It was late February when I eventually gave in to continuous persuasion of my friend and colleague Cole Harris and decided to start experimenting with iPhone applications. He had been on the AppStore for some time and has several successful applications and had given me some tips. Man what a month of March it turned out to be.
The first question was what to develop and my first answer was to develop an April Fool day application. Which I developed but never uploaded. This application provided me with significant insight in to iPhone capabilities.
I had rich embedded devlopment background (how rich :)). I knew C/C++/Java rather well but had never done any ObjC or GUI related development. One and half month later my first application has been uploaded for Apple’s review and I am nervously waiting to see what happens to it.
As soon as Apple approves the application, I will use this space to discuss design and tools used to create the application.
Arcade bowling’s description says: “Stuck in another meeting with the “Bobs”? Tired of filing out endless TPS Report Cover Sheets? blah blah Then look no further. I did not know that 3 year old kids had to file TPS report. At least not in my household. This game seems to be just appropriate for 3 yr old kids. Read the rest of this entry »
Bounce On which is in top 25 free apps category. It is graphics rich game which uses accelerometer smartly. The goal is the same old get the ball to its destination.
Read the rest of this entry »
Can you add 2+2 or 5+3? Wait till you try BrainTuner from http://gengarstudios.com/. It is an absolutely addictive application where you continuously challenge yourself in game of maths trying to beat your previous time and in rush to beat timing you make mistakes answering these simple questions.
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GSM Association is reporting number of HSDPA devices launches in last three years. It is happening a lot faster than anything ever seen. The first HSDPA service was launched in Oct 2005 and we already have >600 devices in the market.
HSDPA Users
In the same period EDGE had only 300 devices in the market. This just shows the vendor’s confidence in HSDPA.
A couple of news to report on IPv4 Exhaustion.
As of September 2008, Geoff Huston of APNIC predicts with detailed simulations an exhaustion of the unallocated IANA pool in February 2011.[1] Tony Hain of networking equipment manufacturer Cisco Systems predicts the exhaustion date to be around November 2010.[2] These predictions are derived from current trends, and do not take into account any last chance rush to acquire the last available addresses. After the IANA pool exhaustion, during 11 months each individual regional Internet registry (RIR) will be able to supply with their last assigned addresses. These dates lie within a depreciation time of five to ten years of network equipment that is currently being acquired.
September 2008: THE RIRs have agreed to a global policy that when the IANA pool would reach a threshold of 5 remaining /8 address blocks these last /8s will be immediately allocated to each RIR. These last /8s are then anticipated to be distributed according to a different allocation policy. This simulation assumes that these /8s will be allocated under a different policy framework than that used at present.
Unstrung is reporting that Adobe and Apple are finally working on flash version for iPhone. Hightime. As an at times grunmpy and at times proud owner of iPhone, I will love the idea of seeing flash on the iPhone. No more need to have special one off clients (e.g. youtube) for dealing with flash enabled web-content. Reading the Unstrung report, it seems this effort may significantly enhance the Apple SDK which other developers may be able to use.
Good luck to Adobe, Apple and all the iPhone hackers out there.
The following are major authorities involved in IPv6 standardization effort:
- IETF is the standardization body for all IP related protocols.
- Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers among other things oversees allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 addresseses
- American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) for North America
- RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) for Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia
- Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) for Asia and the Pacific region
- Latin American and Caribbean Internet Address Registry (LACNIC) for Latin America and the Caribbean region
- African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC) for Africa
Those of us who had not looked at IPv6 closely, thought that perhaps NAT should solve interoperability between IPv6 and IPv4. We all thought that there will just be a NAT box with minimal ALG between the two domains which will take care of any interoperability problem there may be. But it turns out to be rather simplistic assumption. Once we started looking deeper, it quickly became clear that NAT is a non-starter. It can and will still be deployed for certain specialized functions. However, this is really not a solution for a large scale ISP. Some of the issues with NAT as interoperability and transition strategy are analyzed in RFC4966.
To start with NAT has some of the same issues as discussed in IPv4 Exhaustion page of this website. But, IPv6 has many more issues which IPv4 NAT does not. This is due to address format differences. For example, when an IPv4 host sitting behind a NAT box needs to start an IPv4 connection it knows exactly how to do it. Now if we have an IPv6 only host sitting behind a NAT trying to start a connection to IPv4 only host, the networking stack of the host does not know how to start a connection.
There is a lot of information about advantages of IPv6 across the web. This list summarizes these advantages:
- Much bigger IP address space: IPv6 addresses are 126 bits and can address a lot-lot-lot more addresses then IPv4 addresses can.
- Better IP options design: The IPv4 options were extremely inefficient to use for routers. The result was that the options were rarely ever used. IPv6 has a lot better options design making it easier for routers.
- Better Security (May be?): IP address space in IPv6 is much larger making IP address. IPv6 address can is simply not possible. IPSec was designed with IPv6 in mind. However, using IPSec in application domain is likely to have the same issues as IPSec with IPv4. It is believed that the IPSec will be limited to VPN. However, perhaps the biggest security implication of IPv6 will be on current security model. At present most home and enterprise networks use NAT as the first defense against intrusion. With IPv6, we will have enough IP addresses and will no longer need NAT. We will need something more complex then NAT for IP firewall for even home networks.
- IPv6 provides better stateless auto-configuration of IPv6 hosts connected to router. However, the hosts can also use stateful DHCPv6. The stateful auto-configuration may be better in several respects but for an end user they are not going to see any difference. They connect their hosts to the network and it has an IP address, routing information, etc. and are connected to the network.
- Mobile IPv6: The Mobile IPv6 has route optimization built-in, avoiding current triangular routing issues in the Mobile IPv4. This paper on MIPv6 provides a good details on MIPv6.
Various Blogs/Wikies from around the Web
- The Wikipedia Page about IPv6: You should start from here. As of Oct ‘07, some of the information here is dated.
- This Ars Technica article is an excllent information source on IPv6. It covers various aspects of the IPv6. However, the IPv4 exhaustion date on this page has some bad assumptions as discussed on IPv4 Exhaustion Analysis page of this site.
- Go6.net has a wiki styled page on IPv6 covering several IPv6 related issues. The information here is uneven.
- This PPT presentation provides good overview of MIPv6.
