Sat, 31 May 2008

Venkatesh clarifies

Mar 07 18:49:41 <venkatesh> often, your flames lack flame

I guess that's a good quality to have....

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Mon, 26 May 2008

IPv6

Kartik pointed me to this post about "The Future without IPv6". IPv6 is the future addressing scheme that the Internet will hopefully be transitioning to in the next decade or so; IPv4 is the current setup. The reason we need a new addressing scheme is simple - we've run out of addresses. The dream of the Internet was "end to end connectivity," but you can't do that if you don't have enough addresses to give everyone on the network an address.

You've seen this every time you open up a laptop and it gets an IP address from a "wireless router" - the IP address created for you by that router actually can't be reached from the broader Internet. Network Address Translation (NAT) is a trick the router plays where it changes the headers on your messages destined for the Internet so everyone else on the network thinks the box sent the message. But this means if you want to do something not allowed by that box in the middle, or allowed but misunderstood, it is in an incontrovertible position to screw that up.

The article writes:

Ubiquitous multilevel NAT means the Internet becomes a system for making TCP connections.

Using the Internet only for TCP connections to me spells the end of decades of Internet innovations like Voice over IP that rely on the flexibility of the Internet. And the fact that these connections must always go to the few servers able to have their own dedicated IP addresses creates a separate class of connection in the Internet world: "consumer" vs. "distributor". That class distinction is what IP was designed to erase.

I don't agree with the author that we will never move to IPv6, but I also know we won't do it fast enough to satisfy me. Luckily, thanks to the "end to end" nature of the Internet, especially IPv6, I can do my own migration now and give my computers both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. I'll be here in the future, waiting for the rest of you guys.

P.S. I'm already "multiplexing multiple transports over a single TCP connection" with my always-on SSH tunnel. I am aware of the drawbacks he lists.

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Mon, 19 May 2008

Humility in the open source world

"Thanks, Markus. I'm glad to know I was dumb"

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Fri, 16 May 2008

Another satisfied customer (of Dovecot)

everything is perfect.

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Thu, 08 May 2008

Hypotheticals

<l7_> hmm, well that's a rather problematic hypothetical
<shiznick> what?
<shiznick> oh, the nuclear holocaust thing?

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Sat, 03 May 2008

Lessons to learn

<vsrinivas> what I really really wish existed somewhere was a 'lessons to learn from N'
<vsrinivas> where N was plan9, coyotos, erlang, alef, ....
<vsrinivas> because srsly, we're not using them. but it'd be nice to understand what worked and what didn't and how it was applicable to reality
<paulproteus> "Programming UNIX as if it were Plan 9"
<paulproteus> "Programming Python as if it were Erlang"
<paulproteus> "Coyotos idioms for kernel designers"
<vsrinivas> something like that
<paulproteus> "Alef for Naught?  Not!"
<vsrinivas> hahahahahaha!

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reCAPTCHA

CAPTCHAs are a name for programs designed to test if they are being used by another computer (a "bot") or by a humamn. They do this by asking the user to do a task that presumably can't be done by a computer; for example, reading obscured words.

reCAPTCHA is a well-known CAPTCHA service that takes images from the Internet Archive's book scanning project. Some words are hard

But as for spam in MediaWiki, it seems that simply using the blacklists mentioned earlier is not enough; the Reed Free Culture wiki (for example) has been spammed beyond recognition with link spam. So I am deploying reCAPTCHA to show a CAPTCHA to users when they register, and showing a CAPTCHA to anonymous users who try to add links.

P.S. Attentive people may consider a personal link I have to the Internet Archive's book scanning project. That has nothing to do with my liking reCAPTCHA. (-:

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eSpeak

While I was listening to the Raven, Matt remarks:

"I don't know what the purpose is, but clearly it should be a female voice with a British accent."

Kragen replies online: "oh, use -v en/en+f2 for that"

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A name

<cdchan> That seems like Awkward City.
<paulproteus> Awkward City Soundtrack

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Tuesday

was like simulated annealing, but where you never turn the temperature down.

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Fri, 02 May 2008

Who is that Mailer-Daemon anyway?

"He's a magic dwarf with a taste for destruction."

Another good quote: "On the Internet there are no cops, just system admins."

And the part where I think I like him: "It would be a shame if we lost our public postal system to private companies!"

He suggests sysadmins use collaborative filters. That's interesting, since I currently just use a local DSPAM that collaborates with nobody.

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