Hi everyone, welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier. We're here with a great guest, Balaji Siva, Subramanian. Are you all right? Okay. Okay, VP of product and business development at Ops, MX, formerly with Cisco, doing networking, now you're doing a lot of DevOps. You guys got a great little business there on real time, real time hardcore DevOps. Absolutely, so we help large enterprises do the digital transformation to be able to help them achieve that transformation. You know, Stu Miniman and I were talking about cloud native and one of the reasons I wanted to bring you in was we've been talking about cloud native going mainstream and cloud native is essentially code words for cloud, microservices, essentially DevOps, DevOps 2.0, whatever you want to call it. The mainstream of DevOps, DevOps for the past 10 years has been kind of reserved for the pioneers who built out using open source to the fast followers, building large startups to now larger companies. Now DevOps is turning into cloud native. We see, you know, in the cloud, born in the cloud, on-premises cloud operations, which is hybrid and now the advent of multi-cloud, which really brings the edge conversation into view, really a disruption around networking and data. And this is impacting developers. Absolutely. And you know, pioneers like Netflix, New Spinnaker to kind of deploy. That's what you guys do. This is the real kind of thread for the next 10 years data software is now part of everyday developer life. Now bring that into DevOps, that seems to be a real flash point. Yeah, so if you look at some of the challenges enterprise have to get to the velocity that they have, the technology was a barrier. So with the Docker adoption, with the cloud adoption, cloud basically removed, basically made the infrastructure on demand and then the Docker really allowed the multi-microsoft architecture allowed the people to have velocity in development. Now their bottleneck has been, now I can develop faster, I can bring up infrastructure, but how do I deploy things faster? Because at the end of the day, that's what is the last sort of mile sort of say of solving the full puzzle. So I think that's where things like Spinnaker or some of the new tools like Tecton and all those things coming up that allows these enterprises to take their container-based applications in functions in some cases and deploy to various cloud, AWS or Google or Azure. Bology, tell me about your view on cloud native. You look at, I just looked at the basic data out there. You got AWS, you got KubeCon, which is really the Linux Foundation, CNCF. I mean, the vendors that are in there, the commercialization is going crazy. Then you got the cloud followers from Amazon, you got Azure, basically pivoting Office 365 and getting more cloud action. They're investing heavily and Google GCP, Google Cloud Platform. All of them talking about microservices. What's your view of the state of cloud native? Yeah, I think I talked to, I'll probably talk to hundreds of customers this last year. And these are large Fortune 100, 200 companies to smaller companies. 100% of them are doing containers. 100% of them are doing Kubernetes in some fashion or form. If you look at larger enterprises like financial sectors and other, what you call the Fortune 100 companies, they do actually do OpenShift. They've had OpenShift for their Kubernetes, even though Kubernetes is free, whatever, but they definitely look at OpenShift as a way to deploy container-based applications. And many of them are obviously looking at AKS, EKS and other cloud form factors of the same thing. And the most thing I've seen is AWS. EKS is the most common one. Azure somewhat and GKS somewhat. So I mean, you know the market trend that's there. So essentially AWS is where the most of the problems are happening. What do you think about the mainstream IT, typical IT company that's driven by IT, they're transforming just a few, I'd say about a year ago, most answer like, oh, could people, the big cloud providers are going to be not creating an opportunity for the splunks of the world and other people. But now with that shifting mainstream companies going to the cloud, it's actually been good for those companies. So you're seeing that collision between pure cloud native and typical corporation enterprise that are moving to the cloud or moving to at least hybrid. That's helping these companies, like the splunks of the world, the data dogs and all these other companies. I think there's, so there's two attacks on those companies that you talk about. One is obviously the open source moment. It's attacking everything. So anything you have in IT is attacked by open source. Software is eating the world, but open source is eating software. Because software is easy to be open source. Hardware, you can't eat it. There's no open source. Nobody's doing free hardware for you. But open source software is getting the software, right? In some sense, but anyway, so any software vendors are fully, everybody's considering open source first. Many companies are doing open source first. So if you look at, if you want to look at data dog or Prometheus, I mean look at Prometheus. If I look at IBM, U-Deploy or Spinnaker, I may look at Spinnaker. So everything, Kubernetes, or maybe some other forms of, they'll look at Kubernetes. So I think these vendors, as you talk about, one is that, one is the open source part of it. The other is that when you go to the cloud, the provider itself provides the basic things already. If you look at Google Cloud, I was actually reading about Google networking, a lot of things, a lot of the load balancers and all those things are inbuilt as part of the fabric. Things that you typically use at outer or firewall or those things that are inbuilt. So why would I use a FI load balancer and things like that? So I would say that, I don't think their life is that easy. But there's definitely- All right, so here's the question. Who's winning and who's losing with cloud native? I mean, what is really going on in that marketplace? What's the top story? What's the biggest thing people should pay attention to and who's winning and who's losing? I think the sort of the standardization of the cloud native technology is definitely helping vendors like AWS and basically the cloud vendors, because no longer you have to go to VMware to get anything done, right? They have proprietary software that they had and you don't have to go there anymore. Everybody can provide it. So the winners, I would say the customers, obviously, because now they have more choices, they're not vendor locked in, they can go to EKS or AKS in the heartbeat and nothing happens. And so customers are the winners, big winners. And then I would say the cloud providers are big winners. Open source is really hurting some of the vendors we talked about earlier. I would say, yeah, I would say the big guys are the- The big guys are the- The cloud is getting bigger and bigger. Yeah. More powerful. What about VMware? You mentioned VMware and you're hinting to their proprietary, they also run on AWS natively. So- Absolutely. They're still hanging around. They've got the operators, but they're not hitting the devs, but they have this new movement with the Kubernetes they acquired a company to do that. You know, I would say that the AWS, sorry, VMware on AWS, essentially is that, I would say it's almost a no-op for VMware in some sense, in some sense. But they have to be, it's almost like a place to sell their where. They used to be on-prem vendors already have the infrastructure and VMware goes sells to that customer A. Now the customer says that I'm not using it on on-prem server A, I'm on AWS, can you provide me the same software? So essentially, number one, by moving to the cloud, they're essentially selling to the same customer and the same stuff. Number one, number two is once now I'm in the cloud, I would obviously peel away my workload to native AWS or Google. So I think in the long run, I would say that it's a strategy to survive, but I don't think it's long-term successful. Operators don't move that fast, devs move much fast. So I got to ask you, in the developer world and cloud native and DevOps, kind of 2.0, 3.0, what are the biggest challenges that's slowing it down? Why isn't it going it faster? Or is it going fast? What's your view on that? Yeah, I think I would say that the biggest challenge obviously, as you said, the people, right? In some sense, people have to transform and in large organizations, there's a lot of inertia that allows people, they have deploying existing services the way they're deploying the services. Some of them are custom built, the guy who wrote it and they no longer exist.  And so some of them are built like that. But so I think the inertia is basically like now, how do I transform them over to the new model? If the application itself is getting more broken into microservices, then it's a great opportunity for me to migrate. But if it's not, then I'm not going to touch something that's actually there. So I would say is that and then technology is complex. Actually, every day we have people, you know, there's a lot of interest. There's a lot of people learning, learning, learning new stuff. But I cannot hide one Kubernetes good engineer if I want to try it hard in the Bay Area at least. Because it's hard. Because they're working somewhere else, right? Well, they work somewhere else or the technology is still early enough that people are learning in droves. I mean, don't get me wrong there. But I think it's still fairly complex for them to digest all of them. I think in five years, fast forward five years, you'd see that technology knowledge would be more. So it would be easier to hire those people. Because if I want to transform internally, let's say I'm an enterprise, I want to transform, I need to hire people to do that. And what are the use cases, what are the top use cases that you're seeing in your work and out in the field in the business that people are rallying around, they can get some top three use cases for end to end, you know, cloud native development? I would say the use cases are like, if I'm doing any kind of container based applications, obviously I would like to do through the new model of doing things because I don't want to like build based on a legacy technology for sure. I would say that the other ones are like new age companies, they are definitely adopting cloud first and they are able to leverage the existing models and the new models more quickly. I mean, I would say these are the two things, the thing is that if I'm doing something new, I take advantage of that. The virtual answer to the question. Do you think microservices is overrated right now or is it hyped up or is it? No, I think it's real, absolutely. And what's the big use case there? It's a velocity that people get by adopting microservices, right? Before I used to work at Cisco when there's a software release, I have planned for six months to release the software because there's so many engineers and developing so many features, they develop it over a period of time and then when they actually integrate, there's two, three months of testing before it gets out because the guy who wrote the code probably left the company already. By the time the software actually sees the light of the day. Give some data from your perspective, you don't have to name companies, but like for the people that are successful with DevOps at an operating level, what kind of frequency of updates are they doing per day? Just give them order of magnitude numbers on what is a success in terms of? Yeah, I mean, the great examples are something like Netflix, we're 7,000 deployments a day, but obviously that's at the top of the pyramid, so to say. Many of the other customers are doing some of it in one to two a week. I mean, these are very good companies. This is at a per service level. I mean, I'm not talking of the whole application because the application may have 10, 20, 50 services in some way. So there's a lot of updates going on every week. So if you look at a week timeframe, you may have 50 updates for that service, but I think individual service level essentially could be one or two a week. And obviously the frequency varies depending on. There's a lot of software being updated all the time. Absolutely, absolutely. Apology, great to have you in. And I got to say it's been, we could use your commentary and your insight and some CUBE interviews. Love to invite you back. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here in the CUBE conversation. We have thought leader conversations and experts from our expert network, the CUBE, CUBE alumni. And again, all about bringing you the data here from the CUBE studios. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.


