DECEMBER 31, 2009

2009 Blog Rewind: IPv6, CyberWar, Ruby String Processing...Oh My!

Looking through our posts from 2009 it struck me how diverse our topics can be, a testament to the strong team of writers we have contributing to the community. Three posts had nearly identical impact when you consider views, comments and inbound links. Yet the three all take on vastly different topics.

First, you have Brent Cook's "6 Surprising Facts about IPv6", which inspired many people to start looking at IPv6 a bit more deeply:

Working lately with our IPv6 support, I have a long list of fun facts to share. As you know, IPv6 is a 128-bit addressing scheme designed to solve the various problems with 32-bit IPv4, or AKA the next 'big thing'.

Read the full post, "6 Surprising Facts about IPv6".

Not surprisingly, since it has garnered so much attention in 2009, was our series on cyberwar, USCYBERCOM, the cyber coordinator and more. This has been a topic I felt was very important and started writing about it in "Four Critical Priorities for USCYBERCOM":

During most of the past year, military and cybersecurity experts have been calling for the creation of a cyber command within the Department of Defense (DoD). On June 23rd Secretary Robert Gates' memorandum established U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) to address the current risks and "secure freedom of action in cyberspace". The announcement was met with much fanfare from the defense community, but simply announcing USCYBERCOM is the easy part. Actually building the command center is the real challenge.

Read the full post, "Four Critical Priorities for USCYBERCOM".

Finally we end this second to last edition of 2009 Blog Rewind with another post from Dustin D. Trammell. This time Dustin takes on "Ruby String Processing Overhead":

The important point to note is that String object constructors initialized with literal strings only seem to provide a performance benefit on longer strings and using processed strings seem to provide the performance benefit when using shorter strings. This means that there is a measurable string length threshold at which using one or the other initialization method becomes statistically significant for your project, and a window of length sizes within which it doesn't really matter all that much which method you use.

Read the full post, "Ruby String Processing Overhead".

Check back later for the final 2009 Blog Rewind and the most read post of 2009!

Posted by Kyle Flaherty