TCP, Hold the Congestion Control?

In an off-list discussion in the protocols interest groups, I got involved in a rather deep discussion of packet rate, congestion control, network neutrality, jitter and choices in Internet design, which are actually quite interesting to share.

A little background here – one person asked if it was true (it is) that the cwnd (congestion window) internal stack variable doesn’t have an immediate impact on the network, because TCP updates its actual rate only once per RTT in the congestion avoidance phase, so the cwnd += SMSS*SMSS/cwnd update with each ACK is only an internal calculation. You got that?

Which went on to the question posed to me – “While I now believe that it would actually be ‘legal’ according to the spec. to implement a TCP sender like this (no one seems to say that you MUST saturate your window at all times)…”

Wait partner. Going back into the Internet Wayback Machine and chatting with some of the earlier worker bees, it turned out it actually started out this way, and congestion backoff fell right out of this.

Send it By Messenger – it’s Faster

A certain very large software company which prides itself on providing the ultimate enterprise solution in Silicon Valley now wins the “Send it By Messenger – It’s Faster” email award.

A manager at that firm sent an email to a private channel for video production. And then waited…and waited… Where was the movie?

I wanted to know that myself. So I checked the logs and found we hadn’t received any email! What happened to it? As he investigated on his end, we watched and waited, until the email popped in at 1:34pm. He was sent our email after processing and deployment to the site successfully at 1:37pm. So we got it, produced, uploaded, and displayed it. All in about 3 minutes less some odd seconds.

However, we found it took about 2 hours to get the email from his company to here. As my Physics 110B professor used to say when someone was very dullwitted, “Talk about phase lag”!

The moral of the story – before you blame the receipient of the email for blowing you off, maybe you ought to check first with your firewall guardian.

Or as the manager himself put it sheepishly afterwards, “We are the cobblers children”. However, for shoemakers they have pretty ritzy digs.

Progressive Venture Dinner for Women Entrepreneurs

Last spring I was having coffee with a business journalist in Palo Alto, and we wandered onto the topic of why women find it hard to obtain institutional investment, how difficult it is for women to be taken seriously, and finally, how not “looking like them” can preclude consideration of a candidate company, because it’s easier to talk to people you relate to like yourself. So, what do we do about it to “level the playing field”?

The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs (FWE) Venture Dinner upcoming in Newport Beach, CA is one of the very few opportunities for women to pitch their companies to investment, with FWE-provided infrastructure and bootcamp. In contrast to other venture forums such as Art of the Start (sponsored by Garage Ventures), this is a venue where women are presenters, organizers, and judges, and where being a woman doesn’t mean you’re virtually standing alone.

CEO Pitches, Bows and Optimism

Well, a few weeks back I got to participate in two events. One was watching Rick Bentley, CEO of Connexxed, do his elevator pitch – not in an office, but in front of a plane at the Palo Alto Airport. The second was attending the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs farewell party to Susan Hailey, their retiring CEO, after a successful tenure.

What was neat is that both events were captured with video service (“MinutePitch – Your Video Screen on the Web!“) simply and easily. Rick’s pitch is simply great. There’s nothing like watching a second-time CEO take the helm.

It was so easy to take a digital camera and capture Susan’s farewell captured in Kick-off to Fall (“Forum for Women Entrepreneurs – Bay Area Chapter“).

Fun Friday – Read a Book and Shun the Web

Well, I was chatting with Karl Schoenberger of the Merc about the dismal state of the industry, and he had a great line I just had to pass on: “I am among the 0.35 percent of Americans between 50-54 who are shunning the Internet and re-reading Raymond Chandler novels. No, we don’t have a chat room or blog about it either.”

Lest people think I never have time to read books, actually I do read books – all the time. Give up random TV sessions – the great time waster – and you’ll have plenty of time to use the Internet, read. and even work in media.

I take my kids to the library weekly and we go through about 5 books apiece. I just finished “The Birth of Venus”, a 2003 best seller, noticed today they have a new Sharpe’s rifles book and a prequel to the Mist of Avalon, along with a new Skolian series book (the author is a Harvard physicist, and I always read books by physicists, esp. women, even though Berkeley physics is better since it’s my alma mater).

But that’s not all. My husband William has a large collection of classic scifi from the 30’s-50’s as well, if you’re into unique short stories. Look up “A Logic Named Joe” by Leister if you’re down on the Internet. Totally predicts the craziness (it’s a funny story) and it was writtten in 1946 (appeared in Astounding).

