Helvetica vs. Arial

Helvetica-vs-Arial deathmatch Flash

In case you're interested, read some of the backstory on Arial on The Scourge of Arial and linked articles.

(I have no position on this debate; I just found it a bit amusing. Links originally from this blog entry.)

Random thought

Ich sage zwar dschäi-die-bie-ßie aber oh-deh-beh-tseh.

PSA: Opera browser now free-as-in-no-ads

If you've ever wanted to try out Opera but didn't want to pay nor endure ads, or if you've been using the ad-supported free version of Opera but would like to get rid of them, Opera is now offering version 8.50 for free download without ads.

From what I can tell, they won't be coming back, either.

"www. is deprecated"?

scribot_feed linked to no-www.org just now, which reminded me—I think I had come across that site before but had forgotten what it was called.

Personally, I disagree with their analysis of the situation; it appears to hinge on a disagreement we have over terminology.

Specifically, they talk about "www" as a "sub-domain" with language such as Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain?. I tend to call the first "label" of a domain name the "host name" (for want of a better word, since the full name is also a "host name" in my book, as well as a "domain name"). So in "www.livejournal.com", "www" would be the "host name" and "livejournal.com" would be the domain. It's a host inside a domain.

Using http://livejournal.com/ seems weird to me since it appears to be addressing not a single host but a whole domain—even though my browser connects to a certain host, a single machine (possibly one of many sharing the same name in load-balancing situations, but one machine for any given connection). Connecting to a "domain" seems… wrong to me.

They also mention that Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. but that's a red herring in my eyes: mail servers do not require this specifically because of how email works with DNS.

In the olden days (as far as I know), mail to user@example.com would cause the mail transfer agent to attempt to connect to the machine example.com, but we've had MX (mail exchanger) records for ages now, and they're the preferred method for determining which host to send email to.

So when you want to send mail to user@example.com, the mail transfer agent now looks up example.com's mail exchangers in the DNS. Those might be, say, mail.example.com, backup-mx.example.com, and othermx.otherhost.com (i.e., they could even be in a completely different domain name!); then, according to certain priority rules, it will connect to one of those hosts to attempt to deliver the message. Only if no MX records can be found for a domain will the MTA, for historical/compatibility reasons, attempt to connect to a host whose name is the portion after the @ sign.

So the reason why we don't need to write "recipient@mail.domain.com" (if mail.domain.com is the mail exchanger for domain.com) is because of MX records in DNS. But there's no concept of "HTTP exchanger" in DNS; I vaguelly recall a concept of service records (RR SVC?) which could do this (i.e. say that HTTP traffic to domain X is handled by a host named Y), but I don't think that's widely supported.

Historically, a URL of http://FOO for any FOO means to browsers "convert 'FOO' into an IP address by looking up an 'A' record for that name, then connect to that IP address (or one of them, if there are multiple 'A' records". Whereas mail sent to user@FOO means to MTAs "lookup hostnames by finding 'MX' records for 'FOO' and order them by priority. Then take the 'best' MX (with the lowest priority number) and convert that hostname to an IP address by looking up an 'A' record for that name, then connect to that IP address". To rather different approaches.

Where subdomains come in is in names such as www.hpl.hp.com, which for me is host "www" in the "hpl" (HP labs) subdomain of the "hp.com" domain. But in www.example.com, I wouldn't call "www" a subdomain.

If people say that calling the host containing their websites "www" is redundant because you're accessing it with a URL scheme of "http", I can accept that—use a different hostname, such as "web" if you'd like (as MIT did early on, with web.mit.edu being the host with the school's official website, and www.mit.edu coming later and hosting a student organisation) or something completely different such as "argon" or "senator-bedfellow" or "salticus-peckhamae". Call your main website http://marvin.example.com/ if you don't like "www". But give the machine a name of its own, by which it will be known in the domain, and construct the URL by tacking "." + the domain onto the machine name! http://example.com just seems weird to me, like a person without a given name.

