Josh's Weblog

IPv6 Requirements Loom Closer

According to govexec.com the White House has mandated that all government systems be IPv6 compliant by June 2008. This is a strengthening of the march to IPv6 as the DoD had been pushing its own requirements on this area for some time.

With this person in place, agencies will be charged with developing, by the first quarter of fiscal 2006, an inventory of existing IP-capable equipment and an analysis to determine the financial impact and risks of the transition, Evans said.

The industry will of course be happy about this:

Jawad Khaki, corporate vice president for Microsoft, pushed for a “market-based conversion to IPv6 [as] the most technologically feasible and least disruptive” transition process. He speculated that the flexible nature of IPv6 would mean that conversion activity would happen “at the edge of the network” with home computers, eventually moving to “encompass the rest of the global Internet infrastructure.”

Of course, USAGI and IBM have already put IPv6 into Linux… years ago.

“To reap the benefits from IPv6 federal agencies first must begin to plan and develop requirements that will take full advantage of what the new protocol offers,” committee Chairman Tom Davis said. The Virginia Republican expressed concern about the security and competitive risks associated with the IPv6 transition.

Entrepreneurs! Start your engines!

(Full disclosure: I work for IBM's Linux Technology Center and managed the network group within the LTC for two years.)

Amazon.com links:

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Linux” Thursday, Jun 30 2005 05:06 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Waterfall

The backyard waterfall is close to ready for the Independence Day BBQ. We'll be clearing up the water and getting the depth right.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Pictures” Monday, Jun 27 2005 07:36 AM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

The Downing Street Memo

Since there seems to be a belief that the Downing Street Memo is a “smoking gun” indicating a conspiracy to manufacture evidence of WMDs in Iraq, I figured I'd give it a read. It all revolves around this paragraph, and in particular one word (which I have highlighted below):

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Taking the memo as legitimate, which is always doubtful when presented by a journalist, I wonder what the big deal is. It's pretty clear to me that the term “fixed” is being used in the sense of focused energy. Even so, prominent Democrats (eager to remind everyone that at least they whine about important things and to help others forget that they seldom offer solutions to the problems they whine about) continue to hype the secret memo.

The rest of the memo points out the difficulty of removing Saddam from power, and the political realities of the situation.

Even so, this is hardly the smoking gun people think it is.

A sentence on the second page of the article doesn't say Saddam has no WMDs, only that he had less than others:

Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

Also,

Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD.

And,

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

Nowhere in the memo or its conclusions does it say that Iraq had no WMD. Nowhere in the memo or its conclusions does it say intelligence was being fabricated to indicate that Iraq had WMD. Where's the smoking gun?

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Politics” Sunday, Jun 26 2005 12:10 PM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

Linkedin.com Reaches 3 Million Users

While my own network at linkedin.com is only 88 direct people and 1.7 million by the fourth degree, last night they signed up their 3 millionth user.

Linkedin is a service that allows you to network with your trusted colleagues and friends as a way to help you get referrals for either jobs or businesses. I've been working at reconnecting with folks I've worked with up to twenty years ago. It's amazing how many email addresses you can find when you have archives going back to the mid-90's, but most of those addresses are bogus. If it wasn't for google, I'd have a hard time finding some people.

I have not yet convinced Misty to make use of Linkedin to stay connected with her friends in nursing, and my dad is too deep in the throes of the infamous bar exam to spend time on it, but some of my colleagues have picked it up and run with it.

I like Linkedin, though. It's already found me a couple of job opportunities and referrals that I liked.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Business” Friday, Jun 24 2005 06:55 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Kelo et al v. City of New London

The Supreme Court has given the government permission to use eminent domain powers to seize homes and businesses for private development. This 5-4 decision by the court will up the ante in the eminent domain debate. The court's reasoning?

“The city has carefully formulated an economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including—but by no means limited to—new jobs and increased tax revenue,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

All it takes to steal my neighbor's property is a business plan? Previous precedent required evidence of a blighted neighborhood to allow this sort of a taking. Now, as Justice O'Connor warns, it has been widened:

“Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random,” Justice O'Connor wrote. “The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

There are prominent examples of that in Las Vegas already, and in Oregon similar kinds of takings due to zoning were combatted with Measure 37:

the owner of private real property is entitled to receive just compensation when a land use regulation is enacted after the owner or a family member became the owner of the property if the regulation restricts the use of the property and reduces its fair market value.

Will the Supreme Court come along and throw out Measure 37 as well? Will it take a national constitutional amendment to set the limits on what the government can take? I will be interesting to see what the Castle Coalition says about this new development.

Update: I'm adding this to the Beltway Traffic Jam.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Politics” Thursday, Jun 23 2005 09:17 AM  |  Permalink  |  2 comments  |  No trackbacks

Flag Day

Today in 1777 the Continental Congress approved the Stars and Stripes as the national flag. However, it's first use as an American battle flag was (probably) not until September 11th, 1777. Remember that Francis Scott Key didn't write his song about the flag, then called the “Star-Spangled Banner” until mid-way through the War of 1812, quite a bit later.

My favorite flag is the Gadsden Flag, with the snake and the legend “Don't Tread on Me.” A slightly different flag was used by the Culpepper Minutemen who added the slogan “Liberty or Death.” The version pictured above has been flying at our home (along with the modern US flag) since the 2003 Independence Day barbecue…

You can find more early American Flag clip art here.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “General” Tuesday, Jun 14 2005 08:22 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Poker Spammers Return

I don't know if it's because I've been on a hiatus, but the Poker Spammers woke up last night and tried to attack this blog. I'm deleting unapproved moderated comments from these guys about once every ten minutes. I don't know why they use such obviously fake email addresses and try to only comment on old postings. That will never work with the moderation settings I've enabled here.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Jun 9 2005 07:53 AM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

Online Coalition Comments to the FEC

I just signed the Online Coalition's comments letter to the FEC. I encourage others to do the same.

The main part of the letter:

The electorate is best served when the Commission crafts rules that remove actual corruption while encouraging more participation, opinions and choices to permeate the democratic process.

It is in this spirit and for the reasons stated below that the Commission should move forward with its proposal to include the term “paid advertisements on the Internet” under the definition of “public communication,” to extend the protections afforded to volunteers to include individuals and groups of individuals, and to treat certain online publications as falling under the “media exemption” rule.

Keep the Internet free of government intervention.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Politics” Thursday, Jun 2 2005 08:11 AM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks