Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Feb 14
TDYR #100 – Reflecting On 100 Episodes Of The Dan York Report
In this episode I reflect back on the first 100 episodes of The Dan York Report ...
Feb 14
Humor: IPv6 Exhaustion Counter
In the spirit of the IPv4 Exhaustion Counter, we were greatly amused to see that there is an IPv6 Exhaustion Counter. 
As well as an alternative version for IPv6 prefixes. Kudos to Sam Bowne for creating this fun little counter!
The beautiful part about IPv6 is that there are no issues with running out of IPv6 addresses… and you can be free to think of IPv6 address plans without all the legacy restrictions of IPv4 and trying to conserve every possible address.
How can we help you make the move to IPv6 today?
Feb 13
TDYR #099 – Want To Try Out Curling? Find A Local Curling Club!
Want to try out curling? Find a local curling club! In the US, you can visit:
http://www.curlingrocks.net/USA-Curling/Clubs/Find-a-Club
In Canada, you can visit:
http://www.curling.ca/membership/member-curling-clubs/
Feb 13
Why We Want Dedicated Curling Ice, Part 1: It’s About The Schedule!
Why do we want dedicated curling ice versus curling on an ice arena? With the great success happening with Keene Ice’s plans for a new year-round ice arena here in Keene (which is awesome!), we’ve had several people asking this question – and the reality is that we may need to use arena ice as part of our process of starting up, but our end goal is very definitely to have dedicated curling ice in the Keene region.
We touched on this subject in our FAQ, but I want to expand on the reasons. The primary reason is scheduling. With an arena, you are competing for time with the many hockey leagues, the figure skating clubs, the public skating time, as well as rentals and other uses. The end result is that you typically only get to have time for curling on one day of the week, and even then at a time of little interest to others, in part because you really need about a 5-hour block of time to do setup/tear-down and play two games. (A typical curling game of 8 ends lasts about 2 hours.) If you look at the websites for some of the arena curling clubs in the region, you’ll see that they are typically only playing on one or two days of the week.
In contrast, with dedicated ice you can have curling happening on every day of the week – and can also frequently run curling “bonspiels” (“tournaments”) that bring in people and teams from around the region.
Curling Leagues
Consider the schedule of activities at nearby Petersham Curling Club. Here is their schedule:
- Mondays – Men’s League with multiple evening games.
- Tuesdays – Daytime League at 2pm. Men’s League in the evening
- Wednesdays – Women’s League
- Thursdays – “Signature” League (A highly competitive league.)
- Fridays – Mixed (men and women) League in the evening.
- Saturdays:
- Youth Curling League from 9 – 12:15pm
- Mixed Doubles League some Saturday afternoons
- Rentals of curling ice some Saturday afternoons
- Mixed (men and women) League in the evening
- Sundays – Rentals of curling ice on some Sunday afternoons. “Under 5″ (years of play) social league in the evening.
That makes for a LOT of activity! And there are other rentals that take place during the day and other activities that happen at the club from time to time. Here in Keene we would also see curling ice being able to be potentially used by the schools for physical education activities – and we could potentially see our colleges being interested in having some curling activities or teams.
Or consider Broomstones Curling Club in Wayland, MA. They also have multiple leagues playing each day of the week – and their club is full! You CANNOT join even if you wanted to! They have a waiting list and simply cannot accept people into their club because they have no room for people to play. Here is what their league calendar looks like (and this doesn’t include their active youth curling program, their college program or their rentals):
You can’t build this kind of community and activity around curling with just a few hours of rented ice arena time!
Bonspiels (Tournaments)
For scheduling, the other big issue is the hosting of curling “bonspiels” which are tournaments where teams compete. I’ll write more about the potential economic impact of bonspiels in another article, but suffice it to say they are a great way to get people excited about curling and to bring in a large number of people from outside the region (and to have them staying in Keene hotels, eating at our restaurants, shopping at our stores, etc.).
