Global Nerdy

File this under “It may be old, but it's new to me and it might be new to you”: over at the blog Modern Life is Rubbish, they've got an article that shows which countries have the most IP addresses per capita and which have the least.

Here's how the article's author did the math:

First of all, I obtained an IP address to country lookup list, which revealed the blocks assigned to each country – from this I was able to calculate the total number of IP addresses allocated to each country. I then divided that total figure by the country's population, giving an indication of the number of IPs available to that country per capita (person).

Here's a world map, color-coded by people per IP addresses. Green is fewest (best); red is highest (worst):

Let's look at the ten countries with the most IP addresses per capita. As you might guess, all these couuntries seem like pretty decent places to live. To find out more about each country, click on its flag or its name; you'll be taken to that country's entry in the CIA World Factbook.

1. Vatican City	10.5 IPs per person
2. United States	4.5 IPs per person
3. Canada	2.2 IPs per person
4. Iceland	2.0 IPs per person
5. Monaco	1.8 IPs per person
6. Gibraltar	1.7 IPs per person
7. Liechtenstein	1.51 IPs per person
8. Sweden	1.501 IPs per person
9. Finland	1.496 IPs per person
10. Australia	1.459 IPs per person

Now here are the 10 countries with the fewest IPs per capita. Unsurprisingly, most of these countries don't figure very heavily on most people's vacation lists. To find out more about each country, click on its flag or its name; you'll be taken to that country's entry in the CIA World Factbook.

195. Afghanistan	1,458 people per IP
196. Madagascar	1,514 people per IP
197. Guinea-Bissau	1,550 people per IP
198. Central African Republic	1972 people per IP
199. Burundi	3,278 people per IP
200. Myanmar	4,112 people per IP
201. Malawi	4,197 people per IP
202. Ethiopia	4,582 people per IP
203. Niger	58.139 people per IP
204. Democratic Republic of Congo	58.140 people per IP

In response to this entry, someone on Reddit posted this list of holders of class A address spaces, each address space representing about 16 million IP addresses:

  3/8   May 94   General Electric Company
  4/8   Dec 92   Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
  6/8   Feb 94   Army Information Systems Center
  8/8   Dec 92   Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
  9/8   Aug 92   IBM
 11/8   May 93   DoD Intel Information Systems
 12/8   Jun 95   AT&T Bell Laboratories
 13/8   Sep 91   Xerox Corporation
 15/8   Jul 94   Hewlett-Packard Company
 16/8   Nov 94   Digital Equipment Corporation
 17/8   Jul 92   Apple Computer Inc.
 18/8   Jan 94   MIT
 19/8   May 95   Ford Motor Company
 20/8   Oct 94   Computer Sciences Corporation
 21/8   Jul 91   DDN-RVN
 22/8   May 93   Defense Information Systems Agency
 25/8   Jan 95   UK Ministry of Defense                 (Updated - Jan 06)
 26/8   May 95   Defense Information Systems Agency
 28/8   Jul 92   DSI-North
 29/8   Jul 91   Defense Information Systems Agency
 30/8   Jul 91   Defense Information Systems Agency
 32/8   Jun 94   Norsk Informasjonsteknology
 33/8   Jan 91   DLA Systems Automation Center
 34/8   Mar 93   Halliburton Company
 35/8   Apr 94   MERIT Computer Network
 38/8   Sep 94   Performance Systems International
 40/8   Jun 94   Eli Lily and Company
 43/8   Jan 91   Japan Inet
 44/8   Jul 92   Amateur Radio Digital Communications
 45/8   Jan 95   Interop Show Network
 46/8   Dec 92   Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
 47/8   Jan 91   Bell-Northern Research
 48/8   May 95   Prudential Securities Inc.
 51/8   Aug 94   Deparment of Social Security of UK
 52/8   Dec 91   E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co., Inc.
 53/8   Oct 93   Cap Debis CCS
 54/8   Mar 92   Merck and Co., Inc.
 55/8   Apr 95   Boeing Computer Services

It figures Halliburton would be in the list.

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Unlike Om, Scoble, Kevin McDigg and the rest of the techno-pundits with bigger, more heavily-trafficked blogs than this one, we've got real work to do…real man's work. We'll have some articles posted tonight. Stay tuned!

A couple of people I know actually fell for this site, msfirefox.com, which purports to be a site announcing that Microsoft has purchased Firefox and is releasing it as Microsoft Firefox 2007…

I've got my hands full with a PS2, XBox 360, a handful of software projects and a life, so the Wii is not likely to be part of my hi-tech entertainment altar in the near future. There's another factor: aside from good looks, a quick wit and a bon vivant approach to life, I have also inherited this from my father: sweaty palms.

