Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka

Currently:

2008-08-19»

my flatmates’ flotilla launches»

My housemates have been away for a few weeks, building various-powered boats to sail in tandem down the Hudson:

I think this means they’ll be home soon. Unless they’re planning on sailing back.

2008-08-18»

ORG update; the not-night terrors»

I’m having so much fun doing this that I barely spotted that I’d crossed the thirty days mark! Luckily now I have noticed, so I can re-adopt my grudging acceptance of another month’s hard labour, thanks to my new, much despised by me, blog sponsors, who all joined the Open Rights Group to watch me suffer.

I’m now looking for five more donors to make me look the chump in September. If you’re enjoying this (you sadists), do consider joining the Open Rights Group for a fiver a month (cheap), and mail me your reference, and what you’d like the money to go on.

At the risk of sounding like some sort of endless Nerds In Need campaign, I’m amazed we’re up to over 900 members.

My personal goal for this fund-raiser was to hit our original 1000, but I’m afraid I egged the ORGsters to take it up to 1500, because that would let us do a bunch more work, and gain independence from other sources of funding. I find it fascinating how different EFF feels from other non-profits I’ve worked with because of its strong reliance on individual donors (it’s usually around 70% of our income). There’s around 13,000 EFF members from across the world, and all you have to do is say “Hello, I’m an EFF supporter, and…” to get my undivided (if ADD-ridden) attention. I guess I’d describe it as having a huge crowd of incredibly smart, but somewhat vocal, hands-off managers: when they drag me into their office (or just corner me at a conference) usually the start of a very high-level conversation.

I’ve noticed the same with ORG supporters. Oddly, my main involvement with ORG is because it’s part of my EFF job to help out other digital rights groups internationally, so I don’t see myself as an ORG representative per se. But whenever I speak to someone who starts with “So, I’m an ORG member and…”, we usually both end up scribbling madly in notebooks at the end.

I’d be more involved in day-to-day UK issues if it wasn’t for the time difference, which is nasty for a late-night person like me, so the UK falls under the same “all communication via email” shadow as India and Russia.

This may change. Next week, Ada starts kindergarten (the weirdly teutonic name for junior school here. Guards, take zis child to … DAS KINDERGARTEN). As some sort of punishment for living in a 21st century hyperpower, school starts freakishly early here. Ada needs to get to school at 7.40am. That means I have to get up at 6am (2pm UK time).

As some of you remember, the very reason why I started the whole Life Hacks™ thing was because I couldn’t get up in the morning. Now I have to, otherwise I get prosecuted for secondary inducement to truancy or somesuch. I have already warned everyone I know that the consequences will be dire. I will wreak my revenge on the species that plans to keep me a prisoner of the burning day-star. It will be World War Bedtime, let me tell you. Even worse, Ada has inherited my nap rage, so we’ll both be punching milkman in the face and snarling at postal workers for five hours of the “day”. Europe, you may quake now.

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inbox seventy-two thousand; email2vcard»

Typically my spare time today was spent in the folllowing proportions: 2 hours allotted to emptying my inbox; 3 minutes spent actually emptying my inbox; 1 hour, 57 minutes spent writing a program to theoretically “help” me empty my inbox.

Spreading the procrastination around, here’s that code. It’s for the millions of people who, like me, use good old command line mutt and a graphical contact manager on Unix (although I think it may have more uses than that). It takes a standard email, pulls out the name and email of the person the mail is from, generates a vCard, and then attempts to open that vCard in your nearby contact manager. It uses vobject, hewn from the glowing pits of Chandler, which you can install with easy_install vobject or apt-get install python-vobject. Hours of entertainment.

Things you might be able to glean from this:

my vaguely okay wrapper for command line python utilities, concealed in the Main() class.
vobject is pretty good for handling vCard and iCal objects. I’ve used it a few times.
if you ever want to open a file using the correct handler under GNOME/KDE, xdg-open is your friend.
my ingenious solution for not knowing when the contact handler (in my case, Kontact) will actually pick up the vCard, which is stored in a temporary file that I delete at the end of my program — just wait five seconds, and then delete it. How hacky is that?
that python’s subprocess module badly needs more helper utilities, IMHO. That subprocess.Popen stuff is just Python’s new way of saying “run a shell command”, and it should be clearer than that.

