Loopback Filter with Truman Boyes

I am very happy that I signed up for this run and dedicated some time to preparing for it; this is my second 5k race and I feel pretty good about my performance. I pushed myself hard and there were more hills and changes of terrain than a prior run that I had in New Jersey. The Run Melbourne 5k was organized well, there were some good warm-ups in Federation Square – doing aerobics to Grease Lightening – “go grease lightening your burning up your motor now .. “ – and I was pumped to start in the “under 30 mins” section; the second wave just behind the under 25mins section. It was a chilly morning, wearing shorts and a new Adidas Techfit top, my Vibram Five Fingers, and the morning wind cut between the buildings and channeled a cool spell across the runners in Fed Square. In any case I was ready for the run and when the second wave started I started moving pretty quickly to work myself up through the crowd, breaking through a few sections and uphill through the Botanical Gardens. It started off uphill and since this was the first 2km’s I found myself cruising pretty decently. There were plenty of motivators on the sidelines, a band playing some rock about 1km in to the run, some african drummers along the path, and some ladies holding up signs that read, “men in tights are hot!”. Funny.

I kept moving at about the 5min/1km pace, and when I had a downhill section I really picked it up and started taking large leaps to keep my speed up. At about the 4km mark I started to slow a bit on the uphill of the bridge near Rod Laver Arena. I felt winded from exerting myself downhill but once I took enough calming breaths I was ready to pick up the pace – plus the terrain had leveled off. The final 5k was over the bridge and down into the Birrarung Marr (city side of the Yarra near Fed Square). I am still waiting for the results which will be published in The Age on Tuesday, but I expect it to be around 26 minutes. The clock said 28, but we were the second wave that started about 2 minutes after the 1st wave. In any case, I am feeling pretty pleased with my results.

My next big run is coming up in November  (likely were will be another one I can fit it in Sept). November’s run will be a 12km relay triathlon in Phuket, Thailand with some friends from work. Team Suspicious if you are interested. How fitting.

In Melbourne International Airport about to fly to Wellington; I brought my USB 3G adapter (from three.com.au), which is handy especially in the airport where wifi services are at a premium.

My trip to Wellington is just for the weekend. Going to get the apartment over there ready for some new tenants, and I will pack a bunch of our belongings and send them up to Hong Kong.

My travel this year has been considerable, but somehow I have yet to requalify for AAdvantage Gold. I am about 5k miles away; even though I had so many flights, a large percentage of them were so discounted that they had no mileage accrual.

I had an interesting conversation with a mate recently about Skype supernodes. The question that came up is certainly not new, but it does resurface from time to time: can supernodes in Skype p2p networks create some type of man-in-the-middle attack which may include eavesdropping on transit sessions. This brought me to look at the Skype protocol analysis which was performed by some folks at Colombia University in Sept, 2004. The full paper is here. Now, I am not sure if the protocol has evolved considerably from the time of the paper, or if supernodes are now a commonality in Skype p2p networks. From what I understand, and what the paper describes, if a node is behind NAT or a FW it will not become a supernode. However, there are plenty of network connection methods that will provide a public IP address to a computer. Take some mobile networks for example that do assign from a public pool to nodes. It seems that nodes that have been available for a long period of time, and are therefore deemed as being reliable would be candidates to become a supernode. This is interesting in the mobile Internet model; think about a 1xRTT/2.5G/3G bridge inside a taxi/truck/etc. It could be a mobile supernode that routes calls and messages.

It would be interesting to see a more recent protocol analysis of Skype to see if there are areas that have been further engineered. Since the service now sells commercial calling capabilities, I would imagine that quality of service functions (even if rudimentary) would be developed.

The trip to China and Hong Kong was quick but a lot was accomplished. The trip to South Korea was canceled as the meetings were not finalized. In any case this worked out well, stayed an extra day in Beijing with a friend, and got to see a local perspective on eats and checked the local area. It was a good trip to China.

I presented some ideas on large DC designs, primarily discussing some ideas around linking large IDCs together. MPLS VPNs (L3VPNs and L2VPNS) are usually the most straight-forward. You get the things you want on costly transit links such as QoS, Traffic Engineering, Load Balancing (ECMP, etc), and you also have the ability to handle overlapping address spaces in the event that you want to use the same addresses on machines in the production and staging areas of the provider network. Now what if there is only Internet connectivity between the DCs in either a primary or backup sense, is there still a way to deploy MPLS to link the DCs? Yes, it is quite feasible to use MPLS over GRE, and if you really needed encryption, you could even have MPLS over GRE, over IPSEC. The overhead is not nice, but it works.

It is worth pointing out that QoS and Traffic Engineering are not really feasible in an end-to-end approach when the tunnel is over GRE tunnels since the traffic will pass over a pure IP network that works in a best-effort basis.

We also discussed the use of Hadoop as a means to perform distributed computing on a large scale. All the big boys use Hadoop including Baidu, AWS, Alibaba, AOL, etc. The ideas that Hadoop presents are quite impressive. Take for example that they wrote a filesystem (HDFS) that is fully distributed across hundreds or even thousands of nodes, and uses the stock standard disks inside each machine because the IOPS are much higher than using a SAN. The idea is that it is easier to move the computation than it is to move data. I couldn’t agree more.

Up in Shenzhen now. Headed up here via train from Hong Kong; showed my passport to depart Hong Kong, then walked across the long hallway to China, where I then present my passport to enter China. My hotel was within walking distance of the train station so I navigated my way over to the Sheraton Fourpoints. A nice hotel as you would expect from the Starwood group. Taking the train back to HKG today, then flying up to Beijing for a meeting.

Shenzhen is a major developing city, and the place is buzzing with excitement in various markets. I forgot to pack my Apple MBP DVI-to-VGA adaptor for this trip, so I visited a local electronics bazaar. It was truly amazing to see the types of electrical components that are sold wholesale and retail. LEDs in all possible colours, diodes, capacitors, chips, ethernet PHYs, you name it. I picked up the adaptor for 7RMB. I bought two.

Next week I will likely be in Seoul, S. Korea before heading back to NJ. Then a trip over to Australia, then back to NJ for August, and then back to Hong Kong after that. Time to rack up some miles in the sky. That will pay off when we want to take some trips next year, or to help the family get some tickets with points.

My trip to China is finally booked, well most of it anyway. Some parts of the travel are going to be left until the last minute when I actually know where I need to be; it appears to be in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Beijing. I am flying out of JFK airport in NYC, and the toss up on which airport to fly out of  (I would have preferred closer EWR) really came down to the Airline, Frequent Flyer Programme, and the total travel time. Cathay Pacific is a really good airline from my experience in traveling around Asia, and better yet they are part of OneWorld so on these long flights I am able to get some more miles to use on personal trips.