First Commercial Quantum Computer

This past week, D-Wave Systems announced the sale of the first commercial quantum computer to Lockheed Martin.

Although quantum computers are still in their infancy (we're talking ENIAC-like infancy here), their potential is astounding.  The most interesting thing is that certain problems that are hard for conventional computers should be very easy for quantum computers.  This could have some really unexpected results, such as defeating almost all of the cryptographic techniques we normally use to protect our information today.

I don't know if what D-Wave has is the beginning of something significant or not.  However, for a mere $10M, you could buy one and find out.

OpenStack

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the OpenStack Design Summit in Santa Clara.  It was an amazing event with hundreds of people (most of them developers) and significant representation from major industry players like Citrix, Cisco and Dell.

It is hard to believe that it was only last summer that Rackspace and NASA announced the project.  In that time, the project has had three releases.

The project has several major components, including a compute fabric called "Nova" and an S3-like blob store called "Swift".

By most accounts, Swift is ready for prime time (in fact, CloudScaling was involved in several large deployments).

Nova on the other hand is still an early-stage product.  Nevertheless, several major players have announced their intention to have product deployments in the near future, including Internap who plans to do so later this year.

All this activity has attracted significant investment, and most of the effort seems to be focused on: block storage as a service (think EBS, sort of), network as a service (check out Nicira), and higher level management and integration functions (basically all those "little" things that turn a technology into a real-world service).

One thing is for sure, this is a space to watch carefully.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers.

IPv6 on Comcast

I recently switched back to Comcast, and given that they have been talking up their IPv6 initiatives a lot, I decided to see how easy it was to get IPv6 connectivity. As it turns out, it was almost trivial.

While Comcast is planning to have dual-stack (both IPv6 and IPv4) support soon, they currently only support 6to4 in my area. The good news is that they support automatic 6to4 tunnel configuration.

Here is how I got it working with my Mac.

1. I unplugged my router and connected my Mac directly to the cable modem (6to4 tunneling does not work behind a NAT gateway -- well sort of, but I'll save that for a future blog when I get it working).
2. I restarted the cable modem (if you don't do this, it will stay bound to your router's MAC address and you won't get any connectivity).
3. I waited for things to settle down (the cable modem has a bad habit of giving you a 192.168.100.x address space temporarily, but unplugging the ethernet cable from your computer and/or renewing your DHCP on your computer should fix it).
4. You should now have regular IPv4 connectivity.
5. Now the cool part. In the System Preferences network settings, I clicked the "+" to add a new network, and chose "6 to 4" for the interface type.
6. I then opened a browser to ipv6.google.com and voila, it worked.

Of course, this was a temporary solution because I had to unplug my router. However, I've heard that several people have had success with the Apple Airport Extreme and several of the other routers listed on the 6to4 Wikipedia page.

I plan to do some more experiments with DD-WRT or Linux as the router. Stay tuned.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I am interested in a broad range of technology and thought it would be worthwhile to share a few of my discoveries.