A records on top level domains

After I stum­bled upon the won­der­ful URL shor­te­ner http://to/ today and imme­dia­tely began pos­ting it on IRC, I recei­ved a com­ment that someone didn’t even know that is was pos­si­ble to do so. I, of course, could only com­ment “of course it’s pos­si­ble”. But in the same train of thought, I just had to have a look at who else has a valid A record on their top level domain. So I fet­ched the IANA TLD list and, after being baff­led by the puny­code TLDs, threw some sh at the pro­blem:
(for domain in $(grep -v '^#' tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt); do host -t A "${domain}."; done) | grep -v 'has no A record'

For the sake of enjoy­a­bi­lity, I thus offer the results in table form, along with what kind of site is run­ning on port 80. Data time­stamp is 2010–01-08T16:05:00+0100, loca­tion for rou­ting is DTAG-DIAL26 / AS3320.

So, in short, 5 of 18 (27%) are down­right bro­ken, one is being autistic, and a fur­ther 2 (11%) are not con­fi­gu­red to do anything mea­ningful, lea­ding to a total of 8 — or 44% — of TLD A records being use­l­ess. Bonus: none of the sites have AAAA records and, thus, no IPv6 availability.

Discordian iCal calendar

Since I was play­ing around with Date modu­les a bit, I deci­ded to con­jure up some iCal files for the Dis­cor­dian calen­dar, which chro­ni­cles the Year of Our Lady Dis­cord, as descri­bed in the Prin­ci­pia Discordia.

With the goal eli­mi­na­ting any kind of depen­dency on actions by me to gene­rate the calen­dar files, I just pre­ge­ne­ra­ted them for the whole 21^st century.

The files are stored at /discordian/$year.ical, with $year ran­ging from 2001 (which was the real start of the cen­tury and the mil­le­nium) to 2100.

For the sake of easy access — and as an expe­ri­ment to see what Google’ll make of it — I’ve com­pi­led a handy table so you can just click for the file you want.

Feel free to include this on your Google calen­dar (will make for an inte­res­ting traf­fic study) or redis­tri­bute it with a kudos to me, lin­king to this page (http://ydal.de/discordian-ical/). Copy­right shouldn’t be an issue since this com­pi­la­tion does not exceed the Schöp­fungs­höhe, but I’ll declare them to be CC-BY-DE 3.0 just in case.

DNS prefetching for spam address verification

See­ing how DNS pre­fet­ching is the new fad with brow­sers, I reckon there’s an easy way to con­firm valid addres­ses of web­mail ser­vice users:

1. Con­trol a DNS to assign uni­que has­hed hostnames.
2. Inte­grate links to has­hed host­na­mes in spam mails.
3. If the reci­pi­ent uses cur­rent Chrome, Fire­fox, etc:
   1. The DNS pre­fet­cher will resolve the host name,
   2. Giving you a con­fir­med hit for the address in your log­files, since your uni­que host­name gets resolved.

Kind of remi­nis­cent of the whole “oh, we can have e-Mails with HTML, let’s put in images!” affair. The only thing that might be a bit of a pro­blem for a spam­mer is get­ting a domain with DNS ser­ver control.

Advanced interaction in FPS

There is always a bit of metho­lo­gi­cal slow­ness when it comes to the first per­son shoo­ter genre of com­pu­ter games: deve­l­o­pers are lazy to try­ing some­thing new, lest they fall flat on their faces. This is sort of true when it comes to advan­ces in level design and gra­phics, where there’s a bit of ten­dency to move along, but only on known lines — next to nobody really adopts open levels. If they do, they are eit­her of (next to) no impact at all (I’m loo­king at you, Front­lines: Fuel of War), or they change the whole game into some­thing that gra­vi­ta­tes around cer­tain hot spots, as in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Cher­no­byl, for example, or the first actual FPS doing this, Strife. And some­thing so open like Ope­ra­tion Flash­point, even though sporting quite impres­sive gra­phics, was never as suc­cess­ful as a rehash like Cry­sis which just slap­ped supreme gra­phics on old and pro­ven FPS concepts.

Then, there was the other extreme, wer some­thing radi­cally new was tried. Games like Tre­spas­ser, which was a game set in the Juras­sic Park uni­verse with some rather nice gra­phics, and a very fre­aky con­trol sys­tem. In this, you directly con­trol­led the arms of your cha­rac­ter, moving them around, rota­ting hands and clen­ching fists manu­ally to grab levers or push buttons.

It was horrible.

But the thing which hasn’t chan­ged at all for quite some time is how your cha­rac­ter inter­acts with the world at large. The big chan­ges in this category:

1. Doom star­ted out with using your key­board arrows to move you along, and PgUp and PgDn for aiming up and down.
2. Quake intro­du­ced the mouse into the mix, which still took some time to get adop­ted, though.
3. Then, Half-Life intro­du­ced the WASD key lay­out to accom­pany its ple­thora of spe­cial keys, which also popu­la­ri­zed the “use” but­ton to inter­act with environ­ment objects, instead of just run­ning into or shoo­ting them.
4. Recently, game­pad con­trol­lers are often used, and there’s a shift in lay­out map­ping to con­form with the limited amounts of but­ton avail­able on a controller.

And that’s very much it. For eons, you run around using your use but­ton to make stuff do other stuff. Besi­des just activat­ing swit­ches, you have your use key trig­ge­ring dia­lo­gues, opening doors, picking up things, and just about ever­y­thing you can ima­gine. If you do anything that bor­ders on com­ple­xity, you’d pro­bably get a pop-up dia­lo­gue explai­ning your opti­ons to you, totally brea­king game immer­sion and, in a few sorry cases, actually kicking in the fourth wall with a vengeance.

This was the case even with my beloved com­plex games like Sys­tem Shock, even if they tried to be some­what immer­sive in their inter­face. But then, there came the least likely can­di­date for reform ever: Doom III. Nobody expec­ted D3 to be anything but a new “shoo­ting demons” thingy; yet not only did it come along and intro­du­ced story to id Soft­ware games (which Quake IV con­ti­nued to flesh out), but it also intro­du­ced a revo­lu­tio­nary immer­sive way of using com­pu­ter con­so­les: instead of activat­ing them with your use key and then cli­cking around on the screen, D3 just chan­ged the cross­hair into an arrow when you viewed at the con­trols of a ter­mi­nal and allo­wed you to push and mani­pu­late but­tons wit­hout ever brea­king immer­sion into the universe.

An example (just the first few seconds, really):

Example screen­shot, bla­tantly sto­len from the site in my post scriptum:

But it didn’t last. And I won­der: why? Was it too com­plex? Did it alie­nate the tra­di­tio­na­list that he had to do more than push ‘e’ to use a com­pu­ter? It’s just so good, yet nobody seems pre­pa­red to adopt it to their games. Bioware’s Mass Effect is quite good at try­ing to keep immer­sion high and making the player expe­ri­ence the game, rather than just play it — but they, too, resort to brea­king immer­sion when it comes to com­pu­ter ter­mi­nals, using a com­bi­ned inventory/data sto­rage sys­tem on a sepa­rate screen.

The ques­tion remains: Why? It’s good, it works, it’s not hard to learn — so why avoid it?

P.S.: While sear­ching for good screen­shots, I found an arti­cle cal­led Through The Loo­king Glass — Fully Inter­ac­tive Sur­faces In DOOM3 by Bernd Krei­meier, which explains things in a bit grea­ter detail.