Journalism

Postel Award goes to Dr Jianping Wu

by kierenmccarthy on August 2, 2010

Dr Wu - Postel Award winnerMissed this last week: the Internet Society (ISOC) has handed out its annual Postel Award, which honours those who have made outstanding contributions to, broadly, the Internet.

The winner this year – awarded at the IETF meeting in Maastricht on Wed 28 Jul – was Chinese technologist Dr Jianping Wu (left). Dr Wu received the award for “the pioneering role he has played in advancing Internet technology, deployment, and education in China and Asia Pacific over the last twenty years”.

Dr Wu developed the China Education and Research Network (CERNET), the first Internet backbone network in China. It has since become the world’s largest national academic network. He has also been building a large-scale native IPv6 backbone in China. IPv6 is a crucial but complex expansion of the current Internet system and it is large-scale rollouts that are making it possible to shift the Internet onto these new networks. [click to continue…]

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Wordpress and Thesis: your upgrades are driving me mad

by kierenmccarthy on July 12, 2010

I love Wordpress – the software that this blog runs on. And I love Thesis – a clever piece of software that works with Wordpress to provide all sorts of clever customisations.

But the combination of them is driving me nuts at the moment. In particular, the fact that they keep bloody updating both too frequently, and each time something goes wrong with one or the other or the combination of both and then I am forced to trawl through techy posts from people who *believe* they are being clear but really aren’t.

A few months ago, I abandoned an upgrade from Thesis 1.5 to 1.7 because it destroyed the look of the site and made it unreadable (and this despite me following upgrade instructions carefully). Of course, lots of other people had the same problem and so “guides” started appearing online. I tried these guides, and it fix some issues but also created new ones. So I stepped back down to 1.5 – and found I had lost some of things I previously had.

I decided, unwisely, to try again tonight after a break. Same problem – mostly with the menu. So I decided to leapfrog 1.7 and try the beta of 1.8 which, amid all the wonderful reasons as to why you should upgrade, also noted it had fixed an issue with navigation menus. This I did and the site all appeared great. Except now the options within 1.8 don’t actual change the site – so now I have two useless menu items at the top of my blog that I don’t want and can’t get rid of.

AT THE SAME TIME as these troublesome upgrades, Wordpress has put out at least three upgrades in the past few months. I had also held off upgrading for a while because of the problems I’d have in the past. But, I had used the updated versions (on new sites) and they were better, so I bit the bullet and upgraded. And then upgraded again. And then upgraded again. And now I see Wordpress is urging me to upgrade a fourth time to version 3.0.

Will people PLEASE STOP PUMPING OUT NEW UPGRADES! You are turning them out too fast. You are causing people to have to constantly go back to their site and fiddle about with it, and you keep causing problems with other plugins that aren’t upgraded every bloody month. I know you think you need to do this but you don’t!

I know you think that new features that enable the user to upgrade some plugins with just a click mean that upgrades are easy and so you can do more of them – you are wrong. It is a royal pain in the arse and you are causing me and many thousands of other people alot of grief. Stop it. We use your software because it means we *don’t* have to fiddle around with code and files.

Store up your great ideas and new tweaks and resist the urge to keep banging them out like over-excited schoolboys. Please, a maximum of once a year. It really, really is not worth doing more than that. I know you think it is but can I please assure you that it isn’t.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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ICANN’s two missing accountability clauses

June 25, 2010

Earlier this year, the organization that oversees the domain name system, ICANN, saw the first use of its Independent Review Process – its highest level of review for decisions that affect billions.
The IRP decided conclusively against ICANN. The issue was whether the organization had been right to deny the application for dot-xxx as a new [...]

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ICANN Day 3: Good news all around

June 24, 2010

I’ll be honest: I didn’t go to many Wednesday sessions at ICANN Brussels. At least not physically. The remote participation tools mean that, unless you want to actually raise a point at the microphone, you can settle yourself down somewhere more comfortable and follow events on your laptop (and even your iPhone with the Adobe [...]

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Why ICANN doesn’t need to go back to the GAC over dot-xxx

June 23, 2010

This Friday, it looks as though the ICANN Board will follow the clear conclusions drawn by its independent review and approve dot-xxx.
Given the importance of the first use of the review process, the importance of the Board being seen to be accountable and the fact that the community was pretty unanimous in recent public [...]

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ICANN Day 2: The bells! The bells!

June 22, 2010

Nothing aids careful discussion and debate more than loud repetitive ringing. So thank you the Square Meeting Centre in Brussels for introducing not one but two ringing systems that go off every 30 minutes: a fire alarm and the bells from the nearby cathedral.
Despite this auditory assistance, the second (third) day of the ICANN meeting [...]

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ICANN Day 1: Was it – dare we say it – actually fun?

June 21, 2010

After a slumbering, almost tedious, first day, the meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) came alive today for its official opening.
Gone were the musical extravaganzas of the previous two meetings (a shame?), but CEO Rod Beckstrom made sure there were fireworks by giving a defiant speech to his organization’s critics. [...]

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Beckstrom: You are not a pipe

June 21, 2010

ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom gave a defiant opening speech at the opening of the organization’s meeting in Brussels.
Answering accusations that the organization is ignoring its own accountability processes, that the staff and Board have insufficient checks on their work, and that he himself had overstepped the mark in comments he made to governments at [...]

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ICANN Day 0: A lot of yakking, a little movement

June 20, 2010

Strolling through Parc de Bruxelles at 8.30am, with barely a soul in sight, and only the occasional car on the road, I couldn’t help but wonder whether to go back to the hotel and have a lie-in. It’s a Sunday after all. Even the outside of the giant see-through jigsaw that is the Mont des [...]

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The ICANN Board by the ICANN Board

June 2, 2010

Self-evaluation paints picture of Board at odds with itself
A self-appraisal of the ICANN Board has just been posted on the organization’s website.
In it, Board members rate 89 different measures of their own performance according to a seven-measure rating from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. Unfortunately, despite plenty of figures in the documents, there is [...]

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