Domain name:           burrell.ca
Domain status:         EXIST
Approval date:         2005/02/02
Renewal date:          2012/02/02
Updated date:          2010/02/02

I’ve been watch­ing it for the past 3 or 4 years. Who­ever owns it doesn’t appear to be using it for a whole lot — prob­ably just email if any­thing — and it def­in­itely doesn’t seem to be a domain squat­ter. I was start­ing to think it was someone who registered the domain and for­got about it. When they for­got to renew the domain last month I figured it was finally going to be released.

Last night — the date the domain expired — I checked it and it was lis­ted by CIRA as SUSPD. I.e., it had entered the 30-​​day “sus­pen­ded” period where the owner has one final chance to renew before it’s released. I think CIRA charges a pen­alty for renew­ing a domain while it’s sus­pen­ded, so who­ever owns this domain appar­ently really wants it for some­thing. I guess I can’t be too upset about it. Oh well.

I just dis­covered the Pola web­site has not been work­ing prop­erly for non-​​English users. From a Ger­man user I was get­ting errors like:

ActionView::TemplateError (trans­la­tion miss­ing: de, num­ber, human, storage_​units, format) on line #8 of app/views/attachments/_form.rhtml:

I tracked the prob­lem down to an incom­plete Ger­man loc­al­iz­a­tion file. I’m not really a “web guy” so I haven’t taken the time to determ­ine if my Red­mine install­a­tion is out-​​of-​​date or just mis­con­figured. In any case, after adding the miss­ing storage_​unit entries to the de.yml file and restart­ing the server, it appears to be work­ing now for Ger­man, or at least it works for me when using the Ger­man localization.

I’ll take a bet­ter look at it and fix up the other loc­al­iz­a­tions when I get a chance.

I won’t go over the back­ground of IPv6, but suf­fice it to say I think it’s rather keen and I’d like to see it catch on as it would sim­plify a lot of things. It’s got a ser­i­ous chicken-​​and-​​egg prob­lem: con­tent pro­viders don’t see the need to sup­port IPv6 until their read­ers are using IPv6; end-​​users don’t care about IPv6 until con­tent pro­viders do.

We’ve been using IPv6 (Jasna may or may not be aware of it) on our net­work for about half a year. Since my ISP, Tek­Savvy, doesn’t route IPv6 traffic I’ve had to resort to 6to4 for the time being to pre­tend that I’m part of the great IPv6 Inter­net. For IPv6-​​capable sites, I con­nect over IPv6 and for those that aren’t, I con­nect over IPv4. It’s all very trans­par­ent, so I checked my router stats to see how much of our band­width was actu­ally hap­pen­ing over IPv6 and it was only about 0.01%, very discouraging.

A large pro­por­tion of our band­width comes from Usenet, so I went to see if I could find IPv6-​​capable Usenet serv­ers to help fight the good fight. As it turns out, there are three free Usenet serv­ers which are IPv6 cap­able, all of them being in the Neth­er­lands. I tried all three and one of them actu­ally worked for me.

Finally, I decided to make this site, Wiz­ard­like, IPv6-​​capable. Well my host­ing com­pany, Dream­host, doesn’t sup­port IPv6, but there’s a friendly site, again in the Neth­er­lands, called IPv6Proxy, which will proxy any hos­ted site. Thus, if you want to con­nect via IPv6, you can no go to ipv6​.wiz​ard​like​.ca (note: even if you aren’t IPv6-​​capable, that site will still work. Due to how IPv6Proxy is set up, the host­name has to be IPv4 reach­able). The reason I cre­ated a sep­ar­ate domain for the IPv6-​​reachable site is that it can be rather slow. Con­sider:

If you’re like me hanging out in Canada, con­nect­ing to IPv6Proxy in the Neth­er­lands just so that it can con­nect to Dream­host in Cali­for­nia and then relay the web­site back to you is a little silly and adds about 100ms of latency.

In addi­tion to ipv6​.wiz​ard​like​.ca there’s also ipv6​.pro​jects​.wiz​ard​like​.ca.

I have finally found the motiv­a­tion to register my own domain (wiz​ard​like​.ca), which gives me a lot of flex­ib­il­ity in how I do things, but also con­sol­id­ates everything I want out of web services.

So far it’s just this blog, which replaces my old blog, and my soft­ware pro­jects site. Over the com­ing weeks and months the web­site will likely spread, at least into an image gal­lery, and maybe also into a gene­a­logy data­base and a teach­ing resources site. It’s also fant­ast­ic­ally nice to have my email, XMPP (Jab­ber), data back-​​up and repos­it­ory ser­vices under one domain.