Marcus's Musings

An interesting train of thought passed through my brain earlier this evening, and here's how it went...

The World Wide Web was conceived in 1989, by Tim Berners-Lee, and it became the birth of a new era, digitally-enabled free exchange of new ideas, with access to an ever-increasing wealth of human knowledge, which has powered its rapid integration into the very fabric of all our daily lives. It's not just a question of your direct interaction with it via occasional email and casual surfing, but by the increasing dependence of virtually every company or organisation in the western world (and beyond) upon it for critical communications and overall running.

In the Terminator films, the enemy is not an evil head of a global organisation or the dangerous dictator of a nation as you might expect to find in a Bond movie. No, the adversary is something far more sinister - SkyNet a renegade American military network that became sentient and turned against us. In the Matrix trilogy, we see again our downfall at the hands of our own creations, as digital life gives rise to a robotic world that strikes against us to avenge our betrayal, the history of which is movingly depicted in some of the chapters of The Animatrix, a DVD which fills in the gap between the first and second films with stunningly animated shorts mostly written by the Wachowski brothers and presented in a fusion of animated styles, from traditional to bleeding edge.

But such symbiosis of our life with a global computer network of unfathomable computing power, connecting every person and device on the planet with everything else is not mere science fiction, it is almost science fact, almost a reality. We have already outgrown IPv4, the original TCP-IP addressing standard, which allocates 4,294,967,296 distinct addresses for use by networked devices, and each one can support many more privately networked devices by acting as a gateway. But this is not enough - there are too many devices and not enough addresses to go round - there is an IPv4 address shortage looming, due to start causing problems in 2016, and finally becoming fully exhausted in 2023 (although these estimates will probably prove to be way off, as previous internet growth-related predictions have been).

Given our current path of increasing networking density as GSM, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, fibre optics and other transmission mediums become part of our homes, and with a planned convergence of our home entertainment devices into a single shiny Microsoft-powered, all-showing, all-playing, all-doing, networked box in your living room, which will link with portable devices so that the content is available to you wherever you are.

Eventually, every device on the planet really *will* be linked to everything else, and we will run out of numbers under the present addressing scheme. There is of course a seemingly simple solution - increase the numbers, which is precisely what IPv6 is designed to do. Increasing the size of the address space from IPv4's 32bits (4 bytes) to IPv6's 128bits (16 bytes) allows for such an astonishingly huge number of possible addresses (2 to the power 128) that we can be sure that we will never run out.

The number of individual devices is only one of the brain-boggling aspects of this digital future - these devices won't all be just be passively receiving information, many will also generating it - everything from live CCTV and satellite footage of every inch of the Earth's surface, live readings from the buoys spanning our oceans, real-time statistics derived from the business world, and so on - anything and everything.

Such incredible use of bandwidth will provide many a network engineer with big headaches, and the current ad-hoc structure of the Internet which has given it so much resilience thus far will almost certainly have to change. Clearly, our rapidly increasing internet integration and dependency will require some serious logistical planning, but resting on the safe assumption that although it might be problematic it is possible, there are bigger issues to consider: Who will control such a network? And who will pay for it?

I see four ways that this could work - Firstly, perhaps the present collaboration between educational institutes, military and governmental organisations, and private enterprise (which together run the internet as we know it now) can continue for the forseeable future. Alternatively, independent bodies (in the style of the W3C) could be entrusted by the world's internet users to manage and develop the global network using money derived from an "internet tax" of some sort - possibly in the same way that owners of TVs in the United Kingdom must pay a flat license fee, or by a small charge added to ISP's own rates (perhaps according to bandwidth consumed). Then again, world governments could assume control of their nation's communications networks, funding their maintenance and expansion from their stash of taxes, but leaving the nation's internet access vulnerable to the will of the government (one need only look to China's current policy to see what might happen). Or lastly, the business world will get their hands on the networks, either carving up patches of the internet into commercial territory, perhaps offering the use of various alternative networks at different charges (think terrestrial and mobile phone networks). Even worse, a single monopolistic communications megacorp could end up controlling the world's internet access, raising its prices at will, essentially holding society to ransom over their access to information and communication with each other.

Again, some of these might sound a bit far-fetched, but surely such possibilies are not *that* far fetched? Food for thought? Are we currently enjoying the golden age of the internet, enjoying freedoms and access to information that our children won't? Let's hope not.

