engineering

What's in a name? That's a good question. Some feel that the name that you are given at birth provides and accurate description of who you will turn out to be.

Back in 1997 I did some research in an attempt to reverse-engineer algorithms used by search engines. In that year, the big ones included AltaVista, Webcralwer, Lycos, Infoseek, and a few others.

The team of NASA engineers whose ingenious, ad hoc air scrubbers sustained lives aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft as it limped home will receive the first GlobalSpec Great Moments in Engineering award April 19th marking the 35th anniversary of their unsung heroism.

Nelson-Gal Joins the Interwoven R&D Team as Senior Vice President of Engineering.

Engineering search engine GlobalSpec, announced today that it is partnering with Dice Inc. to offer an engineering job search. This option will be available on GlobalSpec's website.

GlobalSpec, known as "The Engineering Search Engine", has partnered with Engineering.com to improve the site's search capabilities. Engineering.com is designed to serve as a global portal for those interested in the field. The goal of ENGINEERING.com is "to become the ultimate resource tool for the global engineering community and to provide a leading business-to-business Internet marketplace for engineering products and services."

Being multihomed means you have two (or more) routes to any destination connected to the Internet. In other words, you need a way to decide which route is better. When left to its own devices, a BGP router will try to send traffic over the route with the shortest AS path. Depending on the connectivity of your upstream ISPs and traffic patterns, this will suit the available bandwidth of the respective connections to varying degrees. Even though bandwidth is getting cheaper all the time, it's usually advantageous to try to balance the traffic so that it takes advantage of all the available bandwidth in a multihomed setup. Thus, if BGP decides that most of the outgoing traffic should go through the smallest pipe, you will have to tell it that this isn't what you want by tweaking one or more BGP attributes. Ideally, more traffic will then flow over the under-used connection. At the same time, you'll want the traffic to take the best route to a destination, if possible, whatever "best" may be. This type of activity is called traffic engineering