Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Curious Image: manlift In the near future, a quixotic AI hosted in a manlift (http://tinyurl.com/5ofuk, http://tinyurl.com/5or6w) takes its job too literally and refuses to let a women embark. The AI says it can not possibly let a fair maiden undertake so great a risk. comment[] 10:09:01 AM     Rise of the Stupid Network This is an interesting paper by David Isenberg at http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html. Why the Intelligent Network was once a good idea, but isn't anymore. One telephone company nerd's odd perspective on the changing value proposition. The stupid network is still pretty smart, the smartness is around the network however, not the services that run on top of the network. An interesting example of this is how security and configuration are being pushed down into L2. In 802.1X, for a L2 session to be setup you must be authenticated. This could require a certificate and a RADIUS server. From the RADIUS server you may also get your vlan and other configuration. This is all seems like L7 to me, yet it is must be in place for L2 to work. In the old days on ethernet L2 was just supposed to work. Now we have to jump to the high level to make the low level work. This makes sense to me. I am not knocking it. It's interesting to me how even our most basic layering abstractions don't last. comment[] 9:59:33 AM     Bit Twiddling Hacks This is a great page by Sean Anderson at http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html on Bit Twiddling Hacks. This is the kind of stuff you'll find embedded deep in the code marked by the comment "tricky." If you are going for an interview you'll find several answers to the favorite "counting bits" question. I've added the page as resource to my interview questions page at http://www.possibility.com/epowiki/Wiki.jsp?page=InterviewQuestions. comment[] 9:44:29 AM

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