Philosophical technology

So there’s been this really interesting thread on nanog of late, about address allocation in IPv6 address space, which hinges on a very strange question: can you be too wasteful with something that seems like it shouldn’t run out?

The background, for the non-technically inclined, is this: at some point in the future, we are going to have to abandon the addressing scheme that has brought you the Internet so far (IPv4) and transition to a new scheme (IPv6) because we’re running out of physical addresses. Most people are aware that the name of a particular machine on the network is just an alias for a numeric address — it’s the numeric addresses we’re running out of, thanks to the limitations of the addressing scheme. IPv4 has a theoretical maximum of 4,294,967,296 addresses; I say “theoretical” because large chunks of the address space are reserved and can’t actually be assigned.

It’s a little bit like the problem we all had about a decade ago, when we discovered we were running out of phone numbers because suddenly everyone had cell phones and fax machines and modem lines. The difference is that we can’t just open up a whole new whack of prefixes by changing the area codes and introducing ten-digit dialing. In Internet land, we’ve hacked around this problem for a long time, pushed the day of reckoning back a couple of times with elegant and not-so-elegant solutions, but we’re going to have to face the music eventually, and deploy the new addressing scheme. Wiki, uncharacteristically, has a nice summary of the scope of the problem.

IPv6 offers the possibility of having 3.4 x 1038 hosts. That’s a lot of addresses. The way it works now is that when you call up your ISP to provision service to your house, you typically get an address. In IPv6-land, we can basically allocate you, as an individual customer, something like a current Internet’s worth of addresses for you to do with as you please. These wouldn’t be private or reserved addresses; they’d be globally routeable and globally accessible, and things like NAT and hiding the number of machines hooked up to your connection wouldn’t be necessary anymore. This has some profound implications.

The nanog thread I linked to has a simple question at its core: given the exceptional size of the IPv6 address space, is it in fact a good idea to hand out that many addresses in one go? Should we be conserving addresses by not handing out a couple billion to people who might use one or a dozen individual addresses? IPv4 worked like this for a while, at the beginning, when we handed out huge blocks of IPv4 space to people who never actually ended up using them (see visual example), and the various registries haven’t really worked very hard to reclaim them. We’d have the same problems under IPv6, too, but 3.4 x 1038 is a really big number — staggeringly big.

If you accept the premise that running out of addresses will take an absurdly long time, and/or require networking many many many things in our lives that may or may not come to fruition (and even then it’ll still take an absurdly long time), do you support giving people way more than they’d need? There are technical arguments for and against this strategy, but the philosophical question remains: given a really large resource, where you’d have to be staggeringly stupid and unlucky over a shockingly long period of time to run out of it, is there such a thing as being wasteful with its allocation?

Fair credit

Compare and contrast two candidate Web sites: Jessica Van Der Veen and Ida Chong. Clearly, we’re getting better at designing campaign Web sites, and candidates are using the Web more intelligently now than they used to.

It’s not so much the Web sites themselves that interest me, however. Look at the domain names:

jessicavanderveen.bcndp.ca versus idachong.com.

Ok, look, I know it’s 2009 and the whole namespace pollution horse has not only fled, but burned the barn down to cover its tracks, but still — candidates as third-level rather than second-level domains! This is great. I gotta give the BC NDP props for doing this right. I don’t know whether it was a deliberate choice to be good to the namespace, or whether it was an accident that came of the way the party is managing its IT infrastructure, but way to go, guys. (The only way it could have been better is if it had been fredflintstone.bc.ndp.ca, but I’ll settle for what we got.)

See also this and this (as a primer if you don’t understand why this is so significant).

(Said the guy who owns fumbling.com and vrinimi.net and is neither a network provider nor a corporation as far as he can tell…)

Use it, lose it, watch it fade

Part of my motivation for re-starting 365 (along with my motivation for re-starting the blahg) was to re-train myself to take pictures. I’ve taken a lot of pictures over the past few years, but almost none of them have been for my own sake and virtually all of them fail to meet some kind of arbitrary “art” test. Holiday snapshots, a couple of weddings, some environmental portraiture — not exactly what I’d call a great portfolio of work to look back on; it wasn’t exactly challenging, either.