#!/usr/bin/env python
##
# email2vcf.py
###
"""email2vcf.py

"""

__version__ = "0.1"
__author__ = "Danny O'Brien <http://www.spesh.com/danny/>"
__license__ = "GPL v3"

import vobject
import email
from email.Utils import parseaddr
import tempfile, os, subprocess, time


class VcardableMessage(email.Message.Message):
    def toVcard(self):
        r"""
        >>> from  StringIO import StringIO as st
        >>> em = "To: me <me@spesh.com\nSubject: a test\nFrom: Testy McTest <test@spesh.com>\n\nThis is my phone numner: +1 555 134 5678\nThanks!\n\nd."
        >>> p = email.Parser.Parser(VcardableMessage)
        >>> m = p.parse(st(em))
        >>> v = m.toVcard()
        >>> print v.n
        <N{} McTest  Testy >
        >>> print v.fn
        <FN{}Testy McTest>
        >>> print v.email
        <EMAIL{}test@spesh.com>
        >>> print v.note.value
        From email message-id: Unknown
        Dated: Unknown
        Subject: a test
        """
        v = vobject.vCard()
        (name, email)  = parseaddr(self['From'])
        family = None
        givenname = None
        if ',' in name:
            (family, givenname) = name.split(',')
        if ' ' in name:
            (family, givenname) = name.rsplit(' ', 1)
        if not family:
            givenname = name
        v.add('fn').value  = name
        v.add('n').value = vobject.vcard.Name(family = family, given = givenname)
        v.add('email').value = email
        mid = self.get('message-id', 'Unknown')
        dt = self.get('date', 'Unknown')
        sub = self.get('subject','Unknown')
        v.add('note').value = 'From email message-id: %s\nDated: %s\nSubject: %s' % (mid, dt, sub)
        return v

def main(args):
    """ Convert mail to vcard, then kick up systems' vcard handler"""
    if len(args) == 0:
        st = sys.stdin
    if len(args) == 1:
        st = file(args[0],'r')
    p = email.Parser.Parser(VcardableMessage)
    m = p.parse(st)
    v = m.toVcard()
    f = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(prefix="email2vcf", suffix=".vcf")
    f.write(v.serialize())
    f.flush()
    p= subprocess.Popen("xdg-open" + " " + f.name, shell=True)
    sts = os.waitpid(p.pid, 0)
    time.sleep(5) # give app long enough to import the data
    f.close()

import sys, getopt
class Main():
    """ Encapsulates option handling. Subclass to add new options,
        add 'handle_x' method for an -x option,
        add 'handle_xlong' method for an --xlong option
        help (-h, --help) should be automatically created from module
        docstring and handler docstrings.
        test (-t, --test) will run all docstring and unittests it finds
        """
    class Usage(Exception):
        def __init__(self, msg):
            self.msg = msg
    def __init__(self):
        handlers  = [i[7:] for i in dir(self) if i.startswith('handle_') ]
        self.shortopts = ''.join([i for i in handlers if len(i) == 1])
        self.longopts = [i for i in handlers if (len(i) > 1)]
    def handler(self,option):
        i = 'handle_%s' % option.lstrip('-')
        if hasattr(self, i):
           return getattr(self, i)
    def default_main(self, args):
        print sys.argv[0]," called with ", args
    def handle_help(self, v):
        """ Shows this message """
        print sys.modules.get(__name__).__doc__
        descriptions = {}
        for i in list(self.shortopts) + self.longopts:
            d=self.handler(i).__doc__
            if d in descriptions:
               descriptions[d].append(i)
            else:
               descriptions[d] = [i]
        for d, o in descriptions.iteritems():
            for i in o:
                if len(i) == 1:
                    print '-%s' % i,
                else:
                    print '--%s' % i,
            print 
            print d
        sys.exit(0)
    handle_h=handle_help