Thank you, Sarah, so much for that speech. It is such a joy as a member of the Peacebuilding community to hear a government official, especially one which has, you have such a 30,000-foot view over so many fields, echoing the values that we place on prevention of positive change in the world and in a very sophisticated, nuanced way. You're not saying that it's easy and we very much appreciate your offering to join us in this challenge. So thank you so much. And it is wonderful to have a chance to talk with both of you, who, I guess, together have the 60,000-foot view on the whole peace and development and security landscape. And it's wonderful to have this opportunity to go a little bit deeper. Could everyone hear okay? Are mics good? So I have a range of questions for you, but I wonder if we can start on the CVE question on which you ended your talk. And to share some perspectives of how USIP is thinking about CVE and PVE, ways in which we could help you, Sarah, in your role. And one question I have is, to what extent is it enough just to do good peace-building and development? Do we need to label it specifically as CVE? And one concern that we have in the peace-building community is a certain instrumentalization of our work. And so our partners in the ground feel we're not doing this to create sustainable, healthy communities, but to root out the cancer of the extremists. So, Ed, where do you both come down on the labeling issue and how to make sure that we have the trust of local partners in doing this very ambitious work? You know, this is, I think, a really important question because as anytime when you have an emergence of an important new collective effort, there's a certain bagginess in the definitions. And so what exactly is in countering what's in preventing violent extremism? I think it's a really important, robust debate that's going on. And it's understanding how do the Venn diagrams of good development work, of good peace-building work, and of good countering and or preventing violent extremism, what's in that set of Venn diagrams? Where are the overlaps and how do you understand not to overly instrumentalize approaches, motives, aspirations of the people with whom you're working? So I think we're walking down that pathway together. Fundamentally, I think, as Sarah said, if you are helping communities to be strong, to be resilient, to realize their own aspirations, connect state-society relations in a more positive, productive, effective way that you are working upstream and there becomes less of a distinction between preventing peace-building and development. But the further you go downstream, I think these efforts start to differentiate more as you need to more specifically address the already difficult strands of violence or extremism that may have existed. Thank you. And this is a good conversation for all of us to continue to really focus on and get clarity and agreement on the terms, on what we mean by this and how we understand success. So I think one of the interesting opportunities for all of us as an international community interested in peace will be to look at the UN's new countering violent extremism approach because when I would urge you all to listen to Bonke Moon's address at the countering violent extremism summit in February here, because he used the word prevention, I don't know, maybe a dozen times. I mean, for the Secretary General, the pivotal opportunity, as he described it in his statement, was to take the prevention approach and essentially instrumentalize the counterterrorism narrative. I mean, let's not imagine that instrumentalization works in only one direction. And I know that the concerns of those who work in peace building is always a fear of co-optation. But I think what was so powerful about the Secretary General's framing of the work against violent extremism was his exposition in a room full of some 60 plus leaders of states of very different characters, his characterization of the responsibilities of governments to citizens as a core element of what it means to prevent violent extremism. So there are different ways to think about which part of the debate is doing what to which other part of the debate. As we move, as Nancy quite rightly said, upstream to think about the earlier interventions and to think about how all of the actors, government, external funders, communities and citizens, civil society organizations, all have a particular sort of responsibility inside of opportunities vis-a-vis violent extremism. So, A, I think that when we talk about prevention, we are on the most solid ground. But whether you want to think about governance or not as part of the prevention equation, I see the preventing violent extremism conversation as being a huge opening for the stakeholders within a society to talk about governance in a way that is related to a security conversation that governments are very accustomed to engaging in. And so in very important ways, the preventing violent extremism conversation leverages our ability to talk about governance in ways that might not be possible or heard otherwise. And so again, I think it's just a huge, huge opportunity. And I think that this lexicon question will be not settled by ever, but I think that as the UN releases its new approach, I think that will be a very useful touch point for a universalization of what we mean in this vocabulary. Because whatever we do or say within the US government will be A, one microcosm, B, bureaucratically derived and not necessarily coming from a free form space in which one can start with the language that you wish. But I think it's also sort of besides the point as we move toward global partnerships in thinking about what it means to go upstream on the violent extremism challenge. And thank you very much for setting out that framework, Sarah. Because one complaint that the peace building community has had about the CBE discussion to date is a certain over focus at the community level. And of course we believe that's critically important, but it sometimes lets governments off the hook on issues like corruption, which are such drivers of conflict. And so you're saying about how there used to be that dialogue between the local, the governmental levels, and then the global level is critically important and something that I'm not sure our field does as well as some other fields like global health, where those kinds of different levels are engaged much more easily with each other. Well, if I could switch gears for a moment and ask you to imagine this whole audience as a group of kindergartners, if you could give them some advice about what they could do in their lives to become peace builders and to play a role in this world of changing so quickly, what advice would you give them? Use your words. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, but I do think that is certainly where it would start. And one of the things that USIP really focuses on is bringing people together who might not otherwise have a chance to sit down together. And so it's engaging in conversation, have the conversation with that bully across the room and find common ground and find a way to move forward. I believe that fundamental to a lot of good peace building is the understanding of how to do that and of the importance to do that. And that if you move to violence, you probably aren't gonna solve whatever the problem was. I think that's a key point because as we see the next generation, which is so much in a technological bubble, where it's very easy to have your own views reinforced, I think we're losing a very basic skill of how you talk with people who are different from yourself, which is one of the key elements of the DNA of peace building. I agree so much with what Nancy just said. And I think it relates to my admonition to all of you that I hope you will enter into what you may label as security space, because I think that the divide between those who do security and those who do peace is a really dangerous one because I think that at the end, they're so integrally connected and that some of the biggest challenges to peace are in the way that the security debate is framed and that only if you enter into that debate and you listen hard, as Nancy suggested, can you begin to find ways where you have those common interests that you can work toward? And I have always found in my work on civilian protection that the strongest arguments, not the only arguments, but the strongest arguments for those who hold a strong security frame as their point of reference is to talk about the security self-interest and changed behavior and that requires engagement and that requires engagement with actors that you may see as being the problem, but if we don't engage on that question, who will? So you've touched on this, both of you in your remarks, about the necessity of reaching across different fields. In your own career, Sarah, in human rights, and traditionally there's been a little bit of friction between the human rights community and the conflict resolution community. How do both of you, in a very concrete way, work with fields that have different terminologies, different frameworks? I mean, how do you start to be the worker bee, cross-fertilizing them? Do you have tricks of the trade or insights you could share with us? Fundamental to the whole peace-building field is the understanding of how to look across the various divides.  