James Titcumb

• James was just owned by Primordial! Face meltingly good. Now watching Opeth. Still 4/5 more bands to go… (22/06/2008 17:38:07)
• James is wondering what on earth nofx is doing at a metal fest… And don’t think they do either! (22/06/2008 19:42:56)
• James is watching At The Gates, so have it! (22/06/2008 20:48:50)
• James is going to watch the mighty Morbid Angel! (22/06/2008 22:48:48)
• James is in a nice brasserie in Le Havre on the long hard road out of Hell(fest)! (23/06/2008 12:42:42)
• James has just had a nice shave. Going to have a bath now, and prepare to run all the errands today. (24/06/2008 08:11:45)
• James is listening to Enochian Theory soundcheck. Waiting endless hours for ours… (24/06/2008 18:23:14)
• James has played and is dead and knackered. (24/06/2008 21:34:57)
• James thinks the wedge bouncers are absolute bastards. (24/06/2008 22:31:49)
• James feels like it’s morning again! (25/06/2008 09:11:09)
• James has hunger inside him. Want to lunch it up, home boys. (25/06/2008 12:06:45)
• James feels a bit meh. (25/06/2008 14:55:25)
• James wants to get home onto the Wii Fit… (25/06/2008 17:12:04)
• James is sick and tired of the bouncer argument. (26/06/2008 09:36:11)
• James wishes the weekend would come. (26/06/2008 11:08:38)
• James wonders where the days go… (26/06/2008 12:42:48)
• James is eating a Refresher bar. (26/06/2008 16:28:12)
• James is going to get turned into a pillar of salt for liking the Heinz Deli Mayo advert!!! (26/06/2008 17:08:23)
• James has the tired in his face. (26/06/2008 21:17:54)
• James started the morning with an epic fail – setting the alarm off! (27/06/2008 08:50:33)
• James also fails at resetting the alarm (27/06/2008 10:38:06)
• James is still wondering what the yellow “Danger” icon is on his task bar… (27/06/2008 12:43:18)
• James can’t wait to be in the middle of no-where with Hannah. (27/06/2008 12:52:20)

This article I found on the Mind Tree Blog sort of covers old ground for me, but it was interesting nonetheless. It’s interesting the way he doesn’t forward specific things, but rather everything in the URL… so we’d forward something like:

http://www.asgrim.com/channel/Google/news/something/

to:

http://www.asgrim.com/index.php?p=channel/Google/news/something/

and letting the PHP script decode the specifics of the URL, rather than setting up specific forwards like:

http://www.asgrim.com/index.php?module=channel&provider=Google&section=news&article=something

I’m not sure which I prefer. The method mentioned in the article does give extra flexibility without having to modify the .htaccess, but the latter gives more specification as to how the URLs should work. I guess at the end of the day it’s up to opinion.

If this BBC news story is anything to go by, this web address could actually exist soon. It looks like Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will be allowing registration of TLDs (Top Level Domains). For the immediate future at least, I doubt it will be very used apart from the big companies (hello Google!) due to the “low six-figure” price tag (in USD). This means that web addresses could change something like this:

• http://www.google.com/ »» http://google/ or http://www.google/ or http://news.google/ etc.
• http://www.microsoft.com/ »» http://microsoft/ or http://windows.microsoft/
• And potentially personal addresses (when prices drop..) such as http://james.titcumb/

It’s certainly a revelation, but is it a good idea, thats the question… How will this be recieved by the general public? How easily will people take to typing addresses without .com or .co.uk or other TLDs? Since practically the dawn of the internet, these popular TLDs such as .com, .net, .org etc. have been a staple of the internet. Even phrases have been named after these TLDs, such as “the dot com crash” and so on.

The other extreme of course, is that it gets taken up a little too well, and it goes mad, and companies register TLDs such as in the title of this article. I’m a bit aprehensive until I read further into it, but if executed properly, I think it could work well, and would benefit the internet immensely.

On the third hand (?!), there’s the already heaving size of the internet. Capacity problems are being taken care of by the introduction of IPv6 to replace IPv4 at some point, and releasing TLDs generally will allow more combinations of domains (to a certain degree), but don’t you think there’s already just way too much information on the internet? Or perhaps there’s not enough… I think thats a whole other debate there, so I’ll put the lid back on that one for the time being.

Of course, part of this proposal is to allow non-Roman text in domain names. So instead of http://news.yahoo.co.jp/, we could see http://ニュース.yahoo.co.jp/… The problem I see with that of course, is that I don’t have a japanese keyboard, so I’d have to use character map… which would take a while. Japanese keyboards of course have Roman letters. Although to me personally, it doesn’t matter as I can’t speak or understand non-Roman languages, but I’m sure it’d matter to someone out there!

Firstly, I’m not a huge fan of gays really, I don’t like watching them kiss etc., but I’m quite happy to socialise with them. If you think that makes me homophobic, I think you’re wrong, but you’re entitiled to your opinion. However, this BBC article annoyed me. Those people at The World Centre For Banning Stuff have now decided to ban this advert for Heinz Deli Mayo, which depicts two men kissing. I mean really… who cares? And don’t even get me started on all those comments about religion… According to this American guy, SpiritandTruth7, I’m going to turn into a pillar of salt for sympathising with gays! Can you believe that?! I’m dreading being turned into a pillar of salt…

Anyway, I don’t see anything wrong with the advert, but kudos go to Heinz for making it so controversial. I probably wouldn’t have heard of it until I found it in the supermarket, but I’m sorely tempted to get some Heinz Deli May now!

Image credit goes to David Firth.

Due to my house move, I’m relocating my servers to a temporary location for a couple of weeks until my new internet line is set up. Therefore all websites that run on my servers will be down for several hours during transit to the temporary location on Saturday 28th July 2008. The move will be done some time mid-afternoon, and I anticipate they will be running again late afternoon. The temporary location does have a different IP, so I will have to update the DNS records, which can take up to 24-48 hours to propogate around the world. I aim to keep disruption to a minimum, but please bear with me!

Note that once I have the internet line working in my new house, similar downtime will occur again due to transit from the temporary location to the new house. I will inform again when this is due to happen!