Finally, I also do video commentaries as well. It’s quite different to speak an opinion piece than write one. Good exercise for the mind of a writer and a reader.

So, since it’s Friday, read a book. You’ve got the weekend to enjoy it.

Credibility and the Web – What is Video’s Influence?

Well, I was discussing David Danielson of Stanford University and his upcoming talk on “web credibility” with the VP Marketing / Branding of a client company. Basically, web credibility has to do with how information is arranged on a site to make it “trusted” to the customer – something both good security and marketing people know implicitly. So what did a hot-shot marketing guy say about an academic’s work on this topic? Plenty.

He noted that those studies on credibility did not properly address Internet video commercials and rapid turnover branded video, yet they’re finding a dramatic change in the last two years with their 18-34 age demographic in view / use of video for the buying decision.

Automation Makes or Breaks Internet Startups

I’ve been hearing a lot about costs of running a datacenter these days, and how important it is to outsource even though administration and overhead of international contracts is not cheap either. I’ve been hearing about projects that were transferred out of the US only to die in a foreign land. Seems it would be cheaper to just abandon those projects, rather than slowly kill them.

But there are other ways to reduce the costs – especially for startups – you automate and use the Internet. As Tony Perkins says, “the costs of launching an Internet company have never been lower”. You’ve got customer acceptance, branding is cost-effective, and now over 50% of the domestic US Internet customer base is on broadband. It’s all about the service, and ease of use.

SiliconTCP, EtherSAN, and Scalability

Everyone says I was amazingly ahead of my time. As Rick Merritt, EE Times writes about the possibility of using storage interconnects concluding “Competitors such as Broadcom Corp., which have existing 1-Gbit R-NICs, will not be able to scale to the greater bandwidth because they lack the ASIC state machine architecture…”.

Well, now I’m pleased that I wrote a paper for the global storage network workshop last MayAll You Need is TCP: EtherSAN and Storage Networks, and even more grateful for the feedback I received from people like Jim Grey of Microsoft, John Wakerly of Cisco, and Greg Pfister of IBM. Gordon Bell was an earlier advocate of the InterProphet technology and urged Chuck Thacker to take a look at it several years ago. So it appears this is finally becoming a topic of serious consideration – although I’ve been seeing it coming for many years.

The fundamental scalable state machine architecture patent (“TCP/IP network accelerator system and method which identifies classes of packet traffic for predictable protocols“) was filed in 1997 and granted 2000. A term memory patent (“Term Addressable Memory of an Accelerator System and Method was independently filed and granted July of 2004. It’s a better memory approach that hand-in-glove with a state machine architecture that deals with certain flaws.

It’s an Inside Pitch on a Fast Ball…

One of the neater things that you can do with MinutePitch is to capture top startup CEO’s strut their stuff and compete for funding with a click of a button. I’ve been to a number of Pitch Competitions over the years, where I’ve watched the room gyrate like a whirling dirvish when a CEO hits a home run. I’ve always thought “Wow, I wish I could see that again in instant replay”. But the moment is lost, and everyone slumps back in their chairs. Sometimes, that CEO doesn’t even get a follow-on, because the next pitch is sooo boring it drives out everything else, including that great pitch just before.

So I was lucky enough to be off with my friend and fellow Berkeley physics alum Rick Bentley this weekend as they were shooting his company’s first pitch. And was it ever fun. He did it on the spot, on location, at the airport between flights. Why the airport? Because he’s serious about security and he’s a pilot. This is absolutely cool, and definitely the way pitches should be done – so you can capture the moment and make it last.

Free Culture and the Internet by Lynne Jolitz in Dr. Dobbs Journal

Well, my book review Free Culture And the Internet discussing Larry Lessig’s latest book is now on the newstand in Dr. Dobbs Journal. After I had Coffee with Larry Lessig back in April of this year, he kindly had a copy sent to me.

My background in this area is most extensive – in fact, it predates Dr. Lessig’s professional interest by a bit. Even in the 1980’s I was wrestling with the issues of royalties and copyrights and license agreements as part of the staff of Symmetric Computer Systems, and used that experience to great advantage later with days, as I write in my backgrounder of the review, also entitled Free Culture and the Internet.

If you enjoy the review, let the editor of DDJ know so we can keep them coming. And if you like the review enough to read the book, let me and the author know what you think. Books are meant to be shared.