Second Best Bench
What seems like a long time ago (2006), I picked up a cheap Canon DSLR for a bit of fun, and surprisingly enough found it fun. What was even more surprising was that this picture was the first that indicated that perhaps some of the images I made were not entirely bad. And I have just heard that Getty have picked this image up (via EyeEm) to sell.
As someone who has spent far too much time dealing with the Domain Name System, I get kind of miffed when people insist on creating names that conflict with the DNS ordering. You see the DNS naming works from right-to-left (the wrong way around if you’re reading this in English).
Take the name for this site – really.zonky.org – which is admittedly a rather quirky name. The most significant part of the name is at the right (org – and yes I’m ignoring the really significant and invisible “dot”). The next most significant part (zonky) specifies what organisation has registered the site (me), and the least significant part (really) points to one service at that organisation.
So when people ask for names that break that ordering it is ever so slightly irritating – for example if you have a service called mail.zonky.org and wanted a test service you might request mail-test.zonky.org which breaks the ordering of things. As an alternative, test.mail.zonky.org doesn’t break the naming, looks a bit nicer, and ultimately more reasonably flexible.
Let us look at a slightly more complex example; let’s assume that we have a domain called db.zonky.org and want to register a service name for each database. We could register names such as db-addresses.zonky.org, and db-orders.zonky.org, or we could register them instead as addresses.db.zonky.org and orders.db.zonky.org. In the later case, I can very quickly write a firewall rule that allows access to *.db.zonky.org (whereas db-*.zonky.org would not work).
Ultimately suggest names in DNS naming order unless you can justify why it is not suitable.
Another Rescue by the RNLI
Liam Fox has claimed that Trump protesters have “embarassed” themselves by protesting Trump’s visit to the UK. He claims that we have a tradition of being polite to guests (at least until they throw up on the carpet, piss in the wine, and try to have sex with the host).
Well, I didn’t invite that jumped up rancid little toad who is Putin’s lickspittle and quite possibly the closest thing we’ve seen to a major free world leader being a Nazi. So I am under no obligation to be polite to the bankrupt crook.
Besides which, with his unreasonable and unhinged attack on NATO, Trump has been pissing in the wine, so it would not be unreasonable to slam the door in his face. Of course I’m not being “diplomatic” but I’m not a politician so I’m not being paid to be polite to the kind of person resembling that which you instinctively scrape off your shoe.
To USians who might feel a bit insulted by how their president is being treated; well if you did your job properly and didn’t elect someone with the brains of a pea-sized petrified panda turd who separates children and puts them in concentration camps then we might treat them with a bit more respect.
Well that was an interesting day in politics!
Trump has arrived in Europe and immediately tried to insert both feet into his mouth – he insults the other members of NATO by openly criticising them for not meeting their commitment to military spending, and claims that NATO owes money to the USA for protection.
Now there used to be some grounds for criticising the European members of NATO for not spending enough on their military, but the spending has been going up in recent years (despite austerity). You don’t criticise someone for being overweight when they’re on a diet and have lost half their flab!
And Trump claimed that Germany is under the control of Russia because of Germany buying natural gas from Russia! First of all, the figures he were using were wrong, and when you boil it down Germany’s energy needs are very rapidly being switched to renewable energy sources – on some days all of Germany’s energy is supplied by renewable energy sources.
Trump exhibits the diplomatic skills of a rabid dog.
European nations aren’t dumb – we watched Russia blackmail Ukraine over gas supplies in winter and know that we need to wean ourselves off Russian gas. And we know that the US has sent us a self-destructive idiot to deal with; those meeting with Trump will be gritting their teeth and putting on their most diplomatic face.
The other interesting thing is the effect Trump’s attack on NATO has had on the US Senate; they’ve basically passed a resolution (passed 97-2) saying in a long-winded way: “Ignore that idiot Trump, we’re fully behind NATO”.
There are those in the US media saying that Trump is Putin’s biggest ally on all of this – he apparently would rather do a deal with the Russians than with the traditional allies of the US. Is Trump actually an FSB agent?
No. The Russians might well make use of Trump and drop him an advantage or two, but they’re not so dumb as to employ an idiot like Trump.
Trump is a clear and present danger to the interests of the US; not the stuff like treating immigrants like criminals (although that is bad enough) but the big stuff; stuff that will encourage Republicans to turn on Trump – National Security and the economy.