Our Curious Habits (Paul Smith)

 

As an engineer, I’m often accused by my non-engineer brethren of being overly analytical. I confess that I can’t help scrutinizing some things (well...most things) to try and figure out how they work. This can lead to satisfaction and a boost in self-assurance when things work as expected, and a compulsive drive for further analysis when they don’t. I have been blessed (cursed?) with this inclination for as long as I can remember. I have been formally trained for it in school and throughout my career. Reinforced by a lifetime of use, this habit is unlikely to ever change.

There is some comfort in knowing that I am not alone in this. There are very few, if any, STEMers who don’t share this particular habit. Of course you don’t have to be educated in a STEM field to have habits, and many of them are difficult to rationalize. The fact that curious things arouse our curiosity is yet another curiosity of humanity.

Not all of my curious habits stem from engineering. One that has always produced a tingle in my analytical feelers involves the use of my car’s GPS. For some still unknown reason, as the robo-voice commands start to come more quickly and the little blue line on the screen begins to twist and turn impossibly, I have an uncontrollable urge to turn off the radio. I can understand why Helter-Skelter might be a poor soundtrack for these moments, but the actual content doesn’t seem to matter – the radio just has to be off. Period.

During my lifetime, technology has progressed from rotary dial telephones to the little computerized communicators we carry in our pockets. I believe I have adapted well, but I still spontaneously pick up my cell phone, quickly clear off all the little App-Badges, and then set it down again. Yes, I am at the age where short-term memory begins to fade. I confess that on more than one occasion, I have walked into a room only to wonder why I went there in the first place. Lately, I get text messages saying “Hello?” before it dawns on me that I had interrupted a conversation to dispatch those little red flags. Of course turning off the flags is out of the question, because then I might miss something important.

Live as long as I have, and you will likely accumulate drawers full of imprinted T-shirts. Sporting events, concerts, vacations and any visit to a Hard Rock Café – none of these count unless commemorated with a T-shirt. Now that 2020 really is hindsight, I realize that working from home provided me with the opportunity to swap Dockers and button-down shirts for shorts and T-shirts in the “office.” Still, there were lots of T-shirts at the bottom of my drawers that never seemed to get worn. I felt guilty and yet I remained frozen in inaction.

Somehow I failed to notice as the T-shirt stacks started shrinking. With help from our son, my wife cut them up and made a beautiful quilt for my birthday. Now I am frequently reminded of every Hard Rock Café I have ever visited, along with the fact that “Real Men Marry Accountants.” Some curious habits call for an intervention.

Unsurprisingly, neuroscience is also curious about curiosity. Neuroscientist Charan Ranganath of UC Davis has used fMRI to show that curiosity helps us learn and retain more. His research team also measured an increase in dopamine (the brain chemical associated with reward and pleasure) as we begin to anticipate an answer. Curiosity begets curiosity, which feels good.

I remain curious about my curious habits (GPS, App-Badges, T-Shirts...) but I’m beginning to understand that the world is too complex for there to be answers for everything. Although many of us have careers where we are paid for answers, our ability to provide those answers is enhanced by our continuing curiosity over the answers we don’t yet have. There is a certain satisfaction in leaving open the possibility of not knowing , if only to keep the dopamine flowing.

“By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.”

– Alan Watts

Author Profile - Paul W. Smith - leader, educator, technologist, writer - has a lifelong interest in the countless ways that technology changes the course of our journey through life. In addition to being a regular contributor to NetworkDataPedia, he maintains the website Technology for the Journey and occasionally writes for Blogcritics. Paul has over 40 years of experience in research and advanced development for companies ranging from small startups to industry leaders. His other passion is teaching - he is a former Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Paul holds a doctorate in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Try this Wireshark display filter

 

Wireshark’s features can really be a catch 22. In one way they are very powerful but on another hand, many of them are difficult to find. But you do find a gem of a tip or5 trick, packet analysis gets a lot easier.

In this article I want to share a different kind of display filter that you may not be familiar with. I’m sure you have used MAC, IP address, TCP, UDP and maybe even some application layer display filters. I find that sometimes I need to display just a few packets that might not have MAC, IP, TCP or UDP port numbers in common.

As you will see in the video, one way to address this challenge is to simply Mark the packets and then apply a display filter for just marked packets. The other way is to use the following display filter syntax frame.number in {frame numbers} this will simply display any frame number you provide in the curly braces.

That’s it folks, quick and simple and have a Happy New Year

Wireshark Tutorial - Find TCP Delays (chris greer)

 Hey Packet People out there. 

Let's take a few minutes and learn a new trick with Wireshark (or get practice on one that we have used before). In this video, we chat about how to use the TCP delta column to isolate delays. It's a handy trick to know, especially when you are digging through traces with multiple parallel connections. In the video description, you can download the trace file so you can follow along. 

