Nick Jackson

Apparently the folks over at ICANN, the body responsible for all the IP addresses and domain names on the internet, have unanimously voted to allow arbitrary TLDs to be registered. This is a monumentally bad idea.

Certainly, some organisations will make good use of this system. We could have a nice set of stuff from Google:

• http://google/
• http://mail.google/
• http://maps.google/

All of which is very nice. Trouble is, we’re also in for a huge swathe of new domain squatting where irritating companies with lots of money will buy TLDs just to clog the system. All it takes is one company to register the “con” domain and they receive all the mistyped .com requests. This is not good. Perhaps Pepsi will register “cola”, so http://pepsi.cola is good, but http://coca.cola will then be blocked.

I’m personally all in favour of more restriction, and forcing sites back into their appropriate country TLD and keeping the global domains for global companies and organisations. Screw .cola, .facebook, .google, .microsoft and the rest.

This is what I’m being the Chief Majorly Awesome Lighting Dude for next week:

I’ll take my camera and get some photos of the rig, the desk and so on. Should be the most complex rig to plot I’ve had yet, into the double figures with intelligent lighting and the most obscenely overpowered desk I’ve ever used in a school.

Apparently our favourite gaming-related “lawyer”, Jack Thompson, has walked out of a hearing, claiming that the judge doesn’t have authority to preside over aforementioned hearing. Associated is a rather verbose letter, in which he seems to perform his usual trick of going off at 7 different tangents at the same time using bizzare language and repeatedly referencing how he, The Mighty Jack Thompson, has saved the world.

This is the same person who seems hell-bent on banning any video game which is more violent than The Adventures Of Fluffy Bunny Rabbit in Cotton Wool Land (not a real game) since it scars the poor children and makes them want to go decapitate police officers using chainsaws and then urinate down their throats.

This is the same person who throws legal threats at anybody within 100 yards who mentions his name, the name of anybody he has sued (which is an extensive list) or the name of anybody he has sent a legal threat to (an even longer list).

This is the same person who goes off his nut about how God has sent him on a mission to clean the world of the violent smut which is degrading today’s society every time that somebody points out that he’s talking bollocks.

You get the idea. Please, hurry up and debar him so we can finally be rid of his endless rambling about how far up his own backside he is.

The latest Doctor Who episode, Silence in the Library, is proper Doctor Who. Watch it, be scared, but don’t hide behind the sofa. It’s dark down there.

Dude, you sound like an idiot. Game looks mildly entertaining though.

As you may of may not know, next year I’m living in a place called The Junxion with a few friends. We’ve decided to go a bit above and beyond the usual student flat with printed photographs Blu-Tacked to the wall by heading to everyone’s favourite Swedish store, IKEA.

The trouble is all the cool stuff we really want to get, like better lighting, shelves, artwork, hanging rods for kitchenware and so on rely on us drilling holes into the wall, which will probably upset accommodation.

We’ll just try make the flat look so good they don’t care.

It is with great pleasure that I announce that I’ve finally gotten around to recreating The Drama Society’s logo in glorious vector format, meaning that we can scale it up indefinitely for great victory!

I took the original, small and somewhat low quality JPEG we had (Since the original creator of the logo either didn’t leave us a high quality version, or it has become misplaced somewhere) and then ramped up the scale, despeckled, sharpened it and converted it to PNG in The GIMP. I then had a marginally better quality version to load into Inkscape and use the ‘trace bitmap’ feature on. Sadly this left behind some very wobbly edges due to scaling, so it was out with the path editing tool and some heavy-handed deleting of spline points. I think the result is quite good.

No, I am not going to tell you how to do this.

I have recently discovered that the library security at Lincoln can be easily defeated using nothing more than a simple, freely available online tool. This allows you to enter the library simply by knowing a valid Student ID number (All undergraduate student email addresses begin with these), and check books back in which aren’t actually there.

This is not good.