Projects: Watching the Namespace

Old: (c. July 1998):
My latest thing: playing with ideas on how to represent the steadily shrinking Internet namespace. The idea is that all of the good two-letter and three-letter domains are taken, all of the good .com domains are taken, blah blah blah. Well, talk about it all you want, but I can actually see it happening.

aa		az

za		zz

The image above represents the two-letter domains. The vertical axis represents the first letter, the horizontal the second letter. They read a-z starting at the top left, and going down and across. There seem to be a lot of open Q, X, Y, and Z domains, but they are all .orgs. If a domain namespace is open, it is black. As the TLDs fill up, the colors are added until they turn white. In this model, .com is red, .net is green, and .org is blue. Therefore, the domains .com and .net add up to create a yellow square if .org is not also registered.

Sooner or later, or when Greg hassles me into action, I'm gonna do the three-letter domains as well, using some weird sort of algorithm to represent the three-dimensionality of the problem on a two-dimensional plane, probably using the same 26x26 grid, for the first two letters, and discrete color values for each of the third-place letters - going from 0 for all available, up 9.8 or so for each letter taken, until we hit 255 for each color. I expect to see some really weird patterns.

Well, you know, Sort of like this: (and it's Netscape Color-Cube safe!)

aa		az

za		zz

For the curious, I have included the Perl source, though it is certainly not perfect or elegant, it works. The first two programs, whois-2.pl and whois-3.pl, query InterNIC via whois, building a list of domains which are registered and those which are not. The important bit, make-xpm.pl, is what created the lovely multi-colored image above. (I actually did the other one by hand, while I was writing the code for the make-xpm.pl script, to remind myself of how the XPM format works.)

The original XPM files, 2d.xpm and 3d.xpm, were then transformed into GIF images using a free trial version of Image Alchemy, using the following commands (with links to each image):

alchemy -g ./3d.xpm ./3d.gif

alchemy -g -X260 -Y260 ./3d.xpm ./3d-260x260.gif

alchemy -g -X520 -Y520 ./3d.xpm ./3d-520x520.gif

and similarly so for the 2d versions,

alchemy -g ./2d.xpm ./2d.gif

alchemy -g -X260 -Y260 ./2d.xpm ./2d-260x260.gif

alchemy -g -X520 -Y520 ./2d.xpm ./2d-520x520.gif

Well, my secret is out. This is what I do when I'm procrastinating.