Eric's Beijing Diary

Thanksgiving. It's really an American holiday. Christmas is different, because that really is international. But Thanksgiving is pretty much American. Nevertheless, there are a lot of Americans in Beijing, so there are usually a dozen or so places that prepare a Thanksgiving Dinner. Last year I went to the John Bull pub for Thanksgiving Dinner. This year I invited Amber to share a Thanksgiving dinner with me at the Swisshotel in Dongsishitiao.

It was a nice meal, but I don't think I have quite found the perfect place for Thanksgiving Dinner. The price is just too high. One hundred sixty-eight RMB, plus a 15% gratuity. Almost 200 Kuai. That's about $25 US. It may not seem like that bad a price if you are coming from America. But in China, that is an astronomical price to pay for a meal. It's a week's wages for a minimum wage worker.

But it was worth it, because Amber really enjoyed herself, and we had a good chance to talk about the whole idea of Thanksgiving. I told Amber that God causes the rain to fall on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5:45). So if a farmer prays for rain, he will be blessed with rain, but his neighbor will also be blessed with rain, even though his neighbor is not a believer. The man who believes gets rain, and the man who does not believe gets rain. The believer has food to eat, and the unbeliever has food to eat. The believer has health, and the unbeliever has health. The only difference between the believer and the unbeliever is that the believer takes time to say, "thank-you." The unbeliever never says, "thank-you," to God, because he doesn't believe that God even exists. On hearing this, Amber said, "Oh! We better say 'thank-you' right now!" So we did.

The recent UN summit on the Internet has given the world body a new picture of some of the peculiar features of that inscrutable monster.

I am not sure why the Europeans are so interested in managing the Internet domain structure, unless it is just the fact that they don't trust the Americans. But the push to "internationalize" the management of the Internet displays a misunderstanding of just how the Internet works. We often say that "nobody owns the Internet." This is true in terms of content and who can or cannot be involved. But from a technical standpoint, the Internet structure is inherently hierarchical. This is because the Internet has millions of hosts, and every one of them needs to have a unique address. We call this address an "IP address," because it is a function of the Internet Protocol. So the first problem is to make sure that every address is unique. But there is another problem. For users, Internet addresses are not identified by a number. They are identified by "friendly names." Hotmail's current IP address is 64.4.32.7 So if you open Internet Explorer and type in that number, you will get Hotmail's website. But nobody does that. There are a couple of reasons why we do not use numbers to identify websites. First, they are hard to remember. We do have internet search engines, of course, but most people have a group of websites they need to go to frequently, that they need to be able to remember easily. The second reason, is that sometimes IP addresses change (perfectly exemplified by the problems I have been having with my student web site). For a small company, this could be something as simple as changing an Internet Service Provider. If websites were only identified by numbers, then every time something like this happened, clients of this website would somehow have to be notified of the change. But because we use friendly names, it is a simple matter of changing the DNS mapping. The mapping between the friendly name and the IP address is made once on the DNS server, and the end users don't know the difference. Much, much simpler, but someone has to be in charge of this. The agency is called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit organization charged with assigning IP addresses to Internet hosts.

When you type in the URL for a website, your browser issues a request for a mapping. That is because in order to reach the website you are looking for, your computer needs to know the IP address. The request for this mapping goes first to your local DNS (Domain Name System) server, and is then passed up the line to the root server. The root server takes care of mapping for the root domain, and refers to the top level domains (.com, .net, .org, etc.). There are 13 or 14 root servers positioned in various parts of the world. (I can't remember all the locations, because I am not teaching Microsoft systems here in China, so I don't have any DNS servers set up.) Each domain is then responsible for the mapping below that level of the hierarchy. For example, microsoft.com would manage the mapping for support.microsoft.com. So the organization takes care of assigning domain names, and mapping IP addressed to those names. The technical management of this whole process cannot just be picked up and moved at will.

In addition to all this, there must be a structure to facilitate the development of internet technology. This would be the Internet Engineering Task Force. The IETF is a very informal organization. The IETF does not go out and recruit engineers to develop the Internet. They just show up. Engineers who care to be involved in some aspect of Internet development choose to participate in one of the many working groups managed ( I use the term loosely ) by IETF. They meet together, drink coffee, shoot the breeze and come up with ideas. As casual as these confabs are, they do generate the ideas which become the technology that drives the Internet. Eventually, of course, this technology needs to be codified, and this is done in the form of RFC's (Request for Comments), such as RFC 1548, the original document establishing the Point-to-Point protocol which you probably used to connect to the Internet to read this.

