LoveMyTool - Building an Open Community for Network Management and Monitoring

Sunday Buzz: Buddha Saves No One (by Denny K Miu)

Am I afraid of dying?

You bet I am.

Entrepreneurs like myself despise uncertainty and there is nothing more uncertain in life than death.

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Death is both certain and uncertain.

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Interestingly, throughout the history of humankind, there has never been a more lucrative entrepreneurial opportunity than the business of dying.

Sunday Buzz: Never A Minority, But Often Under-Represented (by Denny K Miu)

I will soon celebrate my fortieth anniversary of becoming an American citizen, having lived two-third of my life in a resource-rich first-world country.

In retrospect, I have had the good fortune and luxury of spending my last forty years being a square peg trying to find my own round hole, or as the picture above so perfectly illustrated, being able to find a place to sit even when I am expected to stand.

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There is no better experience to summarize my journey than the one faculty meeting at UCLA back in the late-80's when we were discussing affirmative action. I was a non-tenured junior professor and I was doing my best minding my own business. Then out of the blue, one of the senior professors turned to me and said, "Denny, you are a minority. Tell us what you think."

Sunday Buzz: What if God doesn't want to be unique? (by Denny K Miu)

During my last year as an undergraduate student, I was invited by my adviser to join his research team. At the time, Reagan was our president. While he was busy expanding our defense industry, he also knew that he was fighting our last battle with the evil empire.

So he initiated the so-called "dual use" program (later greatly enhanced by his successors) which basically tied justification for all future peacetime defense spending with potential commercial applications. This subtle shift had the unintended consequence of completely changing the funding dynamics of academia research.

My professor was a practical man. Until then, he was perfectly happy solving mathematical problems. All he had to do, once a year, was to convince his long time program manager inside the Department of Energy that his efforts in understanding wave propagation in layered elastic media were beneficial in improving the design of underground bunkers to survive nuclear attacks.

Sunday Buzz: Immigration is Not a Right, Neither is Privacy (by Denny K Miu)

My family immigrated to the United States in 1971. Due to some minor logistic issues, I had to fly to San Francisco on my own, a month behind my parents and my younger brothers. I remember that day well. I stepped off a brand new Pan Am 747 and feeling very proud. The stewardess had presented me with two choices, and I answered "Coca Cola". That was the entirety of my very first conversation in English and it was all good.

Upon arrival, I was ushered into a big lobby with lots of people in uniforms and I handed over a large bag full of papers that my dad had said that I needed to guard with my life. After they searched through my luggage they pointed me to an exit. Outside the sliding doors, I saw my parents, and my uncle and aunt for the first time.

We got into a huge Chevy station wagon with wooden side panels that was bigger than most sampans in Macau. We drove into San Francisco and I saw Golden Gate Park for the first time. It was an incredible experience, as if I was being driven through Champs-Élysées in my own bullet-proof popemobile.

Sunday Buzz: Taps Don't Kill (by Denny K Miu)

"Guns don't kill, people do."

"Taps don't intrude, our government does."

So much has been said during the last few weeks about the recently discovered secret surveillance program conducted by the NSA that I feel that it is time for the OldCommGuy and I to put some technology on the table.

It is not surprising that when laymen talk about tapping, their frame of reference is still conditioned by what they saw as a child in movies and television shows from Hollywood. To them, tapping the Internet is the same as tapping telephone conversation and as citizens of the United States, we should be given the same privacy protection.

If you follow our Google handout video and Google doc presentation, you would see that unlike tapping the Internet, tapping a telephone conversation is very simple since it is analog and point-to-point over a dedicated line.

Sunday Buzz: (un)Branding for Dummies (by Denny K Miu)

"Taps are non-intrusive, government is not."

For those of us who sell taps to government agencies to enable non-intrusive monitoring of data networks, the event unfolding since last week is very disturbing.

One irony for me from both technical and personal perspective is the fact that while NSA was one of my favorite customers, the whistleblower in question chose to escape to Hong Kong where I had lived as a boy and long before I became an American citizen.

Among the many issues that the popular media got wrong is the assertion that Hong Kong is part of China, in order to support a possible conspiracy angle given how the leak occurred just three days before the premier of China were to meet our president.

Hong Kong is part of China but not an integral part. Hong Kong was a British colony until fifteen years ago when it was returned to China under the promise of "One country, two systems." Hong Kong has its own independent judicial and legislative system even though it cannot hold free election.

Sunday Buzz: Size Matters (by Denny K Miu)

I recently came back from a seven-week trip to Asia, visiting Japan, Hong Kong and China. I always make a point of taking inventory of the electronic gadgets that I packed when I travelled. It is a nostalgic measure of how technology has evolved, constantly improving my personal and professional life over the years.

This time I carried an iPhone 5, an iPhone 4, a Kindle, a Nexus 7 and a Macbook Air.

Throughout the entire trip, my iPhone 5 was my camera-of-choice and my "Star Trek" communicator (whenever I had Internet connection). With Photo Stream and iMessage, I was able to stay in constant contact and share real time experience with my family at home (who are almost all Apple users).

Sunday Buzz: Think Indifferent (by Denny K Miu)

It wasn't that long ago, about fifteen years, after Steve Jobs had triumphantly returned, that Apple was still a dying company. Only less than 3% of the personal computers sold annually were made by Apple. Michael Dell famously said that if it were up to him, he would simply “shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

But yet, as true then as it is now, Apple had devoted followers, especially among the self-appointed elites who were willing and could afford to pay the premium, otherwise known as the "Apple Tax." It was something that the rest of us who hadn't drunk the kool-aid would never understand.

Back in the mid-90's, I was struggling with my first startup and I had to constantly visit venture capitalists for possible investment. One day I was in a VC's office and I noticed that he had an expensive Apple portable computer, a PowerBook, sitting inside a cradle on his desk and connecting to an even more expensive large monitor. To start conversation, I asked him why he would use an Apple computer as opposed to Windows alternatives which were cheaper, faster and had more available software.