So various apocolyptic journalism has bemoaned the slow update of IPv6, citing studies saying that IP addresses will run out somewhere between 2011 and yesterday. It’s even got to the point where converting to using IPv6 will get you some exclusive free porn!

Perhaps if ISPs aren’t too busy throttling their traffic to stamp out those pesky users who think “20MBit” means that you get 20MBit, or fighting off the entertainment industry, they might get around to implementing it. Or maybe they’ll point at NAT since it’ll cost them less.

Either way it’s a moot point because a far more pressing issue that noone seems to talk about is that domains are disappearing at a far faster rate.

These days you will not find many domains that aren’t taken or parked. Lots of new companies have a paucity of vowels or just have stupid names in order to find a vacant domain. Domain hacking has become prevalent. The fact is that people have come to expect your website to match your company name.

It’s just not sustainable though. There are only so many words out there and chances are they’ve been taken. So how do you fix this?

The answer is: don’t bother. How many people actually type in a domain to get to a website these days? Search engines (and by which I mean Google) are so good at matching single search terms to the site you’re aiming for, it doesn’t matter. Consider Dropbox, with the domain “getdropbox.com“. If you’re looking for the BBC’s iPlayer, don’t go to iplayer.com, it’s not there. But searching for “iplayer” will give you the right place as the top result. Add that to browser functionality such as Firefox’s that will do an “I’m feeling lucky” type search if you type into the address bar something that isn’t a domain, and you don’t really need to care about the extra “www.” and “.com” rubbish.

Treating your domain like a phone number isn’t sustainable for new companies. In the future, you won’t put something on your business card because the only domain you will be able to get will be some messy pile of consonants from the higher end of the Scrabble scoring scale. You won’t add “search for us on the web” either, because it’s so ubiquitous nowadays that almost everyone will of their own accord.

Who doesn’t love Web 2.0? With it’s touchy-feely “your opinion is important” angle and it’s focus strongly against extracting money from you, it’s been the new darling of the tech world because it’s like being hugged by the internet. As the world economy slowly declines, time will tell whether this can survive.

Most blog posts, social news sites, online newspaper equivalents and so on have a “comment” button allowing every Tom, Dick and Harry to post their racist, uninformed ignorance as an appendix to the content originally created by the site. This user-generated content is touted as the defining moment of media in the 21st century.

Purported to “add value” by allowing people to “have their say” is all well and good but more and more emphasis is being placed on Joe Public’s interpretation, removing responsibility from the authors for writing decent, well thought out pieces as “the real story is what you think!”.

Compare and contrast this to RSS, a technology with a job to do and which does it with the minimum of fuss. Want to know when a site you like has added content? Use their RSS feed to find out! No frills, no flumpy nonsense, just exactly what it says on the tin.

The problem with RSS is that it contradicts Web 2.0 in several ways. Firstly, the Web 2.0 formula is “hits + adverts = profit”. RSS feeds provide minimal ability to show adverts. Some do, but you can only really include one. Some feeds don’t include the full article, forcing you to visit the site anyway so they can get their full advert fix, somewhat clashing with “the content comes to you” ideal of RSS.

The second problem is that comments are time-delayed from the original content. It will take several hours if not more for your article to build up comments from the people who read it, especially if they are all in different timezones. So if you use an RSS reader to view content, chances are the comments won’t be there yet, or at least not many. So what do you do? Remember to come back later? That’s unlikely to happen, especially if you use RSS. Alternatively you’ll simply not ever see many comments, thus negating a huge part of the “extra value” of the content.

There’s a big pile of stuff on the internet which can be split into primary content, user-generated content, and adverts. The problem is that the technologies surrounding them don’t really overlap. Not unlike music piracy compared to phyisical sales, what is best for the consumer and what is best for the provider are far, far apart, and that needs to be fixed so both can benefit.

Apparently Twitter and Facebook, bastions of the “users not profit” business 2.0 model, have been flirting with each other and decided not to consummate the deal.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was upset that Twitter was even more useless at generating revenue than they were, so offered Twitter $500m of Facebook stock in an attempt to join together in an even larger venture-capital swallowing black hole than either of them could manage on their own.

Now that Twitter can afford an ‘e’ in their URL, they didn’t feel that the valuation was high enough. After all, company values are no longer estimated by income, instead choosing the formula of “(blog posts about us + celebrity users) * arbitrary millions”. Given that the $500m valuation of the stock was based on the equally tenuous $15bn pricetag Facebook got courtesy of Microsoft, this may have been wise.

Although the prospect of throwing away an extra $75 million dollars in SMS fees per year was appealing, it seems that Twitter’s constant threats of maybe working out a profitable business model soon has put the takeover talks to bed.

Ok, say you’re writing a website. You have a layout, possibly planned on paper, possibly just in your head. I imagine it has columns. And those columns probably are a similar height. Unless you memorized a variety of niche CSS functionality, and can flex your float-fu, you are pretty much going to, at some point, think “fuck this” and use tables. If you don’t write a lot of websites, that’s a justifiable response.

