[Spent most of yesterday in bed—when I wasn't in bed, I did some surfing and came across this link worthy of being mentioned, but didn't have the energy. Good thing, since I can use it for today when I, thinking I was feeling better, did stuff I probably shouldn't have and paid for it later on. Oi. —Editor]
I just saw my plane cross the mid-Atlantic, not by looking out the window, but by watching routing updates cascade across the Internet. I'm writing from a Lufthansa jet right now, travelling from Munich to Boston. This plane offers the (relatively) new Connexion by Boeing wifi + satellite Internet service. It's seriously cool stuff—high latency, but absolutely functional. I've been aware of it for a while since the Boeing folks did a NANOG presentation (The North American Network Operators' Group) [1] about it last year. But this is the first time I've been able to use it.
Via jwz [2], “Tracking Plane Flight on Internet [3]”
Now that's just darned neat. I know that Dan the Network engineer is playing around with BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) (setting up a dedicated BGP server to handle the full BGP routing table instead of trying to shoehorn the full BGP routing table into our routers) and I think it would be neat to see an Internet visualization [4] via BGP routing (which is more a policy based routing protocol through autonomous systems than a technical based routing protocol like OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)).
[1] http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0405/abarbanel.html
[2] http://jwz.livejournal.com/638852.html
[3] http://www.renesys.com/blog/2006/04/tracking_plane_flight_on_inter.shtm