Article on IPv6

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I found an article from the Times Online (a British paper) talking about IPv6 and how it will revolutionize the internet. Not a very good article (even ignoring the fact that I already knew most of it), but because the author obviously skimped on his research:

  • When the internet was developed in the 1980s,… — actually, it was the early ’70s
  • They gave each address a “16-bit” number… — No they didn’t. Each IPv4 address is a 32-bit number.
  • …a new one was written based on “32-bit numbers” — In IPv6, each address is a 128-bit number.
  • The number given for 232 was 340,282,366,920,938, and then a bunch of zeroes, but that’s not accurate. The actual number is greater than the one given by 463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, or over 4.6 sextillion.

Obviously, with IPv6, we’re going to need bigger tubes.

Vacation Week

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Busy busy week. Gail and I are both on vacation this week, but we didn’t actually go anywhere; by that I mean that we didn’t go somewhere for the whole week, just a couple of day trips and stuff. Last Sunday, we decided to work outside, moving about 1/3 of a cubic yard of triple mix from a big bag on the driveway to the gardens in the backyard. Of course, Sunday was the hottest day of the year so far, and one of the hottest in the last few years — according to the thermometer in the back yard, it was 38°C (102°F) in the shade. We took a break in the hottest part of the afternoon and watched some of The Lord of the Rings – The Special Extended Director’s Cut (or whatever) while the boys napped. I really enjoyed the LOTR trilogy, and the extended ones are even better. Seems that Mr. Editor Guy wasn’t a big fan of Faramir, since he had a lot more scenes in the extended version than in the “regular” ones.

Monday, we went to Canada’s Wonderland again, and spent most of the day in the water park. Being Monday (i.e. not a weekend), we figured it wouldn’t be crazy busy, but being hot (mid-high 30’s again) increased the numbers, but it still wasn’t too bad. Gail’s mom came with us; driving her home was kind of funny. She lives right in Toronto, and seems to think that since we live a fair ways outside the city, we’re completely unfamiliar with it. I’ve told her a number of times that I know the city, particularly Scarborough, where she lives, pretty well, but it doesn’t seem to sink in. She lives near Victoria Park and the 401, and coming home from Wonderland, the 401 got busy, so I got off on Allen Rd. and went north to Sheppard, which I planned on taking across to Victoria Park. She gave us a tour on the way back, and kept giving me directions. Even after I pointed out that I used to work on Don Mills just south of Sheppard and drove Sheppard Ave. home every day, and was born in North York, and lived in Scarborough for 11 years, and so on, she still pointed out where Victoria Park was and told me that I wanted to turn right at the lights right after Consumer’s Road. Sigh.

Tuesday we finished the bag of dirt from the driveway, took the boys to the library, and had a rather nice uneventful day. My parents came by after dinner, and stayed until this morning. Wednesday morning, my dad and I went to play golf — my first game of the year. I shot something like 117, which it a touch higher than I have shot before, but I only get out two or three times a year. My driver was working really well though, so I was very happy with that. I did hit it left quite a bit, but at least it was consistent, not all over the place like I used to hit. I used to hate my driver, but after the lessons I took a couple of years ago, I can hit it pretty well now. The rest of the day was more gardening and playing outside with the boys, and then we had a wonderful dinner outside on the deck – the heat had subsided, and there were no bugs, so it was very nice.

Today, we took the boys to Ontario Place. I had been there a number of times as a kid, but probably not in 20 years or so. It rained for a while in the afternoon, but we spent part of that time in the Cinesphere, part of it in the water park, and the rest on the wilderness adventure ride (i.e. log flume), so we got a little wet, but we had a lot of fun anyway. Best part — Ontario Place has a policy where if it rains for more than an hour continuously, you can get a coupon for free admission any other day, so we get to go back another time for free. Since it cost us about $105 for admission, this is a good thing.

Tomorrow, we’re going camping for the first time in two years. There are going to be something like 25-30 of our friends there, so it should be a lot of fun. Gail will likely take a ton of pictures, so I’m sure I will scan a bunch and make a Camping 2006 page on our web site.

On an unrelated note, I created a LiveJournal account today, so now I have three blogs (I also have one for my NLL Pool, but I only update that one with pool-related information, and only during the NLL season (Dec-May)). I only created it so that I can comment non-anonymously on other LJ users’ blogs; I have no plans to actually use it as another blog.

