“Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available within a few hours.”

The “suspension” started early in the morning, and didn’t go back to normal until morning the next day. I wouldn’t consider myself Facebook-crazy, but I had something to do, and I was upset about the denial of service. Yes, I checked it was just my account (and perhaps others whom I don’t know about), not some major outage that affected the entire Facebook populace.

That’s how important Facebook has become. But I guess we all know that already. (And I’m sure Google can’t be very happy that netizens spend more time on Facebook than they do on Google services.)

That’s also how the Internet has become. I remember one of Sun’s slogans: The network is the computer. Now, I suspect John Gage, who is credited for coming up with that phrase, probably wasn’t thinking so much about the Internet. But hey, is is more correct than ever today. The Internet is the network.

Living on the network is one of those things I’ve had some reluctance to adapt to. I’m fine with using the network. But to store my “everything” in the cloud, that’s a different ball game altogether. That’s the reason while everyone’s very happy with Hotmail, Gmail, and whatever other online email service that has sprouted all over the Internet the last decade… I still prefer to run my own IMAP server. I want to own my data, and have control over my data. Physically.

I use Gmail too. But it’s more like an INBOX to receive email… everything that needs filing… well, those go into my own IMAP server. Funny enough, if you talk about reliability, I suspect Gmail could have better backup strategy, availability, etc… than I can afford to, or be bothered to build. Perhaps I feel better that the “destiny” of the mail archive lies with me… not some virtual cloud.

But the social web today promises to upset all that. The Internet, or the Web, is becoming the fabric of society. While I can still run my own IMAP server, it doesn’t make sense to run my own Facebook.

That’s how more things are going to be headed: Everything’s on the cloud. I wonder if something will ever be done to satisfy the individual’s need to own and protect their own data. Or, at least to retain some sort of archive. You know, like, how can I backup my Facebook account?

So, back to my Facebook account problem. My account wasn’t banned. It had become unavailable due to site maintenance. It seems insanely long in this Internet-age for a site maintenance to last 24 hours. I hope Facebook learns a thing or two from Google. I never had my Google account unavailable for that long. (*touch wood*)

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Google has thus far been positioning itself as the good guy. Search is their core business, but they give you plenty of things for free, with few services that actually require payment. They shook up the free email service by offering gigantic email storage with their Gmail service. Since then, they’ve expanded to do all sorts of things: browser, operating system (both phone and PC), etc.

Few of these services actually add to their profit bottom line, at least not directly. Do you wonder what Google is up to?

What if, one day, Google says, uh oh, Gmail now costs $1 per month per GB. What now? Many services depend on a Gmail account now. Their Chrome OS beta, for example, requires a Gmail account to login. Yes, a Gmail account to login to your “own computer”. What if Gmail becomes not free?

Don’t you think that with Google setting up a public DNS and getting everyone to use their DNS, they will start to learn too many things about you? What about Google Latitude tracking your movements? Hmm. You realize, Google probably knows more information about you than any other Internet organization.

Then, what about Google kicking up a fuss with the Chinese government, and then getting the US National Security Agency to beef up their company defenses?

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The target audience for this game is quite different from that of SimCity. The background knowledge required is different. Although SimCity also requires you to know something about city planning, economics, etc, much of it is really common sense (at least for the kind of audience who would play SimCity).

In myPlanNet, you really need to know broad fundamentals on various network technologies, everything from data networking, mobile phone networks, broadband, etc. If not, then you had better have a great passion to learn about these things. Apart from just having fun, education seems to be the goal of myPlanNet, because there is plenty of explanations, tutorials, and illustrations. But, of course, if you are not interested in these things at all, you’re not going to like the game.

There are plenty of thing to learn. You’d see how service providers organize their infrastructure into core, aggregation and access layers. There are also edge layers as well as the “service delivery centre”. It’s not very different from how enterprise data networks are built. You’ll see what devices fit in where, and what devices are required to provision what kind of services. You’ll learn what sort of technologies lead to what opportunities, or basically what depends on what other things.

There are three starting points you can choose in the game: 1) As a landline telco; 2) As a cable TV company; 3) As a mobile phone operator. Whichever company type you begin with, you’d soon have to acquire technologies and build out services of the other type of companies which you didn’t choose to begin with, and ultimately continue progressing toward the same goal of reaching the medianet age.

The real life is not different. Look at the SingTel and StarHub (I hesitate to add M1). They both provide landline phones (although limited deployment for StarHub), digital voice, mobile, fixed and mobile broadband, pay TV, etc. Networks are converging, and whether you start out as a landline phone company or a cable TV company, you’d all end up doing the same thing.

