No Such Weblog

Chris Ambler discusses TLD strings and is concerned that ICANN could worry too much about the problems new TLDs have had in the past, with code that would claim that anything with a TLD segment of more than two or three characters was an invalid domain name.

I sincerely hope that Chris is wrong about that -- for two reasons: One, fools are inventive enough to not just assume 2 and 3 letter TLDs (Google hit #1 for address validation javascript), but to also check for the now-existing gTLDs, while essentially sticking to the same broken design -- or, worse, not even being flexible with three-letter TLDs. Two, what I've heared on this topic in Rome sounded extremely reasonable. While John Klensin's RFC 3696 on the topic wasn't mentioned there -- at least in the public forum --, others have recognized that the easiest cure is probably to implement (or just find) free sample code for domain name and e-mail address verification, and to Google-bomb that code.

In other words: Let's help the market take care of that.

So the new Laptop is an IBM Thinkpad R40, and I'm pleasantly surprised how smoothly Fedora Core 1 works with this machine. While some stumbling blocks remain in getting Linux to run smoothly, solutions for most are readily available -- and the rest just works.

Some lessons: In order to actually use the entire mouse assembly (touchpad with two mouse buttons, trackpoint with three (!) mouse buttons), it's best to use a patched version of GPM in repeater mode. For the internal modem, the only thing that works so far is a recent SmartLink driver. Note that the Agere drivers recommended by IBM don't seem to work. The final and surprising problem was getting the laptop's infrared to work: An old-style IRQ collision between te IRDA chipset and a PCMCIA card was the problem; to solve this, I just made sure that PCMCIA isn't started before IRDA.

The one thing that isn't working, yet, is the built-in Centrino Wi-Fi. But there is hope.