Wednesday, 21st December, 2005

Global Frustration

I've been wanting to register a couple of domain names recently. One of which will involve me putting my academic head on and getting in touch with someone in a London Univeristy to see if he'll transfer his now-inactive domain to me *crosses fingers*. The other would have involved a bit of international dealing.

However, whilst trying to find somewhere that could sell me a domain name in the Netherlands Antilles, I found some rules on the country's domain name registrar:

There is among other things required of the requesting organisation or entity that these an effective official establishment has on one of the islands of the Netherlands Antilles and is registered at among other things the chamber of commerce.

(Excuse the translation Babelfish is good, but not perfect)

So basically, if I want to register a .an, I have to go there and set up a company? Poo.

For those entities or organisations which are not registered for example official at the chamber of commerce, or they want register that from the foreign country a field name, a possibility has been nevertheless created within An-domein the field name being able register. This is possible in the form of and so-called "third-level domeinnaam". These are in principle of the form <naam>.com.an, or <naam>.net.an or <naam>.org.an or <naam>.edu.an

So I could have a .net.an for example?

That's not really any use. I wanted to register si.obh.an

More Presents Like This, Please

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

The advantage of being 'out' to all your friends, is that they buy you things that you like for Christmas

Interlocutors

Sometimes, when I'm particularly bored, I like to read some of the spam messages that get through the net. Recently, I've been noticing random images arriving — usually some modded-cartoon of (perhaps) Bart Simpson with his willy out, suggesting that I too can be like Bart and have a large yellow knob...

The one that just arrived in my inbox though, well, I have to say it's quite possibly the most badly written piece of crap I've ever read. And it's hilarious

It's obviously some kind of virus thing — and we all know, kids, not to open attachments if we don't know what they are don't we? — but the chances of me reading this, and thinking (a) it's legit, and (b) it's something I'd like to try, are less than zero.

Download you can directly in this letter I have attached last version of the program program to the letter.

"Download you can" — I'm being spammed by Yoda

to see an image of the interlocutor and to pass to its picture album

WTF is an "interlocutor" ?!

To load program Yahoo-Agent and to receive the information necessary for installation, you can directly in this letter.

I can directly what in this letter?

Gloriously badly written (probably by a bot), but I betcha at least 50 squillion people have opened the attachment already, and are now pwned.

If I was a virus writer, I'd put my efforts into a good cause. One for the public good as it were. I'd write a virus that said "By opening this attachment, you have waived all rights to own a computer — and for the good of the Internet, I will now destroy your machine"

How Not To Spell

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Every year, my next door neighbour sends me a card, and each year how he spells my name gets progressively weirder

Grepping For Comments

My friend NRT was talking today about trackbacks and comments. I've never fully got my head around how trackbacks work long enough to write something that would enable them, so the majority of it went over my head. But I was prompted by him noting how many comments he's had to try and find a way to work out how many I've had...

Comments in this weblog are indicated in the main source files by a little HTML comment — in the tradition of -----BEGIN STUFF----- [...] ------END STUFF------. SO I figured I could just grep the source folders, count the lines returned, and there would be my answer...

Actually, it was harder than that — I could easily return the number of instances of the, um, "comment comment" in each file, but I'd have to add them all up at the end.

So I wrote a script

#!/bin/bash

Y=0
for X in $(grep -rch "$2" $1)
do let "Y += $X"
done
echo $Y

...which I call with two arguments: the top level folder, and the text to search for. Clever no?

I'm really enjoying doing things in scripts at the moment. When I was younger, this was the only way you could get computers to do things. You either had to write something, or listen to half an hour's worth of "bbzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzipssss" from a tape and watch flashing colours on your TV.

I remember, for example, spending days trying to get my head round the functions you had to call to get the AMX Mouse on a BBC B working properly, because I wanted to write a programme that drew long pictures of bricks so that I could cover the walls of a model I was building at the time.

It was very clever — you clicked on the screen and it drew a brick. But it wouldn't cut off half a brick. And if you wanted to start again, you clicked the icon that looked like a demolition ball.

...

In case you were wondering, BTW, this year, the total number of comments is 2,699. Not bad I feel

You're kidding! ".aw" That's so sweet!

Retro Mice

Oh boy, just went on a search for "AMX Mouse" to see if I could find anything related (I think I have on in the loft BTW), and came across a review of the AMX Mouse in "Sinclair User", c1986...

http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/047/amx.htm

My favourite quote so far in reading it has to be...

Who needs a Macintosh, ST, or Amiga when you can use the Spectrum?

Wonderful!