peter kirstein got the jon postel award today. he got a kind of half of a crystal globe/ or fishball, as steve crocker called it, and the usual line: the money is in the mail. peter kirstein brought the internet to europe, so to say. his group helped 1973 to make the first international link to the arpanet. see: the early uk internet

the stuff is kind of hard to get into the head. more than 60 working groups (wgs) are talking about specific problems: routing, gateways, protocols, standards that are in the draft and so on. ipv6, dns, security, multimedia, enum ...

the dream to feed a toaster with bits and bytes is not easy. there is no way anymore to trig a lever and switch to a new protocol or transporting system as it was still possible 20 years ago with introducing tcp and dns.

listened to a talk about the outline of a new one: dccp, datagram congestion control protocol - something that lies between udp and tcp, they say. somehow they were talking about the goal to have a protocol that allows unreliable flow of junkets of data so that it would be more suitable for applications such as streaming media. if it ever comes true it will not be before next year that the final call will be out.

the only interesting thing for me was to watch the process. wouldn't get more anyhow. there was a lot of criticism and suggestion to look more deeper into that and this, but i guess the most important statement was: the whole stuff would change more of tcp than of udp. but to do so, it must be a lot simpler and with less features - even they look and sound nice, the big heads add.

tonight the jon postel award established by the internet society will be handed over ( 57 ietf meeting)

its pretty easy to get in there, so anyone with interest : 19.30, hall d, austria center vienna

the chair is steve crocker, but i am not sure if he is here. hope so. he is the guy who initiated rfc, internet's way of establishing standards about host software and "associates the placement of the initial ARPANET sites at research institutions to the fact that the ARPANET was ground-breaking research.

'During the initial development of the Arpanet, there was simply a limit as to how far ahead anyone could see and manage. The IMPs were placed in cooperative ARPA R&D sites with the hope that these research sites would figure out how to exploit this new communication medium.'" (the history of arpa leading up to arpanet)