    def handle_test(self, v):
        """ Runs test suite for file """
        import doctest
        import unittest
        suite = unittest.defaultTestLoader.loadTestsFromModule(sys.modules.get(__name__))
        suite.addTest(doctest.DocTestSuite())
        runner = unittest.TextTestRunner()
        runner.run(suite)
        sys.exit(0)
    handle_t=handle_test

    def run(self, main= None, argv=None):
        """ Execute main function, having stripped out options and called the
        responsible handler functions within the class. Main defaults to
        listing the remaining arguments.
        """
        if not callable(main):
            main = self.default_main
        if argv is None:
            argv = sys.argv
        try:
            try:
                opts, args = getopt.getopt(argv[1:], self.shortopts, self.longopts)
            except getopt.error, msg:
                raise self.Usage(msg)
            for o, a in opts:
                (self.handler(o))(a)
            return main(args) 
        except self.Usage, err:
            print >>sys.stderr, err.msg
            self.handle_help(None)
            return 2

if __name__ == "__main__":
    sys.exit(Main().run(main) or 0)

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#!/usr/bin/env python

# email2vcf.py

###

"""email2vcf.py

"""

__version__ = "0.1"

__author__ = "Danny O'Brien <http://www.spesh.com/danny/>"

__license__ = "GPL v3"

import vobject

import email

from email.Utils import parseaddr

import tempfile, os, subprocess, time

class VcardableMessage(email.Message.Message):

def toVcard(self):

r"""

>>> from StringIO import StringIO as st

>>> em = "To: me <me@spesh.com\nSubject: a test\nFrom: Testy McTest <test@spesh.com>\n\nThis is my phone numner: +1 555 134 5678\nThanks!\n\nd."

>>> p = email.Parser.Parser(VcardableMessage)

>>> m = p.parse(st(em))

>>> v = m.toVcard()

>>> print v.n

<N{} McTest Testy >

>>> print v.fn

<FN{}Testy McTest>

>>> print v.email

<EMAIL{}test@spesh.com>

>>> print v.note.value

From email message-id: Unknown

Dated: Unknown

Subject: a test

"""

v = vobject.vCard()

(name, email) = parseaddr(self['From'])

family = None

givenname = None

if ',' in name:

(family, givenname) = name.split(',')

if ' ' in name:

(family, givenname) = name.rsplit(' ', 1)

if not family:

givenname = name

v.add('fn').value = name

v.add('n').value = vobject.vcard.Name(family = family, given = givenname)

v.add('email').value = email

mid = self.get('message-id', 'Unknown')

dt = self.get('date', 'Unknown')

sub = self.get('subject','Unknown')

v.add('note').value = 'From email message-id: %s\nDated: %s\nSubject: %s' % (mid, dt, sub)

return v

def main(args):

""" Convert mail to vcard, then kick up systems' vcard handler"""

if len(args) == 0:

st = sys.stdin

if len(args) == 1:

st = file(args[0],'r')

p = email.Parser.Parser(VcardableMessage)

m = p.parse(st)

v = m.toVcard()

f = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(prefix="email2vcf", suffix=".vcf")

f.write(v.serialize())

f.flush()

p= subprocess.Popen("xdg-open" + " " + f.name, shell=True)

sts = os.waitpid(p.pid, 0)

time.sleep(5) # give app long enough to import the data

f.close()

import sys, getopt

class Main():

""" Encapsulates option handling. Subclass to add new options,

add 'handle_x' method for an -x option,

add 'handle_xlong' method for an --xlong option

help (-h, --help) should be automatically created from module

docstring and handler docstrings.

test (-t, --test) will run all docstring and unittests it finds

"""

class Usage(Exception):

def __init__(self, msg):

self.msg = msg

def __init__(self):

handlers = [i[7:] for i in dir(self) if i.startswith('handle_') ]

self.shortopts = ''.join([i for i in handlers if len(i) == 1])

self.longopts = [i for i in handlers if (len(i) > 1)]

def handler(self,option):

i = 'handle_%s' % option.lstrip('-')

if hasattr(self, i):

return getattr(self, i)

def default_main(self, args):

print sys.argv[0]," called with ", args

def handle_help(self, v):

