Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Jan 02
Are You Protected By DNSSEC? A Quick Way To Check
Want a quick way to check if you have DNSSEC validation working at your site? Just go to:
https://www.dnssec-tools.org/test/
You’ll see either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down:
If you get a thumbs-up then all the DNS queries were validated with DNSSEC. If you get a thumbs-down then your local DNS resolver is either not validating with DNSSEC or is not validating all queries. Time to figure out what’s wrong!
If you need to configure DNSSEC validation, we recommend SURFnet’s white paper that includes easy steps for common DNS resolvers.
And if you know very little about DNSSEC and want to learn more, please visit our Start Here page to begin!
Jan 01
My Four Words For 2015
ESSENTIALS
Over the past six months or so I've been giving a great amount of thought to what exactly I want to be doing - in many different aspects of my life. Part of that came about as part of looking at my role within the Internet Society and thinking about what makes the most sense for my particular skills and interests. But perhaps a larger part came about in some of the reading and discussions my wife and I have been having around what many call "minimalism" or variations on that theme. Basically... looking at how to do fewer things better. We only have so many hours in the day and we choose how we are going to spend those hours... and we choose what we give our attention to. My wife's ongoing experience with cancer treatments has certainly changed our overall perspective and made us think about what is most important to us.
This year I want to continue that effort into distilling things down to what are really the "essentials" in my life upon which I wish to focus. This may mean focusing more and putting aside some side projects... or admitting that some project ideas may just never happen - and that's okay.
To go back to that wonderful quote from the poet Mary Oliver:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
And even more so... what will I do - or not do - in pursuit of that?
BOOKS
Given that my last book was published four years ago back in 2011, I do feel a bit of a desire to have another book come out some time soon. An obvious candidate is to pitch O'Reilly on doing a Second Edition of Migrating Applications to IPv6 given that a lot has changed in four years and that there is much more that can be said about IPv6 based on the deployment experience to date. I also have several ideas for books in the telephony/telecom/VoIP space.
I also have several ideas for books outside the pure technology space... more in the public relations / marketing / social media space. And there are some other ideas I have floating around my head...
Ideas for books are easy... it's making the time to create the book that is the challenge! I'd like to see what I can do in 2015 to at least get some book project underway.
HEALTH
"Health" was actually one of my three words back in 2010 and as I noted in my 2011 post I went far in 2010 dropping 45 pounds and starting to get into running. Last year "running" was one of my words and I'm now pretty confident that running is part of my lifestyle and just part of what I do.
But... now this year I need to focus a bit broader than just running. It's been a while since I've had a physical and there are some other health issues I'd like to address. It's time to do a bit more to ensure I'm around for the long term.
CURLING
This is not so much an aspiration as an admission that this year may more heavily involve the sport of curling that I enjoy so much. There are two aspects here. First, my soon-to-be-13-year-old daughter enjoys curling and shows some interest in doing more competitively. IF she does that (and it's still an "if"), that will set us on a potential path of bonspiels (tournaments) and camps that may set the tone for much of our family activity for the year. We'll see. Second, I very much want to see this be the year when we start making some headway with starting up the Monadnock Curling Club and looking at bringing the sport of curling to our region of New Hampshire.
That's what I'm thinking about right now for this year... I have a sense that 2015 could be a big year on a number of different fronts... we'll have to see how it turns out.
Meanwhile... Happy New Year! May 2015 be a great year for you!
An audio version of this post is available:
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Jan 01
TDYR 211 – My Four Words For 2015
What are my aspirations for 2015? This episode speaks about my "four words" for 2015. More details here:
http://www.danyork.com/2015/01/my-four-words-for-2015.html
Jan 01
Happy New Year! Do Your 2015 Plans Include IPv6, DNSSEC or TLS?
Happy New Year! It’s 2015 … what are you going to do differently this year? Will you get your websites working over IPv6? Will you sign your domains with DNSSEC and enable validation? Will you use TLS for all your websites and applications?
We’re looking forward to a great 2015. We’ll be holding ION conferences around the world, including ION Sri Lanka coming up shortly on January 18. We’ll be writing on our blog and posting video, audio, slides and more to all our various sites and services. We’ll be speaking and participating at events from ICANN, IETF and many, many more. We’ll be helping get more BCOP documents written and doing whatever we can to improve communication between network operators and the IETF.
