All of sudden kiffingish.com was no longer available, and for the life of me I could not figure out what was wrong. It had simply vanished into thin air.

After several days of investigating this most ornery of problems, I was finally able to figure it out.

Turns out that when I upgraded to a faster subscription, my ISP decided to switch my IP address without notifying me, those jerks.

I never realized that there were so many other Kiffins out there.

Just for fun I did a search on Facebook for other people also named Kiffin, and I came up with a whole list of folks sharing my first name.

There are even a couple of girls named Kiffin. Never would have expected that but why not?

When I was a kid I always wondered if there was another Kiffin on the planet and hoped and prayed that some day I could happen to meet this person.

Something else that I didn't quite expect is that almost all of them are much younger than I, some still in high school.

I'd be very curious to find out how they got their first name and what life is like for them sharing this unusual name.

Here's a cool game and it's for free. It's called Battle of Wesnoth, and it definitely worth trying out.

I've played it for many hours now and am afraid that I am slowly but surely becoming addicted to it.

Good stuff while commuting on the train and there is nothing else worthwhile to do.

Are you getting just as worried as I am about the future of Internet radio and all those crazy rulings that the government is trying to impose in favor of the greedy and unrealistic music industry monopolies?

If your answer is YES, then perhaps you should help do something about it.

Save Internet radio now!

Finally got Internet up and running after all these boring weeks without being able to surf the web, changing service providers is no easy task that's for sure.

In the meantime, have a fun and relaxing 2007 if possible.

A network's usefulness is proportional to the square of the number of its users, meaning that its value grows exponentially as the user population increases.

One equals one, two equals four, four equals sixteen, sixteen equals two hundred and fifty six, two hundred and fifty six equals sixty five thousand five hundred and thirty six, and so on.

"As the demand for voice, data and video applications increase, delivering higher bandwidth, lower cost and value-added services to the users becomes a major challenge to Internet Service Providers. Today, a brand new type of competition is emerging: Voice over IP (VoIP) has become the killer application for ISP to challenge established telecom operators. This not only means huge saving of communication cost to users, but also helps service providers to generate new revenue, new subscribers, and even gain a stronger position in the shuffling new market..."

Got my ZyXEL P-2602H-63/63C ADSL 2+ VoIP IAD¹ over ISDN plugged in, installed and up-and-running in no time. Never thought it would be no hassle at all. Just tossed my current modem overboard, hooked in the new one, fiddled with a couple settings, and there it was.

This modem is known as a so-called Voice/Data Integrated Access Solution for Residential Users, including the following features:

• ADSL, ADSL2/2+ support
• SIP (RFC3261) Support with 2 phone ports for VoIP
• Support QoS to prioritize voice and data traffics
• Auto Provisioning for easy deployment

Telephone calling over the Internet could not be easier. So far the quality seems almost if not just as good as fixed line, even when the kids are chatting away with MSN Messenger and/or playing Battlefield 2 online.

¹ Oh yeah, IAD stands for Integrated Access Device (in case you were wondering).

So why the heck would anyone in their right mind want to choose SOAP over XML-RPC?

Well for one thing, SOAP has more capabilities and supports a document model which is less restrictive than the more typical request and response call patterns typical of XML-RPC. For example, there is no easy way in XML-RPC to return error codes of different types.

Also, SOAP conversations can be designed around multiple service nodes, splitting up and divvying out the various message parts to be taken care of by the most relevant server. Later all of the responses are collected and passed back in a unified message response, just like magic.

Finally, messages can define for themselves what encoding they want to use, e.g. the one that they know is the most appropriate for a given conversation.

Yes, but what about all the extra amount of overhead? Isn't there a big performance hit?

Actually, SOAP is nothing more than a thin additional envelope around XML-RPC. What most people do not realize is that XML-RPC is already based to a large degree on the core elements of SOAP architecture.

The truth of the matter is that XML-RPC was split off from the initial design when someone became impatient with the slow progress of moving on with the original SOAP specifications.

For those of you still awake who find this tantalizing stuff, here is another interesting reference.

One big advantage of VoIP over traditional telephony is that the call-management functions are decoupled from the voice transmission functions.

This means that when offering new services it is no longer necessary to alter the core network anymore thereby greatly speeding up time-to-market.

One disadvantage however is that some form of quality-of-service must be supported in the protocol in order to make VoIP as reliable as good old telephones are.

We become what we end up finding, and the complete randomness of this pursuit is much more powerful than we now realize.

In the good old days, this was a relatively simple process which we pretty much had under control.

Now with the advent of Internet this responsibility has been put in the hands of others.

Be careful out there.