This news made me want to look at what other top level domains had been proposed.  The ICANN fee to propose a new top level domain is $185,000, so it is clear that there must be an enormous amount of commercial support for any proposal, before it reaches the ICANN process.

The proposed top level domains are normally proposed for the following reasons:

• Specialist language content (e.g. .cymru for Welsh speakers, .ker for Cornish speakers, in the same way that .cat was approved for Catalan content)
• Internationalised top-level domains, permitting non-latin script after the ‘dot’, e.g. .香港 in Hong Kong or ‏امارات.‎ for the UAE.
• Regional (probably PR led!) content, e.g. .berlin or .nyc for new york.
• Social groups, like .gay
• Professional interests, like .wine, or .eco for environmental groups

Not all of these bids will be successful, and many will only be successful bids after many years (.xxx was first seriously proposed around ten years ago).  We are also likely to see consultancies born who specialise in taking new registries through the ICANN processes, and even companies which can host full new-registry systems.

crazy | stuff | xargs -i {}  this {} | that {} (with this and that expanded by xargs, not the shell)

I solved it by generating the command in xargs using ‘echo’, and then passing that into the shell.  Example :

crazy | stuff | xargs -i {} echo ” this {} | that {} ” | sh

Is this the cleanest way of doing it ?  This works fine, but loses readability points !

I disagreed on the grounds that unicast IP is a fairly bad way to broadcast large volumes of data.  When wrapped with TCP to guarantee delivery and ensure quality, the infrastructure to handle the volumes of viewers for major tv series or live events, makes it hard to imagine it being possible to deliver real-time internet TV. This is before we consider the bandwidth requirements for high-definition video and audio.
So why the change of mind ?

I previously assumed internet delivery was the Raison d’etre for Net Video.  Its not.  The internet might not have proved itself as the most viable platform for broadcast video, but it has proved itself time and again as the perfect platform for publishing content.  Internet TV is going to mean that “TV” gets some of the “wisdom of crowds” treatment, and that organisations with interesting things to say will be able to launch video content to worldwide audiences.  Previously, content makers would have needed to work with a huge machine of tens of organisations before video hit the airways, and they’d need to work with hundreds if they wanted to distribute to a worldwide audience.  Today ?  All you need is a bit of content, a bit of tallent and some hosting.

The second benefit to internet video is how portable it is.  I have syndicated three shows from Revision3 (Diggnation, Systm, and Scam School), Scobleizer TV, and some other geeky video stuff.  It is downloaded to my laptop, and copied to my iPhone.  I can watch this on a normal TV at home in high quality, via a cheap phone to tv cable, or on the move via laptop or phone.  I can watch my usual TV if I am staying away by plugging the phone into a tv in a hotel room.
In the future, I expect to watch niche stuff that is downloaded, and popular things that are spooled to disk via a broadcast system.  I would like to see some really neat devices shipping this year which allow me to combine recorded broadcast TV with downloaded Internet video, and let me carry broadcast TV in the same portable manner.

Also would love to hear what internet TV people are watching via the comments on the blog!

I installed some new Xen hosts for a customer last week, and used it as an opportunity to catch up with Xen news.  Although I used to use the xensource open source version to build xen hosts, I saw the free ‘xen-on-a-cd’ downloadable ISO as an extremely important project that dropped the barrier for Xen adoption.

This free CD image is now limited to only four guest OSes – need more on this platform ?  Or need to use more than 4GB of ram ?  These features now cost.

I acknowledge that open source free, does not mean costless.  But there have been two business models that are prevalent in the open source world, and Citrix are starting to behave like less like my favourite one.

The good model is like Red Hat’s – lending developers, money, and a strong name into a popular open source project which is largely feature compatible with a commercial version.  The company is backed by licensing the commercial version, and paid for support/training.  I say lending, because the return to the company should be quality feedback, software, and advocation in the community.
The other is more like MySQL’s.  Although the code is published and shared between the community, the company work hard to limit the distribution of simple-to-install binary versions to enterprises who will not pay for it, for example – by their own admission – they withhold features, and essential bug fixes from the community version for an unspecified time.

Limiting features, and specifying the free edition must run on lower grade hardware, might herald a sad death to any project’s status as a free project.  If, like with MySQL, the community editions and enterprise editions embark upon a long drawn out divorce, then pay for the software, or bin it at the beginning of the process.  I don’t know what will happen to the majority of Xen installations if some people need to make the choice .. but look out for some KVM articles in the coming days.

All successful internet protocols are elegant and simple by design. This makes it possible to retro-fit great ideas someone has one. Internationalisation was proposed in 1992, and it eventually became possible to register Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) in the .com space in 2003. Standards move slowly on the internet!

IDN is up for discussion again at the 31st ICANN meeting on Monday. This time, the world’s registry community are meeting in New Delhi, one of the most significant IT regions of the non-Latin world, to discuss the remaining “glitch” in the IDN system. An IDN might look like this: .com. Therefore any user still needs to be able to type .com in order to reach the resource they request. There is a proposal at the ICANN meeting to add Internationalised top-level domains, actual complimentary TLDs to .com, that will mean that resources can be reached in any supported alphabet.

This is interesting stuff. One school of thought is that this could significantly assist the development of electronic enterprise in many more pockets of the world. The supremacy of Silicon Valley as the web’s main economy would then be broken. I think differently – I think that .com is now too established as the main ecommerce ‘brand’ TLD, and attempts to localise the meaning of .com will be fruitless. .com means “I trade online”. Despite .biz and similar TLDs being equal in technical terms, they are not equal in the eyes of shoppers or traders. .com now has specific global meaning, and can’t be diluted.

