My grandchild is cuter than yours!

I may have some bias in this, but my granddaughter is just about the cutest thing ever.


For those of you lacking grandchildren, I strongly recommend acquiring some. The tricky part is to do this without raising children of your own. :-) The "terrible twos" are a problem for parents, perhaps, but my granddaughter is always happy to see her grandparents, and we always have a good time.

Topic? Uh...I forgot.

I had something really witty to add to this today, but the topic has entirely slipped my mind. I would make some sort of joke about early onset of memory loss, but that's just not funny!

Well, for today, y'all are going to have to put up with an entirely content-free update. (That's for both of you that read this.) I was thinking of adding a link to something fun or interesting, but that would be counter to my current (lack of) purpose.

Perhaps I'll update again tomorrow, depending on my ability to recall anything. Then again, I may forget.

That election thing

So, some of you may have noticed that there's a presidential campaign in progress. More to the point, it's getting exceedingly hard to ignore. That's an annoyance, and I often wish for something more on the British model of "hey, guys? let's have an election next month." Perhaps they should move the first primaries back to August, rather than January. It would certainly make the campaigns cheaper and much less annoying. I'm not helping by writing about it, but, well, I'll pretend that I'm doing so because of the First Amendment.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. I've got two other election related topics.

The first is an interesting online flash app I stumbled upon that analyzes your real political standing. Take a look Electoral Compass USA...it's a pretty reasonable set of questions, and the results worked for me. Your answers are analyzed on two axes - your economic leanings, and your social leanings. The horizontal axis represents left or right economic tendencies, while the vertical axis has traditional or conservative values at the bottom, up to liberal or progressive tendencies at the top. To no real surprise, the centroid it produced for me was a bit above center, but generally pretty much in the middle. Within the uncertainty radius that their analysis provides, there are precisely zero candidates.

Somehow that doesn't surprise me. I suspect that's true for a large fraction of the electorate. That's really quite sad.

The other thing I wanted to discuss is candidate selection criteria. Even though it's now one week to the California primary, I don't have any idea who, if anyone, I'll vote for. I do know who I won't vote for, which annoys me a bit. I'd really like to find a candidate I can vote for, rather than a set of candidates to vote against. My selection criteria are, thus far, pretty simple. I'd like to find a candidate that actually believes in science. I don't mean some sort of faith-based belief - they are free to practice whatever faith they like as long as it's not the driving force in their decision making. Please, no goat entrails in the Oval Office. What I do mean is that I'd like to find a candidate that understands how science works. Pushing "intelligent design" in addition or as a substitute for evolution education is a guaranteed way to not get my vote.

Thus far, that means Huckabee is a definitive "no", given his direct expression that he doesn't believe in evolution. (Wasn't real impressed with him anyway, but that seals it. Oh, and I guess all of those scientists that actually use science to find ever-increasing evidence of evolution are all just horribly confused. Better send them to some re-education camps.) None of the remaining likely candidates (Obama, Clinton, Edwards, McCain, and Romney, as of this writing) have any sort of reasonable statement on the topic...just a bunch of platitude-laced sound bites. If one of them were to where this shirt (sorry, original link unavailable), I think they'd get my vote.

Obviously, other criteria will be necessary to identify a useful candidate. I'll have to think about that at some point. Can I avoid that until late October? Sigh.

Really stupid business practices

Okay, so it's been a while since I posted. I've been a wee bit busy with the real world.

Why am I bothering to post today? What motivated me out of a non-posting funk? Dumb business practices. Today's target of wrath is SBC AT&T Wireless Cingular AT&T Wireless. Sorry, they keep changing the name. (That's a separate rant.) For the record, I've had an account with them since they were named SBC. It's not so much a matter of customer loyalty as laziness, actually.

Back to today's troubles: my wife needs a new phone. Her Motorola no longer has any video at all, which makes it a less than useful device. She's had the phone quite a while, so it's not really unexpected for a semi-disposable consumer device to simply die. This seems easy enough to remedy - just go to your local AT&T store and get a replacement. Piece of cake, right? After all, companies pretty much always take a loss on the hardware, so it should be pretty cheap.

Yeah, right.

AT&T has a semi-reasonable policy of not giving "replacement pricing" too early in a contract period. They do something like no discount for the first 18 months, and then offer a substantial discount (to match their new account pricing) if you need a replacement phone. For the company, this seems pretty wise, as it keeps Joe Consumer from coming in every month and getting a very highly subsidized phone.

There's a few problems with this, however. The dates reset whenever you mess with the contract. My wife's phone is actually several years old, but the current contract started more recently when we added a line for one of the kids. So, we don't qualify for the discount, even though the phone is, in phone years, decrepit.

I can replace her phone with an equivalent newer model for the grand sum of $330. Yup, you read that right. It would literally be cheaper to cancel the contract, go to a competitor, get a new phone and contract, and use number portability to keep the number.

When I noted this fact to the happy customer rep who pounced on me as I came in the door to the place...well, let's just say he looked really unhappy. So much for corporate loyalty to customers. It's actually a penalty for loyalty, which strikes me as really really broken.

I think there's certainly a better way for this to work. Some sort of pro rated system, for example.... In any case, I'm going to call their happy customer support folks and see if they can find a way to avoid losing a customer.

Travel, redux

I'm sitting in the SLC airport on my way home. Courtesy of a 3-hour layover, I seem to have some time to kill.

