cartesian-heights.org

[jack]

How about cartesian-heights.org? It's distinctive, it's a nice name, it looks fairly easy to type.

Are hyphens sane in domain names? I know many sites automatically reject[1] any email address with a "+" in, is a "-" likely to be a problem?

If you saw it, would you remember if it had a hyphen, dot, underscore or nothing between the words? If I said "cartesian heights dot org with a hyphen" would you understand it?

Are you familiar enough with the adjective "cartesian" to be able to remember it if you hadn't heard it before?

[1] See standard "why go to such an effort to make life more difficult for people?" rant

Comments

[teleute.livejournal.com]

The general assumption of marketing is that a hyphen is actually unhelpful because people don't expect it - the standard currently is runonwebpagenames as you've probably noticed. However, if you're not using it as a major marketing campaign, it probably doesn't matter :-).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

LOL. Yes to both :)

But domains I actually expect to remember and type are generally two medium words run together -- cartesianheights is more than I'd hope to get right, I feel my eyes glaze over in the middle.

I would look for cartesian.heights.org, but inevitably many heights domains have been sold, and I don't really want that much collision.

[lupie-stardust.livejournal.com]

I have to say, I'd never heard the word "cartesian" before I say your username. I'm not even sure what it means, still.

[alison-lees.livejournal.com]

Well, there are Cartesian coordinates, which are x, y, and z, on a graph, and then there is Cartesian, as related to Descartes, who was a philosopher. Does that help?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

(And for the record, those are the same. But yes, what alison_lees said for what it means other than me. FWIW my username references "Cartesian Demon" which is a common name for a thought experiment about a demon Descartes proposed.)

[alison-lees.livejournal.com]

Sorry, forgot to mention that that was the sum of my knowledge; I expected there was more to it than that. I'm only a physicist, have a PhD, but can't do philosophy...

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

Are hyphens sane? Yes. I use - in place of the + when + is rejected.

If you saw it, would you remember? No.
Although I know enough about names not to expect you to own heights.org.
I'd probably try it - without a hyphen, get the "Cannot be found", and type cartesian heights into google.

If I said (etc)? Don't know

Are you familiar enough (etc)? Don't know. I've been familiar with your LJ name for ages now.

Have you forgotten how to use formatting? No I'm just lazy.


Alternatively, I could sell you liveflurble.com for a vast fee. I'm not using it any more.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

"type cartesian heights into google."

I think that's a fine method, if people get that far I'm happy -- that's what I almost always do unless I actually know a domain.

Alternatively, I could sell you liveflurble.com for a vast fee.

To me, flurble is you, I'm confused enough if you and your sister share names, let alone me :)

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

muahahaha my plan to confuse the whole world and then ... profit?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yay, profit!

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

I think I need something good to go in the "..." first.

Maybe cheese.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

*puts something good in your ... *

:)

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I like the name. It sounds like an eccentric mathematician's mansion.

I've never known any problem with hyphens on the software side, but on the human side they're awkward and difficult to remember. As teleute said, it's more usual to just run words together. I think the only justification for having a hyphen is if the words would seem to mean something else without (like expertsexchange). The position of the word boundary in cartesianheights is obvious.

Are you familiar enough with the adjective "cartesian" to be able to remember it if you hadn't heard it before?
Definitely. (In your LJ username, "cartesian" is the straightforward bit, but I got confused by "daemon" and thought that cartesiandemon was you.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I like the name. It sounds like an eccentric mathematician's mansion.

Thank you. Credit goes to sunflowerinrain for suggesting it (for my house), and it's grown on me more and more. That's a great description, that basically is what it is, except that it's not a mansion yet, but when I do have a mansion, it will also be called that :)

on the human side they're awkward and difficult to remember

I know what you mean. I would have thought they were sufficiently unusual to be remembered, but the consensus doesn't seem to be.

I can't convince myself by "cartesianheights", it just looks like a mess to me, I think it's too long, and the "eanhei" looks to me like an unbroken mass of something.

"cartesian" is the straightforward bit, but I got confused by "daemon"

Yeah, in retrospect that makes sense. I originally thought "cartesian demon" was too obvious and picked this as a slight pun on it, but that doesn't really mean anything now, so it's confusing: I wouldn't expect ot be able to dictate the name to someone who didn't know it.

[alison-lees.livejournal.com]

I thought daemon was the 'more intellectual' spelling of demon, so it sounded logical?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty accurate afaik. In actual fact, I picked "daemon" as a reference to the operating concept (a program which stays in the background and serves requests from other programs), but there's no evidence of that other than my saying so, it's not inherent in the name.

Pullman put the supernatural meaning quite definitely back in people's minds. "intellectual spelling of demon" sums it up; I would have said to distinguish "daemon" meaning a supernatural out-of-this-world creature from a "evil" demon, but that's just the impression I picked up from people using it in books.

