Note that it is the creation and registration process, as handled by ICANN that annoys me, not the technical implementation, which is DNS.

Originally (in theory), the various top-level domain (TLD) names were used to distinguish the classes of entities that registered domains: .com for business; .org for non-profit organizations; .net for network infrastructure businesses; .edu for educational institutions; and later the addition of .biz, .pro, .info, .name, ….

With the exponential growth of the web, it became harder, and more controversial, to make these distinctions. For their own “protection”, entities began registering names under multiple TLDs. Typically, one would be chosen as the “real” name and the others would simply be aliases for or redirect to the real domain. One of the few useful distinctions I’ve seen is .com and .org being used to distinguish the commercial and FOSS parts of an entity.

The proliferation of TLDs is basically a way for registrars to mint money.

A new era in the way websites are named was ushered in yesterday [June 26] when the governing body for internet domain names announced a massive liberalisation. The body that oversees the internet’s structure yesterday approved a “land grab” for new web addresses that will allow people to apply for any top-level domain name [...] Icann is not being forced to act because of there are not enough name options, but because it wants to open up the system to increase consumer choice. –Mike Harvey and Jonathan Richards, Icann set to spark internet land grab, Times Online

“Consumer choice”? Riiiight.

I’ve already ranted about Network Solutions once today. But here’s another example of this “minting” I’m talking about. They don’t even need a new TLD. The following (with some reformatting) is taken from an email solicitation I received from them a few days ago.

Is the .com domain name you want taken? Get the domain name you’ve always wanted with .us.com — the .com alternative! With a .us.com domain name extension you can:
Protect your brand | Help prevent unauthorized use of your trademarks and licensed names.
Drive traffic to your existing site | Register the .us.com extension and forward traffic to your main Web site.
Expand your reach on the Web | Increase your brand recognition and help potential customers find you more easily.

“The .com alternative”? Riiiight.

Arrrgh.

h/t: zogger, Top Prices for Top Level Domains, Technocrat
image: LionKimbro, Domain name space.svg, Wikimedia Commons

Due to my own laziness, I had to renew my registration with Network Solutions [Wikipedia entry] instead of transferring to another registrar. Yes, I know I should have transferred it long ago.

Since that time 10 years ago, it has become possible to register domains with any of several registrars, and I’ve done so. It has also been easy to transfer domains among them. Except for NetSol. When I’ve transferred non-NetSol domains, it has only taken a few minutes or hours from initiation to completion, mostly dealing with approval emails and the time for the automation to complete.

However, when I transferred my one other NetSol domain, it took nearly a week to complete, including refused transfers, phone calls, and smarmy email trying to prevent me from transferring. Based on that experience I should have begun the transfer early, but I’d waited until too close to the expiration of lohnet.org; I didn’t want to risk the domain falling through the cracks in the middle of a transfer.

You have to initiate a transfer with your current registrar. It was almost impossible to find out how to transfer a domain away from NetSol, but of course there were plenty of informative links on their web site on how to transfer to them.

After finally discovering how, and jumping through the proper hoops to initiate the transfer, my new registrar kept getting rejection notices from NetSol whenever it tried to complete the transfer. That took actual phone calls to NetSol to resolve.

Then I started getting smarmy email messages from NetSol wanting to know why I was transferring, was I really sure, etc. The message that informed me the transfer had actually been accepted also informed me that NetSol would sit on the transfer for five days just in case I changed my mind, The only link in the email appeared to be a link to automatically cancel the transfer. It took another phone call to find out that the same link could be used to say go ahead and transfer now.

Next year I’ll pay more attention and begin the transfer early.

This turned into a brief rant about NetSol rather than history. Oh well.

I’m calling this a half-year review despite the fact that I started this blog last year. I dumped in some junk from years ago, just to give it a home, but I didn’t really start posting regularly until March. It’s just psychologically convenient to use January as the starting point.

Overall, I’m pleased. I’m averaging about 10 posts per month, which is more than I expected. The quality’s not so great, but as I said in a comment earlier this month, “[M]y first goal in starting this blog was to get into the habit of simply posting something, since I had doubts of having the time or motivation to do even that much. Thus, I tend to hurried, short posts linking elsewhere with some quirky comment at the end; really, it’s still just an experiment.”