A typical adult bonspiel begins with multiple games on a Friday night, has games all day on Saturday and then usually has multiple games on a Sunday as well. Typically there is also a dinner or other social event involved as well. The point is that the ice is used occupied for pretty much the entire weekend.
This is a severe challenge to try with an ice arena given the many other needs of the other groups using an ice arena. The arena curling clubs with which I am familiar are often able to do a bonspiel maybe once a year – or sometimes they are able to get single-day events happening from time-to-time.
In contrast, dedicated clubs can run a bonspiel each month if they chose to do so… all really depending upon their own organizational capabilities. Some, like Broomstones, do run multiple events for adults, youth (and different levels of youth), seniors, mixed leagues and more.
THAT Is Why
This is really the big reason why our end goal is to have dedicated curling ice here in the Keene and greater Monadnock region – either as a completely separate facility or as part of an existing facility. We want to build a strong curling community and have a financially strong and viable club. We want to have many different leagues and other activities as we outlined in our vision.
Please join us! Help us make this a reality!
Feb 13
Why We Want Dedicated Curling Ice, Part 1: It’s About The Schedule!
Why do we want dedicated curling ice versus curling on an ice arena? With the great success happening with Keene Ice’s plans for a new year-round ice arena here in Keene (which is awesome!), we’ve had several people asking this question – and the reality is that we may need to use arena ice as part of our process of starting up, but our end goal is very definitely to have dedicated curling ice in the Keene region.
We touched on this subject in our FAQ, but I want to expand on the reasons. The primary reason is scheduling. With an arena, you are competing for time with the many hockey leagues, the figure skating clubs, the public skating time, as well as rentals and other uses. The end result is that you typically only get to have time for curling on one day of the week, and even then at a time of little interest to others, in part because you really need about a 5-hour block of time to do setup/tear-down and play two games. (A typical curling game of 8 ends lasts about 2 hours.) If you look at the websites for some of the arena curling clubs in the region, you’ll see that they are typically only playing on one or two days of the week.
In contrast, with dedicated ice you can have curling happening on every day of the week – and can also frequently run curling “bonspiels” (“tournaments”) that bring in people and teams from around the region.
Curling Leagues
Consider the schedule of activities at nearby Petersham Curling Club. Here is their schedule:
- Mondays – Men’s League with multiple evening games.
- Tuesdays – Daytime League at 2pm. Men’s League in the evening
- Wednesdays – Women’s League
- Thursdays – “Signature” League (A highly competitive league.)
- Fridays – Mixed (men and women) League in the evening.
- Saturdays:
- Youth Curling League from 9 – 12:15pm
- Mixed Doubles League some Saturday afternoons
- Rentals of curling ice some Saturday afternoons
- Mixed (men and women) League in the evening
- Sundays – Rentals of curling ice on some Sunday afternoons. “Under 5” (years of play) social league in the evening.
That makes for a LOT of activity! And there are other rentals that take place during the day and other activities that happen at the club from time to time. Here in Keene we would also see curling ice being able to be potentially used by the schools for physical education activities – and we could potentially see our colleges being interested in having some curling activities or teams.
Or consider Broomstones Curling Club in Wayland, MA. They also have multiple leagues playing each day of the week – and their club is full! You CANNOT join even if you wanted to! They have a waiting list and simply cannot accept people into their club because they have no room for people to play. Here is what their league calendar looks like (and this doesn’t include their active youth curling program, their college program or their rentals):
You can’t build this kind of community and activity around curling with just a few hours of rented ice arena time!
Bonspiels (Tournaments)
For scheduling, the other big issue is the hosting of curling “bonspiels” which are tournaments where teams compete. I’ll write more about the potential economic impact of bonspiels in another article, but suffice it to say they are a great way to get people excited about curling and to bring in a large number of people from outside the region (and to have them staying in Keene hotels, eating at our restaurants, shopping at our stores, etc.).
A typical adult bonspiel begins with multiple games on a Friday night, has games all day on Saturday and then usually has multiple games on a Sunday as well. Typically there is also a dinner or other social event involved as well. The point is that the ice is used occupied for pretty much the entire weekend.