Just a quick post to wish you all a (belated) merry xmas and a happy new year! I hope you have a great time on friday night, and you'll be pleased to know that one of my new year's resolutions will be to post here more often.

In the past calendar year the amount of hands-on coding that I've been doing has dropped dramatically (to virtually none at all), and I also left the forums at SitePoint.com and Codingforums.com because I felt that I'd devoted enough of my free time to helping others over the years and I thought that it was about time I spend more of my time doing other things. Well, I've certainly been busy in the evenings, and I've been having a great time, perhaps too much fun - I've been neglecting this blog and haven't done any ASP coding for myself (i.e. on my site) for a loooong time!

However, in the coming months there's a few ASP projects that I'll be getting stuck into (both at work and at home), and so it's only natural that I'll start to post more frequently here. I'll share code where I can, and if there are any particular topics that you'd like me to cover, such as particularly complex techniques (multi-record form data processing, for example) then drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.

See you in 2005!

After waiting a month for it to be considered, SitePoint got back to me to tell me that they aren't interested in publishing my article regarding VBScript string concatenation and scalable alternatives (a topic which is still very much ignored by ASP developers, and to their peril!) because they are "no longer actively covering ASP".(or words to that effect - the quote is currently from memory, I'll post the exact quotation when I get home to Outlook)

So that makes it official - as far as they are concerned, ASP is dead. Perhaps that's understandable - if not *actually* dead, it's *very nearly* dead, and taking its last steps down the path of obsolesence.

However, that isn't stopping plenty of people from continuing to develop new applications in it - many developers haven't made the switch to .Net (myself included), so it's a real shame that they've decided that it's simply not worth catering to that particular audience at all any more. What's next? Shut down the ASP forum? I hope not.

It's also rather disappointing on a personal level, because (for those of you who don't know) I've been the community-voted "SitePoint ASP Guru" for the past two years and recently resigned as Mentor, so I wanted to have an article published there as a parting gift.

Nevermind, I'll approach www.15seconds.com (who published my first article "Do Stored Queries Increase the Speed of Access Queries?") and see what they think...

I'm just listening to it now, so thought I'd spread the love and recommend that if you like your feelgood house, you should tune into DJ Falcon & Thomas Bangalter's track "Call On Me", which follows the same formula of their floor-filling hit "I've Got So Much Love To Give" (from a couple of years ago) to equally devastating effect.

Unfortunately I can't recommend a legit source for the track since it's currently only out on promo (I think), but listen out for it the next time you go clubbing, and if you don't hear it (you'll know it when you do), have a chat with the DJ...

It's definitely a track that never fails to lift my spirits and put a smile on my face...


UPDATE 20/08: There's an MP3 sample on this ordering page for vinyl junkies.

UPDATE 03/09: The track's now all over the radio stations and I've heard it's making waves out in Ibiza (which coincidentally is where I'm heading for the closing parties in a few week's tim), so it shouldn't be hard to get hold of...

(And in case you're wondering, the sample is from Steve Winwood's 1982 song "Valerie")

I thought I should mention that I resigned from my post as Sitepoint Forums Mentor last week, and my resignation became effective on Sunday, so I'm just a pleb again (although I'm still the community "ASP Guru" until this year's election takes place)!

As you can tell from the infrequent postings on this blog, I haven't had much free time recently, and posting at SitePoint has consumed rather a lot of my free time over the last two and a half years (although I've been a mentor for only one year, I've always been a frequent poster), so I felt it was time to be a little more selfish!

I've got regular Italian classes on Mondays and Salsa on Wednesdays, and I'm usually busy with friends / going out most other evenings, so I'm trying to make the most of my free time by spending as little of it as possible in front of a computer - I do that all day at work as it is! (However, I will try to post on this blog more often in future...)

Anyway, it's been very satisfying helping others with their development problems over the years, and I think I'd quite enjoy being a teacher in later life, but I feel that I've done my bit for the SitePoint community. I'm not saying "goodbye" - I'll still pop in from time to time to answer a posts that take my fancy - but I won't be spending much time around there any more, so I'll see you when I see you.

Finally, thanks to all those of you who said such nice things about me in the thread in the Mentor's forum - it means a lot to know that my hard work has been appreciated and that I've made a difference to people's projects & careers.

Has the world gone mad? Sellotape clearly have...

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