All the net's a page...

The Whole Internet

What is this?

It's a map of the entire Internet. At the moment we're displaying the owner of each IP address (grey boxes), and which IP addresses are listed on the Spamhaus XBL blacklist (red dots), but we should be able to show other things in the future.

A map?

Yes, we map all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses onto a huge image and let you zoom into it and pan around. Just like google maps, but more internetty.
[...]
How is this done?

We've taken snapshots of the internet routing table (from CAIDA for this demo, but we'd probably use a local BGP feed out of preference) to work out who owns each IP address, and a snapshot of the Spamhaus XBL as some interesting data to overlay on the map.

Then we use a Hilbert curve to map those addresses onto a two-dimensional map, as inspired by xkcd, so that nearby IP addresses are nearby on the map and so that CIDR ranges (the usual way blocks of IP addresses are broken down) map onto squares or rectangles.

As you request bits of the map we generate them on the fly (using a fastcgi application written in C++/Qt) in zoomify format to your browser, using the giant scalable image viewer.

Unfortunately the Hilbert curve mapping makes it essentially impossible to navigate to a particular address, though they're apparently working on it. And because it's taken from the routing tables, it doesn't show blocks that aren't routed to, like the Class C block I acquired ages ago before it became expensive, or the block $EMPLOYER acquired around the same time, which I'm posting from. It's still cool

Back to the past

flyback - Google Code

Apple's Time Machine is a great feature in their OS, and Linux has almost all of the required technology already built in to recreate it. This is a simple GUI to make it easy to use.

(from this post on slashdot.)

I just upgraded my work laptop to Leopard yesterday, and fired up Time Machine because, well, automatic incremental backups are a Good Thing. I was intrigued to find, though, that it's not really doing anything special: behind that pretty interface is a directory tree with pathnames like nodename/yyyy-mm-dd-hhmmss. Whee! It keeps hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for a month, and weekly backups until you run out of space on your backup disk, at which point it presumably throws up its hands and begs for more storage.

Apart from the naming conventions and intervals, that's pretty close to what I've been doing with rsync for the last couple of years on Linux. What took them so long?

(eta: Other, similar packages for Win$ and Linux include BackupPC and Dirvish. What are you using?)

I can haz facehuggr!

Today I went in to Kaiser to get the results from last week's sleep apnea test. I passed. Or failed -- I'm not sure which result is which. Anyway, I tested firmly positive, so they sent me home with a facehugger. This one, on loan for a week, is the test version: it varies the pressure and figures out what I need. Then I go back in a week and get a permanent one programmed for whatever it figures out.

Stats: Recording time: 6.75 hrs. Apnea/hypopnea index: 23.5/hr; O₂ saturation: 91% average, 80% minimum; RERA (wakeup) index 4.5%. (I actually got only about 4.5 hrs sleep, so the number of events is actually higher.)

Walkies: there's glory for you!

Yesterday I still had some residual aches from my flu shot on Monday and didn't feel quite up to an exercise walk, so I just walked down to the Safeway and back. Even that may have been overdoing it: I had some odd muscle cramps in the evening.

So today I only walked down to the pond and back, at my old (strolling) pace. May still have been too much, but if I don't get my walkies I go rapidly crazy. (Some people would say that it's a really short trip.) They were painting new stripes on the road and dusting them with tiny reflective glass beads, which the wind promptly scattered all over the road. Since the sun was behind me, I got a lovely glory following me down the hill. (One might say sun dogging my steps, but...) (For some reason Wikipedia doesn't have it on their disambiguation page for glory, but points to the Wiktionary entry for it).