""" Shows this message """

print sys.modules.get(__name__).__doc__

descriptions = {}

for i in list(self.shortopts) + self.longopts:

d=self.handler(i).__doc__

if d in descriptions:

descriptions[d].append(i)

else:

descriptions[d] = [i]

for d, o in descriptions.iteritems():

for i in o:

if len(i) == 1:

print '-%s' % i,

else:

print '--%s' % i,

print d

sys.exit(0)

handle_h=handle_help

def handle_test(self, v):

""" Runs test suite for file """

import doctest

import unittest

suite = unittest.defaultTestLoader.loadTestsFromModule(sys.modules.get(__name__))

suite.addTest(doctest.DocTestSuite())

runner = unittest.TextTestRunner()

runner.run(suite)

sys.exit(0)

handle_t=handle_test

def run(self, main= None, argv=None):

""" Execute main function, having stripped out options and called the

responsible handler functions within the class. Main defaults to

listing the remaining arguments.

"""

if not callable(main):

main = self.default_main

if argv is None:

argv = sys.argv

try:

opts, args = getopt.getopt(argv[1:], self.shortopts, self.longopts)

except getopt.error, msg:

raise self.Usage(msg)

for o, a in opts:

(self.handler(o))(a)

return main(args)

except self.Usage, err:

print >>sys.stderr, err.msg

self.handle_help(None)

return 2

if __name__ == "__main__":

sys.exit(Main().run(main) or 0)

3 Comments »

2008-08-16»

better living through probability: nationmaster and fivethirtyeight»

Today involved pancakes, the massively co-ordinated garage sale of Bernal Heights, and preventing (and failing to prevent) small child injuries. Now I’m listening to Americans talking about being kids being made to read hefty classics which are thus ruined, like Moby Dick and Ivanhoe and Hemingway and … Ivanhoe? They make them read Ivanhoe here?

Yes, it’s Saturday, and you catch me racking myself over what to write about in this weeks’ column. I think I’d be more peppy if I hadn’t spent far too long last night browsing NationMaster and playing International Man of Goggling At Slightly Dodgy Statistics. Then I stumbled on Visualizing Economics and after spending a few minutes sniggering a bit too much at their plots which look like visualizations of random number generators, got far far too involved in their archive. I started with this depiction of share of world GDP of various countries from 1500-2000 (population over the same period is a nice complement).

For those of you with a matching love of statpron, and about to get overinvolved in US presidential politics (whether through your own choice or that of your dominant media), I heartily recommend Five Thirty Eight which takes a probabilistic approach to the election, running a simulation system 10,000 times and showing the number of times each split in electoral votes occurred in their dice rolls. The tone is slightly Obama-tilted ( with a 5% margin of snark provided by an ex-You Don’t Know Jack editor).

It is a beautifully quantum-multiverse view of the election — as though on the day I will absolutely confident that there will be thousands of universes out there where Alaska went for Obama, or where McCain lost Ohio but won the war: I just won’t know which one I’ll be navigating to. Oh the tiny fluctuations that lead to such endless points of divergence!

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2008-08-15»

bandwidth and storage and europe and america»

After doing my reading into fiber in San Francisco, I’d learnt a couple of things: firstly, there’s a lot of fiber around, actually, and secondly, a lot of the fiber under me was owned by Astound, who bought it from RCN, San Francisco’s previously weak-as-tea competition to Comcast.

As it happened, he next day I got some flyers through the letter box from Astound offering 10Mbps for $60 a month. As I’ve been tottering along with 4Mbps/1Mbps for $55 with Comcast, I thought I should look into that.

Competition is a marvellous thing. Wherever in the US Comcast has been facing it, I discovered, they have been magically upping their rates to 16Mbps. Simply calling Comcast support and hinting I was going to shift caused them to mention this fact, and five minutes later, I’m running at around 20Mbps/3Mbps for $65 a month. Add to that the $170 terabyte turned up today, and I feel like I’ve just leapt up about twenty countries in some OECD chart. I guess what I should do now is call Astound and see if they will offer to move PAIX into my bedroom cupboard for $65.99.