My return flights are not turning out to be nearly as nice as the trip out. The first leg of the return trip was The Flight With Large Men. When I'm one of the smallest people on board, we're in trouble. I spent the entire flight plastered to the window, since there wasn't room for my shoulders to fit between the side of the plane and the guy next to me. He wasn't the biggest guy on the plane - that was the guy in front of me.

My next leg is full, so I'm sure to get something similar. I've come to loath the CRJ when it's full. Oh, and one more serious flaw in the CRJ: the windows are too low. I guess only small children like to look out the windows of airplanes. That, or all Canadians are really short. (Or Bombardier engineers, perhaps.)

I'll update this tomorrow, once I'm home and can report on the remaining leg. Time to go walk aimlessly around SLC some more....

The End, take 2

This version of the end of the internet as we know it is a bit more subtle than simply running out of numbers. This one is usually described as the "routing" problem. Let's see if I can describe it for folks who don't naturally count in binary.

For an analogy, let's talk about the post office and the zip code system. The way US mail works is pretty simple, actually. Mail gets sent to regional centers, where it's sorted into sets of mail based on the zip code on the envelope. (It's actually a bit more complicated, but let's stay with this for a moment.) Imagine that a sorting center can only handle 1,000 buckets, perhaps due to a limit on available physical space. There are, on the other hand, 10,000 zip codes. Fortunately, not all of the zip codes are in use.

Pretend that only 500 are in use. In that case, everything works great - there's plenty of bins to cover all of the zip codes. The number of zip codes in use slowly grows, however, so at some point there might be 950 zip codes in use. While there's still enough bins, there's clearly a limit coming. Perhaps the post office decides to upgrade their facilities to support 2,000 bins. That's an excellent solution, for the short term, but you eventually run out of available bins. The only solution is to build 10,000 bins. (Or, do something entirely different, like sorting regionally on the first three digits, and then sorting locally on all five digits, which is actually more how it works.) If there's not room for 10,000 bins, you'll have to get creative. If some facilities can support 2,000, while other can support 3,000, some of this model can get kinda complicated.

In the internet, IP addresses are used to route traffic. (Remember those from yesterday? They look like 134.173.32.4, for example.) We don't use a fixed set of those digits for routing, but it's sort of like the idealized post office described above. We're running out of bins, and it's difficult to make enough.

There's another angle to this problem, too. The post office doesn't specify where you live in your zip code. That's only used to get the envelope close to the right general place. The identifier for where you live is your street address. In the internet, that IP address is used for both functions: it identifies where you are *and* who you are. That combination is helping to fuel how fast we run out of bins. This is, in the industry jargon, the loc/id split problem. (For the truly geeky, go read the IRTF RRG working group's mailing list for waaaaay more information than you really want.)

To get back to our analogy, if the Internet worked like our fictional post office, we'd need bins not just for all of the zip codes, but for every single possible mailing address, and that's just to route letters to the right place! As you can imagine, this is a bit of a scaling problem.

I'll admit that this one is a bit more obscure than simply running out of addresses, but it's just as nasty for the ongoing operation of the Internet.

In my previous post, I mentioned NANOG, the North American Network Operators' Group. They are definitely worried about this one. I kind of did these posts out of order, though, 'cause the group really worried about the addressing problem is ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers.

Lots of very smart people are working on both problems. Let's hope they get it figured out before it all breaks!

The End

There are at least two key problems that could entirely break the Internet, or at least severely limit its future growth, and I'm going to try to lay them out such that people who aren't card carrying geeks can understand them. For today, let's stick to one of them: the address problem.

First, a bit of background. When you use, for example, a web browser, you enter an address for a page you want to view. You might, for example, ask for www.google.com. The underlying network that connects you to Google (and your own computer, too) has no idea what that set of roman letters means. There's a system for converting that name that's (mostly) readable by humans into something that a computer can understand. Not surprisingly, that address is in binary; that is, it's a bunch of zeros and ones. It's normal for network operators to look at these addresses in a more human readable format, so the address for www.google.com might be something like 72.14.253.104.

So far, so good.

Here's the problem: we're running out of these addresses. The central authority (IANA) that coordinates these numbers will run out of available space in 2010. It will become difficult to acquire new ones in about 2012 as a result. (There's a certain amount stored up in regional registries, but that's a piece of complexity that's unnecessary for our discussion.)

Fortunately, there is a solution. It's called IPv6, and it's a vastly larger pool of addresses, although the new addresses are incompatible with the old addresses. That's a real problem.

For devices like routers (the pieces of the network that decide where to send your data), supporting IPv6 means an upgrade. I don't know how often any of you upgrade your home computers, but service providers don't like to upgrade too often - it's expensive! Content providers (like Google, Amazon, eBay, et al.) have no reason to upgrade (yet) because there's not a good justification for the cost, since no one will use the IPv6 version. (The web page would look the same, only the technical goo would be different.)

This is a basic chicken and egg problem. Until there are users, there won't be content on this "new" Internet. Symmetrically, there won't be any users until there's some useful content. It's also a bit like the Y2K problem, expect there isn't a hard deadline, and the deadline will be different for every organization. Also, hitting the deadline won't cause your network to stop working, although you won't be able to make it bigger.

Given the time required to make the necessary changes, we're already too late. This is going to be a mess, and probably very expensive. You can bet that the cost will get passed on to someone.

Why is this interesting on this trip? I'm presently at the NANOG conference. Check out the link if you're feeling geeky.

I'll talk about the other "death of the Internet" problem sometime soon.