Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] a humble suggestion for the use of Proquints in Wireshark
From: Daniel Wilkerson <daniel.wilkerson@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 00:10:53 -0700
Fellow Open Source engineers, please lend me your ear. I am submitting this suggestion in the hopes that I can improve network administration everywhere. Perhaps this suggestion should be an Internet Draft in hopes of becoming an RFC, but I think I have a chicken-and-egg problem: if no one has used the idea in an implementation, the chance that it will be accepted as a standard is low. So I am trying to break the chicken-and-egg problem by writing you first. But the whole point is that you may improve Wireshark by implementing this idea, so it should be a win-win for everyone. The short version is that I was designing an app where humans might have to read and write long random numbers. We generally don't want humans dealing with arbitrary numbers, but sometimes it is necessary, such as when dealing with low-level networking protocols/tools like ping (or debugging tools, such as gdb), etc. which I'm sure includes Wireshark; the problem of these big horrible numbers is only getting worse with the advent of IPv6 and 64-bit machines. I thought that it might not be so horrible for humans to read and write such long arbitrary numbers if they were just encoded in a readable, spellable, and pronounceable way. So I came up with an encoding that seems to provide that property as well as having a reasonable information density: it encodes 16 bits at a time in a PROnounable QUINTuple of alternating consonants and vowels, so I called it Proquints. My hope is that tools that read and write arbitrary numbers, such as IP addresses, will adopt this encoding and make the world better for everyone. I sincerely hope I can get you to take a look at it. The whole thing is free to be used by anyone and I even implemented an Open Source converter between Proquints and decimal, hex, and dotted quads, so you can try it out. The essay is here: http://arXiv.org/html/0901.4016 ; skip to the "Conclusion and Specification" section if you just want the definition of the encoding; it is very simple. The open source converter is here: http://github.com/dsw/proquint/ Here are some examples of IP dotted-quads and their corresponding proquints. 127.0.0.1 lusab-babad 63.84.220.193 gutih-tugad 63.118.7.35 gutuk-bisog 140.98.193.141 mudof-sakat 64.255.6.200 haguz-biram 128.30.52.45 mabiv-gibot 147.67.119.2 natag-lisaf 212.58.253.68 tibup-zujah 216.35.68.215 tobog-higil 216.68.232.21 todah-vobij 198.81.129.136 sinid-makam 12.110.110.204 budov-kuras Daniel http://danielwilkerson.com/
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