Up until now, I’ve always assumed that the UK’s consumer bandwidth situation has been rather better than most of the US — a tidbit gleaned from smug Brit slashdotters, and envy-enducing reports from my friends about their DSL deal-shopping. The received opinion is that the US dropped the ball almost immediately after rolling out broadband, and was promptly outgunned by most of the rest of Europe, something that begging outside telcos for ISDN-level speeds in most of Silicon Valley confirmed for me.

Now, after spending a few minutes on Speedtest’s worldwide self-selected statistics, I’m not so sure. I was originally assuming there was some American-bias to the stats, but digging deeper that doesn’t seem to be the case. The US actually does pretty well compared to Europe (except for those bastards in Sweden, etc) these days.

One thing I’ve learnt is that nation-spanning preconceptions like this are often temporarily true, but not for half as long as they hang around. Pleasantly schadenfreuderish viewpoints have a lot of lag to them. Take mobile phone adoption in the US. When I first arrived here, the difference between US cellphone culture and the UK was stark, and I, like many foreign-media journalists, would frequently dine out on the gap. In 2000, you couldn’t actually consistently text people on other networks; nor would it be reasonable to expect a stranger to have a mobile phone at all.

Then, in I think about 2003, I was crunching some stats about the crappy cellphone penetration in the US for my European friends to gawp at. Instead of doing an us-and-them comparison, I did a time-based one. How far behind was the US chronologically from the UK? It turned out that the US had just crossed 50% of households owning a cellphone. Laughably small compared to 2003 Britain, where it was close to 80% (I am surely misremembering these stats, but bear with me). But nonetheless, pretty much exactly the same as 2000 Britain, my original basis for smugly lording it over the Yanks. America’s primitive phone culture was, it turned out, only as primitive as the futuristic super-advanced one I’d left three years ago.

Sure enough, when my family came to stay that year, my usual prattle about how Americans don’t have mobile phones like we do was swiftly undermined. “What are you talking about, Uncle?” said my annoyingly smart niece, “Look around you. They’ve all got mobiles.”. And they had, and my anecdotes were like drinking from yesterday’s half-empty, cigarette-filled party beers.

I think the same thing is happening with broadband. From 2000-2008 there was a much bigger consumer rollout in Europe than in the US, partly because of government-compelled competition in European telecom (and aren’t I a bad libertarian for even suggesting that), and some really terrible decisions both by business and regulators in the United States. But those differences are slowly closing out as both continents start reaching the limits of DSL and the current infrastructure.

I imagine folks will disagree, which is fine. I’m not entirely sure of the position myself. The real question is: how could we test this? Are the Speedtest stats enough on their own?

6 Comments »

wuala»

Woah, sorry about missing last night: I returned home from work and slept from 8pm to 9am. I blogged in my dreams though.

Briefly, yesterday’s copious free time (ie a few minutes) was spent looking at Wuala (thanks, robwiss!), which is a neat popularisation of some of my pet issues: the infrastructure is a decentralised, fault-tolerant, file storage, with private/public/group access created with a cryptographic filesystem (see the Cryptree paper for details on that, and this Wuala-made Slideshare for a general overview of the tech.) It’s notable for having a user-friendly UI, capability to a run the downloader in a browser via a java client, and therefore have linkability (for instance, in theory you should be able to download the Ogg Vorbis version of the Living in the Edge talk here, once it’s uploaded.) It just went public yesterday, and it’s fun to play around with.

I have a few questions about it, which may be more down to my ignorance than Wuala itself: the source is closed, and so I don’t know yet quite how tied the infrastructure is to Wua.la the company (if Wuala disappeared tomorrow, would the network still exist?), or where the potential weakpoints in overall security might be. On the plus side, Wuala is clearly being used in earnest both for public and private sharing, the user interface does a great job of shielding the crazy cryptopunk shenanigans going on underneath, and it’s cross-platform (albeit via Java, which means it’s not quiite working on my PowerPC Ubuntu server right now).

