Angry Man Without Pants

Haaseltons just lost a customer forever. I will never again set foot inside that place for the rest of my days, which is saying something, as I’ve been a loyal customer for over a decade. I’m aware the place had been getting dingy in recent years, and they’d instituted a strange, petrol-station-like policy of making you request a bathroom key on a stick before using the loo, but the place had nostalgia for me, and I really like their chai lattes.

That Asian guy, who I can only assume is either the manager or the owner, pissed me off big-time today.

I was attending the weekly NaNoWriMo write-in and went to Natas by mistake: the write-in was being held at Haaseltons. I didn’t realize I was in the wrong place until after I’d ordered something to eat, sat down and checked the NaNo site on my cell phone. So I gulped my chai and asked for my cake to go and then dodged up to Haaseltons. I was promptly informed by the owner that I was not welcome to eat my Natas dessert in his establishment. I told him I understood, but that I’d gone to the wrong place by mistake, blah, blah, and that if I could (please and thank you) eat my one little piece of cake I’d be in Haaseltons for at least the next two hours during which not only would I be buying multiple drinks and another dessert, about a half dozen of my acquaintances would be showing up to do the same.

Dude didn’t believe me — all but called me a liar by saying that he’d heard my “story” many times before (from students, I can only assume). He said absolutely no way would he let me eat any food I didn’t buy there. How he intended to stop me, I’m not sure, but I didn’t feel like pressing the point in the face of his obvious hostility. In summary — I was told to get out. Now, I’m a 40-year-old employed professional and bear as much resemblance to a cash-strapped student as Tipper Gore does to Summer Glau. Hell, I could afford to buy everyone in the joint a free coffee (at Natas) out of petty cash — which I was momentarily tempted to do in an extreme act of comeuppance, but I didn’t because when I’m that mad my oratory skills abandon me and I clam up.

(Note: For me to regain my eloquence you have to push me beyond mad and into homicidal, at which point you will find me belting out scathing iambic pentameter whilst simultaneously bludgeoning the object of my wrath to death with the nearest handy blunt instrument.)

Anyway, I don’t like being called a liar, not one little bit, and especially not by some self-righteous fucktard who’s at least my age and should know better than to break the Prime Directive of the service industry — namely, that the customer is always right.

So now I’m pissed and will *never* set foot in Haaseltons again.

Ever.

So fuck Haaseltons. I’ll be spending my money at Natas and Dreams of Beans from now on, where the floors are cleaner, the bathroom isn’t locked, where there’s nice art on the walls, and where the staff know when to shut the fuck up and be polite.

I had a problem.

The tale I was working on for Scary Stories night was getting too long. Sadly, many of my stories suffer from this kind of creeping featuritis. I get a good, simple idea, start working on it, and then somewhere along the way I realize my treatment of it is going to consume far more space that I originally expected. A few examples: “Maeve” – originally projected to be ~8000 words, now at ~15000 and climbing; probably at least another 10k still to go. “Camera Obscura”, my first scary story, originally intended to be ~3500 words, now sitting at ~4000 words with at least that much left to go.

Usually I’m not too unhappy about this, as I think the longer treatments benefit the tale, but this time I have a problem. Scary stories night is a “once-round-the-campfire” kind of thing, so the stories have to be short or people will fall asleep in their Hallowe’en nog before you finish. Not to mention that there is a limited amount of time in the evening and everyone who brings a story needs to be allowed their 15 minutes of fame. You see my problem, yes?

Enter “Double Vision”. I had a great little idea for another scary story (while in the shower, if you must know), and wonder of wonders, the whole thing is only ~2500 words from start to finish. Yay! So, that is the story I’ll be reading for Hallowe’en. I’ll post the first half of Camera Obscura on wordmasons for those who weren’t at the last reading night, and hopefully have the rest of it done for the November reading night. Where it concerns reading nights, having become so used to feeling like a man constantly late for an appointment, this new sensation of being done early is strange, yet pleasant.

Quite addictive, in fact.

It’s a quarter to pi, and the streetlights are out; glowing dreams and burning desires are the only light. Follow me, through the crack in the floorboards, behind the walls, into that land beyond the back of the cupboard. We’ll slide down midnight ways, into deep hidden realms, diamond dust prints through the mushroom forest to the shore of a sundered sea. Take my hand and we’ll dance up a ship of crystal and chimes, adamant sails to caress the night and draw us onward, onward, to forgotten empires, ghostly shoals, and the burgeoning, beckoning endless surf.

