The Lair

For the moment, at least. I’m heading southward in a while to start the first leg of what will be an enjoyable holiday.

This is usually how my trips to Sri Lanka work. The first day I land, I love it. I like the heat, I don’t mind the humidity. I get called a freak by many for this. The fact that I’m running away from -10c temperatures means that I will probably get a cold the first day. I will have all the fruit and food I like to eat within reasonable distance. All those things will be good. My first couple of days at home will be blissful.

Then the angst will set in. No decent internet connectivity. Nightmare traffic conditions (although I may avoid it this time). And you know, extended family. I think my extended family is reasonably cool, sure – but you know, too much of a good thing. By the end of week 1 – I expect I will be wishing very hard that I was in another country. And then things will calm down and settle into an ordered pattern. Some additional chaos in the offing this time around as I ponder that age old question “what happens next?” and deal with the blunt force trauma of getting new travel documents and stuff.

And on a slightly related note. Meetup! I probably haven’t mailed or gotten in touch with most of you lot (except the folks I see on IRC). Send me email. Actually, that’s possibly a bad idea. A call is probably more reliable.

I know, I know – I’m a few days late with this. I blame the personal drama that engulfed my life since Friday. Some positive personal drama mixed in all of it, but you know … drama. Must deal with before doing stuff online etc.

The thing is – the whole deal with St. Valentine’s day eludes me. But any day of the year is good for the quirky (or grand) gesture of romance. I may mock the person doing it mercilessly, but you know – having the big brass ones to do something spectacular just has to be appreciated.

Which is why I stopped and gawked like a bumpkin at the person playing a guitar in the quadrangle of Alcuin College. This enterprising young chap had plugged in his guitar to a power socket in a ground floor kitchen and was busy serenading someone under their first floor window. Needless to state, he had quite an audience of people pointing and laughing. He carried on regardless.

Gawk I did. Yet, I realized I was probably adding to his discomfiture (if he felt any, I doubt it) so I moved on. Only to scamper back moments later because I had the brilliant idea of getting a few pictures of our young Josh-Groban-with-a-guitar. Some innate sense of decency kicked in, however, and I refrained – even though the urge to take a photograph and caption it refused to go away.

Serenade someone on campus with an electric guitar? Sing (I couldn’t pick out the song) under their bedroom window? Now that’s a gesture that Hallmark would find difficult to replicate. A pity then that the big brass balls that this bloke carried around was clearly interfering somewhat with his singing voice. It sounded like two cats stowed in a barrel and tossed into the river Ouse.

Oh well, I sighed as the discordant notes rose up and bounced off the firmly closed first floor window. It’s the thought that counts, right?

So, ICANN switched the root servers over to IPv6 a few days ago. This is a big deal, because although IPv6 has been “officially” deployed since 1999, adoption has been extremely slow. The most commonly used existing addressing scheme (IPv4) is estimated to run out in 2-3 years. Then again, analysts have been screaming about peak oil for a while too, so perhaps it’s all hyperbole.

Part of the reason for the slow adoption rate is because everyone (myself included) has the “if it ain’t broke yet, why bother fixing it” mentality. That’s pretty much why GoPHP5 was started, that’s also why a large number of websites still use Apache 1.3 over Apache 2.0 or 2.2. Anyway, I decided that I would figure this mysterious IPv6 thing out and did a bit of digging.

The problem is, even without knowing that I do – I tend to be quite reliant on the existing addressing scheme. How so? Let me count the ways.

One application area that has seen a fair few advances (for IPv4 addresses) is geolocation technology. For example, it’s currently easy to identify the geographic location of an IP address (see zonefiles – I use this as a quick and easy geolocation service). More comprehensive services are also available ie:, ip2location, hostip.info and the daddy, Maxmind’s GeoIP. With the vastly larger address space of IPv6, the geolocation mapping will need to be reconstructed; and even then the sheer size of addresses may allow a descent into anarchy. The IANA (which governs over IP address allocation) will probably be far less inclined to rigourously police the assignment of IPv6 addresses.