This is a severe challenge to try with an ice arena given the many other needs of the other groups using an ice arena. The arena curling clubs with which I am familiar are often able to do a bonspiel maybe once a year – or sometimes they are able to get single-day events happening from time-to-time.
In contrast, dedicated clubs can run a bonspiel each month if they chose to do so… all really depending upon their own organizational capabilities. Some, like Broomstones, do run multiple events for adults, youth (and different levels of youth), seniors, mixed leagues and more.
THAT Is Why
This is really the big reason why our end goal is to have dedicated curling ice here in the Keene and greater Monadnock region – either as a completely separate facility or as part of an existing facility. We want to build a strong curling community and have a financially strong and viable club. We want to have many different leagues and other activities as we outlined in our vision.
Please join us! Help us make this a reality!
Feb 13
Are There More (or Newer) DNSSEC / DANE Application Developer Libraries We Should Add To Our List?
What developer libraries / modules are you using to add DNSSEC or DANE support to your applications? For some time now we’ve maintained a list of DNSSEC developer libraries at:
http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/dnssec-developer-libraries/
but I noticed that the list is now two years old! While many of the libraries listed on the “common” ones that many developers use, I have to think that there have also been some newer libraries in the time since, perhaps in some other languages. Before I spent time looking around developer sites and mailing lists, I thought I would ask you all who visit this site – do you know of any libraries we aren’t listing?
If you are aware of any additional libraries that we should add to the list, we would love to hear about them, either as comments to this blog post, as comments on the social networks where this post will appear, or via email or our feedback form.
Your help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Feb 12
TDYR #098 – To Get Your Content Noticed, Titles And First Sentences Are Insanely Important
In this era of social media, you have a moment to catch someone's attention and get them to click through and read your content. The title and first sentence of your article are *critical*!
Feb 12
New Apache SpamAssassin Release 3.4.0 Includes Native IPv6 Support!
Very cool news out of the Apache SpamAssassin project that the new release 3.4.0 has full native IPv6 support! This is important because SpamAssassin is widely used as an anti-spam tool for email servers. This update nows means that it can be used in mail servers running on IPv6, including on mail servers running in an IPv6-only environment. From the release notes:
Improved support for IPv6
————————-The rules-updating program sa-update and its infrastructure is now usable over either IPv4 or IPv6, including from an IPv6-only hosts (bug 6654).
SpamAssassin is now usable on an IPv6-only host: affects installation, self-tests, rule updates, client, server, and a command-line spamassassin.
Command line options -4 and -6 were added to prefer/choose/force IPv4 or IPv6 in programs spamassassin, spamd, spamc, and sa-update.
Command line options –listen and –allowed-ips in spamd can now accept IPv6 addresses.
Preferably a perl module IO::Socket::IP is used (if it is available) for network communication regardless of a protocol family – for DNS queries, by spamd server side, and by a client code in Mail::SpamAssassin::Client. As a fallback when the module IO::Socket::IP is unavailable, an older module IO::Socket::INET6 is used, or eventually the IO::Socket::INET is used as last resort.
If spamd fails to start with an ‘Address already in use’ message, please install perl module IO::Socket::IP, or deintall IO::Socket::INET6, or specify a socket bind address explicitly with a spamd –listen option. See bug 6953 for details.
The spamd server can now simultaneously listen on multiple sockets, possibly in different protocol domains (Unix sockets, INET or INET6 protocol families.
DnsResolver was updated allowing it to work on an IPv6-only host (bug 6653)
A plugin RelayCountry now uses module Geo::IP and its database of IPv6 addresses GEOIP_COUNTRY_EDITION_V6 when available.
The following configuration options were extended to accept IPv6 addresses: dns_server, trusted_networks, internal_networks, msa_networks, (but not yet the whitelist_from_rcvd), and their defaults were adjusted accordingly.
The parser code of Received header fields can now deal with IPv6 addresses in a mail header section.
