I haven't posted anything here for a while - I've been very busy.
This coming week I'll be at the National Institute on Computing and the Law: From Steps to Strides into the New Age. I'll be speaking on the topic "The Future of Computing, the Internet & the Law". There are so many topics that I could cover, but I am going to focus on the increasing fragmentation of the internet. I'm going to consider the End-to-End principle as a characteristic to distinguish between those kinds of (good and acceptable) fragmentation that result as a side effect of innovation and (bad) fragmentation that is the result of predatory action. The idea is somewhat similar to that of a generative system as expressed recently by Jonathan Zittrain's in his article "Saving The Internet". The distinction I'm trying to make is going to have a rough time surviving the assult of the details - one man's predatory practice is another man's innovation. However, I feel that we need to start to develop a skeleton of principle else the network neutrality issue, which is a piece of the larger issue of net fragmentation, will become the same kind of hodge-podge, ad-hoc mess that we have in the domain name space.
After I'm done I'll post my presentation in my documents collection.
On another front, I've reworked the CaveBear website to use Joomla. The old website began life in 1994 and contained a lot of primitive pages and was designed for the days of dial-up modems. The reworking was a rather tricky undertaking: I decided conserve the web memory of existing URL's into the CaveBear site by creating a set of 304 (content permanently moved) redirections. That required a lot of dredging through pages that I have not touched in more than a decade.
In addition, our company (InterWorking Labs) moved offices - We are now in Santa Cruz. One of our neighbors is a winery - complete with crushers, fermenting tanks, and oak barrels. Wanna guess where I'm going to go after dealing with a tough bit of code?
And, of course, we are getting ready for our yearly summer of theatre here in Santa Cruz.
I've been kind quiet about ICANN - but that doesn't mean that I haven't been watching with amusement ICANN's continues to make itself even more of a sad joke.
Unfortunately the processes under the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) are also swirling at an accelerating pace. But I have hope that, unlike ICANN, sensible voices will make themselves heard. Much as I detest travel, I plan to make the trip to Rio this fall to attend the IGF meeting.
By-the-way, the new website now contains recipes - While I was recovering from back surgery my wife remodelled our kitchen (photos on flickr). So now that we have a nice place to cook, we cook.
Posted by karl at June 24, 2007 2:29 AM