UCT's smallest office

This is one of the candidates, for sure.
And also a candidate for "Least Paperless Office of the Year"

[and I'm tempted to say that it was so small I couldn't fit inside to take pictures, but I was actually too lazy to try]

[office extends from the pillar on the left of the frame to the right of the frame - i.e. 2 window frames]

[the third window frame visible on the right is someone else's office!]

This is in the Leslie Commerce building. At least this is a hard worker (all those papers!), so no comments about the tightwads there, please...

The New Stephenson opus

The new Neal Stephenson book should be out within 6 months!

My guess is it's going to be the most exercises some geeks will get for a while - 928 pages!

Facebook CDN

I don't know how this slipped through the cracks, but I've just noticed that Facebook has started hosting some content on static.ak.fbcdn.net [fbcdn presumably = facebook content distribution network]

Is Facebook planning on using multiple CDNs?

Both static.ak.fbcdn.net and static.ak.facebook.com seem to be hosted by Akamai, so for us "lucky" .ac.za we get routed through IS. This is actually good news, as we have a very high-speed connection to IS from TENET. Unfortunately, most institutions connect slowly into TENET (~30 Mbps for UCT!) and implement some shaping on popular websites. So we don't get most of the benefit.

Science bandwidth requirements estimate

A recent e-mail from a Meraka engineer working on SANReN:

We know eVLBI would require a 1Gb all the way to Amsterdam, current projections for full SKA is 100GB international capacity, the MeerKAT project will probably require 10GB of bandwidth.

So something like the 'bandwidth glut' of Infraco would definitely be required.

It seems like the only people talking about having too many cables are those with a vested interest in having only a few [competing] cables.

Extra transit for TENET

Viewing the monitoring graphs for TENET's London node, a new transit circuit through DataHop [web?]is apparent:


Peak speeds are about 50 Mbps. Combined with the Telia peak of ~100 Mbps, this means TENET currently has ~150 Mbps peak transit.

Note the very small outbound. Mmmm, eyeballs.