Because I haven’t deliberately been going out to create something, I’m finding that I’m losing my ability to see the world through a camera lens, and my pictures are suffering accordingly. It’s a little bit like my French — not having used it seriously in a lot of years, I have to work hard to understand and be understood. 365 as the photographic equivalent of a French conversational group? Sure, why not.

The first two days of 365 — boy, do they suck. Wowza.

365: Envisioning a Year (again)

Nearly five years ago, I started a project that was designed to catalog a year of my life. By taking one photograph a day, I was hoping to be able to somehow figure out what a year looks like. Well, we got 11 weeks into the thing, and the project promptly died. I never seemed to be able to get it back on track. So let’s try again!

From that doomed project’s introduction:

To begin with, a year is roughly the longest time most of us can easily understand. If we think of time as units with which we work, it is rare to deal with a unit of time longer than a year. We can think, somewhat easily, of “next year” on a daily basis; we do not generally think of “two years from now” or “ten years from now.” When we’re kids, the year is the first long period of time we understand; before we know what a decade is, what a century is, we understand the length of a year. As we get older, our lives are transformed into cycles roughly one year long — school, work, taxes — and we come to define our lives in terms of this unit of time that feels arbitrary and is anything but.

We think we know what a year is. At least, I thought I did, and then I realized that I really don’t know how much is in a year. My journals and my notes stretch back the better part of a decade, and yet I have no clear idea what makes up a year. A lot of life happens in a year, but sometimes nothing happens. It seems like a year is a long time, and it is; sometimes, though, it doesn’t seem long enough, and it isn’t.

In the end, a year is exactly as long as it needs to be.

What is the relationship between the year that we see, and the year that we experience? What are the images that make up our lives over the course of a year? What do 365 days look like?

From 1 May 2009 to 1 May 2010 I’ll be taking a picture a day. Let’s see what happens this time around, shall we?

PS: I am aware other people have done this in the meantime. I’d like to point out that while I didn’t think of this idea first, I did think of it more recently than most people who’ve done the project online. So nyah.

You are all invited to participate, all four of you, so if you want to put your galleries in an on-line location and let it be known to YT where they can be found, we can all get through this together.

Let's just get the mother up there

Yea, and God said to Abraham, “You will kill your son Isaac.” And Abraham said, “I can’t hear you, you’ll have to speak into the microphone!” And God said, “Oh, I’m sorry, is this better? Check! Check! Jerry, pull the high end out, I’m still getting some hiss back here…

Testing and development in progress. Estimated go-live is 1 May 2009.

Do not be surprised if the schedule slips.

That is all. I AM JOR-EL, MASTER OF SCHEDULING!

Crass Consumerism, Hawaii-edition

This is really quite remarkable: Pure Komachi knives by Kai. Knife nerds will immediately recognize Kai as being the genuises behind Shun and Kershaw, probably some of the best knives in production today. Lovely Wife and I stumbled on these in KTA up in Waimea this afternoon and upon learning they were a whole whopping $17 bought a hollow-ground santoku (in purple-pink) and a yellow vegetable knife, figuring “well, at least we have something for the condo, if nothing else.” (I had been contemplating ordering Fibrox to replace the lousy Sabatier knock-offs we have here right now.) A Kai knife for less than $20? Yeah, ok.

I am shocked, shocked, shocked by the performance. Blown away is more like it. I’d never, in a million years, think I would have found a knife that performed as well as my Kyocera ceramic knives for, like, a tenth of the cost — but there it is, in purple-pink. I’m seriously rethinking my knife acquisition strategy as a result of this.

Plus, they’re colorful! Kitchens need more color. It’s just amazing.

(See also Kuhn Rikon for colorful, ridiculously good knives that are suspiciously cheap.)

Edited to add: I have now purchased two more Pure Komachi knives, a fluted sandwich knife and a very strange-looking bread knife. I don’t think I’m ever going to buy another bread knife again in my life.

