Copacetic

I’ve been playing with Google Notebook for the past few days as an adjunct to my del.icio.us links. All in all I like it, especially the Firefox extension that allows you to add notes to the current page without occluding it (unlike the del.icio.us extension). There are some gripes though. Firstly the search doesn’t seem to work, it can’t find a note with the string “VAT” in it despite me having a note defining my VAT number. Secondly, it appends notes to the end of the list rather than putting them at the top, blog style. This means you end up doing a lot of scrolling (especially as the search doesn’t work).

All in all I think I’ll stick with it a bit longer. The drag and drop on the notes page itself is sexalicious!

Michi Henning writes about The Rise and Fall of CORBA on the ACM Queue website. In the article he describes the history and development of the CORBA standard and details why it has been relegated to a infrastructure backwater. They key reason for CORBA’s failure that resonates with me is the following statement,

The OMG does not require a reference implementation for a specification to be adopted. This practice opens the door to castle-in-the-air specifications. On several occasions the OMG has published standards that turned out to be partly or wholly unimplementable because of serious technical flaws. In other cases, specifications that could be implemented were pragmatically unusable because they imposed unacceptable runtime overhead. Naturally, repeated incidents of this sort are embarassing and do little to boost customer confidence. A requirement for a reference implementation would have forced submitters to implement their proposals and would have avoided many such incidents.

I recently gave a dig out to somebody by registering a .ie domain for them. Total time from initial application to finally getting the domain up and running (e.g. getting the IEDR to update the nameservers) was 40 days!! Even I can’t believe it when I count it up.

Even if I generously lop of ten days to allow for some delays on my part in responding, this really is atrocious, and we pay a premium price of €95.59 for this service.

They farcically recommend you use a reseller, but when I tried to register initially via hostireland, I got bounced straight back to the IEDR, who required me to fax (yes fax, not email) in a justification.

My advice, stick to godaddy.com and register any kind of domain you want for $9.95, in seconds.