It has finally happened. The world has run out of internet protocol addresses! The internet is over!

Well, it's not that bad, but it is a serious milestone in the history of the intenet.

The current scheme for ip numbers (called IPv4) has a total of about 4.3 billion possible addresses. At one time, I'm sure no one could ever imagine that we would get to the point where all 4.3 billion numbers would be assigned. Luckily, the nature of the internet allows for long term planning. About 10 years ago, a new scheme called IPv6 was thought up and slowly implemented. It's not completely in place yet but I'm sure today's news will speed things up.

For the average internet user, this is meaningless and will not have any impact on your lives. For some of us however, this requires a pretty serious change. I need to re-learn how to create DNS entries, the names of the different types of records are changing, and where I could once have some hope of keeping an ip address in my head, that's now a thing of the past. I still remember the ip number of the dns servers from my first ISP, 198.7.0.1, such simple numbers will soon be a thing of the past, gone the way of 7 digit phone numbers and all of NYC being in the 212 area code.

Even localhost (probably the most simple ip number to remember) is changing, 127.0.0.0 in ipV4 is now 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1. I guess I can keep that one in my head, but something like 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334? no way.

More on this esoteric topic can be found, of course, via google http://www.google.com/search?q=ipv4+last+number+assigned

Today's photos:

 
 

The mystery of the colored snow solved! Some artists have been going around the neighborhood with cans of spray paint.
 
 

somehow I don't think this bike is going anywhere until spring