Exodus from Edmonton

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OK, I don’t get this. The Edmonton Oilers were a game away from winning the Stanley Cup, and suddenly everyone’s jumping ship. OK, maybe Chris Pronger had “personal reasons” for wanting out, but there seem to be a lot of players who are leaving Edmonton. Obviously Pronger was traded to Anaheim, but a bunch of free agents have also left: Ty Conklin, Georges Laraque, Sergei Samsonov, and Jaroslav Spacek have all signed with other teams. Mike Peca is supposedly in talks with the Leafs (though that seems to have stalled), and Radek Dvorak has stated that he has no interest in returning. I’d have figured that after having been that close to winning it all, you’d want to stay with the same team, and try to get just that little bit better next year. Maybe after Pronger asked to be traded, a bunch of the free agents figured there was no chance of that, and so they all jumped ship.

Kind of sucks for Edmonton fans, though they probably still have a better
chance of winning it all next year than the Leafs. The Leafs should sign Peca and
Anson Carter quickly, then sign Eric Lindros to a cheap contract (if he’ll take
one; if he wants more money than last year, let him go), and dump Jason
Allison. They already did the right things in buying out Ed Belfour and Tie Domi
(I like the guy and all, but he’s getting too old, and is too expensive for what
he brings to the table), and they resigned Nik Antropov to a fairly cheap
contract, which is good (well, the cheap part is good). Not a big fan of
Antropov’s — we’ve been waiting years for that guy to turn into the star
player he was touted as, but so far in his career, as Bob McCown would say, he’s
just a guy.

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The Big E

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I was browsing around on Wikipedia this evening before my baseball game, when I came across the entry on Eric Lindros. I’ve never been a big fan of the Big E, mainly because of the way he started his career. He was drafted by the lowly Quebec Nordiques in 1991, and had indicated, even before the draft, that he wouldn’t play for them. It was that arrogance that pissed me off — he’d never played a single NHL game, and already he’s decided that he’s too good to play for Quebec. He demanded to be traded, and he was — to the Philadelphia Flyers. The trade was unbelievable though: Lindros went to Philly, and here’s what went back to Quebec: Peter Forsberg, Ron Hextall, Chris Simon, Mike Ricci, Kerry Huffman, Steve Duchesne, a 1st round draft pick in ’93 (Jocelyn Thibault), a 1st round draft pick in ’94 (traded to Toronto in the Mats Sundin deal), and $15 million in cash. Three years later, the Nordiques moved to Colorado, traded Thibault to Montreal for a goalie by the name of Patrick Roy, and won the Stanley Cup (they won it all again in 2001, and have also won 8 division titles). Lindros went on to lead the Flyers to the Cup finals once in 1997, but they didn’t win it.

I found it quite ironic that Lindros refused to play for Quebec because they sucked so bad, and yet trading him away allowed Quebec to become a very strong team for many years. Lindros plays for the Leafs now (or at least he did last year, but hasn’t yet been resigned for next season), so I’m supposed to like him now, but first impressions stick with me for a long time. Having said that, I wouldn’t mind if the Leafs did resign him, as long as it isn’t for much money – $1.5 million tops.

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The Circus

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We went to a circus on Saturday. The Shriner’s circus was in Burlington, and some friends of ours had tickets but couldn’t go, so they gave them to us. There were your standard trapeze artists, clowns, jugglers, and stuff (though not a single pair of stilts to be seen anywhere), and they were all good. The things I wasn’t so impressed with were the animal acts. Oh, the animals were all trained very well, and the performances went off without a hitch, but something about applauding because six horses were running single file in a circle, then switched directions because some woman with a whip twirled her arms just didn’t sit well with me. At least once (I think twice) the MC said that elephants are an endangered species and that they hoped that the opportunity to see the elephant at the circus would cause us (the audience) to become interested in helping do something about it. He also said that elephants in the wild generally live around 45 years, but elephants living in captivity can live up to 80 years. I read over the web site for the circus company, and they do say that they are they take “great pride in the care that [their] animals receive”, and I’m sure that the animals are generally not mistreated. The elephant act didn’t bother me — one elephant standing on a little stool while some gymnast climbed around on him — and the trained poodles were very cute, but the only time I saw a whip (which was not used on the animals — in fact, she never cracked it once) was during the horse act, and that bothered me.

I’m no tree-hugger, and I do eat meat, but cruelty to animals really bothers me. I cannot envision a scenario involving these horses and a whip that does not involved some cruelty to the horses. They were also tied up in such a way that the horses could not lift their heads beyond a certain point. This was probably for the safety of the performers, but the horse is a very majestic animal, and seeing them with their heads constantly pulled down made them look subservient and humiliated, and I really felt sorry for them.

Weirdness: the MC looked a lot like Wil Wheaton, who writes one of the best blogs on the ‘net. His latest entry (ironically about writer’s block) is a great example of why blogging was invented.

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Changed comments again

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I changed the comment stuff on my blog back to the standard blogger comments. The Haloscan stuff was working OK, but I just didn’t like the look of it — to read the comments, you had to pop up a separate window, and that window had advertising links in it, and I’m too lazy to reformat the window to look nicer. I’ve moved the comments made during the Haloscan days back over, though I haven’t found a way to reset the times to the original times, so it looks like I got a bunch of comments on various different entries all within a few minutes of each other on the same day. One of the main advantages of Haloscan is trackback, which is not offered by blogger, but my blog is low-traffic enough that not having it is no big deal.

Update: I figured out how to edit comments, so all the comment dates/times are now correct.

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More Separated at Birth

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In a comment on my last posting, Yappa said: “I agree with those! In addition, I’ve always thought that Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter look like twins.” Well, let’s see:

Helena Bonham Carter Johnny Depp

Yup, no question. Must be the facial hair.

Separated at Birth?

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Is is just me?

Steve Yzerman Michael Keaton

While I’m at it…

Corey Hart David Duchovny

I’ve always thought the same thing about k.d. lang and Colin James early in their respective careers, but I couldn’t find any pictures that illustrated the similarities.

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Great lacrosse article in Tacoma paper

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Here is a great article in the Tacoma News Tribune about the possibility of the NLL expanding to the Seattle/Tacoma area. The reporter admits that he knows zilch about lacrosse, but has obviously done research on the game and the league, and realistically evaluates whether this could be a good thing for the city. In previous years, when the NLL is considering expanding to a city, I’ve seen articles in that city’s newspapers written by people who also know nothing about lacrosse, but who are less open to the possibility. Some sports writers seem to think “How can a sport be any good when I don’t know anything about it?” Many times, I’ve seen similar articles that seem to be a long version of “Lacrosse? What’s that?”. Nice to see a reporter doing some real reporting for a change, and not just dismissing an idea out of hand because it’s something they’re unfamiliar with. Kudos to Mr. John McGrath.

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Rock ‘n’ Roll Family Tree

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A number of years ago, I created a web page called “The Rock ‘n’ Roll Family Tree”. It was a static page of bands and musicians that linked them all, i.e. a musician that was in two bands linked those two bands. If another musician in one of those bands was also in a third band, then that band was linked as well, and so on. A band was only considered linked if a member of that band was also a member of another band — things like guest appearances, one-off duets, session work, and things like that didn’t count. Eventually, I had well over 100 bands linked, including everyone from Black Sabbath to Culture Club to Foreigner to Strawberry Alarm Clock.

Unfortunately, I’ve since lost the original list, but I’ve
been toying with the idea of re-creating it. Of course, I’d do it in PHP now, with
a backing database. I’d love to use SQL Anywhere (the database product I work on)
as the backing store, but very few web hosting companies (if any) offer SQL
Anywhere support (mine does not), and I am not willing to host the site myself on
my own home machine. I’d also love to add a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-type
thing where you could enter two musicians or bands and display
the links between them, but that’s a lot more work. For example, to get from
Whitesnake to Metallica, you could do this:

  • Steve Vai was in Whitesnake
  • Rudy Sarzo was in Whitesnake with Steve Vai
  • Rudy Sarzo was also in Quiet Riot with Randy Rhoads
  • Randy Rhoads played with Ozzy Osbourne
  • Mike Trujillo also played with Ozzy Osbourne
  • Mike Trujillo is now in Metallica

In many cases, there are multiple ways to get from one band to another —
Steve Vai also played with David Lee Roth, as did a guitarist named Jason Becker.
Becker was previously in a band called Cacophony with Marty Friedman, who later
joined Megadeth with Dave Mustaine, and Mustaine used to be in Metallica.

Just for completeness, Steve Vai appeared in a movie in 2006 called
Crazy, with Chris Ellis, who was also in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon. And
Kevin Bacon is also a musician, having recorded an album or two with his brother,
so maybe he’ll make this list too.

Aw, crap. I just found bandtoband.com,
which is exactly what I described above. They took my idea and ran with it.
(Though I suppose it’s possible that they simply had the same idea, and
didn’t steal it from me.) They have almost 7,000 bands in their database, so I
suppose there’s no reason for me to do it.

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