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Van Jacobson gave a Google Tech Talk on some of his ideas of how a modern, global network could work more effectively, and with more trust in the data which changes many hands on its journey to its final destination.

The man is very smart and his ideas are fascinating. He has the experience and knowledge to see the big picture and what can be done to solve some of the new problems we have. He starts with the beginning of the phone networks and then goes on to briefly explain the origins of the ARPAnet, which evolved into the modern Internet and TCP/IP and the many other protocols we use daily (often behind the scenes).

He explains the problems that were faced while using the phone networks for data, and how they were solved by realizing that a new problem had risen and needed a new, different solution. He then goes to explain how the Internet has changed significantly from the time it started off in research centres, schools, and government offices into what it is today (lots of identical bytes being redundantly pushed to many consumers, where broadcast would be more appropriate and efficient).

If you have some time I really suggest watching this talk. I would love to research some of the things he spoke about if I ever got the chance. I’m sure they’ll be on my mind anyway and inevitably I’ll end up playing around with layering crap onto IPV6 and what not. Deep down I love coding in C and I think developing a protocol would be pretty fun. I’d learn a lot in any case.

At Seekport I’m currently working on an app to handle the config of their business-to-business search engine. It’s web-based and I’m using PHP, since that’s what they’re re-doing the front-end in. Right now it’s a big mess of Perl, the main developer (for the front-end) is gone, and they’re having trouble managing it. I have read through it, and it’s pretty dismal. They have config mixed with logic and duplicated code all over the place. There’s an 1100 line sub in one of the perl modules. Agh!

I think this has to be one of the big reasons why people who love their Mac, love their Mac (or other Apple product). I usually just have cheap PC speakers plugged into my Mac mini, but I didn’t bring any with me to Munich and the internal Mac mini speaker isn’t very loud, so I’m using headphones to watch movies. My Mac remembers the volume setting when the headphones ore plugged in, and when they’re not, so I don’t accidentally blow my ears. It’s like my iPod pausing when the headphones are unplugged. It’s excruciating attention to the smallest, (seemingly) most unimportant detail. I love it, and I’m hooked.

I’m almost half way reading Jeffrey Friedl’s book Mastering Regular Expressions and I have to say that for a book on something that could potentially bore you to tears, he really does an excellent job of keeping it interesting. Even though a lot of the examples are contrived (I’m sure out of necessity), he also uses real examples of regexes that he’s actually used at Yahoo!.

This game that Jim blogged about is probably the coolest game I’ve seen.

You really just have to watch the video, I won’t bother explaining it here. I don’t really play games much, but this I would play.

If you thought the PowerBook’s two-finger scrolling was cool check out this touch screen:

This is really amazing. Forget traditional tablet PCs… this is revolutionary and useful in so many applications. I hope this kind of technology is mainstream by 2015.