tech: July 2007 Archives

After having written about the Cisco Networkers 2007 show, I thought I'd go back and finally finish editing and uploading pictures from the year before, when the convention was in Las Vegas.

Naturally a shot of the Chocolate Fountains was in order:

Other than the catering debauchery, however, what I remember most about last year was walking on foot (shocking, I know) through the city one evening with Sándor's Canon S400, taking pictures along the way. I can't really figure out what this herd of chairs was doing outside the Riviera Convention Center, but the scale of the rear wall gives a sense of how monolithic these buildings would be without their strip-side decorations:

In fact, wandering just a block or two off the strip is a good way to get a sense of just how enormous these disguised warehouses are that house casinos and ballrooms:

Off-strip also affords strange views of some relics of earlier architectural eras, such as the Guardian Angle Cathedral:

In contrast, the spaces that you're supposed to see are expertly designed and landscaped to make you forget exactly where you are. The most recent big casino to go up, the Wynn, takes this to an extreme with a small artificial lake hidden inside what appears to be an alpine hill from the strip. Walk inside the casino, and into the Bartolotta seafood restaurant, and a mixture of pine trees, plantings and an enormous earthen berm shields you from the traffic of the streets just a few dozen yards away from your dinner table:

The rest of the photos from 2006 are online here.

For the past two years {2005, 2006} I've been going to the Cisco Networkers show in Las Vegas. Makers of all sorts of advanced networking equipment, Cisco sells the kind of technology essential for the internet to function, albeit the kind that's normally invisible. Cisco routers and switches direct traffic within office buildings, as well as provide services so that computers can get an IP address when they connect to either an Ethernet jack or a Wireless access point. Increasingly, as networks become targets for organized attacks, Cisco is in the security business -- selling the 21st equivalent of fireproof safes.

This year the Cisco convention moved to Anaheim, California, which is home to the DisneyLand resort and a good 40 minutes from downtown Los Angeles. The local hotels -- each of which, interestingly, had an internal Starbucks in it -- were pretty excited about this convention:

The actual conference itself is divided into interminable sessions on such delightful topics as router configuration languages and Voice-over-IP data packet prioritization strategies. All around the Anaheim Convention Center, (mostly) white middle-aged men discuss the intricacies of data networks, the 21st century's equivalent of civic engineering.

I mostly hung out on the show floor, which was filled to bursting with companies interested in participating in the Cisco 'ecosystem' of products and services built around the company's offerings. One example is Fluke, who makes network testing equipment used to trouble-shoot complex Ethernet wiring systems.

This particular piece of network testing equipment is an entire Windows-based touch-screen computer with a custom Ethernet interface, which will set you back $20,000:

After all that cash outlay, you might expect it to analyze 10GigE networks ... but you'd be wrong, for that you'll need this guy:

As mentioned above, Cisco's big focus recently has become security, and one of the big presences on the show floor was a truck trailer dedicated to "lawful intercept" and other law-enforcement issues. It was like the John Ashcroft Express, complete with the creepy "Securing the Common Good" slogan:

The whole gallery of pictures is online here.

By far the trickiest part of this whole process so far is the insertion, after the whole body is glued together, of a small dowel called the sound post. This tiny piece of wood is responsible for transferring the vibration of the front to the back cover. Because of this involvement with resonance, the post can't be glued in place or otherwise fixed through any method other than force and friction. I was a bit skeptical that we could ever size the dowel correctly: too small and it will easily slip out of place; too large and it would never be possible to move it into place from a diagonal position. Somehow it all came together, and gave us our first experience with a special tool called a "sound post retriever." This is a long piece of metal with sharp wedge on the end. After impaling the post on the wedge, you insert the whole apparatus the soundhole. Once in position, you tilt the retriever carefully, catching one edge of the dowel on the bottom of the case and slowly pulling the post towards you, the friction of the wedge holding the post fast until it's perpendicular to the top and bottom. At that point, a final yank separates the retriever from the post itself, and the system is sonically connected and complete.

If you've done everything correctly, this is what you end up with: