Every Self-Help Book In One Post

by Greg Ferro

I’ve read a few big-name self-help books in my time and I could summarize all of them as “This book would have been better as a blog post.” I once met a professional ghostwriter while working in Lisbon. Her job was to write books for celebrities on any given topic. The amount of engagement with the “author” was often limited to a few days, some more but usually not. Celebs are busy people.  

The ghost writer would get some ideas from the celeb, get some words, get some life stories. Then she would research newspapers and magazines to get more content, collate it into a coherent summary, and send it to the editor. Then back to the celeb for some more content. The home stretch was a couple of months to write the first draft and submit it to the publisher for review. She described her job as turning a page of ideas into a book to make money.

I think self-help books share the same model. Spew up some common wisdom, find some inspirational quotes, share some life experiences (real or fictional) and then add filler to make it book-length. 

Recently I found a plain text file on my storage that was titled “Self Help Books in Eight Lines” or something like that. I don’t think I wrote those lines, but I added a couple of more points and observations. 

Herewith is every self help book without having to read them all, plus a short note from me:

• Take one small step. (Small changes not a big change to start)

• Change your mental maps. (Change your outlook / mind / plan)

• Struggle is good. Scary is good. (Fear is part of the process, it’s normal)

• Instant judgment is bad. (Evaluate and re-evaluate)

• Remember the end of your life. (You are running out of time, every day)

• Be playful. (You have to be fun to be around to get fun)

• Be useful to others. (Then they can be grateful to you)

• Perfectionism = procrastination. (Good enough is near enough, perfect is the enemy of good enough)

• Sleep, exercise, eat, chill out. Repeat. (Work to live, don’t live to work)

• Write it all down. (Makes you think and re-think better)

• You can’t get it all from reading. (At some point, you must act or miss out)

That’s it. All the life advice you will ever need. In a blog post. 

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Introduction to NiFi - Bits N’ Bytes 
NiFi is a utility for moving data from one source to another. That data can be unstructured, structured, or even a database table. NiFi has its origins in the NSA, but is now an open-source project under the Apache Foundation. You can download it from GitHub. What can you use it for? According to this blog, all kinds of things! “NiFi could for example extract data from sources such as databases, transform it by changing the format and load it into a destination data lake. Another use case is event-driven architecture. NiFi can receive events, normalise them and extract parameters to use to route the events to specific destinations.” - Drew 

Why is 56k the fastest dialup modem speed? - 10Stripe
I suppose this one’s only of historical interest, but if you ever wanted to know why 56Kbps was the fastest dialup speed, this article explains in detail. - Ethan

Slack Power Keyboard - Josh VanDeraa
If you like keyboard shortcuts and you spend a lot of time in Slack, Josh VanDeraa shares his favorite shortcuts for actions such as finding unread channels, switching workplaces, reading DMs, and more. He says he barely touches a mouse when in Slack these days. - Drew 

Wait, is cloud bad? - Good Tech Things
Forrest Brazeal makes the point that despite all the fuss about cloud repatriation, it’s unlikely to be an effective strategy for most companies. Why? Talent. How many highly skilled IT professionals does it take to effectively run a data center? If you think this is about the old days where we all ran our own DCs, Forrest further points out that this isn’t about the old days anymore. Infrastructure tech has moved on. We do infrastructure as code now. We deploy apps via containers. And so on. What you’re really doing is building your own cloud. Where will you find the talent for that? All of a sudden, the cost benefit analysis is more complicated when compared to letting AWS et al. be the data center for you. - Ethan

Saying Goodbye to the Full Stack Journey - Scott’s Weblog 
Scott Lowe shares his thoughts and reflections on his time hosting the Full Stack Journey podcast and what might come next. The Packet Pushsers were honored to have Scott as a host on the network, and all 83 episodes will still be available at PacketPushers.net - Drew

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TECH NEWS 📣

Backlash over fake female speakers shuts down developer conference - Ars Technica
A conference leader created fake profiles of diverse speakers as a way to entice other speakers to present. He got caught, and now his conference isn’t happening. The story gets worse though…turns out the organizer is a serial offender in this area. It’s too bad we live in an age where we have to guard against such shenanigans. - Ethan

Cisco aids Ukraine in cyber defense with modified switches to counter Russian attacks - IT World 
The article reports that Russia has been attacking Ukrainian energy infrastructure via GPS jamming. Cisco is shipping devices resistant to these attacks. “Cisco’s response involved shipping a large order of modified equipment, specifically designed to maintain accurate time even under radio jamming conditions. This solution employs the Cisco Industrial Ethernet switch with an internal crystal oscillator, enabling new clock recovery algorithms for accurate timekeeping when GPS is unavailable.” Cisco provided the modified gear without charge. - Ethan

Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years - IEEE Spectrum
Being honest, I have mixed feelings about this (admittedly admirable) milestone. We work with Ethernet, IP, BGP, and some other aging technologies because it’s what we have. Because we’ve made it work despite it being forced into use cases beyond the original imaginings or intent of the creators. Because it’s too hard to change. We can’t even complete the move to IPv6, dragging IPv4 along into perpetuity. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but it seems like we should have evolved local network transport beyond the fundamental design consideration of containing broadcast storms. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared on Bluesky by Jen Gentleman

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

What is Vector Packet Processing? - Netgate
Vector Packet Processing (VPP) was originally code inside some version of Cisco IOS or maybe the UCS VIC network (I’ve forgotten which). Today it’s the graph table abstraction inside CSR routers and other high scale/large hardware. During open source interregnum in the mid-2010’s  when Cisco actively participated in contributing and marketing of open projects, they decided to open source and publish VPP. Its early days were somewhat subdued but the arrival of DPDK and eBPF has enabled VPP substantially and there is demand for routing functions in Linux in user space. Having an understanding of what’s happening inside Linux routers is a valuable career skill and why VPP can accelerate software and hardware forwarding is worthwhile, in my opinion. - Greg 

Kathará - Container-Based Network Emulation System 
I haven’t dug into this one yet, but it certainly caught my attention as a potential platform for labbing. That said, Kathará seems aimed at academia more than practitioners. The site says, “Kathará is an open source container-based network emulation system for showing interactive demos/lessons, testing production networks in a sandbox environment, or developing new network protocols.”  The success stories page shows uses at many higher ed institutions. - Ethan

Showcase — Information is Beautiful Awards 2023
If you are designing dashboards or user interfaces you will know how difficult it is to dream up ways to represent data in a way that executives with limited mental capacity and emotional intelligence will a) read b) comprehend. Most people still believe a 3D Pie chart from Excel is the pinnacle of evolution. Anyway, this site is a vibrant collection of world-class data visualizations that have somehow made their way to an awards site. Inspirational to me. This one caught my eye on moving to a new country and finding a house. - Greg 

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

What Is a SuperNIC? - NVIDIA Blog
This is a branding exercise from Nvidia to create industry terminology around its Bluefield-3 DPU product line with a view to creating a perceived networking leadership in the AI market. We have seen “DPU” corrupted by vendors attempting to uprate their legacy SmartNIC products while racing to bring to full-featured DPUs to market. FPGA accelerated networking has been around for decades - you need CPUs, memory, and a full operating system plus the applications for storage and networking off-load today. The next step is a product strategy that permits trusted applications from third parties to run on the SmartNIC such as firewalls, routers, storage engines, visibility, and so on. To be fair, SuperNIC isn’t as contrived as “Ultra Ethernet” and its easier to say that DPUs so I don’t hate it - Greg

NVIDIA’s New Ethernet Networking Platform for AI Available Soon From Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo - NVIDIA Newsroom
Brand server vendors such as Dell and HPE are scrambling to find relevance for their products and services in the AI market. While these companies have their own networking products, Nvidia wants to capture as much revenue as possible when selling GPUs inside those servers and their networking products are differentiated. Spectrum-X silicon is fast and tightly integrated with Nvidia’s toolchains for managing AI infrastructure. - Greg

Announcing The Cloud Computer - 0xide
0xide is selling a cloud computer in a custom hardware form factor plus software designed to make rack & stack, expansion, and operations much easier than what you’re used to. From what I’m reading, 0xide has done something quite different here, and worth looking at if you manage your own facility. According to the announcement, they’ve even rolled their own switch! - Ethan

Lessons Learned from Twenty Years of Site Reliability Engineering - Google SRE
Eleven practical lessons about operations by the SRE folks at Google. Not a long read. Each lesson is accompanied by an anecdote, some of which made me wince. Why is it that some lessons must be learned the hardest possible way? - Ethan

Broadcom announces successful acquisition of VMware - Broadcom
This is a blog post from Broadcom CEO Hock Tan offering his view on what’s next for VMware. Summary? Double down on VMware  Cloud Foundation for on-prem private cloud and boost the cybersecurity. Obviously cybersececurity is a massive growth business so combing the Symantec and CA products can scale a wider solution - (Interesting fact: VMware  was bought for $68B but Palo Alto Networks is currently valued at $84B.) That large numbers of VMware people are leaving shouldn’t be surprising. Reasons ?  1) In 2023, it is easier to get rid of people now and hire them back later if they are needed. 2) Long term employees with large stock options get to take the cash and find something new to do. 3) Broadcom hasn’t been gentle to existing staff but is generous. We did a Heavy Strategy podcast on predictions on what happens next:  HS027 Broadcom and VMware - What's Gonna Happen? - Greg

Workspaces Thin Client - Amazon
Thin client computing hasn’t been huge growth story. Over the decades it’s become embedded into a lot of corporate infrastructure and is critical for a lot of high security/restricted access needs. AWS is known for deploying products that are either easy to do or that customers are willing to pay for. - Greg

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared on X by @d0rkph0enix