The AutoWhitelist plugin was updated and can now deal with IPv6 addresses.
Installation unit tests were updated to prevent them from failing on an IPv6-only host.
This is excellent news and we congratulate the Apache SpamAssassin team on making this happen. If you are a SpamAssassin user, you can get release 3.4.0 now to be able to fight spam on email connections over IPv6!
Feb 12
Enjoying Watching Olympic Curling? TRY IT OUT This Sunday in Petersham, MA
Are you enjoying watching curling at the Sochi Olympics? Are you intrigued by the game and want to learn more? Would you like to try it out yourself?
The great news is that you CAN try it this Sunday, February 16, from 12-5pm, and then again on Thursday, February 20, from 6-9pm.
The great folks down at the Petersham Curling Club (PCC), about 45 minutes south of Keene, are holding two FREE open houses to help people learn about the game. As noted on their page about the curling open houses, the two upcoming dates are:
- Sun, Feb 16, 12-5 pm – At this Open House you’ll have a chance to actually try the sport of curling. You’ll learn how to deliver a stone, the role of sweeping and more. This will be a great opportunity to get on the ice and experience the sport yourself!
- Thurs, Feb 20, 6-9 pm - This will be a week-night version of the Feb 16th Open House where you will again get a chance to try out the sport of curling.
All you need to bring is a pair of clean, rubber-soled shoes and your enthusiasm! You’ll have the chance to try out the great game of curling that you are seeing on the Olympics.
It’s easy to get to the Petersham Curling Club – from Keene just head south on Route 32 (going down past the Keene airport) and stay on Route 32 all the way down through Richmond, NH, Royalston, MA, Athol and on into Petersham. The club is located right off of Route 32. More information can be found on the PCC directions page. In good weather it takes about 45 minutes to get from Keene down to the Petersham club.
The Petersham Curling Club is a great place to curl and is where several of us involved with starting up the Monadnock Curling Club all curl. We strongly encourage you to head down to Petersham, MA, and check out the Open Houses. And if the curling bug bites you as it has us, please do join the PCC and start playing the awesome sport of curling!
And then… please let us know you are interested in seeing curling come to Keene!
Feb 12
Enjoying Watching Olympic Curling? TRY IT OUT This Sunday in Petersham, MA
Are you enjoying watching curling at the Sochi Olympics? Are you intrigued by the game and want to learn more? Would you like to try it out yourself?
The great news is that you CAN try it this Sunday, February 16, from 12-5pm, and then again on Thursday, February 20, from 6-9pm.
The great folks down at the Petersham Curling Club (PCC), about 45 minutes south of Keene, are holding two FREE open houses to help people learn about the game. As noted on their page about the curling open houses, the two upcoming dates are:
- Sun, Feb 16, 12-5 pm – At this Open House you’ll have a chance to actually try the sport of curling. You’ll learn how to deliver a stone, the role of sweeping and more. This will be a great opportunity to get on the ice and experience the sport yourself!
- Thurs, Feb 20, 6-9 pm – This will be a week-night version of the Feb 16th Open House where you will again get a chance to try out the sport of curling.
All you need to bring is a pair of clean, rubber-soled shoes and your enthusiasm! You’ll have the chance to try out the great game of curling that you are seeing on the Olympics.
It’s easy to get to the Petersham Curling Club – from Keene just head south on Route 32 (going down past the Keene airport) and stay on Route 32 all the way down through Richmond, NH, Royalston, MA, Athol and on into Petersham. The club is located right off of Route 32. More information can be found on the PCC directions page. In good weather it takes about 45 minutes to get from Keene down to the Petersham club.
The Petersham Curling Club is a great place to curl and is where several of us involved with starting up the Monadnock Curling Club all curl. We strongly encourage you to head down to Petersham, MA, and check out the Open Houses. And if the curling bug bites you as it has us, please do join the PCC and start playing the awesome sport of curling!
And then… please let us know you are interested in seeing curling come to Keene!
