Networking

Alongside “don’t drink coffee too late at night” I have a new rule to make sure I get a good night’s sleep: “never fire up Wireshark after 10pm”.

I’ve been at a networking conference this week. If you’ve sent me mail and I haven’t replied, the above indicates why. Normal service will be resumed in a day or so.

A friend just sent me a link to RFC 1925, The Twelve Networking Truths. Although it is one of the humorous April 1^st RFCs (in this case by Ross Callon of the Internet Order of Old Farts), it is also full of genuine truths.

Although I don’t follow the really popular bloggers to any great extent, I had come across Mark Pilgrim because of his columns at xml.com, and I knew he had a blog that was fairly popular. What I didn’t know until a couple of days ago is that Dive Into Mark contains a number of things that are funny, but also full of genuine truths.

If you’re drinking coffee just now, I suggest you put it down somewhere safe. Then read Mark’s essay on “why specs matter”, which he starts off with the statement that most developers are morons, and the rest are assholes. True, true. If you’ve had a really bad day in the standards mines, find relief for your grief in the short but pointed “Unicode Normalization Form C”. Funny; but also so, so true.

[2012-02-24 Removed direct links to Mark Pilgrim’s blog, due to his disappearance from the internet.]

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.
   — Douglas Adams, HHGTTG

One way to get an idea of what’s in store for the internet is to peek over the technical horizon by reading the Internet Drafts put out by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF).

One interesting current research area is that for Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs); networks where the conventional TCP/IP assumptions of continuous connectivity and “low” delay are broken. One of the things this translates into is standards for an Interplanetary Internet, but it also has relevance for sensor networks, communications with submarines and web access for reindeer herders.

[2018-03-05: Updated with new URLs, some via the Wayback Machine. The reference to the main Internet-Draft has become a reference to the superseding RFC.]