The Science of Pretty Much Anything (Paul W. Smith)

 

In the late sixties, I spent several summers working in a gas station. I learned how to rebuild brakes, mount and balance tires, and perform basic maintenance and repair tasks. I also pumped gas. For those too young to remember, these were the days when you would pull into a gas station and someone would pump your gas, check your cars fluids, fill up your tires, and wash your windows. I was also taught to look for opportunities to sell tires, batteries, wiper blades and replacement fluids. Although it was essentially a sales job, it gave me an opportunity to learn some basic auto mechanics which probably saved me a lot of money with my own NCPO (non-certified pre-owned) cars. At the time, my friends and co-workers referred to me as a Gas Pump Jockey. I was fine with that. It wasn’t until I got to college and my dorm-mates and I were joking around about resumes that I adopted the title Petroleum Placement Engineer to describe my summer job. Judiciously naming things can confer credibility, warranted or not. That’s not rocket science. Consider Political Science, which is a science largely because it makes use of Social Science. The latter attempts to understand and predict human behavior. The accuracy of pre-election polling is one measure of how well that works. PTSD, opioid addiction and depression have long been the focus of Psychological Science, but that seems to be changing. Rather than trying to fix what’s wrong with us, some researchers are beginning to wonder what it is that allows some people to thrive. This has given rise to a new field – Happiness Science. The timing is good because...well... 2020. We clearly need some Immunology Science, and perhaps a little Economic Science, but Happiness Science is one of the most underrated of all. Most of us have struggled through this pandemic year seeking a comfort zone somewhere between Ventilator Science and Psychiatric Science – perhaps HS can provide the guidance we need. It is a well-known axiom of any science that you can’t improve something without first figuring out how to measure it. The science behind the World Happiness Report can be deduced from a spreadsheet (Fig. 1 data). According to the numbers, the happiest country on the planet - out of 153 studied - is Finland (for the third consecutive year). One can’t help but wonder why anyone would remain in Afghanistan, which finished dead last. The United States came in at nineteenth. It is noteworthy that most of the data in the report were gathered pre-COVID. It is perhaps not surprising that we Americans aren’t very happy. Dr. Martin Seligman, a Psychology Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that happiness is a potent mix of our genetics and behaviors and is heavily affected by what’s happening to us at any given moment of time. Happiness, to no one’s surprise, is fleeting. There have been remarkable strides in gene-editing recently, but don’t count on Genomic Science to snip out your misery gene any time soon. Dr. Seligman believes we have a genetic set point for happiness, much like the one we have for weight, that we can’t modify directly. We can, he claims, take control of our thoughts, behaviors and actions to build lasting habits that will enhance our resilience to life’s events and raise our happiness. While engineering the placement of petroleum might not be the resume builder one would hope, I did learn valuable skills and derived a great deal of self-confidence from being able to diagnose and fix my own car as well as those of my friends. I was eventually tasked with going out on service calls to our regular customers. This entailed meeting interesting people and either solving their problem on site (dead battery, flat tire, lost key) or towing the car into our shop for repair. I realize now that my enthusiasm for the job, and the variety of people and situations that it presented, are key ingredients of contentment. The touchstone of Happiness Science is hedonic adaptation – the human tendency to drive both positive and negative feelings to a neutral comfort zone. Just as the misery of a romantic breakup is eventually forgotten, so is the ecstasy of a new car – each puts us into a type of stress mode that we are hardwired to avoid. Happiness may be annoyingly fleeting, but at least now we know why. Not content to concede the inevitable “meh”, scientists have taken things a step further – how can we nudge that neutral set point toward the happy side? Their advice is to guide feelings of intense enthusiasm toward a calm contentment, which is easier to sustain. They also suggest avoiding the pitfalls of adaptation by mixing up the things you are grateful for while focusing on people and experiences rather than possessions. Based on the principles laid out by Happiness Science, I should have been modestly happy working as a Gas Pump Jockey. I was, and now I know why.

Author Profile - Paul W. Smith - leader, educator, technologist, writer - has a lifelong interest in the countless ways that technology changes the course of our journey through life.In addition to being a regular contributor to NetworkDataPedia, he maintains the website Technology for the Journey and occasionally writes for Blogcritics. Paul has over 40 years of experience in research and advanced development for companies ranging from small startups to industry leaders. His other passion is teaching - he is a former Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Paul holds a doctorate in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara

aircheck - field test

I thought it would be helpful to cover 2 topics in the write up:

- Thoughts on the Aircheck G2/Air Mapper tool from Netally

- Share wireless site survey tips and tricks that you can use with any tool

NetAlly's Aircheck G2 is a very solid and capable tool that I enjoyed using but like all tools, there is always room for improvement and evolution. As I said in the video, I would give it an 8 out of 10 and quite happy with it.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Aircheck, it is a handheld wireless tool (that also does some wired testing) that can be used for all sorts of wireless tasks that cover disciplines ranging from support, design and implementation. In the video you will see that I used the tool to perform an outside survey and determine if there are any dead zones.

Throughout the video I mention that you can still do a survey without a tool like this and explain some of the steps involved. The advantage to using a tool is that it is specifically designed for this purpose, you can ask the company questions if you should encounter issues on best practices using their tools.

Just some additional points worth mentioning that didn’t make the video:

- When working on several maps, it is difficult to tell which map you are in when using Link Live site survey maps. It would be helpful to have the survey title or something as the top.

- Does not support external USB keyboard or mouse

- Aircheck requires tight VNC for remote control and a web based solution would be more convenient

Regardless if you use your personal equipment or tools purchased for a specific task, documenting your goal and methodology is more important than the actual findings. If you read a report and can’t figure out why they did specific tests and how they performed these tests, you can’t determine if the results are relevant or how to replicate the tests.