The network song

The other day, InfoWorld‘s Executive News Editor Mark Jones and I were entering Internet hosting company Inflow’s Austin, Texas, datacenter when we passed the obligatory box of earplugs at the door. We asked Cameron Brown, the facility’s general manager and our genial host, how often they were used.

“If you’re only going in for a few minutes, you don’t need them,” Brown said. “But if you’ll be inside for an hour or more, they’re a good idea. Otherwise, the noise will drive you crazy.”

He’s right, of course. The din in a modern datacenter — especially a heavy-duty co-location facility such as those run by Denver-based Inflow — approaches factory-floor decibel levels.

I was reminded of this incident when reading Jon Udell’s insightful columnthis week.

For those who don’t know Jon, he’s one of several InfoWorldregulars who spans two worlds — journalism and IT. He got his start at Byte magazine, where he wrote reviews, features, and a monthly column. On the IT side, he built Byte’s original Website and designed Safari Books Online, and he’s constantly finding new ways for people and information to come together online.

At InfoWorld, Jon writes an influential Weblog(see infoworld.com/89) as well as the aforementioned Strategic Developer column.

This week’s column is classic Udell. It’s about a clever network monitoring tool called Peep that was created by Michael Gilfix. Peep translates system events into sounds; a user log-on might be represented by a cricket chirp, for example. The result, depending on how you tune it, can be a junglelike wall of noise that tells you much about what is happening in your machines.

Granted, Peep is an early effort. But as Udell points out, it exemplifies an important trend: the use of innate human talents — in this case, sensitivity to ambient sound — to improve the human/machine interface. Peep takes you beyond the din of the datacenter, so to speak, so you can hear what the servers are actually doing.

Speaking of better human/machine interfaces, InfoWorldintroduces a modest effort in that direction this week. Henceforth, instead of printing complex URLs, we’ll use a numeric code. For example, infoworld.com/89 points to the Udell Weblog (otherwise a 26-character URL). Infoworld.com/55 points to Gilfix’s description of Peep (normally a 74-character URL!).

That’s not as clever as cricket chirp log-ons, perhaps, but it makes the print version of InfoWorlda tiny bit easier to use.