Readers are interacting online in our blogs, forums, and articles. We present a sampling of their comments here unedited and in their own words.

on our website . . .

IPv6 Urgency

With the implementation of NAT (Network Address Translation) in most networks, I don't understand the urgency to move to IPV6.
—from "It's 2009. Do You Know Where Your IPv6 Addresses Are?"

Author Mel Beckman replies: As I pointed out in the article, the widespread adoption of NAT back in 2000 is what put off the originally scheduled IPv4 address space exhaustion, which would have happened in 2005. NAT let organizations conserve IP addresses by hiding the bulk of their IP address usage behind firewalls with private IP numbers, masking this usage increase.

But Internet growth does not come from existing organizations and applications, but from new ones. Third-world countries are streaming onto the Internet, and each new site needs at least a handful of public IP addresses. New applications and devices—cell phones, cloud computing, etc.—are chewing through address space as well. This isn't just conjecture. You can actually watch IPv4 addresses being consumed at Geoff Huston's "Daily IPv4 Address Depletion Status Report," linked here and at the end of the article.

There have been some attempts to use double-NAT to slow the rate of IPv4 consumption. Something called "provider NAT" extends the existing IPv4 address by stealing bits from the IP port number fields. That has proven to be hideously complex and mostly unworkable. Don't forget all the pain traditional NAT causes either. As a practicing network engineer, more than half of my workload is dealing with NAT issues. I'd much rather replace that tedium with the nice, clean, fresh IP addressing scheme of IPv6.

Customize Your Favorite Web Pages

Just wanted to draw your attention to Chickenfoot from MIT. Similar idea, I suppose developed with Greasemonkey as a model, but with some very nice enhancements. They confess to being less strict about security, and therefore perhaps susceptible to the same issues earlier versions of Greasemonkey had.

But those enhancements:

• sidebar editing - at the top of the sidebar you edit your script, and at the bottom of the sidebar you see your ouput and errors. Change your script and hit the run button to see the effect immediately. Can't get started? Select "Record actions" and work the web page you want to automate - your clicks and typing will be recorded as a base script which you can then edit. You do have to be patient with the editor, though, it is clunky.
• Chickenfoot commands to augment and intermix with the full Javascript language - common tasks become almost natural language. Example:
  
  

  go("google.com");
  enter(document.getElementById('q'),"chickenfoot mit");
  click("i'm feeling lucky");
  

• local file i/o! - Javascript has traditionally been sandboxed in the browser for security. But Chickenfoot permits reading/writing text files on your PC. I'm not saying it's SQL, I'm not saying it isn't a potential vulnerability.
• a button to package your Chickenfoot script as a self-contained, distributable Firefox extension - I haven't tried that yet.

I started as a Greasemonkey user, but write all my new stuff in Chickenfoot. It's simply easier and more powerful. Either way, you can't beat the customization.

Nice article, Scott. Your explorations are among the best things on this site.
—from "Browser Scripting with Greasemonkey"

in our blogs . . .

Employees: Asset or Liability?

What price application knowledge? My company has just made several experienced developers redundant. They left taking vital knowledge of an extremely complex integrated application suite with them. In the next upturn, anyone coming in from outside will find it increasingly difficult to pick up enough knowledge to be able to make changes without screwing up another area of the application.

The problem is that we're seen as a resource with a cost, not as an asset with a value.
—from "Are You a Commodity"

in our forums…

Writing PDFs from RPG

I've been writing PDFs from within RPG for some time now using the excellent examples from JPL as a basis. I've just tried to introduce the rotation function and I'd really appreciate a bit of help as to why I cannot get it to work properly. The code below is an extract from my code which successfully prints Rotate 1 correctly at an angle, but totally ignores the instruction to print Rotate 2. It then goes on to happily print further text without rotation. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as always.
—check out the great answers this poster received in our RPG forum

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