Then up, up, up the winding stair, now stone, now wood, now sparkling air, treading the path of a hundred billion souls who never were. A sacred sign beneath your feet, a lighted way in darkness deep, and fearsome death to left and right. Fear not. Hold tight. A synergy of power preserves, protects, propels, and soon all is light, and stardust, moondust, the dust of dreams and the cold pressed oil of wonders beyond our ken. A hundred singing towers upon the blue sands of distant everlen, a shivering symphony of alien tones, isolate one, then another, yet more, until the song is yours, and the door to the next mystery opens, beckons, a bright and shining gate, and we’re through, red giant eyes and comet tail hair and hand in hand and a kiss longer than the milky way and deeper than the sky.

Then down, down, through moon rings and sun beams and clouds, a rain of laughter, tears, iridescent motes of finely cut longings and the essence of desire, a powdered mortar of a million timeless moments, drifting, drifting, drifting, to this tiny space, this sliver of time, and the pi is only apple now, and the streetlights are back.

Yes, I’m still alive. No, I’m not posting anything today. I’ve been busy with work, home and writing. I hope to have two short stories finished by 30th October, a novelette finished by 30th November, and another short story finished before Christmas. I’ll post here when I have the time, energy and inclination.

I mentioned in an earlier post that with IPv6, you could “…give out a gazillion addresses a day every day until the sun becomes a cold dark cinder and not come anywhere near running out“. You might have thought I was kidding, or at least exaggerating for dramatic effect.

I wasn’t.

Let’s do the math.

IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses, which means we have a total address pool of 2¹²⁸, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. Yes, that’s 340 undecillion addresses. I know that’s a weird sounding number, but I’m not making it up. By comparison, our current addressing scheme, IPv4, uses 32 bit addresses, which gives us a pool of 2³², or 4,294,967,296 addresses. (I’ll bet that may be one of the first times a number just north of 4 billion has looked small…)

Those of you who are quicker of mind might be thinking – Gee, we’re running out of addresses. Does that mean there are almost 4 billion people using the Internet already? That’s half the planet!

Actually, no. There aren’t anywhere near 4 billion people on line. Due to various historical quirks and design decisions, 605,422,592 IPv4 addresses cannot be allocated for general use. Yes, 15% of the total IPv4 address space is unusable. Also, because network and broadcast addresses must be reserved for every subnet allocated (and there are a whole lot of subnets on the Internet), about 2% of the remaining addresses are also unusable. That leaves about 3.6 billion usable addresses. Remember, however, that every single piece of Internet equipment out there consumes at least one address — every router, every web server, every mail server. You get the idea. Also remember that many people use the Internet both at home and at work, from two different IP addresses. In actual fact, world wide there are only 1,668,870,408 people using the Internet (as of June 30 2009).

Kinda sucks, eh? We’re just about to exhaust a 4.2 billion IP address pool, and we’ve only got a paltry 1.6 billion people on line. That means that, on average, each person on line is consuming 2.1 IP addresses. This means that, if we’re lucky, by the time we actually run out of version 4 IP addresses we’ll have about 2 billion people on line. That’s 50% efficiency folks.

That sucks.

That also means that we’re not likely to be any more efficient with IPv6, so lets adjust our numbers for that reality. Dividing 2¹²⁸ by 2 gives us 2¹²⁷, or about 170 undecillion addresses.

Now, how long until the sun burns out and becomes a cold dark cinder? I looked around on line, and the general consensus is that ol’ Sol has about 5 billion years left before it runs out of hydrogen and expands to a red giant, burning the Earth to a crispy cinder. However, this site goes into a little more detail. The bottom line being that the sun won’t actually achieve anything approaching both cold and dark until about 50 billion years have elapsed. I did say cold dark cinder in my original post, so I’m holding myself to that.

So, if you’ve got 50 billion years to give out 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,728 addresses, how many can you give out each day? Well, 50 billion years would be 18,250,000,000,000 days. That’s 18.25 trillion. So lets divide 170 undecillion by 18.25 trillion and see what we get.

We get a big number. We get 9,322,804,573,176,396,259,270,537. We could give out just over 9 septillion addresses each day for the next 50 billion years. So, as long as we can agree that a gazillion is somewhere south of 9 septillion, my original statement stands.

Postscript: I have IPv6 service via Hurricane Electric’s tunnel broker service. Current IPv6 allocation policy means I get a whole /64 subnet allocated to me. That’s 2⁶⁴ or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses. (18.4 quintillion addresses just for me seems a bit excessive, but that’s committees for ya. Maybe some day I’ll actually have a need for each individual cell in my body to have it’s own IP address. Who knows what the future may bring.)