I look at the dialogue that's happened over the last few, I don't know, is it almost a decade, about framing it as human security and as an effort to reach into the hard security and all these other fields. Similar to Sarah, when I was in government, had a bureau at USAID that had nine marquee brands and, you know, what is quickly, quickly apparent is that you've gotta bring these specialties together. And I have in the past used the story of bringing my elderly father to Mayo Clinic. After having seen specialist after specialist who isn't ever really able to understand what the problem is, you go to Mayo Clinic and you have a team that's working together to do a diagnosis of the overall system. And it's when we're able to bring these various expertise together to better understand inside of a system what the issues are and how to move forward that we get better traction. And, you know, inside the government it is filled with, and outside the government, all of us end up specializing more and more and more and working inside systems that are further divided from the other specialties. And we just are not gonna have the impact that we need. We're not gonna understand the complexities that exist in a particular conflict that doesn't so helpfully divide itself up by the specialties that we have. So I think this is one of the biggest challenges that we have going forward on both the bureaucratic front on the diagnosis front and thinking about it in a systems way and understanding how to address complexity and get to the other side of that with the kind of actions that will have an impact. I think the will is there if we do it in a way that recognizes people and bring them into the partnership with equal mutual respect. But one issue with the Mayo Clinic that you mentioned is that the doctors there are incentivized to work in a system that they are rewarded for that which is very different from normal healthcare models. So how do we incentivize that kind of systemic engagement within these very complex bureaucracies? Money is really good, is that it? And that's part of the reason why I have been talking about the value of having flexible funding for atrocity prevention or funding for preventing violent extremism that requires people to argue how they're gonna work together to achieve a result because there's nothing, the fundamental way to get people to work together is to get them to all work collectively on a problem that they all care about. And if you're problem focused as opposed to turf focused or terminology focused or paradigm focused or whatever focused, if you're problem focused all things become possible. One of the best ways to get people to be focused on a common problem is to have a pot of money that's dedicated to the problem. And then it just changes the fundamentals of how you come together. And that's me speaking through a bureaucratic lens. But I think it's one of the least appreciated but most powerful elements of what Congress can do as it looks to fund national security, foreign policy development objectives is to articulate the kinds of results that it wants to see instead of deciding which pieces that it thinks it wants to privilege because to Nancy's point, there are a variety of tools that can play to a problem set. And you don't know until you deeply understand the problem set which are gonna be most opposite for that particular case. So that's how I think you do incentives with money. That also speaks though to a role that NGOs could play in supporting the budgets and the flexible funds that would then make that kind of joint action possible. So we can talk more about that. I wanna open the floor to questions in just a moment but I had to ask a final question. It is not lost on me that we're three women leading different kinds of peace building organizations. And I wonder if you could say a word about the role you see in women in peace building but also a potential problem that I've been seeing just in informal research in Washington. So I went to American University and was giving a couple of lectures as a guest in classes. And the course that was basics of peace building was 27 women and one man. And in the course that was security in a modern world, it was reversed. And so are we facing a gender issue in the peace building security field? And also what are the bright spots you see about working on women in peace building internationally? I think your illustration goes to Sarah's point about how to talk in the security, the so-called security world. And at our peril, do we come up with a division along the lines of gender that addresses so-called soft peace building over here and hard security over here with gender lines? So that's a very good cautionary illustration. It also speaks to the earlier point we were talking about on how vital it is to bring these pieces together and to see security in a broader frame and discuss more broadly. I think there are different ways in which women are socialized traditionally. I think the question will be going forward in a world where people have maybe more conscious understandings of the gendered way in which we work that might shift. But we still, I know at USIP there's a lot of attention paid to making sure that we bring men into the conversation about how to address women's rights and women's roles and that it does have to be everyone at the table together. Agree with that? Good. Well, let me do a quick time check with the powers that be here. Because I have on my watch, we have about 15 minutes, but our clock is saying 41. Guidance? Well, I'll wait to hear more guidance and we'll continue with Q and A. We have mics up here. Oh, so we're gonna be passing mics around. So maybe we'll cluster questions. So I know that a lot of people want to have direct input. So hands with questions? Yes, I see Howard and Peter. Why don't we start with both of you and I'll keep scanning. Hi, thank you. Thank you. I've been interested for a long time because I had to deal with it on the ground for a long time. In the relationship between state and USA and defense on the ground, which is a different story from what we read in the QDDR, which since I'm retired, I don't have to read anymore. But I'm particularly interested, Sarah, in what you were saying about getting State Department and embassies more focused on community building, which always I saw, because I'm a USAID person, as a USAID responsibility. And I never saw the skills or the incentives or the interest among State Department people for really getting at the community level in a constructive and programmatic way. And I wonder if you're trying to accomplish that or what you're trying to do is sensitize at a sort of higher level so that on the ground, State and USAID programs can be much more complimentary than they sometimes are. Thank you. Peter. Thank you. My name's Peter Dixon with an organization called Concordes International, not American. But we bring people together who might otherwise be shooting at each other. And my question relates to the security and peace fields and how they do or don't connect with each other, because I'd just like to ask how you think the constraints and the targeting of so-called material support for proscribed organizations constrains the ability of those who want to counter violent extremism in a very direct way. Thank you. Thank you. Why don't we take one more, Fred? Thank you. Fred Tipson, a proud alumnus of the Institute of Peace. Kudos to all three of you for leading the fight of making this about holistic approaches to specific contexts and solving problems in a very localized and holistic way. Is this a mic on? Sorry. I'm struck, however, by the fact that our efforts at prevention seem to be disregarding the increasing scale of the problem that we're facing, the increasing scale of the stresses that are generating violence in various parts of the world. So our challenge, to talk about preventing much of this violence is probably becoming increasingly unrealistic. The growing number of young men who have no prospects in life, these underlying causes of violent extremism, livelihoods, degree of government, little legitimacy and so forth that are being exploited by leaders but have underlying causes that are not resolvable. And I just wonder how you think about this and I'm talking about climate volatility, population growth, things that we probably cannot change in the short term but which will lead to much greater stress in societies from Pakistan to Nigeria to Egypt, et cetera. The business of peace building can't be the quaint reference to small scale, national only discussion of issues. Somehow we're, I don't seem, we're not coping with the broader range of what's going on in the world that's generating the kinds of conflicts that are gonna only get worse, in my opinion. Okay, well thank you. Three questions that could really be the focus of three conferences. Exactly. One on how to get the State Department emphases better focused on community. One on the material support question and are we constraining peace builders from talking with the people they need to be talking with and then the scale of the problem. Sarah, would you like to start? So the response to the question about communities is that I do see political officers as moving beyond, in the field, moving beyond the question of going to visit the detained human rights activists to learning more about what's going on with communities and who are their leaders, what are their leadership networks, what are their main concerns, how are their views represented or not to local or national government. When I was in Kenya, we traveled, Leon and I traveled out to Mombasa and with a young political officer who spent his time talking to community leaders in Mombasa, religious community leaders, local neighborhood community leaders, civil society leaders had a forum in which he regularly engaged in dialogue with them so I think that communities are increasingly recognized as a focal point for political work and understanding and assessment and it will vary, I'm sure, by the capacity of the post and the accessibility of the communities but I think what's really important and this pertains especially to my personal view of how we think about preventing violent extremism and it relates also to the third question about macro causality versus micro manifestation of inequality or injustice which is that violent extremism does not, it's not sort of a blanket that washes over the world in one fell swoop, it's something that works through seems and weaknesses and vulnerabilities and so the prevention work as we look at terrorist networks and we look at where they're currently strongest, the hot zones with conflict or safe haven of terrorists and you look then about how they spread out to buffer and periphery zones, if you start at the periphery, again to Nancy's point about as upstream as you can go, places that are at risk but are still very permissive environments but where you can trace the vulnerable networks, those communities that are most likely GP targeted by extremist organizations that are operating next over, you can identify where the most important vulnerabilities are and those are communities really worth investing in in terms of understanding and in terms of supporting. So my view about how we as an international community look at the threat of violent extremism is not that we need to turn the entire globe into Marine County in order to combat violent extremism is that as we can predictably understand where some of the biggest vulnerabilities lie, where some of the populations are most vulnerable and that is where we need to concentrate our effort because we don't have to the point of the third question the resources to fix everything right now if we did, we wouldn't. So I think communities are increasingly important but I think they have different degrees of importance in different contexts and I think they're particularly important for us to understand and work with and reinforce in the context of the violent extremism challenge. On material support, I think there are often untoward consequences of public policy decisions and I think there is no question that I have heard from many organizations that the material support prohibitions do create challenges for peace building organizations particularly when they wanna work with those that are closest to the problem set on the violent extremism problem set. So I would acknowledge that I've certainly heard that that is a serious issue. On the final question about the big tectonic pressure points that are increasing the potential for vulnerability and inequity and violence, absolutely no one actor has enough resources to deal with them and we could get into a long discussion about the international system and the limits of the UN and why this is my view about why it's so important to involve the private sector in discussions about preventing violent extremism when you're looking at assistance budgets that are just a minuscule portion of the foreign direct investment value in many of these countries that are most at risk. So there's no question that no one entity can do it all, that we need everyone engaged and that while neither the US government nor the international community has enough sort of resources and energy against any single one of these thematic threats whether it's climate change or inequality that you can't do everything at once and so you have to make choices and so to my mind the prevention agenda then needs to become more specific. That's why to my mind the prevention agenda is not the development agenda. The prevention agenda is very distinct from the development agenda and development tools have a real role to play in prevention once you know what it is that you're trying to prevent. If you're trying to prevent mass atrocities against civilians, if you're trying to prevent the spread of violent extremism, you need to look at the risk factors for those activities and you need to concentrate your development and your peace building efforts in those areas. So to me it's not a question of do you do development or do you do conflict prevention. It's if you're gonna do a certain kind of prevention where are you doing it? With whom are you doing it? How do your development tools and then your other tools whether they're foreign direct investment or whether they're judicial capacity building come to play in that community because of that vulnerability because you've identified that risk factor. Thank you. Nancy do you want to take any or all of those? So let me just make a few specific points to compliment that the first on the state aid conversation I would just add that I was very happy to see the QDDR take on this issue of taking more risk because none of this work can be done as long as our diplomat and development professionals cannot leave the embassy or the aid mission. And so we need to unleash our government officials so that they can get outside and do that work. It's very important to have all the NGO partners and all the other actors doing that work. But the more that we keep our official Americans locked up inside the worst that will be for us as a country. So that's absolutely critical. On the material support I absolutely agree. I think it over and over again it becomes a significant problem both for peace building and for humanitarian work. And we need to find more nuanced ways, more carve outs, more ways of making that help without also being a hindrance without canceling out other efforts that are absolutely critical. And I believe that's an important piece of work. On the scale issue Fred, absolutely Sarah to everything that you said I would also add that this is why there is such an effort on global partnerships. And I would say a part of those global partnerships are actually the creation of these or the further solidifying critical norms around state behavior and expectations and how much of the violence that we're seeing is fueled by or prompted by the kind of grievances that stem from corruption, from inequality, from basically fragility at the state level. And so we had a wonderful group of African women leaders here earlier this week, parliamentarians, ministers, et cetera. And they were furious with the lack of leadership at the very top of their countries and the inability of the UN to make a difference on these issues. And they're ready to mount a walk across Africa or some kind of mass action to really underscore that it's not okay for leadership to continue on the way it is. And so I think it's both creating a greater understanding of this normative action. And there is a lot, especially augmented by digital media, there's a lot of energy for people to have it be differently and it's harnessing and supporting and enabling that to happen, which will be a part of the equation. And everyone is different. Every conflict, every seam is different. And so at our peril, do we apply mass solutions? Some more questions? Yes, up here. And then Chick. Hi, I'm Kim Hart with Search for Common Ground. I wanted to build on your comments about increasing collaboration by having problem-focused funding. I think that's really accurate. It's a big challenge here in DC, as we all know, with accounts like the Complex Crises Fund getting zeroed out every year. And some of these really critical global accounts that do fund this type of work. So I just wanted to hear a little bit more about how your teams are building that with The Hill, looking forward, and how our community can help. Thanks, Chick. Hi, thank you. It's so good to be here. And Nancy, it is so good to see you in that chair. We appreciate it very much. My biggest concern, overall, is one that we've referred to a couple of times in terms of scale. And scale means resources. It means money for the institutions that are engaged in violence prevention and peace-building. The organizations and bureaus that you represent are doing extraordinary work, but so incredibly under-resourced in comparison with virtually everything else that goes on in the US government. And as you all know, it wasn't very long ago that we went through a real struggle just to keep this institution alive, let alone be adequately funded. Part of the challenge in getting particularly the Congress to even pay attention to these institutions and what you're doing is a lack of confidence in the efficacy of peace-building, a lack of confidence that we can actually, that you actually can do it, that it can make a difference. What can messages do you take to the American public and to the Congress? What message would you encourage us to take to the people we connect with and in our advocacy efforts on behalf of what you're doing to help strengthen the case, to get the case out there and to begin to scale up the financial resources that make it possible for all of us to do what we're trying to do. Thank you. Good, thank you. And I've just gotten the word that we have three minutes, so maybe we can use that opportunity both to answer the questions and to wrap up with any other comments you'd like. Sure, thanks, Ron. The conversation about resources is one in which I think the administration has, the Obama administration has talked about the importance of funding foreign assistance and it does seem to be an issue that the Hill has a different perspective on and that is not historically an aberration and so this is a long-term challenge that we've had exacerbated by the facts that you all know that most Americans are under the false impression that we spent oodles of money on foreign aid when of course we spend an embarrassingly low on the amount when compared to other developed countries and so I don't have a silver bullet on that. I think we have in seeking to talk about the importance of prevention within the State Department, we are trying to highlight the fact that when everything that we do is committed to in a specific line item for a very specific purpose that is divided up by sort of bureaucratic budget-driven process, it just becomes hard to stay focused on the integrated problems. We can have, and this relates to the second question on metrics, the Hill has said very positive things about our HIV AIDS program in large part because the results are so easy to measure and this is like, we focus on the crisis because it's here, we don't focus on prevention because it's not here yet and we focus on the things that we can measure the results of even if there may be not the only things that are important and so the challenge to just build now into the answer to the response to the second question is to be able to articulate the value if not demonstrate the value of prevention work or of peace-building work, it's a huge challenge for the atrocity prevention work that I mentioned because how do you show the results of a non-barking dog? First of all, in the case of Burundi that I offered up as an example, nobody wants to crow about Burundi because we're very worried about Burundi, right? So how