This blog has often been silent for long periods while I’m working hard on something. This time I think it was worth it. With a few good friends, I’ve started Minds + Machines, and from now on most of my posting is happening on the Minds + Machines blog. While I was searching for a regis...

As my 350 closest friends are aware, I have been pursuing .NYC hard for over a year, and in fits and starts since 2000, in conjunction with my friend Bill Semich, who manages .NU. dotNYC is the company behind our latest (and now it appears final) effort to get New York City to get behind the .NYC to...

Bart Lieben is an intellectual property attorney who has become the go-to guy for trademark verification for top-level domain Sunrise periods. In my interview with Bart, he talks about how he does his job, with some tantalizing hints about a system he’s developing to make the whole trademark v...

A cranky letter from the NTIA to ICANN (PDF), submitted in late December during ICANN’s comment period for new top-level domains, has encouraged the awkward coalition of those opposed to new TLDs. The NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration), a division of the Departme...

We needed to locate where most of the memory is allocated in our scripts (as some of them became too memory hungry), so I've created memtrack extension. This extension helps us to see unusually big memory allocations in production code. Of course we use error logging, so memtrack just produces warni...

Image: An atheist bus advert (credit: Lorissa) You’ll doubtless have heard the story of the journalist and comedian, Ariane Sherine, who was irritated by a Christian ad campaign on buses declaring that non-believers  “will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spe...

  Image: Adriana's b-word t-shirt I am sticking to my don’t-mention-the-b-word in January resolution, inspired by Mark Earls for the moment. B-b-b-b-b-but it’s very hard when Tom Hopkins et al start talking about the b-word crisis#mce_temp_url# and I want to blog about it.  It̵...

Image: Er, All your media in one place (an excuse to include a pic of Babel, by Cildo Meireles) Yep, you heard that right: 2009 could be a year of MetaSocNets. That is to say meta-social networks, services that give you access to all of your social networks in one place, a bit like the way that Adiu...

Image: Pollyanna - a mascot for optimism apologists everywhere It’s funny how, like me, people have to caveat finding things to be optimistic about in 2009 with phrases like “I’m not being Pollyanna-ish”. Saying that the Great Disruption may bring good, or at least a lot of o...

WARNING - this post will not be interesting to anyone who doesn’t care about ICANN and how it manages the Internet. If you do care, or if you’re an insomniac, it might be worth a read. ICANN commissioned an “Independent Reviewer’s Report,” containing recommendations for...