Monthly Archive for August, 2007

Vanilla: Link-Free Once Again

Published
by
Chris Meller
on August 28, 2007
in Daily Grind, Internet, Links and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

Following Matt’s announcement that the text-links had been removed from the free Vanilla forums package, I thought it was a good time to donate as well. There’s no way I can match Matt’s $1000, but I hope my meager $100 donation helps out.

It really surprised me to see Matt donating to Vanilla, particularly since Automattic is the producer of another open-source forums product: bbPress. Seeing this kind of support for a competing project really does make me love open source all the more.

Keep up the great work!

Ironic Quote of the Day

Published
by
Chris Meller
on August 24, 2007
in Commentary and Daily Grind
. 0 Comments

I’ve got the Quotes of the Day widget on my iGoogle homepage, and I found this one ironic this morning:

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.
- Dan Quayle

Yeah, I’d say it’s changed…

Interesting IP Registry Statistics

Published
by
Chris Meller
on August 23, 2007
in Cool, Internet, Links, Networking, Techno-Babble and Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Found a cool post in my RSS feeds this morning: IP Registry Statistics

Stephen (who, by the way, lives in Boston, the lucky shmuck…) has setup a script that aggregates all the IP WHOIS data from the various IANA-designated organizations and runs some interesting statistics on them. Since I’m a statistics addict, I had to pose a few questions and observations. My response got far too lengthy for a simple comment, so here we go…

Since all their member countries are listed individually, why does the European Union have so many IPs? Wouldn’t the EU only represent actual government-used addresses?

That must be one hell of a database with 2.5 billion IP address records in it… I take it it’s running on MySQL? I’d love to see some automated processing, possibly spitting out aggregate numbers for historical reports (imagine the pretty IPs -> IP Exhaustion graphs).

I find it interesting that, according to Wikipedia, industry experts expect us to run out of IPv4 addresses sometime between March and May in the year 2010; but that here we are in August of 2007 and we’ve only used 2,534,086,476 of the available 4,294,967,2961 public IP addresses.

Talk about an exponential increase in usage. In the entire history of IP-based computing, we’ve used (about) half of the IPs, but in less than 3 years we’re going to use the other half? Just out of curiosity, I had to do some math.

Do you realize that, assuming we meet their expectations of running out of the remaining 1,760,880,820 IPs by March, 2010 (about 950 days away), that means we’re allocating a net of 1,853,558 additional IPs a day? That’s almost 2 million IPs a day…

That’s 1,287 IPs every minute, 21.5 IPs per second.

Somehow this seems unreasonable to me… But then, I guess I’m not an industry expert, huh?

  1. Per the above Wikipedia entry. This doesn’t exclude private subnets or multicast addresses, so my later figures aren’t going to be entirely accurate - just mostly. [back]

How to Make Developers Happy

Published
by
Chris Meller
on August 20, 2007
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Gripes, Links and Work
. 0 Comments

How To Win Friends and Make Developers Happy

If you’re managing developers (dare I say IT personnel in general), and you’re doing any of these wrong, it’s time for a serious change.

Now, how do I subtly hint to my boss that he’s doing most of these wrong? Oh yeah… quit.

(via Dzone here)

The Interesting 700MHz Spectrum Auction Rules

Published
by
Chris Meller
on August 16, 2007
in Commentary, Internet, Links, Networking and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

This story from Ars Technica, about the pending 700 MHz wireless spectrum auction (via Digg here) really interests me.

Just when I think the FCC can’t be any more generally useless and that, unless Google grabs up the entire spectrum, we’ll further be doomed to more Ma Bell / AT&T anti-competitive practices in the US wireless market, something amazing happens.

Not only have the FCC adopted two open access policies for the national spectrum (requiring open devices and open applications for all customers), which had been heavily advocated by Google to help open up the market, even if a single company were to snag the entire spectrum; but the FCC have also carved out several portions of the spectrum that would be reserved for local / regional use only.

This really is amazingly good news if you think about it. Say we have a worst-case scenario: AT&T drops a huge chunk of change to snag up the entire national spectrum in the auction. Well that’s alright, because smaller organizations can still bid on the regional portions of the spectrum and continue to offer competitive services to a more focused market. Simply because they don’t have the bankroll of a mega corporation, doesn’t mean they’re completely out of the market.

On top of everything else, there are built-in requirements for these areas of the spectrum that govern how much of the licensed region must be provided service within x years.

Finally, the smaller portion of the national spectrum comes with an added bonus… and an added curse… for the company that purchases it. They get a small chunk of wireless spectrum for their own evil purposes, but they also get a significantly larger chunk for free. One caveat: they have to build out a public services network on this extended real estate. That means they’ll have significantly higher implementation costs to develop the actual network, but after it’s in place, they get free use of this additional spectrum (provided it’s not in use for the public services at the time). In the end, everyone really wins, as long as a company can find it financially reasonable to take this jump.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m looking forward to these auctions next year. This should be a pretty exciting time for wireless technology, regardless of who wins the national chunk in the end.