Simon Arlott

A week ago I was in Hoylake, England to watch the Scottish team compete. I took plenty of photos and video of the event (with multiple cameras). As usual France, The Netherlands and Germany had most of the top 10 pilots. Maggie did very well against many of the German pilots. Fortunately at least one Scottish pilot (#38) did manage to beat Kevin (#42) who moved to the England team last year.

I don't have any GPS track logs from a pilot this time as I needed it myself to track the time of all the video cameras. The large blob of red and orange in the bottom right is the caravan area where I took all the race photos:

My local ASDA has stopped selling their Smart Price soap and the next cheapest alternative is Simple Pure Soap. There's no "Value" soap in Tesco either so I had to try the "Simple" soap. It costs four times as much and smells awful.

Over 300 people from the UK Internet community got together to mark the end of IPv4 at the London Transport Museum and promote the adoption of IPv6.

Ed Vaizey MP did an introductory speech followed by an review of IPv4 by Prof Peter Kirstein (UCL) and IPv6 by Simon McCalla (Nominet). After a short panel debate on IPv6 readiness there was a mock handover of 185/8 from IANA to RIPE NCC. Finally, Gary Feldman performed his RIPE55 song "The day the routers died" (a parody of American Pie).

I took a few photos and some video. The Internet survived unharmed (although I did turn it off at one point, sorry if you were using it at the time).

Based on an idea from a NANOG post I created a script to walk an ip6.arpa zone and list all IPv6 hosts.

It works surprisingly well:

$ ./ip6dnswalk.py 2620:0:1C00::/40
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0003 www.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0004 login.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0005 hphotos-sjc1.v6.fbcdn.net.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0006 apps.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0007 m.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0008 register.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cfe:face:b00c:0000:0000:0009 check6.v6.facebook.com.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0000 pr01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0001 pr02.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0002 bb01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0003 bb02.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0004 pr02.pao1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0005 pr03.pao1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0006 bb01.pao1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0007 bb02.pao1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0008 ae0.pr01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:0009 ae0.bb01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:000c ae4.bb01.sjc1.tfbnw.net.
2620:0000:1cff:dead:beef:0000:0000:000d ae2.bb01.pao1.tfbnw.net.

More details and a method of preventing this are in my ip6walk git repository.

Three different eBay sellers have all sold me USB Bluetooth adapters (at costs varying from very-cheap to brand-name-premium) with duplicate addresses*. I'm currently waiting for the third one to stop ignoring the law (and me) so that I can return the most recent purchase.

I was ready to give up and decide it was now impossible to buy genuine Bluetooth devices that comply with the Bluetooth Specification when I tried purchasing some Belkin adapters from Amazon, and it turns out that despite the increased cost these actually have unique addresses.

* Bluetooth adapters with duplicate addresses means that if you happen to be using your adapter within range of someone else who got theirs from the same manufacturer's batch, you'll get conflicts accessing devices because there will be two devices on the network with the same address. Avoid Dynamode and cheap unbranded devices.

Finally. It took an extra 17 days to work around BT's inadequate ordering system, and then another extra 10 days for BT to send out an engineer before they could discover that they needed to override their Dynamic Line (mis-)Management system in order to allow the upstream line rate to be 10000Kbps... for a few more hours. Followed by another 3 days for it to slowly automatically increase the speed because they're incompetent and unable to override the system. Additional delay provided by AAISP caching the line check result too aggressively.

A week ago I was in De Panne, Belgium to watch the Scottish team compete. I took plenty of photos and video of the event. Scotland didn't do too badly, even managing to beat a couple of other countries, but The Netherlands, France, and Germany had the top 10 pilots.

Based on GPS track logs it looks like I didn't actually walk to France on the Thursday as the course stopped short about 100 metres from the border:

Red parts are slow, green (turning to blue) parts are faster. The maximum speed was 38 MPH. The French border is the line perpendicular to the course at the bottom left.

Map data ©2004-2010 OpenStreetMap contributors.
OpenStreetMap data can be used freely under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Every cheap "Serial to USB" adapter I can find uses a PL2303 chip with active low signaling, which isn't the same as a real PC serial port. Fortunately FTDI sell real adapters. The US232B has 9V high, -9V low outputs and its inputs are open low at 0V.