I was trying to explain why an internet page used ‘F’ as part of the colour designation. “it’s because it is a hex number” I unhelpfullyy suggested. “How can F be a number?” was the instant reply.

I was surprised as this was a technically savvy user. So I tried to expalin the rational behind using ‘labels’ on a set of binary combinations and realised that I learnt hex as a Unix user as part of the package without really thinking too deeply.

It all stems from Binary, and I suggested that he think about the World cup, 1 winner, 2 finalists, 4 semi-finalists, 8 quarter-finalists, 16 round qualifiers, 32 top of pool teams. Each step is a doubling (or halving) of the teams. So in the same way we have in ’colums’ 1,2,4,8,16,32.

The real trick though is understanding that binary is not a left-to-right read. It is a right-to-left read so the world cup draws would actually be 32,16,8,4,2,1

If you want to express the world cup winner that is simple, take the first ‘column’ and turn this from 0  to 1. As there are two finalists you make the first column 0 and the second 1 making a representation of 10. Third would be a 1 + 2 so that would represented as 11.

This continues and as you add more teams you may want to represent the whole 32 so you can position every team. Therfore to be fourth becomes 100 and so on. Twentieth is 16 + 4 so 10100. Thinking of it in that sense let  him see tha 16 isn’t actaully a numer, bur a state, a ‘label’ for a binary code of 10000. It also helped him understand the funny numbers used, 512 1024 etc. in computing terms. It is a lot easier to put F on a keyboard input then 010000.

So as a Rugby Union fan I can at last say that football does indeed have some use!

2012 is getting filled up slowly but surely with end of world scenarios.

 In true prophet of doom style w now hear that all IP addresses will run out, meaning no more internet connections. While it is true that the ‘old’ system of IP ranges will no longer suffice there is a fix already in place.

I can remember in the late 90’s having discussions about the IP addresses running out. The internet explosion hadn’t really hit at that time and the discussion was about workplace networks and business use. Unlike IPv4, which is 32 bit based e.g. 192.190.190.190, IPv6 is 128 bits long and uses hex rather than decimal notation e.g. 3dfe:1940:4545:3:200:feff:fe51:67df. We can jump from a ‘maximum’ of 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses to over 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 IPv6 address.

IPV6 already has acheived wide adoption, but like most things human we have left switching to the new system to the last minute. Most operating system can deal with IPV6 already so that shouldn’t be an issue.

As with the ‘millenium bug’ lets not tear our hair out about this one, though soon it will be the turn of another dire warning about the global use of IT.