An enlightening system

That was what communism was supposed to be, right?

(Here is the whole amazing picture.)

Open Water

Yesterday we went with my girlfriend to watch the "Open Water" movie at the Ster multiplex cinemas in Patra. Although the film was short and relatively simple since most of it just showed the 2 main characters agonizing in the middle of the ocean, I found it very powerful, mostly because the situation was presented quite realistically.

Google Desktop

Some days ago I installed Google's new feature for Windows 2000/XP that builds an index of the files in your computer and displays possible results whenever you do a google search. It takes some hours after the installation in order to build the index, but the good thing is you can use your computer meanwhile. I have found the tool especially useful, and it actually addresses a desire that I have felt many times, when I wanted to find something I knew I had seen in my PC, and I would like to be able to search it as I search the Internet with Google.

Some people have expressed security fears but this is actually unfounded, since Google Desktop doesn't search anything that wasn't already there.

The IPv6 shepherd story

For almost 10 years now, IPv6 has been the revolution that is just around the corner but never seems to actually materialize. I would say that now is the moment, but this has been said so many times in the past that it reminds me of the story with the shepherd that cried "wolf" and was believed by none when the wolf actually appeared. Well, IPv6 is certainly not a bad development, but it does seem to have been predicted so often that the predictions have been discredited.

For those people who have not heard of IPv6 before, it is the protocol that is destined to replace the currently used IPv4, with its usual IP addresses that look like 150.110.60.8. Our new IPv6 addresses look like this: 2001:648:800:1:204:75ff:feb3:36a0 (yes, they are uglier, but that's why they come in abundance: sixty thousand trillion trillion times more than the total available IPv4 addresses). Why are they so many? Because the 4 billion IPv4 addresses that once seemed infinite some years ago were about to be exhausted. So the IETF that designed it, decided that IPv6 should have more address space than anyone could ever expect to be necessary, just to be sure.

Perhaps predictably, the Internet did not wait for IETF to finalize, test and deploy the new Internet Protocol. It just went ahead finding hacks to solve the immediate problem, and one such solution proved to be quite successful: NAT. Actually, it was so successful that some people even believe that IPv6 will never happen, because despite NAT's shortcomings (and they are many), it has relieved the IP address shortage that was the main factor pushing the Internet towards IPv6.

I am nevertheless confident that it's time has come, and a basic reason is the maturity that surrounds the new Internet Protocol nowadays. IPv6 support is bundled in Windows XP, as has been the case with Linux and *BSD for quite some time. Cisco is also a major promoter of IPv6, as most of its competitor router manufacturing companies. There are all types of applications that work over IPv6, especially in the Linux/BSD world. But most important, NAT is simply not sufficient anymore. With huge countries like China and India progressing towards becoming major economic powers and devices like cell phones becoming essentially small computing gadgets, IP addresses for everyone and everything are necessary. Nothing can provide them as easily and effectively as IPv6.

Preparing for the IPv6 Workshop

Tomorrow I will have a presentation at an IPv6 Workshop (link in Greek) in Athens organized by GRNET (the Greek NREN, responsible for the academic network connecting greek universities).