Peter's Griddle

IPv6 village at Hacking At Random 2009

2009-07-07T15:00:00.003+02:00

In August I will be visiting HAR2009. My focus will be on setting up IPv6 stuff. In the works is a 'Village' for that. See the wiki. If you are going, or are interested in IPv6, please contribute.

Jfoobar translates my columns on open source

2009-04-03T09:01:00.002+02:00

The guys over at Jfoobar were so kind as to translate one of my dutch columns, about buying open source. You can find it at Jfoobar. I wrote a bunch of them, so stay tuned for more on Jfoobar.

YouTube is a very small TV network

2009-02-27T17:37:00.000+01:00

Google executives recently claimed that YouTube users submit 13-15 hours of video material every minute. Downloads are ten times that. Although these numbers are impressive, they translate into an average viewer population of 90.000. The Super Bowl typically attracts close to 100 million viewers. American Tv networks measure their audience by the million. Popular programs attract 10-20 million

Which computing cloud is closer?

2008-12-24T11:00:00.015+01:00

The ‘cloud’ stands for a worldwide infrastructure of computers that can deliver applications and content to any place on the Internet. Early examples of clouds are content distribution networks (CDN), which can serve web content from a worldwide distributed network of servers. Because the servers are closer to the user the user will see quicker response. Because there are multiple servers, larger

Video killed the TV star

2008-11-27T15:07:00.002+01:00

In the future, the dominant traffic on the internet will be video. However, it will not look like TV. Instead it will be more like video on demand, for everybody.The early internet was mainly used for interactive terminal traffic, but that soon gave way to file transfer. In the late nineties, web traffic took over. In the past year, peer to peer (i.e. file sharing) has become dominant, within

Watching the cloud

2008-11-22T15:21:00.008+01:00

Google App Engine is an infrastructure to deliver applications through Google’s cloud. You can drop applications written in Python in it, and let Google do the hosting. I am setting up a business based on this (GriddleJuiz).So the first obvious questions are: where is the cloud, and does it perform? With the help of my friends from Watchmouse I ran a test on one of my Google App Engine sites and

United States is world leader in IPv4 address waste

2008-10-24T11:35:00.007+02:00

The world is running out of IPv4 Internet addresses, which is why we should work on the deployment of IPv6. Or so the reasoning goes. The address space exhaustion is well documented and real, see also my earlier post. But how much of these addresses are really in use, and how do countries differ in that respect? Is there any chance we can recycle a lot of unused addresses? It would be interesting

Chrome: Google owns the web

2008-09-08T09:13:00.004+02:00

In my previous post I discussed the technical qualities of Google's new browser, Chrome. On a strategic business level, Chrome is the kick-off for a new battle for platform dominance. How can substituting one piece of free software (the browser) for another have such business impact? To understand that, you will have to look at the business model of Microsoft, and how it is affected by the

Google Chrome: here is Web 2.1

2008-09-08T08:56:00.002+02:00

Google's new browser, Chrome, appears to be a major improvement not so much for its functionality but for its stability.In software land, version 2 of something indicates the first serious incorporation of user feedback. In this way, Web 2.0 addressed user needs for more interactivity and multi-user, multi-site collaboration. In software land, version 2.0 brings the new functionality, but you

Hardware can fail, you know. Things can break.

2008-07-02T16:02:00.003+02:00

Computers are terribly reliable, in general. Today's computers execute millions of instructions each second, with an error rate that is inconceivable in other technologies. Yet, if you have hundreds of thousands of machines, you do need to take care of failures. A Cnet article elaborates on the Google situation (a Google cluster has several thousands of machines):In each cluster's first year,

Imminent death of the net predicted, film at 11

2008-04-22T08:46:00.003+02:00

At the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 last week in London, Jim Cicconi, chief lobbyist at AT&T warned that the Internet will be fully clogged by 2010.When I worked at AT&T Bell Labs around 20 years ago, the phrase "imminent death of the net predicted" was already a running joke, so something else must be going on.In the past 20 years network bandwidth has grown by something like a factor of 1

Protect your online assets

2008-03-21T17:36:00.007+01:00

Websites can go down. But there is a lot more that can go wrong with all your digital assets online. Have you ever heard about site-defamations, spoofing, identity theft, plagiarism, and software vulnerabilies?How much revenue will you lose, or damage will you suffer, if any of these happen? If so, do you know how to protect your assets against these risks, without paying an arm and a leg?I am

Digital copy protection does not prevent piracy

2008-03-04T09:11:00.003+01:00

The International Herald Tribune reports on an experiment done by Random House, a distributor of audio books. They released digitally watermarked books and then monitored file sharing networks for these books. It turned out that pirated copies were often made from physical CDs. "Our feeling is that DRM (Digital Rights Management, another word for copy protection) is not actually doing anything to

Mobile Data to Overtake Voice in 2010

2008-02-19T16:13:00.002+01:00

According to Ericsson's CEO Svanberg, the volume of data traffic (i.e. Internet usage) on mobile networks will surpass the volume of voice by 2010. For fixed networks, this point was past years ago.

