Day: 16 May 2020

Okinawa

I have remembering my Karate for nearly the last two months. It has been a quite satisfying choice and has brought some good and old feelings.

As I have been adding katas to my set, I wanted to write and find some info in the web about the origin of Karate (and see if it matches my memory) and the main kata stiles I learned in my time. Not sure if it is still the same though.

I think for my black belt exam, apart from performing some katas in front of my teacher, I had to answer some questions about Karate history.

I dont know why, I can still remember bodhidharma, and Indian Buddhist monk, as the person considered for starting martial arts in Asia. Then it spread to southern China and then to Okinawa. There, it developed while some King forbade weapons so people needed other ways for self-defence. And finally, get to Japan after some conquering. Yeah, very short summary. Surely a better version here.

From my time, we had three stiles of “superior” katas: shuri-te, naha-te and tomari-te. I can’t forget the big picture of Gichin Funakoshi (Father of modern karate) in our tatami.

We used to consider naha-te katas the ones with a lot of “breathing” and “slow moves”. Katas with short and quick moves, were tomari-te katas.

And by chance, I was lucky to visit Okinawa (just for a weekend) when I was working in a project in Tokyo. It was a dream come true. Although I was expecting some spirituality there, I was lucky to attend a very important festival and laugh when some towns in the map where actually kata names!

Definitely, it is a very different place compared with Japan main islands.

Kaizen

I have finished reading this book about Kaizen. Many years ago I heard the term Kaizen for the superior productivity in Japan, mainly from Toyota as the world’s number one car producer. Somehow, I bought this used copy to learn about it.

First, I noticed the book was printed in 1986… I realised I rarely read “technical” stuff so “old”.

The first surprise was that it seems the concept of quality control was actually brought by USA to post WWII Japan. The two main people were W E Deming and J M Juran.

It is interesting that Japan was very eager to learn the productivity secrets from USA and at the end, they created their on version.

I like the focus in people. They need to be engaged and feel part of something. At the end of the day, everybody has to push together to get to great results. As well, it seems key the achievement of small changes and not massive ones. They set for long-term goals, mainly for customer satisfaction that is not just the person who buys the product. It is not all about profits. It seems the profits will come as a by-product (reduce cost, increase customer satisfaction, more sells -> more profits). So the vision is product-oriented instead of result-oriented.

The point that “if you dont have problems, how you can improve?!” is so true.

And one slogan to measure how good is your product: “would you buy what you are producing?”

I can see many concepts are already in place in technology. The “Kambam” board, the constant search for small improvements, etc. If you think devops culture is something really modern, doesn’t look like that.

In general, the approach is quite different from the Western world and has been successful. But the book mentions that you need the innovation side for keep improving. So again, as life, you need balance.

And at the end, Kaizen becomes like a way of life. Or it is like I see it.

I am curious how the author would see Kaizen and Japan nowadays.

SRv6

This year, in my employer, I completed the migration to a MPLS SR Arista core network from a Brocade MPLS LDP one. Our backbone is still pure IPv4 so anything IPv6 is not going to be added. But this week, via an APNIC blog post I read about SRv6. And it looks quite interesting. So I went to the first post to go a bit deeper about what SRv6 is. Based on the statements of the blog, really big networks are already using this technology and quite a lot of support from the open source community too. I missed Arista in that list though.

So I tried to find some “real” proof of this SRv6 is some pcap files to see the format and get a bit better view. I could find at lest a source with some. The examples are not like the ones mentioned in the APNIC blog post but just for taking a look, it is enough:

So I can see inside the IPv6 header, the SRv6 Header as defined in the rfc.

I dont really understand the second IPv6 header (Dst: b::2). From the first IPv6 header, the destination “f1::” has to be the first instruction SID1. I can see how it mentions it contains a SRH (Next Header: 43). And inside the routing header, we can see it is SR type (Type: 4). I assume that Address[0] and Address[1] are SID2 and SID3.

Would be cool to lab a SRv6 scenario.