---

I wonder whether the idea that "example.com" can be the name of a machine comes from people accustomed to "Internet" (in the sense of TCP/IP internetwork) = "World Wide Web", and the many domains where they only see IP traffic going to and from a web server, which is often not even on a machine of its own but on a shared webhoster. In which case, I suppose it makes a bit of sense to consider vanityhost.com as the label of the machine since there is only one machine in that domain and it exists to serve web traffic.

On the other hand, I grew up with the model of a domain being a bunch of machines, say, in an office: several dozen workstations, each with a name, a file server or three, a database server, oh, and also a web server. All the machines being something.example.com, and often being able to call each other simply something since .example.com is the default domain for traffic inside. But each host has a name (not merely an IP address) of its own: one single word, which can be disambiguated on the Internet by adding on the name of the domain.

Meme: LJ interests meme

Since so many people on my friends list are doing it, I thought, why not.

LJ Interests meme results

1. brainking:
   A game site where you can play board games such as Five in a Line (my favourite), Chess, Backgammon, etc. etc. Moved there from ItsYourTurn mostly because I liked the BKR (BrainKing rating) -- a bit like Chess ELO ratings that go up and down depending on whether you win or lose and whether your opponent has a higher or a lower BKR than you.
2. conlang relay:
   Yay! Someone takes a text and translates it into their conlang, then passes it on to the next person, along with a glossary and some basic grammatical notes. Next person tries to make sense of the text and translates it into their conlang and passes it on again. Watch stories morph as people misunderstand things. Apparently, texts tend to turn into creation myths. I have no conlang of my own, but have participated with others' languages (especially Verdurian and Klingon) several times.
3. fantasy:
   Fantasy! Lord of the Rings, that sort of thing. I like to read it occasionally to distract myself.
4. japanese:
   I like languages in general. I got into Japanese probably because there were so many Japanese at my school, and because my mother suggested I take a course when it was offered at the local Volkshochschule. Took four years of Japanese until the class had shrunk from 20 students to four (IIRC).
5. lojban:
   Another conlang. Got into it after following it in a conlang translation relay (vide supra). Is machine-parseable and has, it is claimed, an unambiguous grammar (no "time flies like a banana" where any of the first three words could be the main verb).
6. opera browser:
   I rather like Opera; it's my main browser. I don't remember who introduced me to it. I actually bought Opera 6 and I think I also paid for an upgrade to 7. It's free now, in case you hadn't heard (or rather, they got rid of the ads in the free version).
7. sci.lang:
   A Usenet newsgroup that I loved to read, back in the time when I had time for Usenet. People talking about all sorts of topics related to languages. The occasional flame war, especially if it was cross-posted. Peter D. Daniels.
8. the jargon file:
   Some say it went down the drain after esr took over maintenance (and threw out a bunch of words, introduced some new ones, and discontinued the plain-text version, for example). I first came across it in version 2.9.8, which I printed out and read on the train, then version 2.9.11. Bought the T-shirt when I visited MIT campus. Also got two editions of 'The New Hackers' Dictionary'(?).
9. usenet:
   I used to spend a lot of time on Usenet -- about the time I now spend on my LiveJournal friends page, perhaps. A wide assortment of topics. Or rather, newsgroups, since discussion often wandered away from the nominal topic. I wished even back then I had more time; I felt that one could really participate in perhaps one or two newsgroups where you'd feel at home, or only sample a bunch of newsgroups. (I chose the latter option.) News groups I read (or tried to keep up with at least by skimming the headlines) include (from memory) such groups as sci.lang, alt.games.the-sims, comp.lang.perl.misc, de.etc.bahn.misc, and alt.pizza.delivery.drivers (back when it was still pizza drivers talking about their jobs).
10. x-sampa:
    A way of representing the IPA in ASCII. Came across it on the CONLANG mailing list; before, I had been accustomed to Kirshenbaum ASCII IPA, which I came across in alt.usage.english and, later, sci.lang. I tend to use CXS (Conlang X-SAMPA) now, which is basically X-SAMPA but with some borrowings from Kirshenbaum ASCII IPA and some other changes (most notably using '&' rather than '{' for 'æ').

Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.

And a poll for you:

[Poll #574183]