2015 is going to be a great year!
If you haven’t yet made technical plans for 2015, may we suggest some ideas? How about:
- Make your website content available over IPv6 – We have some suggestions for how to get started. And why not see if you can get your content available over IPv6 by June 6, 2015, the third anniversary of World IPv6 Launch!
- Sign your domain with DNSSEC. Here are instructions for some registrars and DNS hosting operators – and ask your DNS hosting provider about how to get DNSSEC signing in their system.
- Set up your DNS resolvers to perform DNSSEC validation – there’s a great whitepaper that shows how easy this is!
- Join the MANRS Initiative and declare publicly that your network will help keep the Internet’s routing infrastructure clean! See the MANRS document for more info.
- Tighten up the security of your router – read this Internet-Draft around BGP operations and security to understand how you can better protect your routing infrastructure.
- Add TLS to your websites – check out our TLS for Applications area.
Why not make one of these your resolution for the year and see what can happen?
We’re here to help… check out our Start Here page to find resources that may work for you… and please let us know if you can’t find what you are looking for!
Let’s make 2015 amazing!
Dec 31
Revisiting My Four Word for 2014 – How Did I Do?
On this final day of 2014, I thought I should reflect back on my "four words" for 2014. They were:
- Running
- Religion
- Audio
- Strategy
How did I do? Let's take them one by one...
RUNNING
The good news is that I did make running more a regular part of my life. By adding up the monthly totals in my iPhone app I see that I ran over 288 miles this year. It was spotty, though. I only ran 6.2 miles in September yet I ran over 56 miles in July! I finished the year doing 26 miles in December... which works out to be about 6 miles a week. Good... but not great. Next year I'll aim to do better.
It was also a strange year in that I ran only one race... and that was the short 1-mile "Pumpkin Mile" that was part of the Keene Pumpkin Festival and that I ran with my five-year-old daughter. For all the other races I wanted to do I either had a schedule conflict or in one case it rained harder than I really cared to race in.
My goal starting off 2014, though, was to get running more a part of my life... and I think I can safely say that I did that.
RELIGION
Back at the beginning of the year I wrote:
But you wouldn't know any of this from what I write and post online. There are thousands of blog posts online from me since 2000 and many thousand tweets/updates/posts on social media...
... but pretty much NONE of them say ANYTHING about religion.
There are a lot of reasons for WHY I have been silent about the religious side of my life in my online activity... and I'll write a post about that at some point (probably soon).
But I've realized that in being silent and hiding this aspect of myself I'm not really letting myself be truly whole.
So I'm going to start... I've been letting pieces of that side of me leak out into Facebook lately. THIS blog post is a huge step for me.
I'm not going to be "in your face" about religion or anything (that's not the UU way! ;-) ). But I'm going to stop hiding that side of me. I will treat it instead just as yet another facet of the complicated person that I am (and that we all are).
We'll see... this will, in all honesty, be a bit challenging for me... but is an area I'd like to grow personally.
This has been hard for me, but I have started to be more open about this side of myself. For instance, I participated in a panel that was recorded on video distributed on YouTube where I talked about our church and my involvement in the "community breakfasts" that we do for the homeless each morning during the winter months. I also shared on Facebook and social networks when I was giving a sermon at our church in late October on the subject of "Facebook and Fox News: Escaping the Echo Chambers of Affirmation". I actually recorded that sermon but have yet to put it online... perhaps in 2015.
I also shared out more links from our church's web site and social media feeds into my own feeds... which was a big step for me.
Baby steps... but at least I'm no longer hiding my this part of me. We'll see where this goes from here.
AUDIO
Unfortunately this area remained a bit of an "aspiration" this year. I had hoped to do more with audio this year. Now I did do more with my "The Dan York Report (TDYR)" podcast... producing over 155 of the short episodes. I also didn't miss a single week of For Immediate Release (FIR) reports, producing 52 of those reports. I also started using several new applications on my iPhone to more rapidly produce podcasts
BUT...
