Wow, so this is the first I’m hearing of GENI. I’ll give it credit, it sounds like a fun project to be part of but I’m not sure how well it will do in the end.

Here is the basics from what I understand so far: GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) is “a massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch” having already received $12 Million in funding and about 40 gigabits per second of bandwidth provided by other companies to run testing. The project is being headed up by BBN Technologies, INC, a company that prides themselves as being able to “accomplish the most difficult technological feats across a range of disciplines,” and is being backed by National Science Foundation (aka: the government).

Rebuilding the internet seems like an interesting idea. From a security perspective, there is a lot just in the nature of the current Internet left to be desired. There does seem to be some talk about that specifically being one of the reasons for the rebuild; “a ‘clean-slate’ approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet’s birth in 1969.”

It seems to me, though, that we’ve been perfecting the art of keeping the current Internet version alive for so long that to start over would be asking for more problems and more risks. But maybe a rebuild with the wisdom gained from the successes and failures of the current system would achieve better results. Who knows?

You can, officially, check out the official GENI FAQ on the official GENI site.

Given, it may be another 5 years and about $350 Million before we see a final product. It stands to be an interesting project to follow.

- john

bye-bye interwebs

Today @ PC World See Microsoft’s Multi-Touch Spherical Display in Action.

to write a book..

edit -> heh, but I can’t even find the time to finish a blog post I started a week ago.

Because we are, of course, fans of dry humor here:

I want this shirt. Buy me one. I wear size 5x.

Sorry for the horrible pun of a title. Ok. No I’m not.

So, in day two, cuil.com gets their servers online (maybe a drop off in traffic), and I can now at least complete a search without getting a a nasty error about load issues. So what does a simple search find? Well, my momma always told me that a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is two thousand words to show failure:

Wait... Where are the results?

A Google search shows our site and sites that it appears on

Ok, so the Google search is trying to suggest that you mistyped the search. Hey, we’re new and small. I’m ok with that right now. But there are 185 pages out there that link to us. And that number is growing. If Cuil is going to claim that they index three times as many pages as Google, they need to be able to return at least one result when you put in a direct host name!

Bottom line is that Cuil is still failing on day two. I will give them six more days to tighten up before I write them off, but will the public? This may be a hard learned lesson to be well prepared before you launch a site with major media coverage.