Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Australian Cities Research

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 1, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

For some reason I got off on a “Research Australia” kick tonight. I’ve always found it interesting that most of Australia’s inhabitants live in cities on the eastern coast, so I’m mainly focusing my research on the cities of the central and western areas of Australia.

Alice Springs, almost exactly in the center of the continent, sprung up mainly for that reason: it’s in the center of the continent. A telegraph repeater station was originally established there, and later it connected some railways. They’ve got a joint US / Australian military base which monitors satellites, and they’re famous for their “Camel Cup” - racing camels can’t be beat.

Kalgoorlie-Boulder (originally separate cities), were founded mainly by mining folk - especially gold mining. They’re famous for gold… Big surprise. They’ve also been a notorious “wild west” city (Aussie version), and apparently had several popular pubs and brothels. Gold, hookers, and booze… great combination.

And after that, there are lots of boring British colonies. Several were, apparently, just to spite the French, who were rumored to be seeking to colonize the area. Lousy French…

Twitter’s Down

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 1, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Just discovered that Twitter has “scheduled” a database upgrade for, well, right now. I can’t tweet what I’m doing, but maybe it’ll at least help Twitter stop sucking so much.

Server Down

Published
by
Chris Meller
on October 30, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Assuming 1and1 ever gets their act together and my server re-appears on the net once more, I’ll be sure to let everyone know…

The really frustrating part is that I use 1and1’s provided FTP backup to keep about a month’s worth of my blog’s backups on a physically separate machine, but that FTP account is only available from within their network (to prevent people from using it as mass storage for hosting), so I can’t even get to those backups to manually restore them elsewhere.

To top it off, it looks like Media Temple is having problems once more. I’ve temporarily moved the DNS for incoherentbabble.com back to my (gs) account, but it’s running as slow as molases. It took quite literally 10 minutes to delete the prior Wordpress directory left over on my account and perform a fresh SVN checkout of Wordpress 2.3.1. Just spectacular, guys…

And here I thought I’d earned some karma points lately. First I’m in the final 3 job applicants (out of about 500 I’m told) and I lose it out to another guy, and now this series of unfortunate events… I’m beginning to think someone up there doesn’t like me very much.

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]

Playing over at WordPress.com

Published
by
Chris Meller
on June 19, 2006
in Announcements, Follow Up, Links and Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Just to let everyone know, I’m still playing over at WordPress.com. So far, just some theme changes and playing with widgets, no actual new content.

Just thought I’d let everyone know… You know, in case you cared…