How does this effect my earlier calculations? Are we giving away IPv6 addresses too quickly? I did the math and, surprisingly, we’re probably OK with this policy, as we can afford to give out 505,390 /64 subnets every day for the next 50 billion years.

I think I can live with that.

Enjoy it while it lasts folks, ’cause the ole Interwebs is gonna implode in just over 700 days. I’m talking about the IP address crunch. Kind of like peak oil, we’re burning though the last 10% of the available Internet addresses at a rate that puts us firmly on track to run out in mid-to-late 2011. If you take perverse pleasure from such a thing, you can watch the addresses running out before your very eyes, rather like sand though an hourglass. If that doesn’t turn your crank, Wikipedia offers a helpful executive summary of our digital plight.

“Oh NOs!”, say all the bloggers and gamers and porn site magnates.  “The sky is falling!  What will we do?”

Well, tadpoles, IP version 6 is supposed to be the answer — a new addressing scheme to replace the aged and venerable IP version 4.  (Don’t ask what happened to version 5.  I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.)  IPv6 encompasses an address space that is so super-large that we could give out a gazillion addresses a day every day until the sun becomes a cold dark cinder and not come anywhere near running out.

“Well great!” say all the facebookers and twitter addicts.  “Lets move over to that.”

Only one problem, I say (as does Dan Bernstien). When the bright boys and girls at the IETF sat down and designed IPv6, they designed it to be a replacement for IPv4 rather than an extension to it. In a nutshell, this means that there is no easy way to get IPv6 to talk to IPv4.

So, imagine it. The day finally comes in 2011 when they run out of version 4 IP’s. The next poor sod to request an address from the IANA will get, by default, a version 6 IP, and then he will discover that he can only talk to the rest of the Internet if he uses special, clunky and slow, translation services for his connection. Think Network Address Translation times ten, with horns and a pitchfork. His connectivity will suck, and it will only get worse as more and more sites are forced to adopt IPv6 and use these same translation services to reach the majority of IPv4-only sites on the Internet. Then, on top of that, imagine all the disruption that will be caused by other sites upgrading voluntarily to IPv6 and encountering all the bugs in various vendor’s implementation of the IPv6 network stack that will only come to light under sustained real-world use. Finally, imagine all the screw-ups that will happen as the Sympaticos and Verizons of the world start deploying a network stack that most of their staff have no experience with.

Changing the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6 will be rather like trying to change the tablecloth on a table that seats 500 million diners who are all eating boiling hot soup. Even if nobody gets permanently burned or maimed, it’s still gonna be a f**king mess.

But I’ll probably make a killing as an IPv6 transition consultant.

I want my…
I want my…
I want my Eff Tee Tee…

<insert drum solo>

Now look at them yoyos (that’s the way you do it)
Got fiberoptics from their ISP
That ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Fiber to the home and version 6 IP

Now that ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Let me tell you them guys ain’t dumb
Maybe run a server in your basement closet
Maybe go to work with a click of your thumb

We got to use ole DSL modems
A couple megs for a f**kin huge fee
We got to NAT all of our connections
We got to use that older IP

That little asian with the server and the markup
All comfy sittin in his lair
That little asian he got gigabit access
That little asian he got speed to spare

We got to pay for static addressin’
A tiny subnet for a f**kin huge fee
We got no speed for file sharin’
We got a shrinkin’ pool of IPs

Lookatthat, lookatthat
I should’ve moved to Scandinavia
I should’ve moved to Asia
Where they got fiber, stickin it in every home
Man, can I have some?
And who’s there? What’s that? Video conference?
Runnin it at 30 frames in HD!
Oh, that ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Fiber to the home and version 6 IP

We got to pay for cable that’s crawlin’
Telco’s chargin’ us f**kin’ huge fees
We got a trickle that’s called our upstream
Got no bandwidth symmetry

Listen here
Now that ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Get fiberoptics from your ISP
That ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Fibre to the home and version 6 IP

That ain’t crawlin’

It’s — what — 2009 and here I am finally setting up my own blog, when blogging is perhaps becoming somewhat passe and being replaced by twittering.

So call me a luddite.  Go ahead.

Actually, call me stubborn.  I have always felt it would be inappropriate for me to use a hosted blog site, (such as livejournal, facebook, etc) when I run my own IT company and own my own servers. If I was going to blog, it would be hosted on my own iron and fed with my own wires, dammit!  But that’s a lot of work.  So it never got done.

Until now.

Say hello to Wordpress – installed, configured, up and running in just over 2 days, on my own server.  It’s easy to install, has oodles of plugins and themes, and even allows twittering should the irrational urge ever overcome me.

Anyway, ’nuff said.  I exist.  Cogito Blog.