Today, if you want to port your number from one service provider to another, it relies on two major coincidences – firstly that your old and new provider have an agreement in place to manage the technical transfer between the two networks, and secondly that your old provider remains fully willing to forward all calls destined from your old number, to your new service provider.

There are several issues with such a system – the first is that your old provider are still very much involved, so their technical or commercial failure causes a problem long after you have ported away, another is that the process is slow and manual, and a third is that not all service providers have agreements to permit number porting (called a Mutual Porting Agreement in the industry).

Vodafone are concerned about the costs of the new system, even though an industry group UKPorting has only just begun to gather information about how the system should work.  I think that it’s a flawed premise to argue that a system is too expensive before a system is selected (and associated costs are announced).  Instead Vodafone should get involved with designing a perfect system.

The UKporting system to facilitate fast, reliable, and simple porting must happen, and must succeed.  We have to protect consumers who port their number from failures caused by their former service provider.

I am concerned that the system may mean all multihomed telephone networks will need to move to any all-call-query model that’s run by one natural monopoly.  If a single entity holds the industry to ransom, we have not moved forward – there’s still a single commercial or technical position that can fail to break your port.  The single All-Call-Query model also lends itself well to governments having access to a single point where recording of most call attempts can be made.

I’ve been trying to draw the attention of some other technical people by talking about NN on mailing lists.  Sadly some people have got the wrong end of the stick – they think that the rule simply states that ISPs will be allowed to carry customer Quality of Service preferences to the edge of their ISP networks.  This is not the case – the Net Neutrality debate is about whether an ISP should be permitted to be un-neutral irrespective of, or even against their customers’ wishes.

One company that stands to loose most from an un-neutral net is Google who have been quick to earn column inches supporting the neutral net.

Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research speaks from the front cover of this weeks’ Computing arguing that the only reason “the net has grown far beyond the original perception bounds” was in fact ” because it is open, and because services can be launched without being fettered by higher level control.  At Google, we think it is good for competition to try to keep services this way, and that is what we are going to push for.”

I don’t want an internet dominated only by companies with deep pockets.  Google, the archetypal company with the deepest pockets don’t even want an internet dominated only by companies with deep pockets.  The only parties that stand to gain from the NN war as the ISPs that have been the most aggressive at driving down consumer internet charges, to un-sustainable points.  Don’t give them a life line.  Let’s have a fair internet.

To provide “free” wifi to residents, a council must spend our money on many more items than simply wifi access points located in strategic points around the city. They need to provide onward connectivity (expensive), operational support, technical support, security systems, subscriptions to professional groups such as the IWF, monitoring and maintenance and much more. The council can’t afford to fix the pot-holes on my road, despite billing me each April on the promise of doing just that, so where will the money come from in order to pay or this infrastructure?

I also do not want the council competing with my local ISP. Government is not designed to compete with private enterprises. Turfing council tax paying employees out of work by competing with their employers is surely counter-productive.

I also don’t want the general public to be led to believe that internet access is free to provide. Its bad enough that Carphone Warehouse, Orange, and other companies are trying to their best to leave customers of ‘free’ broadband services with that theory without my local government joining in.

Some people believe that free municipal wifi could be a positive externality achieved when a city is ‘wifi’d’ for public sector employees to use when doing their job. I would love to see any cost/benefit analysis that demonstrated that the applications that drive our public sector are cheaper to run over ubiquitous wifi rather than store-and-forward messaging systems that take advantage of wifi at strategic points or 3G data connectivity. I then want to see the figures that suggest opening up a private local government network for public use wont cost any more money.

Then followed the argument that if local government can provide street-lights, then why shouldn’t they provide wifi using the same rationale. The problem with this logic is that streetlights and IP connectivity are not similar enough to compare. Street lighting is a public good; in economic terms, that means that we all are required to pay for it and we all get it, irrespective of our purchase preferences as free economic agents. People wouldn’t ‘buy’ street lighting in normal circumstances, even though there is a compelling reason to deploy it. Internet connectivity is not like this, where IP is useful, it is already widely deployed.

Firms need to fight in order to be the best at providing services, so that they can feed innovation and value. Consumers need to choose which service meets their needs the best. I would wager that you demand very different things from your domestic internet connection than I do. If I had to buy SheffieldCityBroadband (which I do have to buy, if I get taxed for its provision – tax is of course demanding money with menaces), it probably wont do what I need.
Free wifi isn’t free. Someone has to pay. And if that someone is the taxpayer, then why can’t we just pay “the best” private company in our area to provide the service. Perhaps I will be lucky and get two providers to fight it out to be the best!

Lastly, the concept of buying internet access from the Government is extremely frightening to me. Check out the content blocking section of the LINX Public Affairs site if you want some evidence that the government are desperate to filter our internet connections. If everyone buys their state-IP the government have a simple place to block our content!

We already all use syslog-ng or rsyslogd or similar to aggregate our logs centrally, but it would be great to be able to aggregate logs inside our monitoring systems in such a way that when we add servers to our networks, any issues that they raise, in the application layer, or in hardware, are described to monitoring systems in a common and expected way.

If the taxonomy of error handling was equivalent on, say, routing kit as well as desktop systems, this allows sysadmins to deploy complex monitoring systems with less effort.  Understand how to handle a mistake with system-X and every single system you deploy from then on benefits from tried and tested monitoring and management.

Its early days for CEE, but I am optimistic about the benefits we could all realise if there was a desire to standardise logging.  Looking forward to what happens next.

All of the blogs I found when googling recommended to plug the printer into the mac directly, let it detect it as a local printer, then plug it back into the network.  Frankly, that’s pants.

Just pick the ‘HP Laserjet 5 Series’ gimp-print driver from the drop down.  It works fine then.