do you take credit for two years worth of investment that you believe has helped to prepare us better and helped to prevent violence when violence could emerge at any moment, right? So that's tough in and of itself but the non-barking dog, which is to say whether it's the Nigeria elections or whether it's the Kenya elections where we believe that our efforts diplomatic and programmatic were very important contributors to the lack of a result that we feared, that's just a very hard case to make and so I don't have a great answer to that. I do think that it is a chronic liability for the way we do our foreign policy budgeting. First of all, and just very quickly the complex crisis fund from my old seat is one of the most important otherwise unencumbered funds that there is. To Sarah's point about the budgeting process, it's really important that there be the kind of funding that enable a faster response to an unanticipated crisis. Not to undercut the upstream efforts but you do wanna have that flexibility. I would note, this measurement issue is something that is always a struggle and in fact, you may wanna mention the lunch today, Melanie, on that but the causality will remain a challenge. I believe there is a very strong argument that must continue to be made about the fact that the more we focus on getting ahead of problems, it's more cost effective than doing massive responses either to a natural disaster or to a war and a conflict where you have to resort to military means. It is definitely in our national security interests to try to prevent conflict from happening and it's a very, very in the scale of things investment to make in that effort and it's certainly in line with our values as a country and the more we do it in partnership with frameworks and with networks where we are collectively working on a problem and not so worried about the particular causality of one act or another but more how are we achieving the desired outcome of peace and stability, the better off we are in getting around some of the complexities of measuring and if you look at some of the shifts that are on the table for the post millennium development goals, for the sustainable development goals, it is just imperative that we have goal 16 in there which is the heartbeat of bringing together democracy with peace building and that will provide a global framework with indicators that all of us can feed into and I think that will be that plus frameworks like the New Deal for Engagement with Fragile States where you have negotiated frameworks that a number of actors are feeding into at a very local level. We need to be alert for those opportunities, we need to be rigorous with our own efforts and partner with others in frameworks that enable us to really understand progress and it will take that kind of concerted effort to get us where we want to be as this ever interconnected interdependent globe. Well on that note, thanks to both of you so much for a fascinating discussion. Actually after the next panel we'll have more information about our lunch which indeed for those of you who are interested we'll focus on all the questions you wanted to ask about negotiation. We will have a 20 minute, 15 to 20 minute break, listen for the gongs. Ursula, am I supposed to be? Oh, Linwood, yes, sorry to see you behind me. Linwood will tell us everything we need to know, thank you. Thank you Melanie and Sarah and Nancy for this wonderful discussion and thank you for participating in that discussion. As Melanie has said, we're on break now for approximately 20 minutes. We'll return to Carlucci and we'll have a discussion with our first panel talking about the challenge and the threat of silencing our voices and that will be kicked off by Framing remarks by Rosario Tuchif from USAID. Thank you very much.


Customer acquisition calculator. Create a profitable strategy for your business, part one of two. Now, guys, this is a two-part video series. You really should go watch part two. I'll have a link in the description below so you can go over and do that. But we're going to talk about getting customers. If you want to get more customers, whether you're selling digital products, physical products, services, it doesn't matter. You're going to want to watch this video to the very end. I also have a course, a $97 course absolutely free, and I'll tell you how to get that too.  It's something you're always going to need to work on. Now, it shouldn't be a product of, you know, well, I've got 10 more customers this month. I don't know where they came from, but I got 10 more customers. It should actually be a process. It should be actually something that you're working towards, not just, you know, I got more customers. I just don't know where they came from. You should know where they come from. You should actively be going out and getting them. And in this video, I want to show you exactly how to do that. Okay. I want to put a graphic up on the screen so you can kind of see, you know, where they come from first off. Okay. So the first part, your leads, you can see they come from awareness and interest. Okay. So they become aware of you through a video or through an ad or they were surfing the Internet or whatever it is. And then they develop some interest. The next stage of this is called consideration. Consideration is they're like, yeah, okay. I've heard about this company. You know, maybe they're for me. I think I'm going to do a little bit more research on them. I think I'm going to look at some of their products. That's where they get into intent. They're actually intent on possibly doing business with you. And then they evaluate what you've got. You know, they maybe read your descriptions. They look at your products. They look at your reviews. And they evaluate it. And then it comes right down to the actual purchase of the product and they become customers. So you can see their leads, prospects, and then customers. Now, as we're acquiring customers, especially for running ads, that's a whole lot easier to do. We have what's called a CAC or customer acquisition cost. How much does it actually cost you to get a customer? Let's take, for example, you run ads on Instagram. And on Instagram, let's say you spend, I don't know, $500 a month on creating whatever content you're going to create or running ads or whatever it is. And you get 50 customers out of that. So your customer acquisition cost was $10 per customer. So 10 times 50 gives you 500, which is exactly what you spent. Now, we need to look at this because we want to make sure our customer acquisition cost is going to be profitable. Let me give you an example.  But let's say it's $50. Now, we take that $50 and we say, well, how much of that is profit? And we say, well, 50% of that $50 normally is profit. So that leaves me $25 profit. Now, if my customer acquisition cost was $10 per customer, like I just said, I spent $500 and I got 50 customers that gave me a customer acquisition cost of $10. And my profit, when they do buy is $25, I've got to subtract out that customer acquisition cost to come to a profit of $15. I hope that makes sense, okay? So I've got a $25 profit minus the $10 customer acquisition cost. My profit is now $15 on that product. Now, in some cases, you want to look at your lifetime value of a customer, okay? That is LTV, lifetime value of the customer. And the reason you want to do that is because once you get positioned, once you have a little bit of money, you will probably spend more for that customer than you will make profit on their first sale. But you may realize that on down the road, the average customer is going to spend X number of dollars. Like we know the average customer at our survival food company is going to spend several hundred dollars. So if we run an ad, if we do customer acquisition and we gain a customer and we lose $50 or $100, it's not a big deal because we know they're going to spend several hundred dollars over the lifetime of that particular customer. Now, you do have to have the money to build up that audience, right? But you know you're going to get it back because they do repeat purchases. And that's how we look at it. Now, what I'd like to do is just put some averages up on the screen. This certainly is not accurate, but it's an average for each industry. So let's check it out. We've got arts and entertainment. Customer acquisition cost is $21 on average. Business and industrial, check that out. $533. Clothing shoes and or accessories, $129. Electronics and or electronics accessories is $377. Food, beverage and tobacco products is $462. Wow, I would never have thought that. Health and beauty is $127. Home and garden is $129. Looks like arts and entertainment is the way to go, right? Because it's so low. But what is the profit margin on arts and entertainment?  So you're not going to make a whole lot of money back, but some of the business things that you do and some of the courses you could sell, that can be quite profitable because that's the area that we're in. So you've got this budget and you want to acquire some customers, but you're not sure where to put the money. Let's look at some of the things you can do. The first thing is paid advertising. Okay, you can certainly do paid advertising where you actually run an ad. You run it on Facebook. You run it on Google. You run it on YouTube. But that's the first way of doing it. The second way is influencer advertising. Okay? Influencer advertising is where you find somebody that matches up with your brand and they talk about it. They sample it. They demonstrate it. Influencers nowadays can be vastly helpful because they have influence, okay? They have an audience of people that follow them and listen to them and buy products. If you were to just put your product out on TV, okay? Listen, you're going to put it on TV. It's going to go out to everybody, okay? It doesn't go out to a specific group of people. So, you know, even television and radio for years has been using influencers. They'll use celebrities, right? They use sports figures. They know that the value of having an influencer is incredibly helpful when you're selling a product. The next thing is one of my favorites. I love it. And that's email. Email marketing, okay? I can send out an email and I know I'm going to make money within hours when I send out an email because I've already built my own audience.  