The thing is that tables Just Work™ and it’s a hell of a lot easier because tables usually work in all browsers to enough of an extent that you can forget about CSS hacks to fix the other stuff.

CSS purists will scoff; they will say that the layout belongs in the CSS, the content in HTML. Table-based design crosses that line, and it’s bad. Not that the end user gives a shit but whatever. It’s not best practise.

To that end, I’m glad to see that the whole problem has been addressed by inserting table-based layouts into the CSS spec.

Now, instead of writing

<table>

  <tr>

    <td>thing 1</td>

    <td>thing 2</td>

  </tr>

</table>

you can change all of that to DIVs! Then, in CSS, you say it’s a TD or a TR. Woo!

Glad we sorted that one out.

People who use “lol” as punctuation:

“wot r u up to today lol”

Paying a dentist £45 to inflict pain on me.

TV shows where the scientist / programmer explains something and the main character says “I don’t care how you did it, just tell me”. With not so subtle subtexts of “You damn nerds aren’t cool enough to be part of the story.”

Hooray for another exciting chance to watch overpaid, average players serve up some insipid, uninspired drivel for us as England take on the Czech Republic tonight.

In a week where it was announced that Frank Lampard would be receiving £151,000 per week for his ability to spank it high and wide of the goal, I finally realised that I can’t stand watching the England international football team. Posers and also-rans to a man. Bah.

“DPsychoS” on the BBC football blog summed it up in a comment perfectly (comment #30):

“Are these players really worthy of our attention considering what we have seen over the past 2 weeks. There we have seen Olympians with not much money and depending on their families to survive and still bring in success while these footballers swim in their own money and bring in poor performances. Its becasue they do not care while the Olympians do.

It has been said that the money goign into cycling sailing and rowing has reaped the rewards. Well with all the money the FA have, surely not only should England qualify but win every tournament every time.

It will be a boring draw and the players will have their excuses ready.”

Quite.

Apologies for people who read this blog who don’t care about cricket. You will probably want to go read something else right about now.

For the other (ie, Ian), I say this: Pietersen is not captain material.

Vaughan should never have stepped down. He is tactically aware, magnanimous in victory and frank in defeat. His ability with the bat has been called into question recently but so what. Who will replace him?

Strauss is short of runs and form. He may get better with the captaincy, but it’s a gamble.

Flintoff? Disgraced when falling off a pedelo at the world cup and showed his inability in getting thrashed 5-0 in Oz.

Robert Key? Apart from 221 against the Windies, he averages 21 in test cricket. Aside from that, how can he get the respect of the rest of the players from the off?

Collingwood? “Resigned” the ODI captaincy. England need more people like him but it seems he hasn’t got enough flair.

Alastair Cook? Too young, too inexperienced. Has he ever been captain?

But Pietersen? He’s all ego. The South Africans have sussed that out, and everyone else will. He puts himself in front of the team. He has no awareness of field settings, he’s to impatient to, for example, grind down the oposition with spin bowling and accurate pace bowling. He has one method: attack. And that won’t be good enough to win matches against anyone.

I’m sorry but there’s noone to replace Vaughan and that’s the main reason he shouldn’t have gone.

There’s been a few posts recently extolling the virtues of terse, or indeed non-existent, comments in code. Apparently, if you need to comment your code, you suck as a programmer because you can’t handle writing clear, concise, self-explanatory code.

I call bollocks. There is one extremely important reason for commenting your code which is this: you comment what your code is supposed to be doing, then you write the code.

It’s much easier to write a sentence explaining what you plan to do than it is to write the code to do it.

Once, I was debugging some code that a colleague of mine wrote. It came down to a constant, where he wanted to do something every 30 minutes, using this:

private static int WAIT_FOR =  1945800;

Which is 30 * 60 * 60 * 1000 - ie, 30 hours. It took me ages to work out what was wrong. It would have been helped a lot if a comment had explained what the constant was for! Ever since that, if I have a constant which deals in time, I comment it saying “30 minutes”. If I screw up my math, at least the comment says what I meant.

As another example, I recently tracked down a bug in Hibernate. I spent ages finding it, and when I did I was only half certain. The code didn’t have comments documenting its intention, so I wasn’t 100% sure of my fix.

Similarly, there is a bug in Javassist related to Java 1.6. stack maps. I think I know what’s wrong, the fix seems simple, but because they have no comments at the particular point of the bug, I don’t know if my fix is right or if the bug is elsewhere. By not explicitly documenting the intention, bugs become harder to understand.

It’s entirely possible to overdocument, I agree with that. For example:

public int getCount() {

return count;

}

That’s obvious what it does, and you don’t need a comment really. Why say “Returns the count”? It’s stupid.

Comments as a list of steps in the method are a good thing - for one, it’s easier to read comments than code, and it’s also a nice verification of what the original coder meant. Documenting intentions makes your code much simpler to anyone who might have to maintain or debug it down the line, with no harm to yourself. Just do it.