Month: May 2005

Domain hunting: 220,000+ domain ideas

Yes, you’ve read it right – I am about to give you more than 220,000 ideas for domain names. And no secrets too…

I stumbled upon this blog entry, which talks about del.icio.us and how the domain name was a part of the success of that site. It also gives a few examples for every country top level domain (TLD). I found the idea very cool, but the list of examlpes rather limited.

And than I thought why not to use a dictionary and some Perl programming to generate more examples. I got the list of country TLDs from this IANA page, edited it a bit with Vim and than used Perl to crossmatch it with the list of words provided by intallation of words-3.0-2.3 on my Linux box (which was based on Moby project).

The result of the script’s ouput is the sorted list of words that match each country’s domain name. You can customize few things as well. Minimum domain length in characters can be specified. Also, you can ignore words that start with or contain some match somewhere in the word. By default, words that contain underscore (‘_’) are ignored.

Here are the files:

  • domains.pl – the script itself.
  • tlds.txt – list of TLDs for all countries. Edit this file to contain only those countries that you are interested in.
  • domains.txt.gz – compressed file with the result of the script run for all countries. This file is roughly 700 KBytes.
  • domains.txt – result of the script run for all countries. The file is about 2.5 MBytes. NOTE: download this file only if you’re not going to run the script yourself AND if you don’t have gzip on your machine.

If after reading all of the above you’re still wondering what I am talking about, here is a little quote from the domains.txt file for Cyprus.

Domains for cy (Cyprus):
 abbacy
 abbotcy
 aberrancy
 abeyancy
 abhorrency
 abnormalcy
 absorbancy
 absorbency
 abstinency
 abundancy
 acceptancy
 accidency
 accordancy
 accountancy
 accumbency
 accuracy

Have your breaks in time with KDE

I’ve already talked about KDialog and DCOP which are two magic KDE tools that could use more promotion. Today I came across another nice examlpe in this post.

#!/bin/bash

PROGRESS=$(kdialog --icon kalarm --title "Short rest" \
    --progressbar "Take a break..." 30)

if [ $PROGRESS ]; then
  for (( i=0; i<30; i++ )); do
    dcop $PROGRESS setProgress $i
    sleep 1
  done
  dcop $PROGRESS close
fi

This simple shell script will remind you to have timed 30 second breaks when executed at predefined intervals from KAlarm. You'll see a nice progress bar while having a break.

Children vs. adults

It’s interesting how some adult things are more obvious to children than to some adults. I witnessed this many times with different kids. Today I came across yet another examle.

A Brief Conversation with Charlie (age 4) About Politics and Conservation:
HIM: Dad, are there bad guys?
ME: Yeah, I suppose there are.
HIM: Do we know any bad guys?
ME: No. No, I don’t think we do.
HIM: Is Bush a bad guy?
ME: Bush?
HIM: The President. Bush. Is he a bad guy?
ME: Well, I think he really believes that…uh…well, some people have different opinions than other people…uh…
HIM: But he wants to drill in the arctic! And that will hurt the animals! We have to stop him and make him go away! People need to stop building so many houses! We have to stop Bush! People shouldn’t drive their cars so much!
ME: Hey, get your shoes on.