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 the BT Home Hub. It’s a nice white box with blinky lights on the front, a phone, and a load of cables coming out of the box. It is also one of the singularly worst pieces of communications hardware it has ever been my misfortune to have to deal with.

The Home Hub is BT’s “plug-and-play” router for home users, and indeed it does have some plug-and-play elements. If you plug in the power supply and the ADSL cable, it connects to the internet for you with zero configuration. Shove in an ethernet cable and it sets itself as a default gateway router through DHCP, or it serves as a WiFi hotspot. At least, all this happens with the latest software.

When we got it, it had the original software. Oh joy of joys, this needed configuring through a terrible user interface. We were promised it would get better though, it had automatic updating! Sure enough, a few weeks later, it was updated with the new user interface, better stability, automatic configuration and so on.

Well, automatic except for everything else. Whenever your hub is reset to the factory settings, it forgets extra things you have as addons. This means that our IP phone stopped working until we re-activated it.

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And lo, with the blocking of “Have You Ever?” and “Which Les Miserables Character Are You?”, my Facebook blocked applications list now includes over 100 of the most irritating bits of the internet to ever have been created.

I’ll admit to having had a couple of Facebook applications installed. I had a couple of interesting network visualisation ones installed, and still do have one for inserting mathematical formulas in messages around the site. I have even shared applications with people who I thought would find them interesting. However, I object to having people mindlessly send invites to everybody on their address list. Anybody who knows me will know that I don’t do the pointless quizzes, and I have a penchant for elegance and simplicity in websites. Why anybody believes that I would want to fill my profile with things saying “I am most like: Peter Petrelli” and “I have 1,285,395.4 fish in my tank!” is beyond me.

Seriously guys, I don’t want your app invites unless you think I’ll genuinely be interested. I’m far more likely to spot a useful application on your profile and just add it myself.

Oh, and as for the coloured profile people? You can go swivel on it as far as I’m concerned. Facebook started as a simple, elegant method for students to keep in touch. Despite the opening to everybody (Bad idea in my opinion, but oh well) it’s being kept mostly that way, providing you know how to block all the crap. Coloured profiles, even if limited to preselected themes, are a bad idea. Sure, allow users to theme their own view but please, for the love of all things holy, don’t let people expose us to fuschia pink on green.

Without spoiling things for the UK citizens who haven’t been grabbing Chapter 2 via the internet (Try WatchHeroesOnline or cucirca), Heroes continues to be slightly ass-whuppin.

Despite a few slow points, the 2nd chapter (First 11 episodes of Season 2) is a good arc which really builds some characters. The ending makes you wish there wasn’t a mid-season break. Curse that Writers’ Guild strike! 

I didn’t have to go shopping at all this week - a nice man turned up with it all! Online grocery shopping rules.

Who remembers the internet back when ‘Broadband’ was an amazing marketing opportunity at 512Kb/s? Now, who remembers 56Kb/s modems being all the rage?

Here at Brayford Quay, modern, plush student accommodation with en-suite sit-down showers, a desk and 6 complementary power sockets, over the wired network, I am pulling downloads at an amazing, awe inspiring, jaw dropping… 4KB/s (Or, for the technically minded people who spotted that one is bytes and one is bits, around 32Kb/s). That means (And I’ve checked this) it would be faster for me to write a letter back home (On real paper!) asking my parents to download the files I want, post it, wait for it to be delivered, wait for my parents to download the files, and wait for them to be mailed back to me on a DVD. That’s including the weekend.

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