What we talk about when we talk about losing a wing

William Langewiesche, The Devil at 37,000 Feet:

The site smelled of jet fuel, which had soaked into the soil and spilled into two small streams that flowed through the forest there. It also smelled of death, or more accurately of organic decomposition, which in the heat was well advanced. Perhaps a hundred soldiers were at work, expanding a helicopter landing zone, and collecting and bagging the victims. They had built a camp out beyond a cluster of wreckage from the Boeing’s wings, where the landing gear could be seen still desperately extended. The main wreckage lay just to the north in a dispersed chaos of torn and twisted metal, shattered machinery, bent hydraulic lines, tubes, wiring harnesses, cockpit displays, cabin seats, and all the transported contents of the airplane—a sad spillage of luggage, purses, briefcases, clothes, medicines, cosmetics, photographs, trophy fish that sportfishermen had been hauling home from Manaus, and thousands of computer parts that the Boeing had been carrying in its cargo hold and that now littered the forest and slumped into a stream. The debris had dug into the earth on impact, and had drawn trees and branches into the tangle. The condition of the dead should be left unsaid, except to note the mercilessness of the slaughter, and the fact that after Gol Flight 1907 hit the ground hardly any corpse remained intact. Carnivorous tigerfish had braved the poisoned streams and were feeding on flesh that had fallen into the water. This is what happens when a wing is severed in flight. The Caiapós are warriors, perhaps, but they were deeply disturbed by the scene.

Langewiesche has always had a distinct flair for clear, powerful writing, but this piece, on the mid-air collision between N600XL and GLO1907, reminds me of nothing so much as Raymond Carver’s fiction — sparse, precise, commonplace language that ultimately endows its subject with startling power. I understand the technical details of what happened over the Amazon that day — I understand the technical details of most aviation incidents better than most — but I’ve never read an accident report quite like this before, one that sent shivers down my spine.

If I owned a ski resort, this would be paradise

If living on the prairies taught me anything, it’s that it’s far better to shovel 2″ of snow twice rather than 4″ of snow once. So in that spirit, I attacked the driveway here at 2100, clearing the roughly 3″ that had accumulated since Snowpocalypse, Round III began at ~1700. I then went and did other things for 4 hours, only to come back to five more inches — thank you, increasingly heavy snowfall! That took an hour to clear. There’s now enough snow around that I’ve run out of places to put it; my neatly-constructed piles are avalanching themselves, and I can’t seem to keep anything in place. I have given up trying to keep the sidewalk clear — I can’t even find the sidewalk anymore. Unshoveled areas feature suicidally high cliffs of snow, and I am dreading daybreak.

That's… remarkable!

So last month, Sirius-XM went ahead with their channel merger, blowing up basically every channel I actually listened to. Lucy, the alternative hits channel — gone. The System, a WorldSpace trance channel — gone. POTUS, kind of like talk radio without the morons — gone on XMSR Canada. XM Chill — horribly disfigured. Bluesville is OK, for now, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope for it. Thanks, Sirius-XM! I’ll be waiting to see if the Mariners suck before deciding whether I’m going to cancel my subscription.

What amazes me is that the only thing I actually wanted on Sirius — CBC on satellite — didn’t get merged over. Blows my mind. Buncha apes. I fail to see the point of paying for subscription radio services that don’t sound all that different from the crap that’s on commercial radio for free.

The only bright spot in the channel realignment is that I now get BBC Radio 1 — not a subset, not a stupid branding with a bunch of poncy accents — no, we’re talking about the real, live, actual Radio 1 feed from the UK. Of course, I’m too old to fit in Radio 1’s demographic, and I’m listening to it eight hours out of sync (hooray for 0300 programming in Britain!), but man, this is what satellite radio is supposed to be! I’d kill to be able to get radio feeds from other English-language radio networks. That’d be awesome.

But that’s not the point of this entry. I’ve been diving back into my music collection, and trying to find new and interesting stuff to listen to. Pop music these days mostly makes my teeth hurt, or makes me miserable; the last truly great new pop song I heard was (and I’m almost ashamed to admit this) Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love.” Everything sounds the same. So I’m back exploring what, for lack of a better term, could be described as “sonic landscapes” — instrumental, electronica, trance. Start with Sigur Ros and E.S. Posthumus and get stranger from there.

But I stumbled on this thing tonight, and it was so striking, so startling that I had to share. It’s Max Richter’s “24 Postcards in Full Color” (available on iTunes for the damned, but in a DRM-free format). This is 24 tracks, none of them longer than about 2:30, using a string quintet, a guitar, and a piano, with a bunch of other, stranger found sounds. The goal was, apparently, to explore — get this — the ringtone as a musical form.

Yeah, right was my initial reaction. But here’s the truly weird part: it actually works as music. They’re like, I dunno, musical amuse-bouches. It’s some of the strangest, most interesting music I’ve heard in a long, long time.