February 21, 2012 archive

Feb 21

Internet2 DNSSEC Special Interest Group (SIG) Provides Forum for Research/Education Community

Internet2DNSSECSIGAre you are member of the research or education community interested in connecting with others who are implementing DNSSEC? Or are you interested in monitoring what is happening within the research/education world with regard to DNSSEC? If so, the Internet2 Consortium has a Special Interest Group (SIG) focused on DNSSEC. The SIG has a website with a great amount of information at:

https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/DNSSEC/Internet2+DNSSEC+SIG

As noted there:

This SIG (Special Interest Group) is intended as a collaborative forum for the research and education community, to share information and support each other in deploying DNSSEC – the Domain Name System Security Extension.

The SIG primarily communicates through a mailing list and instructions to subscribe are provided at the top of the group’s web page. The SIG also has monthly conference calls where they provide updates on recent and upcoming activities and initiatives.

If you are within the research or education community and interested in DNSSEC, this group is definitely a great place to connect with peers and collaborate. We definitely encourage you all to check it out and join the work.

Feb 21

O’Reilly Offers Free Ebook: "Publishing with iBooks Author"

PublishingwithiBooksAuthorIn an interesting move, O'Reilly Media has made their brand new ebook, "Publishing with iBooks Author", available for free download (assuming you have a free account set up with O'Reilly). As is standard with O'Reilly now, the ebook is DRM-free and available as EPUB, Mobi (Kindle) or PDF.

Now, I personally have serious issues with iBooks Author with regard to its deviation from the EPUB standard and the legal lock-in that restricts sales to Apple's iBookstore. It also annoys me that books created with the tool will only work on the iPad, even while I understand Apple's strategy.

Having said all that, I've played with iBooks Author and it is a great tool for creating ebooks. Apple has raised the bar on ease-of-use for ebook creation tools and that is definitely a good thing. As my attendance at O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference last week in New York certainly showed to me, we need tools that are easier-to-use for even more people to be able to create ebooks.

My sincere hope is that creators of other ebook authoring tools will take a serious look at what Apple has done with iBooks Author and figure out how to deliver a similar (or better) user experience where the final output can also work on other ebook platforms. The tool vendor who can do that will certainly receive a lot of interest judging from the conversations I've had with people both at TOCCON last week and also in numerous other venues.

So to that end, I commend O'Reilly on releasing this new ebook for free and I do hope people will download it and understand just what Apple has done to make ebook creation so easy... and then use that knowledge to build even better tools!

P.S. In full disclosure, O'Reilly is the publisher of my most recent ebook, but that has nothing to do with why I am writing about them here. (And it was written entirely in DocBook XML, because that's just the kind of author I am... )

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Feb 21

RIPE Labs Reports on IPv4 Address Depletion Per Region

IPv4AddressSpaceGrowthWhich regions of the world are depleting their IPv4 addresses the quickest? Our friends over at RIPE Labs published some interesting statistics earlier this month about the growth in IPv4 address allocation per region. The article’s goal is:

With the depletion of the IPv4 free pool in the APNIC region and the imminent IPv4 free pool run out in the RIPE NCC’s service region, it is interesting to look at IPv4 allocation rates per country to see where free pool run out has and will have the most consequences, in terms of curtailing growth of IPv4 address usage. In this article, we try to visualise where “the pressure is on” the most.

To perhaps no surprise, the Asia-Pacific and Latin/South American regions experienced the greatest demand for IPv4 address allocations although in the case of the AP region the “free pool” of IPv4 addresses is now exhausted.

The brief report by Emile Aben provides some very interesting data and useful summaries of the state of IPv4 address usage around the world. Definitely worth a read for those looking to understand where we are with IPv4 address exhaustion.