I want to produce more original content in the future, but that’s much harder work, and I have Other Stuff I have to take care of first — I keep finding excuses not to spend time composing “worthy” articles. Of course, a world of juicy material is out of bounds, since I can’t really say much about friends, coworkers, or my job without suffering painful consequences — they know where I live.

An additional problem is the number of feeds I subscribe to. There is, essentially, an infinite amount of material being produced, so no matter how fast you read, no matter how efficient your filters, it’s impossible to keep up with it all, absorbing all the time you’re willing to spend. No matter how interesting the information, I have to step back and say “I don’t care”. So, my next step is to delete most of those, only keeping the few low-volume feeds I really enjoy reading. Maybe then I’ll have more time for original thought, lol.

Another significant bit is that we’ve switched to a four-day work week, at least for the summer. I find that I really need that third “weekend” day to wind down and shift mental gears, maybe get some quality meditative time.

So, what to look forward to? I’ll still produce a lot of spur-of-the-moment junk posts, but do expect some more pithy items now and then. Over time I expect the balance to shift that way. Since I’ve yet to develop a “voice” or “theme”, just expect random topics.

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
…
The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition—in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute—would fail constitutional muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional.

Read the PDF for the actual opinion, taking note of what is not covered, such as registration, gun-free areas, etc.

Wikipedia has an extensive entry on firearms.

Also see Happiness is a Warm Gun.

image: Bobbfwed, HK USP 45.jpg, Wikimedia Commons

In the main, today’s robots are not that clever [to inspect pipes and shafts]. They cannot climb or navigate in vertical pipes – and very few have active joints. Cybernetics and optical measurement scientists at SINTEF are working on a solution.

SINTEF (2008, June 27). Robot That Climbs In The Pipe. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 27, 2008.; image: scaled from article

Well, there goes another hiding place. It’s a vast metal-wing conspiracy, I say.

For several years I’ve used an IDE adapter a friend gave me. I don’t remember the circumstances, just that he happened to have it with him and I needed one right away. It’s actually just the tiny adapter board from a disk enclosure — he didn’t have the case and as you can see here, it’s actually more convenient to use and easier to store if you just throw away the case.

I also have to work on larger disks, but there’s usually a spare tower around somewhere I can plug the disk into. Still, it’s a pain to open the case, then fiddle around with booting a utility CD, or whatever I need. Until recently I’ve just not been motivated to get a more featureful adapter, both because of the expense and the bulk. However, with the mix of SATA and IDE interfaces, and the ongoing inconvenience of finding a handy spare system, I wanted a new adapter.

I finally decided to get an inexpensive Vantec SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter from Newegg. As you can see here, it’s convenient, with connectors for the various data and power interfaces, and stores compactly in the box. I’ve used it several times and with excellent results.

In any case, it reminded me of this note on our vending machine, and the scribbled addition I made to it.

Robofish are unique in that that they can coordinate their activities and, due to underwater inter-communication, don’t need to surface to communicate, either with each other or researchers.

A video and photo gallery is available at an older page, Fin Actuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (UW’s Nonlinear Dynamics and Control Lab).

Just imagine these armed with minature torpedoes! Now we’re safe nowhere on earth — these Robofish have the sea, BigDogs have the land, cyborg insects have the air and enclosed spaces, and tiny terminators have our very cells — yikes! Combine that with the swarming robots research and we’re doomed! Doomed, I say!

h/t: School Of Robofish Communicate With Each Other In Underwater Robot Teams, Science Daily
h/t: Roland Piquepaille, Robofish teams of underwater robots, ZDNet
image: University of Washington

Good: Let’s go SCUBA diving!

Bad: Yikes, we’ve been swept into shark-infested waters!

Good: Hey, an island …

Bad: … infested with Komodo Dragons!

The full story is here.

h/t: Greg Laden
image: Markofjohnson, KomodoDragonRinca1.jpg, Wikimedia Commons

Some of you may remember column-sensitive programming languages like RPG and FORTRAN, where particular syntactic elements have to appear in certain columns. Such fun.