The IPv6 Internet is alive

2008-02-06T14:16:00.001+01:00

As of this week, the IPv6 Internet is a reality.IPv6-only devices can now access the Internet.The Internet root name servers are now IPv6 enabled. This is a small but significant step on the road to the next generation Internet.

Tamperproof electronic voting?

2008-01-08T14:42:00.000+01:00

Electronic voting has serious drawbacks. In fact, I would not recommend it for general elections. It would just be too easy to hack (look here). Paper based voting has its own drawbacks, as recent events in Kenya show.An article in the New York Times describes a way to combine electronic and paper voting in a way that allows the public to scrutinise the results. Very nifty.

Mobile maps

2007-12-28T20:59:00.000+01:00

The new Google maps for mobile (GMM) impresses me a lot. Have a look at http://www.google.com/gmm/index.htmlIt is an application that you can download to your mobile phone, in my case a Qtek phone with Windows Mobile 5.It is a scaled down but very usefull version of the full version of google maps (GM). It shows roads or sattelite images, and it can plan routes. What makes it even more usefull

Internet censorship

2007-09-03T09:30:00.000+02:00

Apparently Youtube reached an agreement with Thai authorities concerning the blocking of pictures that are deemed insulting to the Thai royal family. In effect, the Thai authorities now have the capability to selectively censor Youtube.While I disagree with Internet censorship in general, I can sympathize with the Thai point of view. In Thailand the royal family is an extreme symbol of national

Perfectly clear service level agreements?

2007-08-30T15:04:00.000+02:00

Service level agreements (SLA) describe the services you have contracted, and their quality levels. Typically, the SLA is provided by the supplier, as they are in the best position to describe the intricacies and characteristics of the services. The result of that is that the customers can see the words 'service level agreement' in the title, and some solid numbers in the text. The rest of the

10 skills and trends

2007-08-02T15:21:00.000+02:00

A TechRepublic article describes 10 skills that are relevant to develop if you are into technical IT infrastructures, or digital infrastructures as I call them. These skills obviously point to areas in which we can expect serious development in the coming years.They are:Voice over IP, especially for replacing phone systems withing companies.Unified communications: One inbox for e-mail, voice mail

Telco strategy: moving up the value chain, are we?

2007-08-02T12:35:00.000+02:00

Two major announcements by dutch telco incumbent KPN underline the need for strategic change in telco land, as margins on traditional services are eroded.I posted a blog entry that touched on that topic nearly two years ago.In a deal with its supplier ATOS Origin, KPN takes over three data centers, and expands its workplace services to small and medium enterprises. In a more significant

New models for networking

2007-07-24T11:18:00.000+02:00

"A new way to look at Networking" is a presentation by Van Jacobson about the next generation of networking. It is worth viewing on Google Video.Van Jacobson could be described as the guy who saved the Internet from congesting, by inventing the slow start algorithm for TCP/IP. This presentation goes deep into the fundamentals of digital communication, yet presents a very clear vision of future

Who needs Windows Vista?

2007-05-29T23:53:00.001+02:00

Vista is Microsoft's newest version of Windows, yet I have not seen wide enthusiasm for it.As I was walking through the rain this morning I pondered this question, and why this version of Windows is less of a breakthrough than other versions.Typically, people don't move to new technology because they want its features, but because it allows them to get rid of old cumbersome ways of working, or at

IPv6 implementation study available

2007-05-29T23:43:00.001+02:00

IPv6 is the new version of the current Internet protocol IPv4. I wrote about that earlier.As a follow up I was asked to write a report on practical implementations of IPv6. It describes how organisations got started on using IPv6 and where it will be deployed first.This report is now translated in English. You can get a copy if you mail any message to the autoresponder at ipv6@getreponse.com (

Online backup now also for Mac

2007-05-24T17:06:00.000+02:00

A while ago I expressed my positive experiences with the online backup service Mozy.For you Macintosh users, the good news is that there is now a version for that platform.If you feel your Mac is not yet safely backed up, surf to Mozynow and give it a try.