Understanding Proof-of-Work

I was curious to study the behaviour of the Proof-of-Work protocol in block-chains. The essence of POW is the use of a nonce as part of the payload being signed. In order to do this, I decided to test it out with a simple signing test program. The signature algorithm Read more…

Remote Wireshark

Wireshark is a free and open source packet analyser. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. This is not a well advertised feature but it is possible to use Wireshark to monitor the traffic on a third machine. This may come in handy Read more…

Slow IPv6 Routes

We’re trying to increase IPv6 adoption by migrating things. However, slow IPv6 routes don’t help. We tested things using Vultr’s network as they had servers is 15 countries. These are an abbreviated sample of the results. LONDON HOST: vm1359261.vultr.com Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1. ??? 100.0 10 Read more…

Death of the General Purpose CPU

General purpose CPUs are dead. Long live the general purpose CPU. I think that this is what’s happening in the world today – we are witnessing a shift in computing paradigms. The most obvious of these shifts is the exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI) computations. As more and more Read more…