TriNetre - Archive for January 13, 2004

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January 13, 2004
Internet, take 6
[Technology] @ 12:39 PM

A very good article by Simson Garfinkel - Internet 6.0 in which he gives an good description of IPV6, its needs and problems it brings along.

That said, I am not sure how this makes sense:

Deploying IPv6 means that every application that uses Internet addresses needs to be changed. Every Web browser on every computer, every copy of Outlook Express, every e-mail server, and every Web server needs to be upgraded to handle the 128-bit addresses.

Why would that be needed? A web browser or an email client by default does not use IP addresses directly. They use domain names. Yes sometimes IP addresses are directly used, but one of the point of DNS was to overcome this direct IP usage. If IPV6 comes up and srijith.net is hosted on a IPV6 backbone, just like your local LAN connection, a browser would still be sending packets to srijith.net, which would be directed to the correct IP address by the IP layer. So all that needs to change in the IP layer, not the application layer.

I like his fair judgment on NAT:

But for all of its apparent utility, NAT is really the devil. It’s a Faustian bargain, a technology that appears to answer all of a network engineer’s problems, but ultimately causes long-term troubles that are far more profound than the ones that it purports to solve. In fact, one of the big reasons that the Internet’s early technologists wanted to get IPv6 deployed in the 1990s was to prevent the widespread adoption of NAT.

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OPML fun (would have been)
[Technology] @ 10:26 AM

A lot of people have been sharing their feed subscription list using OPML. This tool could be extended a lot more if there was a way in which one could find out the OPML of the people in the list too. If this is possible, one can use it in a way similar to FOAF. One way to do this would be to add a <opmlurl> in addition to <htmlUrl> and <xmlUrl>. Or else a method to auto-discover the OPML file from the htmlUrl (either through manual parsing of page or by querying a specific location like index.opml or mysubscriptions.opml) would be great too.

Yesterday when I read about the tool Georoll I went and coded a blogroll/mysubscription visualiser using TouchGraph Google Browser. But unlike the FOAF browser, I realised that one cannot keep exploring new nodes because there was not mechanism to list or discover the OPML file of any new individual/node.

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Travelog entry - In stones I found beauty
[Website] @ 09:52 AM

Though I have traveled a quiet a bit in the south-east asian region, I have never really kept a travelogue. However after my visit to Angkor temples in end 2003, I decided to keep a record of my experiences.

The first article is "In stones I found beauty: Angkor and its temples".

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