There’s no StarHub or SingTel to compete with in this game. But I think the game will give you an appreciation of what StarHub and SingTel do behind-the-scenes and under-the-hood.

The game is not too challenging. Actually you would find it more difficult to go bankrupt (if at all possible) than with SimCity. My guess is that Cisco wants this to be an education tool. You aren’t going to learn a lot if you get stuck with economics, even though there are some simple economics that you have to manage.

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Now, I see my name published in the /etc/services file distributed with some operating systems, such as like Snow Leopard. On other Unix systems, perhaps only the port assignment information is listed without any name or contact detail. Nevertheless, the whole thing is listed verbatim at IANA’s port number listing.

This was for a project I was working on in 1996/1997. That’s like over 12 years ago. It had a promising value proposition. Interesting that today there is still not something like this idea implemented commercially. The reality is that what works well as a research idea may not work out on the commercial front. Things like IPv6 is still struggling with real-world adoption, multicast on the Internet is essentially non-existant.

Yeah, there is not much point in this post, except to remind myself that there is a piece of my handiwork, even if it doesn’t amount to much, that’s now part of the Internet.

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This is not the traditional Monopoly game. It’s actually based on Monopoly City, which is yet another variant of the famed Monopoly game that Hashbro launched this year at the Nuremberg Toy Fair. Still, for all the fans of Monopoly, this will be an interesting game.

They had so many fans that the game servers crashed on day one of launch. Apart from the usual bugs, there were many problems due to overloading of servers. Many users simply could not play the game at all because the servers were too slow to respond or did not respond at all.

So with all the bugs, problems and complaints, Hashbro decided to restart the game. It came up again in its 2nd life at 6:23AM (GMT time) today. In a couple of 10s of minutes, the game servers started to act up again. Many people complained about registration problems. But so far, at least as I write this now, the problems of overloading are nowhere as serious as they were the first time around.

If you’re wondering how I know the time it came back online: Well, I made use of a little URL monitoring script I already had running at work, and I got it to check on the Monopoly City Streets. Yeah, ahem, for the benefit of colleagues who want to know when to “get in”…

The first time around, there were many non-technical problems with the game play too. For example, streets were too cheap. Everyone easily bought up all the streets so that late entrants to the game had nothing to buy and were disadvantaged.

Building a large online multiuser game is really a big challenge. This is particularly so when it is really difficult to estimate user load and conduct realistic load test. In a game like Monopoly City Streets, it may even be difficult to work out the right game rules, have some reasonable protection against cheating, and figure out the right numbers (e.g. price of street, number of streets) for the game to work.

Let’s hope Monopoly City Streets works right this second time around.

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RFC 2324 started out originally as an April Fool’s joke. IETF (which stands for the Internet Engineering Task Force), is known for its publication of many humorous documents on April Fool’s day. There are other examples, such as A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers (RFC 1149), which describes how pigeons can be used to carry Internet traffic. This is also one of my favourites, and for your information, it was successfully demonstrated too.

RFC 2324 is a proper document which describes and specifies the protocol accurately and completely enough to create a real, non-fictional implementation of the protocol. It is not just an April Fool’s joke. Emacs has an extension to handle HTCPCP protocol, and Mozilla patches have been submitted to implement the browser handling of this protocol. HTCPCP specifies useful response types such as “406 Not Acceptable” when the coffee pot is unable to process a brewing requests (e.g. when Half-and-Half milk is requested but is not available), and “418 I’m a teapot” when a coffee brewing request is sent to a teapot.

Some years ago, I came across a write-up about an interesting program someone wrote. I can’t seem to find it anymore, but anyway here’s as much as I remember of it. The story was about how some computer researchers at a certain research facility had a pantry somewhere in the building. It was some distance from where their office was. When they needed their dose of coffee, they would go to the pantry. If they were in luck, there would be some coffee left in the coffee pot. But if otherwise, they would have to brew a new pot. Not a big problem. It takes a while, so they would head back to their office in the meanwhile and come back a little later. The trouble is that when they came back later, there was no guarantee that there would be any coffee in the coffee pot, because anyone could have come by to help themselves to the coffee.

So these ingenious people setup a camera, and wrote a simple X-Windows program to grab images from the camera and display it in a tiny window on their screen. (Yes, it was long ago enough that X-Windows was king, and there weren’t such things as web cameras.) This way, they could monitor the coffee brewing progress and check the status of the coffee level remotely.

These coffee and coffee related things may sound rather hilarious, but many computer and Internet geeks are really serious about their caffeinated drinks and their attendant paraphernalia.

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