My friend Ric Moseley has an interesting theory regarding Mexican food. He claims that all Mexican food has the same basic major components, each dish just stacks the components up in different ways. The major components are tortillas, meat and sauce. Of course there are a couple of different ways to prepare each of these components, but in the end, it really boils down to tortillas, meat and sauce. This applies to just about every main-line dish you find on the menu at any number of the local Tex-Mex restaurants. Crispy tacos, soft tacos, enchiladas, tostadas, burritos, fajitas, nachos, quesadillas, flautas, tamales (well almost)… Add more here… I’m going to stop myself before I start sounding like Benjamin “Bubba” Bufford-Blue from Forrest Gump, but you get the idea. By no means am I knocking the combined assembly. Quite the opposite; I’m a huge fan! When it comes down to it, I appreciate the creativity that is involved in putting these ingredients together in such a manner that the finished combination is far greater than the sum of its parts.

And that kind of leads me back to what SoftLayer brings to the table, so to speak. SoftLayer provides all sorts of components for the modern enterprise. Plenty of folks use them as is, heck who doesn’t enjoy a warm fresh tortilla with a pad of butter. However, for many people, it’s just an appetizer. The real satisfaction is from the combination of the united components when that steaming plate of enchiladas arrives. One of the great satisfactions of my job is seeing how our customers roll up our components in new and creative ways. The array of application deployments that are hosted by SoftLayer is entirely staggering. Let me throw on my digital chef hat for a minute. Start with a private network database, add public network servers, mix in some cloud computing for quick scalability, and wrap it all in a load balancer. Que bueno! That’s some good cooking, and this chef is off to the margarita machine!

The new search engine “Bing” by the software colossus Microsoft is a sad attempt at capturing some of the search engine traffic that internet superstar Google has dominated for quite some time. Based on the preview video at bing.com, the search engine offers little in new features or innovation, instead catering to the ‘too-lazy-to-click-the-back-button” crowd with expanded link previews from the search results page. I have personally found this type of feature to be near worthless, as information of value is typically more than a few lines from the top. Then again maybe my 5 button mouse has numbed me to the indignation so many users have suffered by having to move the cursor to click the back button after discovering the web page wasn’t quite what they were after. (Google added longer previews in March.)

Microsoft representatives point out the technologic advancement of augmenting the standard fare keyword searches with some semantic based algorithms. This alone should yield significantly better results than the current Microsoft engine, “MSN Live Search.” (Google rolled out its semantic searches months ago.)

Next, Microsoft offers the “Conjecture Circle” to combat Google’s “Wonder Wheel”. OK, I’m just kidding on that one. Besides, it is only June, and Microsoft is still catching up with Google’s March features. They will not be taking on the “Wonder Wheel” until August or September.

I think I see a pattern here! This “innovation” reeks of lag. While taking the conservative copycat approach might be the safe thing for the boys from Redmond, it will never vault them to the front of the line in this market. The turbo boost for technology industries is clearly tied to new ideas and advancement. We see this time and time again as startups bring new whiz-bang tools to market and shoot right past the established giants. Time will of course tell. Fortunately in the fast paced world of the internet, we will not have to wait long it see if Bing will go bang.

Everyone is complaining about the price of gas at the pump. It’s a plain fact that it cost more than it used to fill up. Why is that? If you picked a handful of economists at random you will likely get a different story from each of them. One often mentioned of late is the oil speculators market. Not being a business guy, I hadn’t really ever paid attention to the oil futures market; much less the futures market in general. The speculation on oil prices got me thinking. Why do people think oil is going to go up in the future? Most likely because it is a finite resource, and at some point it will become unobtainable through reasonable means. I personally think that the advances in technology will keep the black gold flowing for quite a while, but I am no where near naïve enough to believe that an infinite amount of oil can be contained within the finite confines of the globe we call Earth. Still, there is enough out there either undiscovered or untapped to keep our civilization plugging along well after Al Gore has melted all the ice caps with his private jet.

This led me to consider the impending depletion of the IPv4 address pool. Unlike the supply of magical natural resource oil, the available IPv4 address space cannot be augmented by new technology. There are no hidden underground caches to be found. It’s not like an expedition of the coast of Chile will stick a pipe in the ground and IP addresses will start spewing out. For IPv4, what you see is what you get, and what I see is the last 20% of a shrinking pool.

In theory, the answer is easy. Everyone just needs to jump on the new IPv6 train instead of riding around in their old fashioned IPv4 cars. The practicality of that solution is not quite that simple. That fancy IPv6 train is very limited right now. It currently requires special tracks, and they only go certain places, none of which is grandma’s house. Ultimately, user demand will force local ISPs to start supporting IPv6. In the great dance known as capitalism, they ISPs will bow to user demand and provide this service. However, between now and that future lies a pinch. It’s that last squeeze of toothpaste before you have to run to the store and get another tube. The hosting industry, being the most voracious of IPv4 address consumers, is actively working towards IPv6 deployment. The real question is how long until the home ISPs start supporting it. All the address space in the world doesn’t help if the consumers can’t browse there. And to that end, doesn’t all that legacy IPv4 address space become a precious commodity? In the not so distant future, is there a speculative market for IPv4 real-estate? I see it as a real possibility. I just wouldn’t want to be the one owning that venture when the last telecom announces IPv6 support.