Tahoe is a lot more transparent, but seems to have a different use case at the moment, which is private nests of stable servers used for distributed backup. But if you wanted to do a free software version of Wuala, that still looks like where you’d start (and Wuala is where you would get your inspiration/learn your lessons from).

4 Comments »

2008-08-13»

the sort of day a horrible stereotype of me would have»

Woke up feeling like the National Sleep Debt, danced with daughter to Fatboy Slim’s remix of magic carpet ride until we were late for school, returned back to struggle (unsuccessfully) with Skype for ORG board meeting call-in, email, run off to record Cranky Geeks, skidaddled to have lunch with Ben Goldacre, who I’d not met before (although am apparently in some big conspiracy with) but I now like a bit too much. Exchanged anecdotes regarding survivalists, on being sued, Americana, assorted data valdez, epidemiology. Had awful suspicion he is as charming as this with everyone. Quick email catch-up, run to pick up daughter. Daughter suggests we explore, get stuck on wrong side of Bernal Heights, shiver as fog closes in, ruefully consider that we may have to survive on only the toy dogs that we find abandoned outside hilltop aromatherapy spas, spend rest of evening trying to find useful link to Fatboy Slim’s remix of “Magic Carpet Ride” to begin this blog with. Wave fist at errant god of consistent metadata and music business models. Talking of which, I am vaguely cheered by continuing leaks of voluntary-collective-license-like systems being considered in UK, although still cautious about technological implementation, privacy issues and other yet unanswered questions, also how close labels always get to this before rearing like frit horses and then galloping off, and, most of all, just how fantastically, painfully, and repetitively smug Andrew Orlowski is going to be if it does come together. Decriminalising millions and saving the music industry will barely make up for it.

Content-free post, so as tradition demands I shall spackle it up with yet another old column from Linux User and Developer, called Danger Dot File. I don’t care what you think, I find these pieces intensely amusing, if only out of amazement that I have lived in an age where one can be paid to write jokes about Unix configuration settings.

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2008-08-12»

digging tahoe; wattage update; @fontface!»

After Sunday’s brunch conversation, where we idly dreamt of a capabilities-based distributed-hash-table fault-tolerant filing system, Jeremy took a closer look at Tahoe, Zooko’s project that I’m continually plugging without completely understanding, and noticed that that is exactly what it is.

Last time I played with Tahoe I blundered into a dark alleyway full of unmet python dependencies and got mugged, but the latest version installed a lot more cleanly, and we now have a mini-grid going. I’m also re-reading RFC’s 3401 – 3405 on the Dynamic Delegation Discovery System. I can’t honestly tell you why it feels to me like these are all interlinked, because I’m still at that point where it’s all just pieces looking rather sad on the floor of my garage. I have good instincts, I think, but slow to rationalise, and I backtrack alot. Right now, for instance, my instincts are to put the DiSo people, the AllMyData people, the Zeroconf person, and several bored iPhone hackers in one room, lightly steam them in mild entheogens, and then just when they’re getting somewhere, divert a stampeding herd of straight-edge yet angry and dissolute teenage router-distribution developers into the building. And that can’t be right, so I’ve clearly got some more thinking to do.

I’m going to start dividing up these blog entries when I mention more than one thing, for the love of the metadata. But these are really throwaway items: we discussed how much power a home server draws, and I pulled figures from beyond my arse, but I’ve just run Kill-A-Watt on my old MacMini powerserver (the one running this website), and it does indeed pull down around 17W average. My arse speaks sooth. Of course, I’m not taking into account the cable modem, and the wifi router, so I guess I need to look into that.

In other news, one of the oldest bugs (but not the oldest!) that I watch in Firefox (@fontface support) is getting some new love. Soon, all the major browsers will be able to use downloadable fonts, and then what fresh desktop-publishing linotype hell will we be in?

6 Comments »

2008-08-11»

gmail down; p2p dns»

More fuel for the decentralisation fire with Gmail’s downtime today (Google’s apology). Again, as much as these events people to reconsider keeping all their data marooned on Google’s tiny island in the wider Net, it’s not as if anyone has a more reliable service in place — yet.

