Source Guru

Since my last blog post – I’ve been having a random conversation with somebody through the thing I created.

It’s been random… very random…. though – apparently it’s someone who I’ve met in person – so at least it isn’t a cyber-stalker.

If anyone knows somene who went to UBZ with a .fi domain name, let me know please?

It’s not often that I get so bored I start actually doing something.

Usually, I’ll just end up moaning and whining at people on [Insert name of preffered IM protocol here]

But, you know – I actually did something today. Nothing that’s really of any use to anyone… and nothing that’s really worthwhile for anything other than my own personal amusement – but hey – I took an hour or so – I hacked away – I played around a little, and this is what I came up with – Impressive huh? Didn’t think so – but it kept me amused for a while. As I hope will some of the comments that are left

 However, in writing the code, it did take me on a trip down memory lane, back to when I first got into web programming. My first ever website I set up over on tripod, back when I was learning HTML and thought marquee’s were cool. (though thankfully I never thought flashing text was!)

Back then – one of the websites I visited regularly was dogbomb (NSFW) – and I still do – on occasion – it has a couple of interesting forums I enjoy reading through (particularly the jokes forum – check it out) and has a few…. how shall I say… intriguing (?) topics on there.

Anyway – I’ve strayed from the point. Way back then – Simon (the webmaster) had a little thing you could click on and change a bit of writing on his main page, which I found very very cool (remember I was a newbie back then). He called this graffitti. Well, being the eager little beaver I was… I wanted it. I wanted it for my own, and, that’s how I got into it – I pored the web, yahoo searched, and eventually taught myself perl, and managed to get my own copy up and working. Of course, being a “featured site” at the time on dogbomb, I got a hell of a lot of abuse for “ripping” the code, but – I knew that I’d done it all myself – not stolen anything and well…. I was proud – it was the first time I’d sat down and programmed anything decent (apart from a few really basic RPGs on my old MSX!) and then I started getting into other things – forum software etc etc etc etc.

It all led me to where I am today.

Thing is – with all the innovations already being made – what can we do except copy them? Ok. it may be a different way of doing the same thing, but if it wasnt for the fact that there are so many restrictive licences, patents, etc etc out there, then surely we wouldn’t need all this re-making of things…. GnuPG and PGP for example… I don’t see the point in any of it. Which is why I advocate Open Source Software. Lets all work together instead of duplicating effort – and maybe we can move faster!

A phrase I’ve only ever heard once before today, which was when Igot frustrated at a camper in UT2004

 Anyways, in the process of moving home, and some other stuff going on, I no longer have access to the net from home anymore. So I decided this morning I’d go to an Internet Cafe up the road from me. Well – it was closed – apparently it doesn’t open till 11am (which sucks) – so I went to the one about 3 doors away from that.

 Well anyway, after about 5 mins (logging into gmail – and a site which I’m ashamed to admit I’ve gotten addicted to lately -MySpace) in walk the police, and ask to see the owner. Then ask me to back away from the computer. I’m wondering what the **** is going on.

 Apparently, they had a warrant to search the computers for child pornography, and after checking my background, to make sure i wasn’t a wanted criminal, they let me go.

Interesting though – I’m going to see if I can make some money out of it by setting them up a dansguardian proxy or similar

Years ago, I registered a couple of domain names with some random register, and nominet contacted me regarding one of those (holdings-carparts.co.uk) and sent me a certificate of registration for the domain. That was the only one they sent me anything for.

 Recently, I’ve registered a few new .co.uk domains with my new host, one of them being dealer-network.co.uk (currently nothing there – so no point in going)

Well, anyway, this morning (3 months after registering the domain) I recieve a letter from nominet, asking me to go to their website and confirm my details so that they can send me a certificate of registration.

Uber weird. It seems to me that nominet look through the domain registrations and anything that might seem like it could be a “business” domain they contact so that the business can have a shiny bit of paper saying that yes, they own the domain, and no – cyber-squatters not allowed.

 What amuses me the most is the fact that I won’t actually be using the domain for anything business-like – I’m planning to set up a satirical site for “dealers” of “illegal substances”. Ok, it’s going to be a joke website, but nominet obviously must think I’m on about car dealers or similar. lol. Well… it’s nice they do that – but why only for some domains not others?