Google is now available via IPv6:

% host ipv6.google.com
ipv6.google.com is an alias for ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:0:2001::68
ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:0:1001::68

Try it!  It looks like they are advertising 2001:4860::/32 from Hurricane Electric, Tiscali, and HotNIC.  Traceroutes also indicate they're hooked into Equinix Ashburn.  The PeeringDB entry is out of date, though:

We do not currently peer IPV6 routes.

Not anymore…

I was checking out the Beijing 2008 official Olympics site, today, and noticed it took longer than normal to resolve.  At first, I thought - ok, it's in China, so 250-300ms latency hit is going to be normal.  Well, yes and no:

% host en.beijing2008.cn
en.beijing2008.cn is an alias for www.o.a.sohu.com.
www.o.a.sohu.com is an alias for www.beijing2008.cn.chinacache.net.
www.beijing2008.cn.chinacache.net is an alias for www.beijing2008.cn.cnc.chinacache.net.
www.beijing2008.cn.cnc.chinacache.net is an alias for www.beijing2008.cn.edgesuite.net.
www.beijing2008.cn.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1532.g.akamai.net.
a1532.g.akamai.net has address 72.247.238.211
a1532.g.akamai.net has address 72.247.238.224

Yep, you read it right, five CNAMEs.  To make matters worse, sohu.com and chinacache.net's nameservers are all located in China.  If you have even the slightest idea of how DNS works, it should be apparent that this setup is just a tad inefficient.

Sure, eventually the content comes from a regional Akamai cache, if you can deal with the initial page load time of a couple seconds, even on a 10GbE link.

China's once again showing their technological superiority!  This is going to be a fun Olympics.

The east coast went from being -0500 GMT to -0400 GMT, this morning.  Neither of my atomic clocks are accurate, now.  One advanced the time correctly, but also advanced the date six days in the future.  The other one failed to change the time.

As a result, I woke up an hour late :-(

Here's a fun one.

I've got my Motorola S9 headphones paired with both my Nokia and BlackBerry phones.  The Nokia supports the handsfree profile, while the BlackBerry supports A2DP, AVRCP, and handsfree profiles.

If I'm playing music via my BlackBerry, and receive an email on my Nokia, the Nokia activates the handsfree feature on the headphones, and causes the BlackBerry to pause the current track.

Took me by surprise, at first…

I saw an interesting-looking spider outside, so I took a photo of it.  Turns out it is a spiny orb-weaver:

I couldn't resist - I saw the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player at Best Buy for $50, so I bought it.  I needed to patch my kernel to get it to read UDF 2.50, but after that the included King Kong movie played fine with MPlayer.

Now, I need to keep an eye out for some HD-DVD titles on eBay.

I finally finished recomplicating my network with BGP confederations, recently.  Have a look at the BGP Conversion section.

It was just under eight months ago that I replaced the fan in my IBM T42 laptop.  Now, I found myself awaken this morning at 0651 to a grinding sound from across the room - the laptop fan is failing again!

You can listen to MP3s of it: here and here.

I really hate fans in computers.  They always cause problems for me, it seems.  I've had to ditch $400 video cards because of cheap $2 fans that aren't sold _anywhere_.  I think I'm just going to disable this thing with /proc/acpi/ibm/fan (or ecdump, whichever file works this week) and run the laptop in powersave mode.

</grumble>