The audience will build. You can also use referral programs. I use referral programs. I think that's a good way to get more customers in the door, too. Referral programs, where you pay somebody else to bring you customers, works great. Number five is traditional advertising. Traditional advertising would be newspaper, radio, television, that type of thing. That's one way to get your product out. But understand, you can't target it very well on those medias, but it is a way to advertise. And if you ever check into it, late night ads on TV are very, very inexpensive. Number six is search engine optimization. I do spend money on this. I work on this myself. It's a hard thing to wrap your hands around because there's so much to do, but it's very, very important because when people search online, you're basically getting free customers if you look at your web pages. Number seven, and I kind of touched upon this when I said email marketing, but audience building, okay? How are you going to build your audience? If I spend money out there to run ads, to give people free downloads on how to protect their home and family, I know those people are concerned about protecting their family, which they may also be concerned about having survival food, which is what we sell. So you can spend money and build your audience. And that's what you have to market to once you've built that list. The next thing is content marketing. I'm actually doing content marketing right now. I'm doing free content. I'm talking to you guys. I'm sharing with you ways that you can make money. And that's content marketing because you're going to hear me talk and you're going to say, well, that makes sense. I like that. What else does he have? I do have courses, right? I'm going to talk about content marketing. I can also write blogs. I can write articles. They don't all have to be videos. All of those things are content marketing. Things that help people out where they can click and maybe buy your product or click and learn more about your company after they've consumed that content. It works very well. Now, I'd like to put another graphic on the screen and it has to do with areas that people trust. There's a question ask. In general, which type of advertising channels do you trust more when you want to make a purchase? The first one up there is print ads in newspapers and magazines. And then there's TV ads. And then there's ads and catalogs. And as you can see, it really drops down. You know, ads and podcasts are way at the bottom. But keep in mind, ads and podcasts haven't even existed up until just recently. Online pop-ups don't do as well. But you can see all the different places there. And you can also see that search engine stuff is right in the middle now. It's really, really grown where it didn't even exist before. Now, keep in mind, some of these things don't work as well as they should because there are things that prevent it now. Like a lot of pop-up ads, people can block now. So they won't see those ads anymore. A lot of people are desensitized to a lot of the ads that are out there because they see so much online. So that's why I like to do content out there. That's why I've put over 1,100 videos on this channel. Yeah, check it out. 1,100 videos on this channel. At the time that I'm recording this, I don't know how many it will be by the time you watch this video. But bottom line is I like to give before I take. And I think that is a really good rule of thumb when you're really trying to build your audience. In video two, I'm going to go over some more ways that you can market your company and really get good results. So that's it for this video. I hope you got something out of it. There's more detail in video two. And I think that's going to open up some more opportunities for you. It's going to probably open up your imagination too. So you'll want to check that out. There is going to be a link below for video two in this series. I want to thank you so much for watching this video. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so. Hit that subscribe button below. Turn it from red to gray. And don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you are notified each and every single time I go live. Thank you so much for watching this video. Put your comments below. Introduce yourself. Say hi. Okay? Put all that below so I can get to know you a little bit better and I can help you out. Thanks so much for watching this video. And I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right there so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.


Four more local government areas and six local council development areas have been added to the ban placed on the operations of commercial motorcycles popularly known as Okada in Lagos State. The Commissioner for Transportation Frederick Oladeinde hinted during a press briefing on Phase 2 of the total ban on motorcycle operations in the state. Plus the new correspondent, Lovie Kokoyedoko reports. It all began three months ago. Operations of commercial motorcycles were restricted in six local governments and nine local council development areas in Lagos. According to the government, the movists who curtailed growing men and security threats posed by some of the riders. Four more local government areas and six local council development areas have now been added to the ban list effective from September 1. Based on the apparent positive impact of the ban and the resolution of the Stakeholder Forum, Mr. Governor has approved the ban of Okada in another four local government areas and six LCDAs for the second phase of the total ban, in addition to the ongoing ban in the sixth local government and their respective LCDAs. These local governments and their respective LCDAs are as follows. Number one, Koshifere local government with the following LCDAs equals Isheri LCDAs and Agui K2 LCDAs. Number two, Oshide solo local government with Isolo LCDAs and Ajibo LCDAs. Number three, Shogunu local government with Paraguay LCDAs and number four, Mushi local government with Udi Unu LCDAs. The commissioner advised residents to make use of alternative means of transportation to go about via daily activities. He enjoined residents to access government's existing interventions aimed at empowering them. In the state of the administration, we started the reform of the bus scheme so that people can actually ride our buses with clean suits and still come out with clean suits, etc. We have upgraded the water transport mode. There are more boats on our waters. Mr. Governor has invested in 16 terminals, etc. We are wrapping up the rail project in the bid to ensure that we give people alternative. Now, Canada riders themselves, they have a right to join these effects in my last my lecture. The buses as owners, they come together as a member of a company, they can go in there and apply to own the buses and the buses will be given to their own instrumental basis that they will be paying. So it is a system that is very easy for them to join and in actual part, some of them are hopeful to say that they would like to join and no matter what it is to ensure that they are part of the scheme. Security agents and other law enforcement formations within the state have been put on alert to enforce the fresh ban. We are now being joined now by Public Affairs Analyst Mr. Adenie Kono. Mr. Kono, good evening to you. Thank you for joining us on news now. Now what do you make of government's decision to have a total ban of the popularly known motorcycle riders in Lagos, the government has given instances of threats to security in the state of perceived nuisance by the riders and of course we know that some residents have also raised alarm over the operations of commercial motorcyclists. What do you make of it? I think in my candid opinion it's actually a cosmetic approach to providing solution. When the first ban was made possible, made the 18th of this month, for the first couple of days we saw police men all around Lagos, even in some areas that were not mentioned. They prevented motorcycles from either driving in the highways and the enthusiasm with which that was met just abated and fizzled out and we appear to have them back on a major highways stronger than ever before. Do not forget that there is an economy for importers where we talk about motorcycles and you cannot really prevent people from wanting to move from point A to point B and you also cannot prevent people from creating a corner for themselves. So whatever it is the government is doing with money in there should be really looked at because the same government is a collector of all the monies, mainly all the monies across the local government that have been mentioned regarding more or less the ticket to get every money. So I want to say that the best thing for the government to do is to actually look at more holistic ways of dealing with this issue. The first of that would be harnessing the water potential of Lagos and provide very effectively water transportation and crossing roads and crannies over waterways and building more jettings. Once you do not make occurred riding attractive to those that patronize them, it makes life better. The Netherlands is two feet below sea level, they do more of bicycles if you've been to Amsterdam apart from other places. It means therefore that the country, particularly the state, must leverage its potential. Water covers more parts of Lagos than the land space and the Lagos government in its overall about 53-54 years of existence as a state has not been able to evolve that and I think it's something which we look into. So whatever it is they've done before, for instance, have had to drive extra carefully going on the Lagos-Balangra Expressway, even some parts of other areas, even the Shumori-Barega areas, the post-offer areas, because they're everywhere. Do not forget that apart from being in transportation, the