[ILUG] [ot] .eu...

[kevin lyda]

> And what domain name did he want?   Doolin is a place, the rules are
> very clear on this and have been for years.   The rules which by the way
> were drawn up by the Irish Internet Community.

doolin.ie, or doolin.co.ie.

there's an html editor for linux called galway - now granted it's not
being done by people in ireland (afaik), but it would be neat to see
www.galway.org.ie as a project page for it.

i don't know if people know this, but dns is something that came about
because it solved a problem.  when the net first started people sent
around a master host file - eventually it stopped being workable.  name
conficts, large files, slow lookup times, etc.  so dns created a
heirarchy, and along the way created the unworkable .com domain while it
was at it.

.com is a mess, so what do we do here?  we recreate a flat namespace and
put a slew of rules to patch it together.  brilliant.

i look at in terms of free software - irish software projects would have
a hard time registering in the .ie domain so they would end up with .org
or .com domains.  i can't think of any off hand, but why could i since
they just blend into all the others in the .org/.com mass.  is it any
wonder why alan cox thinks ireland doesn't have any kernel hackers -
their domains probably wouldn't give them away!

and speaking of the rules, doesn't linux.ie violate the rules?

but beyond that what about companies that have the same names as towns? 
is there a ballygowan, or is the flat namespace solution
ballygowanspringwater.ie?  afaik companies can register with the same
name as a town.

and what are we saving all towns.ie for?  for the towns themselves? 
well that's not going to work because town names are only unique by
county, not nationwide.  oh, and ireland's groing in case people haven't
been paying attention to census figures.  what happens when a new town
springs up - ballyfoo - and there's a ballyfoo.ie?  who loses, does the
town have to pick a new name, or does ballyfoo.ie lose it's name.

these are the questions raised when you try to shoehorn in hundreds of
namespaces into one: .ie.

btw, if someone could get me an online list of town names in ireland i
would be quite happy to run a script on it to do lookups on them all.

along those lines i went to go look for domain names that might be town
names - i went to the letter b.  and look, there's a ballygowan.ie, oh
and there's a baltimore.ie.  now you might be tempted to think that
people in baltimore might just not care about the net, but you'd be
wrong: http://www.sleeping-giant.ie/baltimore/.  and i thought names
couldn't be generic: barcode.ie?

wouldn't it be better if there was a www.baltimore.cork.ie and a
www.baltimore.co.ie?

i just spent about five minutes looking though the domain list, and
rules or no rules its a mess.  and this excuse for a set of rules was
created by the "irish internet community."  right.  how many people here
- who generally have a clue - were on this community, and were they
listened to?

kevin
-- 
kevin at suberic.net       "we were goin' for breakfast.  in canada.  we
fork()'ed on 37058400    made a deal: if she'd stop hookin', i'd stop
meatspace place: work    shootin' people.  maybe we were aiming high."
                                                   --porter, "payback"