... I'd had aspirations to do more. Here's how I wound up with what I had hoped to do:
- FIR On Technology with Dan York - Sadly I only cranked out one episode during the entire year. :-(
- Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast - I'd hoped to publish some interviews... but... nope. None. Zip. Nada.
- Internet Society Deploy360 Programme - I only published one episode here, too, but a very large part of this was that I spent a good bit of time seeking an audio publishing platform that supported IPv6... and never found one (SoundCloud doesn't). In the interim I held off on publishing episodes.
We'll see if this gets better in 2015. I thoroughly enjoy audio and would like to get back to doing more!
STRATEGY
I wrote in January:
Finally, there is an exquisite irony to me that while my job title at the Internet Society is "Senior Content Strategist", my own personal content online is severely lacking a strategy. I am inconsistently writing across 8 or 9 different places online - and I'm adding more sites like the Monadnock Curling Club... and there are a few other projects in the works.
Yes, this is a bit of a case of the proverbial "cobbler's shoes", but in 2014 I'd like to pull some of this together a bit more and have a bit more discipline about what I'm doing with all my online content. I'm at least aggregating my online content at my danyork.me site, but this year I want to do more with getting more consistent with the creation of content.
Alas... still a work in progress...
So there I was for 2014... good progress with two of my words... less so with the other two. How did your year work out?
An audio version of this post is available on in my "The Dan York Report" podcast:
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- following me on Twitter;
- adding me to a circle on Google+;
- following me on Ello;
- following me on App.net;
- subscribing to my email newsletter; or
- subscribing to the RSS feed.
Dec 31
TDYR 210 – Revisiting My Four Words For 2014 – How Did I Do?
In this final episode of 2014, I reflected back on my "four words" for 2014. More info here:
http://www.danyork.com/2014/12/revisiting-my-four-word-for-2014-how-did-i-do.html
and
http://www.danyork.com/2014/01/my-four-words-for-2014.html
Dec 31
New Year’s Eve Reading: Enterprise Guidelines for Deploying IPv6
Did you get stuck working on New Year’s Eve? Did you draw the short straw and now you’re sitting there at work while others are off on vacation? If you’re looking for something to do, why not read the recent RFC 7381, Enterprise IPv6 Deployment Guidelines? It will help you get an idea of just what your company or organization might want to do do make the move to IPv6 in 2015!
And then head on over to our IPv6 page for enterprises and organizations and find all the other resources we have available to help you learn more about moving to IPv6.
Today’s the last day of 2014… time to be looking ahead!
Dec 30
Excellent Article on Medium About Podcasting Stats: Downloads, Listens and Listeners
Back on December 12, Pete Davis published a great article on Medium titled "Downloads, listens, listeners, and about those podcast numbers" that dives into all these different stats. Davies was reacting to the hype over the podcast "Serial" and wanting to make sure people understood some of the nuances of how you can measure podcasts.
As he points out, the number of people downloading an episode can be very different from the total number of downloaded episodes. One person, who we will call a "downloader" might download many different episodes. As he notes, people might have different devices or podcast apps that all pull down episodes.
And the number of downloads is VERY different from the actual number of listens that occur. I can personally attest to this - my apps download many different episodes of podcasts... but I only listen to a few of them. The others have been downloaded but will probably never be listened to.
The challenge is that finding out if people have actually listened to a podcast is extremely hard. As Davies writes:
Nobody really knows exactly how many people are listening to podcasts.
This has a lot to do with the many different ways people can listen to podcasts. They can play them in a web page... play them in a podcasting app... play them in a music program like iTunes... download them and play them in some other music app.
All we can do is make guesses... or use imperfect numbers like downloads to make some kind of estimate of the popularity of a show.
It's a good article... and as he concludes, we do need better data around all of this. I also definitely agree with his conclusion that a large part of the success of "Serial" and "Startup" is that they offer compelling content! It happens to be in audio form... but the content and storytelling expertise is what draws people to these podcasts.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- following me on Twitter;
- adding me to a circle on Google+;
- following me on Ello;
- following me on App.net;
- subscribing to my email newsletter; or
- subscribing to the RSS feed.
Dec 30
TDYR 209 – Teaching Our Kids To Build Things Not just Buy Things
TDYR 209 - Teaching Our Kids To Build Things Not just Buy Things by Dan York
