I don't know yet what physicalsocketserver.cc does, but I have a sinking feeling it has nothing to do with an actual physical socket.

Sure, it's a joke. But it shouldn't be. Imagine a self-driving race car. Now there's a 20% project.

http://www.nascar.com/video/none/none/120331/cup-mar-google/

"Given the Dunning-Kruger effect, don't follow your dreams as you are unlikely to achieve your unrealistic expectations given your current skill level." – http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872778

Note to self: use this in perf for somebody I don't like. :)

Hmm, maybe not.

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/26/first-gigabit-wi-fi-routers-ready-to-launch/

I'm generally interested in Gigabit wifi routers since, you know, I'm working on an ISP which does a gigabit, and your wifi can't keep up. I expect this to be a fairly critical market perception problem (because people will go to speedtest.net and say "I'm not getting a gigabit!", not so much because it'll be actually slow).

Also, the first comment at the bottom of the article: "If it can't broadcast from one side of my house to the other, I don't give a ** how fast it is."

The commenter makes a good point there - that reliable signal is better than a supposedly super fast connection.

I started reading RFC 5389, the STUN protocol, and as a matter of fact, in response to your Request for Comments, I do have a Comment or two. It goes like this: Holy cow, that's probably the most spectacularly overdesigned trivial protocol I've ever seen.

What STUN actually does is receive a UDP packet from a client, then tell the client what his external IP address is (in case he's behind a NAT). How could that be hard, you ask?

Well, they have whole sections about how to heuristically guess whether a particular packet is STUN or not, when you have multiple protocols multiplexed on the same port. As if there was some kind of port number shortage.

Also, they have a 12-bit method id and a 2-bit class id, formatted like this: mm:mmmC:mmmC:mmmm. Yes, that's right, the class id is two bits scattered in the middle of the method id. But that's okay, because there's only one method, namely #1. Yes. And (2^12)-1 reserved method numbers, just in case.

...

Not to be outdone, the TR-069 standards people made STUN mandatory, so the server can send the client a UDP message telling it to please initiate a new TCP session back to the (not behind a NAT) server. Ok, makes sense. But what goes in the UDP message, you ask? Why, it's a full HTTP/1.1 request jammed in a UDP packet, with an URL path, a query string, three URL parameters, and a few headers, including a timestamp (which must be strictly increasing), a random id, a nonce, and an authenticator calculated from all of the above using an md5 checksum. All to make sure nobody can forge a "please check in with the server" request, which, in terms of information content, is literally zero bytes long. And don't get me started about their need for a timestamp, a random id, and a nonce.

Starting to suspect that my cube-mate and I might be the same person. We're never actually here at the same time. Also, how come I'm only ever at work lately in afternoons/evenings? That's kind of suspicious. I think I might be doing it just so I can have a whole double-desk to myself.

Neil Stephenson on the singularity:

"""My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater."""

http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor