I had enough talk lately about fairness, procedures, rules, and decisions in the context of a European project. It is amazing how much global heating in a project ecosystem can be generated in a very short time for relatively little value. Perhaps it is time to apply a “green project management” rule in future projects, restricting the heat emissions individuals can cause. Or we need to develop some project heat trading system; perhaps there are frosty project meetings in other places where some heat might be welcome.
The IETF week is over and one of the questions raised in one of my documents was as simple as this: What are the restrictions for valid domain names? Guess what, there is no simple answer. There are several RFCs stating some constraints on domain names and there is practical usage of domain names (not necessarily consistent with all relevant RFCs). It turns out that there is not a single specification that states all the restrictions under which valid domain names can be formed and the DNS directorate of the IETF is now helping to sort this out.
The AIMS (Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security) conference series has got its own web site. The site hosts the conference web pages and in addition has pointers to the summer schools organized by the same group of people who also steer the AIMS conference. AIMS 2009 is going to take place end of June beginning of July in Enschede, the Netherlands. Watch out for the call for papers.
The SNMP traffic measurements and trace exchange formats document has been posted as RFC 5345.
The SNMP context engineID discovery document has been posted as [RFC 5343] (http://dx.doi.org/10.17487/RFC5343).
I am currently at the 72nd IETF meeting in Dublin. There is a mailing list for all attendees (who sign up) to discuss meeting related issues. One of the threads on this list are dietary restrictions and the many combinations that exist among the participants and the challenges of finding appropriate food. After following some of the discussion, I am wondering whether the number of people with dietary restrictions at IETF meetings is larger than normal.
Network operators know that mistakes can happen. This is why it is good to have humans involved in network management control loops so that they can identify and resolve errors. This simple principle, unfortunately, does not seem to apply to many online systems. My recent example comes from a well known scientific publisher. A paper submitted to a network management journal ended up being registered in the publisher’s database as a submission for the Journal of Polymers and the Environment (yes, this really exists).
This was a pretty busy week. We hosted an EMANICS project meeting, the AIMS 2008 conference, and a Future Internet workshop at Jacobs University. All went very well and I believe most people left the campus in a very positive mood and with some new friends. It is not yet decided where AIMS 2009 will take place but from the positive feedback we received it is already clear that there will be AIMS 2009 sometime June/July next year.
Yesterday, I attended one of the meanwhile popular “Future Internet” workshops. I ended up in a group tasked to picture how people will use the Internet in say 10-15 years from now and what services / technologies are driving the future Internet or can be expected to be invented. We came up with many interesting ideas; one of them was centered around the question how people will find out whether they are pregnant…
There seems to be a new music category - music about the good and strange aspects of the Internet. I plan to collect some links to such songs and update this blog entry. If you find something cool not listed here, feel free to drop me a link.
God save the Internet [Jill Sobule, Kay Hanle, Michelle Lewis] I haven’t got a myspace [Pete Green] [Nieder mit IT] (https://youtu.be/BKfTlJ06Eu0) [Pigor & Eichhorn, German] [The Day The Routers Died…] (http://de.