Given that the Wii's control — the Wiimote — is a motion-sensitive thing that you're encouraged to wield and movelike a sword, a fishing rod or gun, depending on the game, it comes with a strap that users are encouraged to wear in order to prevent it from accidentally being sent flying across the room. Ed Burnette points to a YouTube video demonstrating what happens when a sweaty-handed player loses his grip:

Nintendo has issued a safety bulletin that explains the proper use of the Wiimote's strap, complete with these rather airline-safety-card-like diagrams:

Included in the safety bulletin is this bit of sage advice:

Hold the Wii Remote firmly
and do not let go.

“Damn,” I can hear some Wii owners saying, “Now they tell me!”

Burnette suggests that Wii oweners might want to get their paws on Wiimote protective sleeves:

or perhaps the skid-proof glove:

Meanwhile, the jokers at the Penny Arcade webcomic suggest that it's some Wii users' lifestyle choices that are ruining their gaming experiences…

I'm sure we've mentioned it before, but in case you didn't know, both George and I worked at OpenCola. George was a biz dev guy, and I was both an user interface developer as well as the developer relations guy. George worked out of New York, while I started off in Toronto, moved to San Francisco to work with co-founder Cory Doctorow and then went back to Toronto after the San Fran office closed.

Globe and Mail technology writer Matthew Ingram recently posted an entry titled Toronto's OpenCola Lives On in Swarmcast. Swarmcast is a “swarming” technology created by Minneapolis-based developer and former OpenColan Justin Chapweske that does peer-to-peer swarm-based file serving in a manner that's conceptually similar to BitTorrent.

In the article, Ingram writes:

So why is BitTorrent a relatively well-known name and Swarmcast is not? Because the two took different approaches to commercializing their software. Bram Cohen chose the “open source” route and released the code for his software so that anyone could use or distribute it (so long as they didn’t charge money for it or claim it as their own). It quickly became the technology of choice for downloading everything from cracked software and illegally copied movies to pornography, although it was also used for distributing large files such as the various flavours of the Linux operating system. And that in turn got the attention of content owners.

Swarmcast, meanwhile, decided to focus on working behind the scenes with companies that would have an interest in distributing large amounts of content over the Internet — including distributing digital films to movie theatres. The company also helps power MLB.com, the major-league baseball service, which distributes huge quantities of video and audio to baseball fans. Not as sexy as doing deals with Hollywood movie studios, but not bad either.

It's nice to see that Justin and company are getting some deals, and it's also nice to see them getting some recognition as well.

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Here's a message in the browser tabs that takes advantages of “favicons” (you know, those icons for sites that show up in the address bar)…

Click the image to see the full message.

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(I wish I'd come up with the line I used in the title, but some guy at Reddit came up with it first.)

The actual headline at Dr. Dobb's Portal reads Developers Embrace Java, Drop Visual Basic, but the title of this entry sums up my opinion on the matter. But I'll go with the news first and then editorialize.

The recently-released results of an Evans Data Corporation of 430 developers indicate that:

• Use of pre-.NET Visual Basic is down 35% since the spring
• Use of Visual Basic .NET is down 26%

This news shouldn't be too surprising. The last pre-.NET version of Visual Basic, version 6.0 was released in 1998, back during my VB contract development days. The support window for it must be coming to a close, and my guess is that only a few die-hards are using it for new application development rather than maintenance (I myself wrote my last new VB application in 2001 and my last VB maintenance work in 2003).

The development landscape was different back during those VB6 days. A fast home connection meant one of those new 56K modems, a new CD-ROM store seemed to be opening every week and the browser war had only recently turned in Microsoft's favor. The predictions were that the web was just a phase we were passing through; the future was in fat clients, which could provide a rich experience that web apps couldn't. VB6's design made only a few concessions to the web: there was an experimental feature called “HTML forms”, in which you could create VB application forms using HTML instead of VB's form builder (I'm not sure why), and there were countless demo apps showing how easy it was to embed IE into your apps. It certainly wasn't made for the development of web applications. My guess is that aside from a few die-hards — if there are FoxPro die-hards, there must exist VB6 ones — most VB6 use is in the realm of maintenance, not new app development.

VB.NET is a different case: there really isn't much that separates it from C#; it uses the same libraries and for the most part C# in Basic clothing. Given that the difference between VB.NET and C# is so slight, VB's verbosity, the similarity of syntax between Java and C# and that the “VB stigma” meant that a C# programmer would get paid more than a VB programmer, it's not surprising to see the drop in VB.NET use either.

The survey reports that these languages have the top spots:

• Java: 45%
• C/C++: 40%
• C#: 32%

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As for the title of this entry, I have to admit that Java development doesn't excite me terribly. Writing Java applications requires a lot of mise en scene with libraries and supporting objects to accomplish the simplest of tasks — why do I have to declare a class just to write a “Hello World” application? Why does there have to be a 294-page book on using arrays? Why are some of Java's brightest lights abandoning ship for things like Ruby?

You can keep your grass clippings and tree bark. I'll take my steak and caesar salad in the form of PHP, Python and Ruby instead.

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