Also, line endings are significant in many languages, being used to terminate a statement. Of course, you have to be careful whenever you transfer source code among systems, since there are three common end-of-line markers: bare line-feed (LF), bare carriage-return (CR), and the two-character combo CR-LF. I won’t even get into the various record-oriented (vs character-stream) text storage formats.

Unix traditionally calls line-feed newline (NL), but all these variations are often informally called newline, just because it’s easier to say than end-of-line. Note, however, that there is a real ASCII-8 character named new (or next) line (NEL, decimal 133).

As a pathological case, at least one flavor of BASIC used LF-CR (in contrast to the “normal” CR-LF) to continue a logical (numbered) line onto the next physical text line.

Another pathology was that FORTRAN ignored embedded white space (other than column alignment). Whee!

At the other end of the line, there’s indentation.

A degenerate case of column sensitivity requires statements to begin in column one, with indentation (of any size or nature) indicating logical line continuation.

Makefiles use a tab in column one to indicate a command (other horizontal white space is not significant). Now, I never found this to be an onerous burden, but it annoyed Davidson so much that he created Ant:

Makefiles are inherently evil as well. Anybody who has worked on them for any time has run into the dreaded tab problem. “Is my command not executing because I have a space in front of my tab!!!” said the original author of Ant way too many times. Tools like Jam took care of this to a great degree, but still have yet another format to use and remember.

– Apache Ant - Welcome

That quote (and Ant) has a slew of issues I’d like to rant about, but that’s for another day.

Then there’s Python:

… indentation is Python’s way of grouping statements. Python does not (yet!) provide an intelligent input line editing facility, so you have to type a tab or space(s) for each indented line. In practice you will prepare more complicated input for Python with a text editor; most text editors have an auto-indent facility. When a compound statement is entered interactively, it must be followed by a blank line to indicate completion (since the parser cannot guess when you have typed the last line). Note that each line within a basic block must be indented by the same amount.

– 3. An Informal Introduction to Python

Probably the hottest battlefront in the indentation holy war is how to indent. Should tabs (HT) be banned, only allowing spaces (SP)? The indent increment should be two spaces! No, three! No, four! No, <arbitrary number here>!!! Arrrgh!!!! If you’re on a team, just pick something and stick with it, ok? (Insert mode lines for Emacs and Vim to make it easy.) I would suggest four or greater, for people with old eyes like mine and/or who work on hi-res screens (I usually edit in a 60+ line window with tiny fonts.)

Finally there’s the intra- and inter-line layout. One statement per line? Column-align similar elements? White space around operators? Opening parenthesis snuggled or spaced after a function name? Then there’s that whole braces (”{}”) placement thing.

I think that the white space in programming languages issues are much like the page-layout vs semantic-markup issues in HTML — a bad mistake to mix them.

Another aspect is robustness — source code should be able to survive significant *format* mangling as it is passed through various agents: email; cut-and-paste into web pages; funky editor settings (and idiosyncratic human editors); invisible-to-the-eye white space variations (HT vs SP, trailing spaces, etc.); publication in books and magazines; bad printer drivers;…. After all, nowadays it’s not that difficult to find an editor or utility that will reformat your code any way you please.

Two of my favorite mantras are:

• Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
• Guidelines, not rules.

I think you should be able to format source code as freely as possible. However, that doesn’t mean you should, unless you’re entering an obfuscated code contest. Or playing code golf.

I think that rigid rules are like training wheels — they’re fine for someone just learning, but you need to take them off as soon as possible. I firmly believe that occasional “exceptions” lead to more aesthetic, easier-to-comprehend code. I’m not suggesting anarchy; I suppose that what I really have is a set of meta-rules that override my basic-layout rules.

Perhaps I should add a third mantra:

• Don’t let edge cases dominate.

Somewhat related to WS issues: I’m amused by people who are so into counting keystrokes. Just what is the deal, anyway? To me, a few keystrokes here and there are down in the noise range of the scale. If they matter so much, I think you’re doing something wrong — particularly after I see the time and effort some people expend to avoid them. Contrast with using XML for configuration files that are typically hand-edited. That’s psychotic. But those are also rants for another day.

I’d originally intended to include some code samples, but that would make this a much longer (and tedious to produce) post. I’ll wait and see if this attracts any attention before I go to that much trouble.