Month: June 2008

ICANN Set Stage for Domain Free-For-All

Yesterday’s decision by ICANN to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to create their own top-level domain is a bit worrying.  With TLDs like .TV, .biz and .info struggling to make much of an impact (except maybe doubling the amount of spam flying around the internet), who really thinks that allowing people to make up their own?

As appealing as it might be to shift this site from SteveFerson.com to Steve.Ferson, it hardly seems worth the confusion of creating an infinite number of domains for the same company. At present you can usually find a site by typing companyname.com or companyname.co.uk into your address bar. Under these plans, even Googling for a company name could theoretically bring up hundreds of results all pretending to be the ‘real’ site.

That said, it was worth it for this headline from ZD Net.

Good news for existing proposals like .nyc for New York City and .xxx for adult sites. Depending on the costs of setting it up, I could also see a new TLD appearing for Northern Ireland (.nir ?) and am sure some enterprising spirit will attempt to register .blog.  Feel free to leave your suggestion for a new TLD below.

Things that Piss Me Off 3: Twitter Whores

I have a tiny following on Twitter.  I’m comfortable with that. In fact I’d much rather have nobody listening than have a list of people following me who are also “following” 162,458 other people! You’d have thought Twitter would take a dim view of such blatant spam, but apparently not.

To that end my tiny following just got tinier with the deletion of anyone following more than 10,000 people. That seems more than fair to me.

Things that Piss Me Off 2: Literally

I’ve decided there’s probably enough material out there to start running “Things that Piss Me Off” as a regular feature.  I’m going to retcon Friday’s PHP niggle as “Things that Piss Me Off 1”, so today’s entry is number 2.

A quick google has revealed that I’m not alone in being pissed off by this. There is even a blog dedicated to “tracking abuse of the word ‘literally’” (apparently it happens even in works by respected authors, I mean come on!)

“It is bad enough to exaggerate but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.”

Ambrose Bierce, discussing the example sentence “His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet.” in Write it right: A little blacklist of literary faults

I was reminded of this yesterday when one of those shitty “reality” TV shows was on. OK, it was shipwrecked (it was Sunday, my other half was watching it and I was immobile due to recovering from some gentle exercise). The latest bint rejected from the island was being carried off in a boat, supposedly on her way home. When she began to suspect she wasn’t being taken home but to another island she claimed that, if her suspicions were confirmed, she “would literally die”.

As appealing as that prospect sounded my fear that she was just the latest in a long line of people abusing the word literally was confirmed when after a full week she had failed to live up to her promise. Qu’elle surprise!

Big PHP Niggle

I need a quick bitch.

I love PHP. It’s everywhere. All my sites are written in it. My CMS is written in it. My blog engines, WordPress and b2evolution, are written in it. It’s free. It runs on any platform. Hosts all support it. With PHP 5 they’ve even done a lot of work on PHP4’s main downfall – lack of OOP support.

One thing really pisses me off though – it’s totally inconsistent.  Consider these two functions:

  1. strstr — Find first occurrence of a string
  2. in_array — Checks if a value exists in an array

Take a close look. See the signatures?

string strstr ( string $haystack , mixed $needle [, bool $before_needle ] )
bool in_array ( mixed $needle , array $haystack [, bool $strict ] )

In in_array the first parameter is what you’re looking for and the second is what you’re looking in (more or less consistent with preg_match).  In strstr (and its derivatives) this order is reversed. Who on Earth let that slip through? I’m yet to find a free text editor that will tell you which parameters a given function expects (Dreamweaver does a decent job but it’s bloody expensive for a text editor!) the way Visual Studio does for C#, which I use a lot in work.  Given that situation, you’d expect consistency in this sort of thing.  Apparently not so. Instead, every time I want to use one of these functions I have to do a quick Google to bring me to the PHP manual page to tell me which order the parameters come in.

Of course they can’t even fix that without breaking backwards compatibility either, so we’re probably stuck with it.  Bloody marvellous!

Firefox 3 – Initial Impressions

I haven’t come across anything truly groundbreaking in Firefox 3, possibly because I’ve become accustomed to much of the feature set through the Betas and RCs, but there are one or two improvements that are quite useful (as well as a couple of regressions unfortunately).

Wee Niggles

First the bad. When you view Page Info from the context menu it doesn’t give a link to the CSS file in the Media tab any more. I was sure it was there in 2 and a quick google confirmed this. This really sucks – I can’t see why they’ve taken it out.

Secondly, when I was looking through the options to try and return the aforementioned CSS links, I discovered Firefox had decided it was going to automatically download any future updates when they were discovered (I promptly switched the option to “Ask me…”). Bad Firefox.

Magic Address Bar

The good is good though. It doesn’t seem like it at first, but to my mind the biggest improvement of all is the address bar. Sure they’ve added a “Most Visited” folder to your bookmarks toolbar which (shockingly, given the title) contains a list of the sites you visit most frequently, but the address bar has some great, if not immediately obvious, usability improvements.

Continue reading “Firefox 3 – Initial Impressions”

FireFox 3 Released Today

Looks like the excitement is a little bit premature. Not just yet, but at 6pm BST the newest version of Mozilla’s FireFox web browser will be released. Mozilla want Firefox 3 to break the record for the most downloads in 24 hours, which begs the question as to why they pissed off Australasia and half of Asia by promoting Download Day as today, 17th June, when they’re not making the new version available until 10am Pacific Time which means the aforementioned regions will not see the download released until it is 18th June there. That’s without even considering yours truly and millions of other Europeans who will be finished their days work.

Good work Mozilla.