It also made me realise that think of another reason why you might want a centralised (or radically decentralised) service that didn’t run on your edge of the Network. Central services are terrible for privacy, but can be better in some contexts for anonymity. Creating a throwaway mail account on a central service (or better still, getting somebody else to), and then using Tor or another anonymising service to access it would provide more temporary anonymity than receiving mail on your own machine (or serving web pages from it). There can also be a big different from serving and hosting data in an authoritarian regime than holding your information remotely in another, more privacy-friendly or remote, jurisdiction. There’s a good reason why a lot of activists use webmail (and why so many were outraged when Yahoo’s webmail service handed over Shi Tao‘s details to the Chinese government).

Tor actually does offer an anonymised service feature, letting you run services from a mystery Tor node, and point to it using a fake domain like http://duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion/. If you were using Tor right now, that would lead you a webpage, served over Tor from an anonymous endpoint. So you can run anonymous services, in theory from the edge. Of course, not everyone is using Tor, so that’s hardly universal provision.

This brings me to another issue that I talked about on Sunday: mapping other non-DNS protocols into the current DNS system. I believe I’ve mentioned before John Gilmore’s semi-serious suggestion a few years back that we grandfather in the current DNS by saying that all current domains are actually in a new, even more top level domain, .icann. — so this would be www.oblomovka.com.icann., allowing us to experiment with new alternatives to DNS, like dannyobrienshomeserver.p2p., or somesuch, in the rest of the namespace.

Other name systems frequently do something like this already: there’s Tor’s .onion fake domain, and Microsoft’s P2P DNS alternative, which resolves to whateveryourhomemachineiscalled.pnrp.net. What neither of those do, however, is have a gateway mapping for legacy DNS users — a DNS server that would respond to standard DNS queries for those addresses, use the P2P protocol to find the IP, then return it to anyone querying using the existing DNS system. That might be a more backward-friendly system than John’s idea.

In Microsoft’s case, that would be pretty easy, even though apparently they don’t do it right now. Resolving .onion in normal DNSspace wouldn’t be possible currently, although I suppose could hack something up (maybe over IPv6, like PNRP) if you were willing to carry all the traffic (and had asked ICANN nicely for the .onion TLD).

I’m not the first person to think that this might be something that would make an interesting Firefox plugin in the meantime.

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2008-08-10»

brunch with bacon; affordable terabytes»

“Why is everyone in San Francisco obsessed with bacon?”.

“The city is built on it. Well, interleaved strata of bacon and vegans”.

I went to a geekhaus brunch, and the bacon was delicious (this is the same group who had successfully created bacon vodka, so it was bound to be.) Rose talked a bit about her research into hacker spaces, most notably the European spaces, but also the parallel US developments like l0ft and NYC Resistor. Jeremy and I spoke a great deal about what the low-hanging-fruit was for the edge-work. I’d initially thought that hacking on making WordPress a platform with some of the functionality of the centralising social-networking sites would be useful, but of course there is already lots of work going on in that space that is already producing results – DiSo and BuddyPress being the two main ones I know about. I need to set aside an evening or two to really grok the standards that DiSo is using.

So instead we talked about the slightly higher-hanging fruit, still unplucked since the last time this was at the forefront of people’s minds. Around then I went looking for smarter people than me to talk to, and ended up crammed into the back of a car with Jonathan Moore,Bram Cohen, and Zooko. I’m really pleased that Zooko is taking a lead on distributed file systems with Tahoe, and I really must drag Jonathan away to talk about all of this, as he’s is one of the most absorbent academic-paper-readers I know. Skimming through some of the XMPP and DiSO discussions, it feels like they’re discussing Zooko’s triangle-style problems right now; I expect they know the reference.

Terabyte drives are down to $175 now. Not quite the $70 I thought we’d have reached by now, back in 2002 — but then, I’m not sure if IBM was factoring in a collapse in the dollar when they published those figures (Matt Daley has a more up-to-date, Australian, perspective) . And we still have the rest of the year to catch up!

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