The Daily Network Monitor

It’s good to stretch the ol’ brain once in a while. To that end, I popped in to MIT’s winter term to check out a workshop called “Coolhunting and Coolfarming through Swarm Creativity.” I don’t pretend to understand all of what was discussed, but I was struck by the analogies between the social network mapping shown, and the data network mapping performed by tools like WhatsUp Gold.

Prof. Peter Gloor showed off a tool that takes input from email records or online communities to create maps of social or business interactions, and Chandrika Samarth showed a real-life case study of how such mapping can lead to real process improvements in a real workplace, in this case a hospital. Characteristics like “betweenness,” “connectedness” and “sharing” are important attributes of social network nodes, also known as people. The charts show the communication between people as lines of length and thickness corresponding to the frequency and intensity of the interaction. Interesting data visualization, indeed.

I had them all with me tonight – Information Week, CIO, Redmond, eWeek and Network World. Not surprisingly, the world of technology continues to be a world of contradictions and that’s a good thing. Ever since we all witnessed the battles on the airwaves 10 years ago between Cisco (promoting the paperless office) and Xerox and Canon promoting the highest, fastest volume outputs of paper and we in technology took a side that contradicted a colleagues comment or belief – continuing our debates over coffee, beer and long inescapable air flights.

Enter the time machine and here we are 10 + years later and a world of new contradictions.

The jury is still out on SOA. Proponents argue that a distributed, nimble set of web services that replace large monolithic systems is the future. Proponents claim the economies of scale, re-use and distributed network friendly design poses huge benefits for adopters. Yet, the early poll and interview results are uncovering hosts of problems that are frustrating the heck out of CIO and subordinates. Application performance, application reliability and security are all questions and issues in need of a solution.

The jury is in on Virtualization and the ruling looks like guilty for all. We (I) am committed to virtualization like no ones business. Yet, I am reading tonight that the early adopters have already begun to uncover the pitfalls and it would be best to look to third party management companies when deploying a virtualized environment. I cannot say this is a contradiction in pure form but it fits my blog so give me a little break here.

Last, the story that made my night. MIT on Thursday morning will unveil a new working forum whose goal is to expand Kerberos to wireless technologies. Isn’t Kerberos dead? I guess Kerberos really does have 3 heads, I mean lives.