Another spiffy application area that will take a hit (at least in the short term) is the DNSBL system (DNS blacklists) – which publish a set of unsavoury IP addresses. I rely on quite a few of those services (project honeypot, botsvsbrowsers and sorbs) to help head off spammers at the pass. With more addresses than you can shake a stick at, denying by IPs is going to get a little bit harder too.

So, I want IPv6 to turn up soon, yet I don’t. The problem is, there isn’t an easy way yet to test out how IPv6 will work. Most of the internet doesn’t actually seem to know how to route things to and from the spiffy new IPv6 adddresses. That’s where places like Sixxs and Hexago come in. They allow IPv6 addresses to be tunnelled via the existing IPv4 infrastructure.

So, I’m off to get myself a IPv6 tunnel set up.

I remembered seeing the process of mechanically reclaiming meat a few weeks ago on some TV show (the name of which I cannot recall). Cheap sausage rolls just don’t taste as good when you have to eye the filling suspiciously. In fact, in a most uncustomary sense of food paranoia, I realized that everything cheapish and containing meat products is probably likely to have at least a certain amount of MRM. Makes me recall Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler.

So, how to judge retail cuts of meat.

And in keeping with the theme (yet, completely bizarre) – baconated vodka.

It seems vaguely like something from a movie. Or failing which, at least a grander, larger scale version of a time capsule. Unfortunately, time capsules and archive footage usually serve to remind us of the awful hairstyles of the 80s and the cringeworthy aspects of our past. But this time, there’s pretty serious business afoot.

Way up in the arctic circle, there exists an island named Svalbard. (Yes, this Svalbard, as featured in the Pullman books). That’s the site of the “doomsday vault” (more properly, the Svabard Global Seed Vault). The wikipedia entry says that the vault was planned in 2005, I found a BBC link with some concept drawings.

The purpose of such a remote vault? No seedy business, I assure you (ok. C’mon. You had to know I was going there). The mission (via Wikipedia and also via an article in Nature)

… provide a safety net against accident loss of diversity in traditional genebanks. While the popular press has emphasized its possible utility in the event of a major regional or global catastrophe, it will certainly be more frequently accessed when genebanks lose samples due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts and natural disasters. Such events occur with some regularity. In recent years, some national genebanks have also been destroyed by war and civil strife. There are some 1400 crop diversity collections around the world, but many are in politically unstable or environmentally threatened nations.

The first set of seeds from Africa arrived yesterday. Go forth and … sprout?

And while this is an awesomely laudable cause, I do have this reminder from another field. There’s no point taking backups if you don’t test restoring the backup. How do these people know that the seeds are viable? (I mean, I’m sure there is some way – like taking temperatures from the germinating seeds or something). I haven’t found out how it happens yet, though.

The predicted Big Snow has not yet arrived. Giving it a while before I head off home, early for once.

Superbowl this weekend. (And Six Nations. It not only rains, but snows. Heh). Which should be good, except I haven’t really watched much of anything this year, not even the full playoff games. So I feel spectacularly uninformed about which team I want to root for. Because, yes, rooting for a particularly team is important. On reflection, it will probably be the Giants (almost by default), even though they have a propensity to run the ball instead of making passing plays. Why not the Patriots, who have had an outstanding season thus far?

It’s the same inclination that led me to be somewhat reserved in my acclaim for Feds before Nadal burst on the scene. Champions are always more appealing (to me, as a sports fan) when they have a flaw to overcome (see Sampras and clay courts).

I’ve been watching a small startup called Particls with interest. They’re not the first folks to say that they can scout out relevance by a long chalk – but with the advent of the new NL search startups like Lexxe and Haika – it seems more … doable now than ever before.

Also, say hello to a large chunk of the stuff of my thesis – here (bugmenot for the login). I suppose I should be vaguely flattered at the commercial interest in the same field that I wrote a thesis on… Or worried?