people that are doing it really believe they could make quick money just actually to take care of their family. So it means therefore that what is Lagos doing, apart from banning, to prevent people from getting into criminal acts if they are prevented from riding these motorbikes. The reason why the state government has decided for it to be banned is because we seem to have an incremental, you know, incremental incidences of crimes committed by those who ride on bikes and the Lagos-Balangra government on the one hand is justified to do that, but on the other hand, what about the fact that they are disempowering people? Don't forget that there was an op-ro about three weeks ago where the lawmakers at the federal level actually agreed that the federal government cannot ban the use of motorbikes across the country. It is an economy that empowers the state one way or the other, but in disempowering people, what are the alternatives we've created? So this is a very complex conversation where the state government makes use of a high-handedness, justifiably true because it takes responsibility for insecurity, but on the other hand, we may have more crimes on our hands if there is no alternative of doing this. And I think that the Lagos-Balangra must be open. It's game to deal with these issues, please. I think I agree with you at this point where many say that it's like throwing the bathwater and the baby away because in dealing with issues like this, those who are in the hinterland or places where, you know, it's not very motorable. I want to say the Okada riders are the best for them at this point. So what do you think the government should have put in place? In the first place, what makes Okada riding attractive? It's that the solution. Let's do some economics now. When value is provided and the value provided is optimal, the patronage for such value is of the best and in its longest. Okada has been able to provide value for people who have worked all day and want to get to their families in good time. Let us check the road infrastructure. The Lagos-Balangra road has been under construction since Fashala and Amboni has come and gone. Fashala used eight years and Amboni used four, 12. Amboni is going to use another four. So that's going to be about 16 years. Where a road that should be less than about maybe, it's a 60 kilometers per hour, maybe it's in excess of 120 kilometers, has been left unattended for the past 16 years. The harrowing experiences of those that are commuted from Ma'al Tzu or maybe from Malapa Suru, all the way to Badagori, could not be documented. It therefore means that when you as government as demonstrated, you know, ideably capacity to deliver on your terms of reference, which of course forms road infrastructure, water and many other social needful, then the people have to find a way around it. And if it's where to be in a country where people are really civilized, they would have taken the government to court and won fair and square because taxpayers' money goes into most of the works being done. But on your round, you've not been able to provide that. And people have decided to take their destinies in their hands. Very well, it is dangerous because you're exposed if there's any collision and any accident motorcycle could actually make somebody become a disabled person, lose a limb or so. I agree in principle. But at the same time, when people take office, they have terms of reference. And the terms of reference should be priority. Over the course of the time that the federal government has not been able to, the state government has not been able to do is part of this room because let's just leave the federal government alone. If over the years, the state government has not been able to fix that, perhaps in the area of collaborating with the federal government to solve the problem of infrastructure, how then do you expect people, you don't expect people to fold their arms? For instance, we'll talk about employment, which of course is some of the things that we feel the government should have answers to. If government doesn't have room for people to get employed, if electricity is not available for people to have private businesses, yet government takes people to the cleaners to collect taxes or increase it, then when the people revolt, they say that it is a subordination of lawlessness. So government should have a human face in this kind of situation where it understands that we have not done the best we could for those people, let us think. Now, September the 1st is less than two weeks ago. What I think government should have done is to tell them that these are blueprints, one, two, three, four, five, for you to stop or color-riding between now and December of 2022, by the first week, maybe after people have digested their Christmas or New Year's rice or food, maybe by the sixth or seventh, we don't want to see any motorbikes on this room, you would have given a very justifiable period of time for you to band in, out-rightly, and take punitive action. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mr. Kunu. Thank you so much because of our time, but I must say thank you for your comments. And of course, I do understand that the government is working with stakeholders in that sector to see that they are empowered. We hope that the ban would make sense for the state. We also want to see that plan out in public domain, so that people like us can talk about it, that government has provided alternative in the balancing of conversation. Thank you. That's right. Thank you so much and have a pleasant night.


Welcome to the Network Engineering video blog. I am your host, Michael Crane. In today's video, we will implement FileSave and SaveAs to write our nodes and links configurations to a text file. This will allow us to load nodes, links, and their layout when we first start Mogwai instead of having to provision everything from scratch. A real time saver. We will be using WPFS XAML menu tag to add menu items, FileOpen, FileSave, and FileSaveAs commands. We will also be using Win32 save file dialog for the user interface and using the stream writer to write our text files. So let's get started. Like I was saying, we want to be able that we want to save our routers and we want to save the links and we also want to save the location of these guys, right?  So in this video, I only implemented FileSave and FileSaveAs. Let me just show you what I did. I wanted to make this video kind of short anyway, because the Open config is probably going to be a lot more interesting. So let me pull up a diff here. Okay, so in the main window, the only thing I added in the canvas was this menu. Okay, so I just added the menu items for Open, Save, and SaveAs. And for some reason, I noticed it's not putting the, when you do the underscore open, it's supposed to, when you hit Alternate, Alt O, it should put that on there, but it's not working. So I'll have to, we'll have to visit that later. Okay, so anyway, we have these, these menu items I added, which is pretty simple stuff. Now we'll go look at, oh, and then the globals. Let's look at him real quick. I added the default directory, which is just in my documents slash Mogwai. All right. And then the default file filter, which is, I'm just making the config files, text files right now. Nothing fancy. And the config file is just being initialized as null. And the default config Y is just Mogwai. Our Mogwai config.txt, right? And these are just global variables, so anyone can access them and, and read them if they need to. So let's see, here's where most of the stuff happened. We'll start from the top. I had to import system IO for this, our new constructor, right? So this main window didn't have a constructor to begin with. So I went ahead and added it. And I added it because if there's, I wanted to make sure if there wasn't a default directory in the my documents area, then we're going to create one. All right. That's what that, this does right here. Then the, the open file right here, I, there is a subroutine for it. But like I said, it's not, I just copied this config out of the example. So, and kind of modified it a little bit. I just added basically this custom. Most of this is just from the example, except for this down here, right? Okay. And it's just getting the file name from the dialogue, opening the file and setting and config file name, right? Okay. So here's our save file. And this is what gets called from the XAML, right? All right. So on click, it's, it's going to call save file or save as file, right? On click, it's going to call save file. And as we saw earlier, so the config file is nothing and do a save as with a default config file. Otherwise, just save the testbed to the config file, right? Code behind for the XAML event for save as, and it just does the same thing. It says config file is nothing. Use the default config file. Otherwise, do the save as, you know, ask the user if they want to save it as the current config file, or maybe you want to add a dot one to it or whatever, right? Okay. And so here's our subroutine for save as, and you just pass it a file name. And it pulls up the save file dialogue as you saw, which is a windows thing. And this thing is, is pretty old. I don't know how this has been around forever. It seems like anyway, it just takes in the file name that sets the initial directory for it. And then the filter, as you saw in the globals, it just filters on text files, or you have the option of filtering on all files. So that's in this, if you don't know what this is, let me show you real quick. Let's see. So if you do a file save as, let's say, so see the save as type, you initially want to do text files because that's what we're looking for. So filters on text files, or you can filter on all files, right? And we'll talk about this XAML here in a second. So that's what this does right here is either filtering on text files or all files, right? Yeah, so it's, here's the filters where we left off at the default filter here. And then it's got this crazy question mark. And I'm not familiar with this. And it seems to work if you take the question mark off or leave it on there. I left it on there so I could talk about it in the video. I have no idea what it's for. But like I said, I can take this off and the Boolean works just fine. I can leave it on. I'm sure it means something in Microsoft land, but to me, it means nothing. So anyway, that's, that's what it is. I found this in the example. So I just left it. If you hit okay, you know, it gets the file name and saves the test bed and the config file. And then it said, saves the test bed using that file name and then updates the config file with the new file name. And here's our save test bed. Now this is a little more interesting. So I'm using a stream writer. I'm going to write it to the file that's passed in. And I thought about trying to use the xml writer and xml reader. Okay, so here's the xml writer class. And so in their example here, they are creating a button which is a control like what we have. Here's how it saves it. It just says save button or dim save button, they're just saving it as a string. Then they're just using this xml writer dot save. And I was like, wow, that's, that's pretty nice. And when you actually run an example like this, you get something that looks like, like this. And aside from the fact this thing is almost impossible to read. As you can say, this is a xml formatted string.  