How Oslo.pm got the Oslo.pm domain

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At YAPC::EU::2011 in Riga (which by the way was an awesome Perl conference), we learned that the French TLD domain registrar AFNIC was about to open the *.pm top level domain. Having an Oslo.pm domain sounded cool, so off I went to GANDI.net to register it. Here’s what I learned.

The *.pm top level domain was only available to residents and organizations in EU and Switzerland. I was quite distraught to find out that Oslo wasn’t a Swiss city, somuch I almost gave up in despair! Luckily, I’m not prone to let facts of geography get in my way, and tried to register anyway. As one would expect, GANDI.net dismissed my advances in a polite yet firm manner.

Before this rejection, I noticed the wording of the registration form, and just a few days ago I found out that they had changed the requirements. Suddenly anyone in the European Economic Area could register! And as everyone obviously knows, Norway is part of the EEA through EFTA. You can only imagine the joy that overwhelmed me. Oslo Perl Mongers might still get it’s oslo.pm domain! :D

I went back to register anew, and saw that I was allowed to fill in a new form with all kinds of details about Oslo.pm. I was very happy, it felt like it was almost Christmas – until I discovered that I had to somehow prove Oslo Perl Mongers was a real organization, and that we in some way had a legitimate claim to the Oslo.pm name.

GANDI.net’s registration form offered plenty of business registers one could claim membership of. I had heard of none of them, so things were looking bad. The only half-sane alternative was to check out the one register that wasn’t obviously French – the Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S number.

D&B claims «A D&B D-U-N-S® number gives you credibility in the marketplace and can have a positive impact on your bottom line.» And when I found out that D-U-N-S really meant Data Universal Numbering System (truly a name concocted by marketers) I got the feeling that this was going to be expensive. Did I really have to register at some USAnian Pay-Us-And-We’ll-Give-You-Credibility scheme, just to get a French domain name?

First step was to find out if Oslo.pm already was registered. A quick search in their company search (found on their front page) yielded a positive hit. The result page also offered a link where they could send me an email with the D-U-N-S number.

Progress!

Until I found that to get this mail one has to be a registered customer, and that only USAnian and Canadian companies were allowed to register.

Generic curses! Foiled again!

Luckily, The Great Book of Knowledge offered a sliver of hope. There is a sneaky way of finding a (US only) D-U-N-S number – could those instructions also work for companies outside USAnia? As it happens, yes. It worked quite well, and the proof in the pudding can be found by searching for the D-U-N-S number on the Advanced Search page.

Problem solved, and today we know that Oslo Perl Mongers both has «credibility in the marketplace», that the Oslo.pm domain registration was successful, and better still: the oslo.pm domain actually works right now.

Success! \o/

Åpent foredrag: “Fun with dead languages”

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Damian Conway besøker Oslo Perl Mongers og skal holde et foredrag på Institutt for informatikk!

Han er kjent i Perl-miljøet som “the Mad Scientist of Perl” og har gjennom ti år klart å fylle konferanse-saler, keynotes og forelesninger med syke, hysteriske morsomme og utrolige fascinerende idéer.

Nå kommer han til Norge, og foredraget han vil holde for oss heter…

Fun with dead languages

Watch in mesmerized terror as Damian hacks code in five unrelated languages (none of them Perl). Along the way, you’ll also learn about modern archaeological techniques, bidirectional cross-dressing, Ancient Greeks hackers, improbable romances, the real Club Med, why programmers shouldn’t frequent casinos, the language of moisture vaporators, C++ mysticism, conversational Latin, state machines on steroids, feeding the dog the old-fashioned way, the shocking truth about anime, programming without variables or subroutines, the Four Voids of the Apocalypse, Microsoft’s new advertising campaign, what the Romans used instead of braces, drunken stonemasons, the ancient probabilistic wisdom of bodkins, how to kill a language with a single byte, and the price of fish.

Foredraget er gratis og åpent for alle.

Sted: Store auditorium, Informatikkbygget (Ifi1, Kristen Nygaards hus), UiO, Blindern
Tid: Torsdag 11. August, kl. 18:15

Oslo Perl Mongers (Oslo.pm) er en faglig-sosial forening åpen for alle som ønsker å lære om og vedlikeholde kunnskapene sine i programmerings- språket Perl. Vi møter første onsdag hver måned, og organiserer jevnlig fagøl, hackathons, konferanser og foredrag. Medlemskap er gratis, og instruksjoner for innmelding finnes på oslo.pm.org.

Takk til Institutt for informatikk og USIT for hjelpen med å få til dette.

Velkommen!

mvh,

- Salve J. Nilsen (Leder Oslo.pm)
- Martin Setek (USIT, styremedlem Oslo.pm)

Oppdatering: Heng opp denne plakaten om arrangementet!

Walls of rethoric

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How can a leader or politician avoid accountability? Here’s one way.

Choose a sound bite, choose a few topics to repeat, and then repeat them relentlessly. The only thing you have to do, is to fill enough time with repetition and repetition and repetition that anyone listening gets bored and moves on.

This way, you’re using a weakness and strength in normal people to stay in the game.

Normal people easily get bored. Normal people just want a good life. They don’t like analyzing and digging and figuring out why bad things are happening. And they don’t like to have their attention span challenged. This takes time and time is the one thing everyone doesn’t have much of. After all, don’t we all just want a good life to live? Spend our precious time on positive things?

Sometimes, I wish there were fewer “normal” people. I’d call these people “journalists”.

Oslo Perl Mongers scheduled to lose sanity on August 11th

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So, Damian Conway is visiting Oslo on thursday 11th and friday 12th this August.

Oslo Perl Mongers will be organizing a (well planned and stunningly early annouced) last-minute emergency presentation on that thursday evening. Details will be annouced when we have them.

On a serious note, I have to admit Damian is a crazy brilliant presenter and well worth experiencing – even for people who aren’t inclined to use Perl. If you’d like to have your mind bent into funny shapes, make sure not to do anything else that fateful thursday evening!

Also, Oslo.pm is organizing two 1-day training classes in cooperation with Damian and Redpill Linpro. These are for max 12 24 people each, and are sold at a first-come-first-served basis. More datails on the Oslo.pm course page (in Norwegian).

And finally, we get to decide which presentation Damian will give! Damian has a few suggestions for us, but the final decision is entirely in our hands. We’ll do it at next week’s Oslo Perl Mongers meetup.

See you there? :)