Standing on the Shoulders of a Wiseass

The phrase "standing on the shoulder's of giants" has a long and interesting history, generally taken to mean building on past successes of others.

One of the most famous uses of this quote is by Sir Isaac Newton  to Robert Hooke:

What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

While reading  Is God a Mathematician by Mario Livio, I came across an explanation for this quote I hadn't heard before.  Newton, know for his rivalries and disputes, may be been taking a swipe Hooke's stature and severe stoop.  The Wikipedia article on the quote seems to refute this by indicating that Hooke and Newton were on good terms, at least when this letter was written.

On Responsibility

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.


Herbert Spencer

Packet Capture Manipulation Tools

Haven't had a chance to play with them; putting them here so I don't forget:

TCPRePlay : UNIX tools for analyzing and manipulating pcap files
TraceWrangler: A windows program for manipulating pcapng files (such as anonimzing)

An oldy, but goodie.  This one I've many times
TCPtrace: a UNIX tool for analyzing and graphing TCP flows.

Birth Stars

The Joint Astronomy Centre at the University of Hawaii will map out a star whose light started traveling the month you were born. 

Amazingly, it can take thousands to millions of years for a photon to make it from the core of a sun to the surface, depending on many factors including density.  Once at the surface, outside the dense star, it travels at the speed of light.
Put in your birthday, and you can find a star whose light started its journey about the same time you did.  Visit the sight often, because the location of the star will change as you age.

Converting Virtualbox machines to ESXi

Virtualbox is an open source virtualization platform from Oracle that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Its a free and easy way to run machines on existing operating systems.  ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor from VMWare, available for free with limited features.

Virtual machines in one platform can not directly be run in the other.  This set of instructions from Sysxperts explains how to convert a Virtualbox formatted VM to something that can run in ESXi.

1. Used ‘Export Appliance’ option from File Menu in VirtualBox
2. Uploaded the vmdk file to one of my ESX datastores /vmfs/volumes/local_ds1/DC1
3. opened up putty session to ESX 4 u1 server and navigated to the datastore /vmfs/volumes/local_ds1/DC1
4. [root@esxlab2 DC1]#vmkfstools -i DC1.vmdk -d thin DC1clone.vmdk
5. Created new Virtual Machine and utilized option to connect to existing storage and pointed to my DC1clone.vmdk
6. Deleted original DC1.vmdk to clean up

Ethernet continues its inexorable growth

Recently, the IEEE announced the formation of a study group to look into how to make 400 Gbps ethernet work.  Good timing on a recent Bell Labs announcement Not only have they demonstrated 400 Gbps transmission, but it was done over a distance of 12,800km!! The article doesn't specifically mention, but strongly implies, that this distance was un-amplified which is simply amazing.

This is being announced as 100Gbps adoption is ramping up, both commercially (CenturyLink and Verizon) and in the research networks (Internet2 & ESnet and OARnet as examples).

Different pluggables for 100G ethernet.

Future of High Performance Computing

Excellent read on the state and future of High Performance Computing:

Why we need Exascale and why we won’t get there by 2020