A quick look on wikipedia interestingly gives the original etymology: "dæmon, are Latinized spellings of the Greek δαίμων (daimon),[1] used purposely today to distinguish the daemons of Ancient Greek religion, good or malevolent "supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as inferior divinities and ghosts of dead heroes" (see Plato's Symposium), from the Judeo-Christian usage demon, a malignant spirit that can seduce, afflict, or possess humans"

[androidkiller.livejournal.com]

Cartesian-heights sounds to me like some sort of hotel, except with Mathmos instead of Basil Fawlty

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Credit goes to sunflowerinrain for suggesting it (for my house), and it's grown on me more and more. That's a great description, that basically is what it is :)

[d37373.livejournal.com]

I would be a bit surprised if an email filter rejected hyphens. + Is more understandable, in that the stupid way to go is to assume that an email address has the same allowed characters as a URL. Wrong, but an assumption people make. Also, since the hyphen is part of a 'normal' domain name, you might hope that they won't screw it up - even if they would when you used a hyphen before the domain.

Also, the aim is generally to make things more usable, by alerting people when they mistype the address. I haven't seen statistics, but it may be a god trade-off. Not something I would feel happy about, the obsessive that I am.

Not sure if you've seen this, but it's the reason people don't do accurate validation: http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

since the hyphen is part of a 'normal' domain name, you might hope that they won't screw it up

Yeah. But it's quite hard to calibrate my stupid-filter very accurately. It never occurred to me people would exclude "+" as a matter of course (which they do), nor that they would exclude "0" (which afaik they don't), and "-" is somewhere in the middle, but all those look sufficiently similar to me, I wouldn't like to guess where relative to "-" the line is drawn :)

the aim is generally to make things more usable, by alerting people when they mistype the address.

That does make sense. I can't believe having a "+" but otherwise being valid is a common typo, but it does make sense to check. I'd much rather they had a "I know what I'm doing" button and let you confirm that you really meant it, rather than just rejecting it[1] but understand why that's fraught.

I mean, apparently " "@foo.com is supposed to be valid, maybe, but I'd understand rejecting it when I've never heard it used, but people actually _do_ use "+".

Then again, they mainly use "+" so they can filter out mail from people they don't want, so maybe companies don't like to allow it?

[1] I imagine sometimes you can fake this if the authentication is just for user-friendlyness and implementation is client-side, and you create a custom POST request, but I can't be bothered to find out :)

Not sure if you've seen this, but it's the reason people don't do accurate validation:

ROFL. Yes, quite. No, I hadn't. Some things are just possible in regex but are definitely not sane :) However, in this case, afaik, all alphanumeric and underscore characters are treated as valid, and almost all others are treated as invalid, and there's a few special cases, so all you'd have to do here is move "+" from one to the other, so neither way is actually more or less work. (OK, you might want to exclude +@foo.com. But then you probably want to exclude _@foo.com, if you're going to be that "helpful" :))

[james-r.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with cartesian.me.uk ? (It's available).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thank you, that's a good suggestion. I'm not sure, I think (a) I don't really like "Cartesian" alone, I'm not sure why. I guess because (a1) I still feel it ought to be an adjective and (a2) it's not unique to me. And (b) I don't really like how "me.uk" sounds (although I might change my mind).

[liv]

I like the idea of "Cartesian heights", it obviously connects to you, but it's your place, not you personally. And it's common words that are at least relatively easy to spell. On the negative side, it's still kinda long, so a similar problem to "cartesiandaemon", which is a very cool username until you have to type it.

I think a hyphen is likely to cause confusion though. Without the hyphen it's hard to read, but with the hyphen it's hard to remember. AFAIK it will only confuse humans, computers deal fine with hyphens in URLs.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I like

Thank you, yes exactly.

common words that are at least relatively easy to spell.

That's what I thought. Better than "daemon". OTOH, "Cartesian" isn't very common for non-mathmos, though I think easy to spell :)

a similar problem to "cartesiandaemon"

Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. Long is annoying just from a typing standpoint. I think it's probably _less_ problem in an URL, as most of the time you have autocomplete, but you if you start having email adresses (name@cartesian-heights.org) it gets complicated.

AFAIK it will only confuse humans,

:( Apparently so. I thought it would be fairly distinctive, I see hyphenated URLS fairly rarely.

[simont]

The trouble with "Cartesian heights" is that it trips my optimising instinct, and I think "why couldn't he just say y > 0?" :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

ROFL. I think I'd have difficulty acquiring the domain :)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

Are hyphens sane in domain names? I know many sites automatically reject[1] any email address with a "+" in, is a "-" likely to be a problem?

Lots of domain names do have hyphens, don't they? OK, so I can't immediately think of any, but...

If you saw it, would you remember if it had a hyphen, dot, underscore or nothing between the words? If I said "cartesian heights dot org with a hyphen" would you understand it?

Yes, and yes.

Are you familiar enough with the adjective "cartesian" to be able to remember it if you hadn't heard it before?

And yes. I think you can count on mathematicians, historians of the eighteenth century, philosophers, and trivia junkies. I was going to say French people too, but they might have a different word for 'cartesian'... :)

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

Lots of domain names do have hyphens, don't they? OK, so I can't immediately think of any, but...

ex-parrot is in the comments above :)