Occasionally, the writers thereof are in a bit of a nonserious mood (did I say "occasionally?") and they come up with stuff that is a bit far-fetched, such as the "Coffee Pot Protocol," or the "Carrier Pigeon Protocol."

The bottom line, really, is that the Internet is just very, very California. And it always has been. The Internet was developed by the US. Military in 1969 (back when Al Gore was a little boy). But the US Military doesn't do stuff like that on their own. They elicited the help of universities like U.C. Berkeley, just as they worked with the University of Chicago in development of the Atom Bomb during World War II. There was quite a bit of technodevelopment coming out of California during this time. The Palo Alto Research Lab, funded by Xerox, developed such innovations as windows (not capitalized, since it was not a brand name then) and the mouse. Unfortunately for Xerox, the executives in the board room were too thick-headed to appreciate the value of such innovations as a little box with a ball in it that made a dot move around on a screen, so they discarded it. Bad for them, and good for Apple, and eventually Microsoft, who stole it from Apple. But I am digressing...the point is that the tremendous volume of creativity and innovation that resulted in such phenomenal developments as the Internet is not likely to be surrendered to a few dunderheads in the EU who don't like to have the Americans dominating anything. And their wrong anyway. The Internet is not an American innovation. It is a West Coast, Californian innovation. I think most people who know anything about the history of the Internet (including Secretary General Kofi Annan) would be uncomfortable with the idea of moving Internet management to Europe. Personally, I would be uncomfortable with moving it to New York.

It looks like I am finally getting things straightened out with our server here at the Software College. I am referring to the web server that hosts my student web site (http://soft.buaa.edu.cn/oracle/index.html). My weblog is hosted on Blogspot, so ordinarily it would not be affected, except for the fact that I do throw a few jpegs up on my web space once in awhile, and the links from here are going to be dead if the server is messed up.

The first thing they did was to move a bunch websites to a different server. Problem is that when they did that, they also moved the DNS mapping. Not a big problem ordinarily, since I mainly use my website in the classroom. The problem comes because students in the courses I have been teaching around China cannot get to my website, because they don't know the IP address, and all the links I have created to my website were suddenly invalid.

Well, they kept having trouble with the server, so they finally moved my website with the others, so now I am back in business, but that could change, because they are buying a new server, so the url could change again. I guess I should just break down and lease some commercial web space. I have heard that it is pretty cheap in China. But if you teach in a university, it's pretty easy to get a little free web space, especially if you are on good terms with the IT folks. We will see if this situation stabilizes soon. I am getting weary of all the changes.

One of my colleagues here at the Software College sent me a pollution index chart for China. It is of interest right now, because last weekend was particularly rancid. Out of curiosity, I did a survey of the pollution index for Beijing for all the days since I arrived in China on January 10, 2004. Beijing varies quite a bit, because, since it is a big city, it does have more pollution than a place like Dalian or Xiamen. But when it is breezy, the pollution blows away quickly. For this reason, the pollution doesn't bother me that much--most days are nice. But I am worried about what Beijing will be like if car ownership increases at the current rate. It is impossible to predict, but I hate to think what Beijing will be like 20 years from now, if something is not done to significantly alter that dynamic.

Anne Marie flew in late Monday night from Inner Mongolia. She had been there with a team of medical missionaries doing some training and demonstration of medical procedures. Fortunately, she was able to alter her plans a bit so that she could stop in Beijing for a couple days. This afternoon, I took her to the airport to meet the other nurse practitioner who is flying on to Guangzhou with her. We were standing at the Air China window waiting to buy tickets, when we were approached by two men in with Air China identification. They asked us where we were going. I told them that we were trying to get tickets for Guangzhou. They told us that they worked for Air China reservations. What they didn't tell us, is that they were off duty, and selling black market tickets on their own. I talked with them briefly while we were waiting in line at the ticket window, but Andrew (the travel coordinator) showed up, and did a quick comparison. Their price was considerably higher than what we would get if we just stood in line. I also quickly realized that the flight they were selling tickets for was also significantly later.

I have run into many, many such folks in this country. I should be used to it by now. I guess what bothered me so much this time, is that these guys were in uniform, using their positions as legitimate agents of a company, to do a very illegitimate business that benefited them, but was clearly not in the interest of their companies customers. Buyer beware.