And it, but it, it looks like it has all the information we need. Let me pull it up in a better, in a better editor here. Okay, now this makes it a little easier to look at. Okay, so we got the type as a router node. It's got the name, the zindex. I mean, it's got everything. It's very nice. And of course, it's impossible to read anywhere else. And it's got the locations, the width, the height. The problem is, is when I went to use the xml reader, which is this guy up here, I could not, they're using the exact same example. I could not get this to work. It just kept complaining and complaining and complaining after messing around with it for probably two or three hours. I came into this xml writer and, and they had this serialization limitations of xml writer save. And you can go read it. I'm not going to read it to you. But anyway, it just talked about, you know, all the problems that this has. And this seemed a little bit convoluted anyway. I mean, so here's how you load it. So they're using a string reader to get the, to read the save the string. I don't know why you would need a string reader class to do that, but you do. Then you have to use this xml reader as xml or xml reader equals xml reader create. Okay, the string reader, right? And then once you create this xml reader, then you got to create your button. And you have to cast it from an xml reader dot load of your xml reader. And you got to cast it into a button. And I do this, this right here just seemed like nonsense to me. I'm like, what the, so I trashed it. I didn't like it. It was ugly. And it wasn't working. Now what I'm doing, I'm just, I'm just going through the collection of nodes and the collection of links. And I'm saying, okay, well, for each node in my collection of nodes, I'm going to say, I'm going to write node start, and then the node name, node type, the xy locations of it, and write them all in this file and say node end, right? And then the same for the links. And if you're wondering about the node start and the node end, when I'm doing the open, I can come back and say, okay, here's the start of the node. Okay, so I know all the information between these two points are the same node. Okay, so when we go to add more information this later, you know, my parser will know, okay, yeah, I know everything in here is part of the same node. All right, and same with the links. And the links are just link start, link end, and then the name of the link, what kind of link it is, and the two endpoints, node A and node B. And that's basically all we have right now, right? We haven't added really any config to any of our nodes. So, okay, so that's the same testbed. And that produces a file that looks like this. Now this to me is much simpler to read. And I could probably even put some spaces in between them. So yeah, so here's our two nodes, a router, you know, router node, their locations, and their names, right? And here's the link that goes in between them. To me, that's a lot simpler.  So when I start adding more config, I'm gonna have to add more code. Now I might be able to, you know, put this in its own little class, and then make the parser where it kind of reads it, but we'll do that in the future. Right now, this will be sufficient. And we can add to it as we go along. And if it starts getting too, too hard to maintain, when we add new config in here, then we'll have to, we'll just look at redesigning this. But right now it seems to work nice and easy to read. Because this is much better than that mess we were looking at earlier. Okay. And so the last thing I added is updated these node types with Cisco router node, Cisco switch node, and Xena test set. Because when we go to, to import this config, we're gonna have to know, I mean, right now our add router just, just only adds a Cisco router basically, right? But when we start adding Juniper routers and other types of routers, you know, we're gonna have to have a generic router node. We might change this node type to router, right? And then, then the node specific type or node manufacturer could be Cisco, we could put in model numbers if we want. Then when we open our config file up, it knows exactly what to build and how to populate all the fields, right? And that's why I wanted to break out the open config in a, in a separate video, because this is going to be a little more complex and then just writing text to a file, right? 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Welcome to Toffy TV, it is the Everton News Daily. Deli Alley has gone AWOL, that is according to his club Beshictus. Head coach Senol Gunes gave him permission for a short break and Deli hasn't returned. And apparently according to reports he's not answering his phone either. Deli was pictured on Kim Kardashian's Instagram story apparently over the last few days. And he seems to have disappeared, that is what they're saying. Gunes has said a few things, it was raining so he's probably not fancy coming back, things like that. There's their relationship broke down a while ago. Gunes coming out the other week saying that Alley won't be considered for the Beshictus squad for the rest of the season. And this is just further evidence that the 26-year-old seems like he's decided his time may well be done in Turkey. He's still an Everton player, he will return to Finchfarm in the summer. Sean Dyche was asked about him last week, said he would speak to him during the international break just to see where he's up to. This, I don't think will go down well with either the Turkish club or Everton if Alley is not answering his phone. So that one is one to keep your eye on. It's not going very well, I think is the easiest summary to make with that one as concerned. Leon striker Musa Dembale will definitely leave the club this summer. He has been previously linked with a move to Everton. Villa are also credited with an interest in him as well. He has started eight games this season for Leon but he has been involved in 21 of them, he has scored three goals. He is a free transfer, 26 years of age, did very well at Celtic, did really well when he went out to Leon, tailed off a little bit of late but he is someone who Everton could potentially bring in and obviously no free but after paying him a signing on fee obviously but the wages might be manageable as well. A few of the German clubs after him are interested in him as well as Everton and like I said before maybe Aston Villa as well but he is one who Everton could be targeting, should they stay in the Premier League. And another one who did may well target because links have come out of Spain today. AS reporting that Samuel Ciochwisi is available for around £15 million this summer. Everton would have interested in him and inquired about him in both the summer transfer window and the January transfer window. The Villarreal Winger scored his 11th goal of the season at the weekend. He has also got 11 assists as well for the yellow submarines this season. His contract expires in 2024 on Everton and again Aston Villa. There must be a little rubber stamp at the moment that are putting Everton on Aston Villa after all his players are credited with an interest in the winger. So again we'll see. This all like I've said on a few links depends on where Everton is actually playing the football next season which league. But he's obviously very quick and that eye for a goal and assists was exactly what Everton was looking for isn't he. He's got lots of pace as well Ciochwisi. Neil Mawpae's agent has said that he almost joined Salon Atana last summer but then chose to go to Everton after he had had stronger negotiations. There was another opportunity in January for the player to leave for Italy but Everton made a technical change with the coach. And Mawpae remained at Gooderson Park. But his agent has hinted that he may well leave the club this summer and said that there is a couple of Serie A clubs interested in him and he has work to do in Serie A apparently so there you go. So Neil Mawpae tipped up potentially tipped to leave Everton this summer. Don't think it'd be any great surprise to anybody if he does leave. And finally Sheamus Coleman isn't involved for the Republic of Ireland tonight. They're playing Laffia in an international friendly. He's not even on the bench. I don't know whether that's due to him having a knock or whether they're just resting him. They do play France in a Euro 2024 qualifier on Monday night and they may well be trying to save Sheamus for that one. But he is not involved tonight so there you go. That is it for the news daily. Give the video a thumbs up, subscribe if you haven't. And if you want more daily videos including live videos why not become a Toffy TV Premier member. The link is in the description and the QR code will be on the screen in about two seconds. See you later.