We thought it was time for some fun of the geekier kind. If you know what IPv6 is, this should be something for you.

You may have seen IPv6 addresses that contain a couple of actual words. Here is a made-up example: babe:f432:42aa:8271:eee6:1076:dead:beef

Now what if we take this one step further, and construct entire sentences inside IPv6 addresses instead of just a few words? We decided to do just that, and here is how we did it.

Constructing words inside IPv6 addresses

When showing an IPv6 address a hexadecimal notation is used. The hexadecimal digits are 0-9 and A-F (the latter corresponding to the values 10-15).

A 128-bit IPv6 address is written as 8 sets of 4 hexadecimal digits. Since initial zeroes can be skipped in each set, we can include words that are 4, 3, 2 or 1 characters long.

When constructing words, we can use the letters A-F, of course, since they are already letters. Then, to give us a few more letters to play with, we decided to include some leet-style interpretations of the numbers 0-9. (As you’re probably starting to notice, we’re a pretty geeky crowd here at Pingdom. )

We went with: 0 = o or . , 1 = i or l, 2 = R, 5 = S, 6 = b, 7 = T, 9 = g.

So in the end we have the following letters to construct words with: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, i, l, o, r, s, t

Now on to constructing some actual sentences!

IPv6 addresses that make sense (sort of)

The “IPv6 sentences” below are not existing addresses we’ve found. We made them up. But although they’re just made up they are nevertheless correct and could be used in the real world.

Unfortunately we didn’t have the necessary letters to include words like “ping”, “tcp”, “http”, “down” and many others we would have liked to have in our word arsenal, but we had a lot of fun putting various sentences together over a couple of after-work beers.

Here are some of the better ones we came up with:

Happy sysadmin

(root is good. root is god.)

Fearful sysadmin

(dear god. last boot lost all data)

(data loss. good god. i dead)

(too late to face boss. flee flee)

(Almost a bit of storytelling there… )

The Digg (Slashdot) effect

(if digg site or blog is fast dead)

Ideal IP address for Icanhascheezburger.com

(lots of lol cats fill all blog data)

or just:

(lol cats lol cats lol cats lol cats)

A perspective on web robots and crawlers

(get lost or die bots . . .)

Can’t leave them cats alone

(if cat sees bird, cat eats bird)

The truth about beer

(ice cold beer is as good as life)

For ad-crazy sites

(site ads for sale. fill cart.)

Where to go from here?

There are tons of more or less cryptic sentences that you can create this way and fit into an IPv6 address.

Can you come up with more? Show us in the comments.

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As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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