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2025-05-28

Week 229: How long is too long?

What’s the maximum length of a domain name? If you search, you’ll get answers in the range of 253 to 255 octets (≈ characters). Don’t be fooled. The maximum length of a domain name that can be handled by several online platforms, including Microsoft Azure and Heroku, is actually 64 octets, as I found to my great inconvenience on Monday.

We’d planned the bureacracy required to get some subdomains set up for a new service. This required the addition of a few DNS records, the kind of thing that can be done in about 5 minutes by a suitably empowered person.

Alas, I am not suitably empowered.

In a large and ponderous organisation, such changes require weeks of prior notification and the involvement of half a dozen people. Some of this is down to risk aversion and an equation of “security” with whatever makes things as inconvenient as possible (like forcing people to log in again twice a day, even if they’re in the middle of a video call), but even so, having to configure DNS records by writing out all the details in an email so that someone else can type them in is a preposterous way to be doing things.

We jumped through the hoops, leapt the hurdles, and the new CNAMEs were set up. I typed the first one into the relevant field in Microsoft Azure’s slow, ugly, incomprehensible, dogshit awful web interface, and it said it was too long, but not by how much. So then I deleted characters one at a time to see just how long wasn’t too long, pasted that into something that could count the characters, and got the answer.

Of course, it was a ridiculously long domain to start with. I think that a good rule of thumb would be, if it’s too long to type in comfortably, it’s too long. Don’t try to put all your SEO terms into the domain name.

I made the people responsible choose a shorter subdomain, but then had to wait a further two days to repeat the bureaucracy all over again.

I spent the weekend at Gaeltacht cois Tamaise, a couple of days of Irish language courses and events organised by Conradh na Gaeilge i Londain.

This started on Friday night with a reception and launch at the Irish Embassy. It was a lovely evening, and I walked through Green Park to get there, a decision which the pollen made me regret a little.

“Would you like a drink, sir? We have wine, juice, … we also have Guinness.” If you were wondering, they do serve draught Guinness at receptions in the embassy. It was very welcome in the rather hot room. Arthur Guinness would have hated it:

Arthur Guinness […] was a committed unionist and opponent of Irish nationalism; before the Irish Rebellion of 1798 he was even accused of spying for the British authorities. His descendants continued to support unionism passionately – in 1913, one gave the Ulster Volunteer Force £10,000 (worth about £1 million, or $1.4 million, in today’s money) to fund a paramilitary campaign to resist Ireland being given legislative independence.

The weekend classes took place in Bush House (in my head, it’s always BVSH HOVSE as carved on the façade). I went for the advanced level, which was definitely on the hard side for me, but I’d rather be challenged than bored, and I managed to keep up well enough.

I was happy to see old friends from the pre-pandemic London Irish Centre classes that I don’t get to meet so often these days.

Links:

• Solar Orbiter’s widest high-res view of the Sun: 12544 x 12544 pixel image from the European Space Agency.
• tek is “a colorful music making program for your linux terminal”.
• My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (part I).
• Séamas O’Reilly: We have elevated AI that almost never works as well as what it replaces. “This new reality we have created, in all its deadening sprawl and intellect-devouring insipidity, is to be detested.”
• Keir Starmer’s cowardice has made Labour a party for no one. “If politicians merely based their decisions on public opinion, pivotal legislative changes which have shaped our society wouldn’t have been brought. We would still have racial segregation, the death penalty, and, indeed, a ban on homosexuality in Britain.”
• Kelmscott Mono is a black letter monospaced font for text editors, inspired by William Morris.
• A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine.
• Mistress, Miss, Mrs or Ms: untangling the shifting history of titles. “Mrs did not definitively signify a married woman until around 1900.”
• Federal Government’s Growing Banned Words List Is Chilling Act of Censorship. Plenty of words you’d have expected, but also many inexplicable ones: diesel, ethanol, safe drinking water, PCB, climate (yes, just “climate”, although “climate change” is also on there).