you have Quicktime 6 or an mp4 player.

So what happened when he tried to watch a simple mp4 video on a web site? In his own words, “You may be underestimating the decrepitude of the Mercury News’ IT and my own understanding thereof…” and hence a merry chase ensued. “After waiting 10 to 15 minutes while [it] downloaded, I clicked on it only to find ‘this document format is invalid or not supported.'” Frustrating! So why can’t our poor reporter watch an FWE vid? The answer may surprise you…

Video on Demand over TCP and Jitter

A recent question to me from a “born back bencher” eavesdropping on the end-to-end groups musings asked “…how they can even believe they can accomplish a good result with TCP for VOD [Video On Demand]? Yeah they gave me good on SACK and NACK and no matter how many RFCs and drafts they quote, which I have never read, the logic still seems obtuse if the window is end to end”. Actually, this isn’t a silly question – it’s a good one in that we need to examine our environment and definitions carefully and has a lot of richness. Just what a physicist loves!

VOD isn’t just TCP, although end-to-end quality is very much based on how the customer perceives the stream (if you’re truly streaming). If you’re transiting through wireless, all bets are off – no one does good work in this area (yet) as I discuss in Buffer, Buffer, Where is the Buffer? on Byte.

But to get to the gestalt, in a video quality study I conducted several years ago we found you had to deal with VOD at several levels, from production of video for the Internet to TCP streaming optimization – in this case we used SiliconTCP here at the datacenter as well as client end (see SiliconTCP, EtherSAN, and Scalability). It’s really the big pipe / little pipe problem at the customer end that’s the bigger issue here – but we’re now in Internet infrastructure land, and that’s a hard-fought area. But in all cases, jitter is the key!

Every Pore You Take, I’ll Be Watching You…

For the drooling photophiles, it’s here – Canon’s New EOS-1Ds Mark II. Full 35mm frame, 16.7 megapixel. Dual digix processors. Dual CF cards. As one excited guy raves “What a honey”. But at $8k, is it worth selling your soul (or your car) for?

Maybe for the budding dermotologist. At 138 lines / mm, you not only see every pore in a facial shot – you can even determine if your subject has bacteria! Wow. Headshots have never been so exciting. And think of the intimate photography one could do as well…

Reminds me of the passage in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Chapter 5 (A Voyage to Brobdingnag) to wit “…very far from being a tempting sight…their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously colored, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads.”

Uh, maybe best to use it for astrophotography – but the sizes of the pixels do matter. Are the pixels too small to integrate the light properly, so do you have to bin them together? Do you have to do serious cooling for Johnson noise? These are the mundane but serious issues.

If you’ve got the money, buy one for me and I’ll check it out for you. If you can’t afford it, the new Canon 20D just arrived too. 8.2 megapixel CMOS with state-of-the-art low noise sensor for $1,500. 1.6 crop factor. Out of stock just about everywhere, but only a 4 week waiting list. Just drop Lynne Jolitz a line at my website.