IANA Insanity - or, how I learned to stop .worrying and .love the .new .internet


Glowing computer text showing dot com dot info etc.

In The Beginning There was the .com and the .org and the .net and it was good. And, I mean, there were probably a few others - but that's all people cared about. Go Forth And Multiply And THE LORD sayeth "Hey, do people want country codes? Like .UK, .FR, .DE?" And the people were all like "Duh! Yeah!" Except for the people of the American United States. For they gnashed their teeth and wailed "We invented the Internet. There's no way we are going to use .US. We'll take the top level,…

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The Revisionist History of Mad Magazine


(Or, watching culture evolve in real-time.) I love Mad Magazine. My mother introduced it to me as a child. Although half the jokes flew over my head, I was hooked. I've spent years scouring bookshops for ancient Mad paperbacks, and picking through the discard pile at comic-book stores. One thing which always struck me was how progressive Mad was. Even back in the 1960s, it was an equal-opportunities satiriser - men, women, blacks, white,s straights, gays - a quick flick through the…

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Review: A £60 Android Tablet - Onda V96 3G


This is a sponsored post - from the good folk at GearBest. Introducing the Onda V96. A 3G tablet for around £60. Hardware It's a pretty solid set of specs. The 9.6 inch IPS Screen runs at 1280*800. Colours are clear from all angles, skin tones are well reproduced. The screen is bright - if anything a little too bright on its dimmest setting. There's 5 point multi-touch - so you can use all your fingers (or your noses if you'd like). The device is powered by MediaTek's MTK6582 - a …

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Don't use negative numbers for error codes


A warning to programmers - try to understand how people will use your error codes. This morning, I was confronted with a rather bemusing error message on my WordPress blog: Ok, so this should "never happen" and yet somehow it has. I wonder what on earth the error code means? I selected the error code and Googled it! I just copied and pasted the error message into Google and got back a set of meaningless results. Why? Most search engines treat the minus sign as an "excludes" operator. …

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How *not* to do a password change page


We've all been faced with this screen, right? You haven't logged in to a website for a while, so it prompts you to change your password. sigh Annoying but probably necessary. The problem was, every time I tried to change my password, it told me that my old password was invalid. The one that I'd just used to log in. I use the incredible LastPass Password Manager - so I knew I wasn't typing it incorrectly. It took a few tries, but I finally figured out what was going wrong. When I'd set…

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PDFs are the Cheques of the 21st Century


Cheques (checks if you're American) are an amazing legacy technology. Invented in the 17th Century, they immediately transformed the financial landscape. They allowed anyone to transfer both vast and trivial sums of wealth with ease. Whole industries grew up around them - one of my first jobs was programming binary loadlifters repairing computerised cheque-readers - they're an example of a technology which "just works". Which, of course, is nonsense. They're fragile, easy to forge, have…

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