I have many websites and keep building more. Finding cool domain names is constantly a challenge. All three- and four-letter and most meaningful five- and six-letter domain names are already taken. Where to find new names? Here you will learn some simple techniques for creating great domain names.

The Problem

When needed a new domain name, I would do it the old fashion way. We would sit down with my wife in front of the computer and would come up with the words and word variations. I would plug each name candidate into a domain name search tool to see if name is taken.

You can do it at almost all hosting companies before you open an account. My favorites today are BlueHost and GoDaddy. We used to use go to Network Solutions, but after learning about their crazy reservation system we stopped.

This manual domain registration approach is no longer effective. It takes too long and almost anything you come up with is already taken. We need a different way to come up with domain names and automate checking name availability.

The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang

We often used a Microsoft Word to quickly find the synonyms for words. Open Microsoft Word, type in a word of interest and press Shift-F7. A window comes up that shows the synonyms. This used to work well, but not anymore.

The domain names with the common words in the English vocabulary are already taken. But there are many more colorful words in the English language than what we use daily. Open up The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang and browse it. Alongside all sort of obscenity and vulgar you find here, there are also many short, catchy and colorful words – many are very appropriate for the domain name.

The Domain Name Generator

Manually generating word candidates and checking the domain name availability one by one is a big waste of time. It is much more effective to use a domain name generator like MakeWords. It will quickly create numerous name variations and will bulk check domain name availability.

Step1. Here is how I do it. Let’s say we are interested in a new domain name around the word “phone”. Got to MakeWord web site and select “Keyword Lists” tab. Type in the “phone” into the “keyword” field, select “Verbs: Research” in the “List” drop down, select “Show only available domains” checkbox and oppress “Search” button.

Step 2. Review definitions and synonyms. For the word “phone” we have the following: telephone, phones, telephones, cellular, wireless, telephony, telecoms, handset, telecom, cable. Very nice.

Step 3. Review the list of generated domain names. Notice that total of 34 variations were created and checked, but only 13 are currently available and shown. Notice that at least two candidates: PhoneConduct.com and PhoneExperiment.com are quite good.

Step 4. Continue to Extended Search, which allows you to combine many other standard nouns, verbs, adjectives, suffixes and affixes to your keyword.

MakeWords is good, but not the only one domain name generator out there. The Web Squeeze names five great sites for domain name generation: BustAName.com, DomainExposer, dotomator.com, domain-generator.net and nameboy.com. Many sites for you to choose from, but the concept is the same. Enjoy!

The Final Word

Realize that anywhere there is a serious competition – the computers ought to be used for competitive advantage. It is not possible to compete effectively without a help from the machine. If you are about to enter the competitive environment make sure you have some Software Secret Weapons that play on your side and help you compete!

Almost three years ago I developed JavaScript Crossword Engine.
After hundreds of requests from many of the readers, I am finally releasing all of the source code to the community under LGPL.
The source code and a short tutorial can be found in oy-cword-1.0.zip.
Enjoy!

Anatomy of JavaScript Crossword

Download and open the ZIP file above.
Find the file puzzle-1.html and open it up with the editor.
You will now learn how to step-by-step create a puzzle just like this one here:

Give Puzzle HTML Skeleton

First thing you will see is a block of HTML that defines the puzzle structural skeleton.
The individual components have unique ids prefixed with “oyg”.
You can change this HTML to move different components around.
Make sure that you keep the element ids as they are, because these ids are used to inject and bind runtime objects of the crossword.
The class names are prefixed with “oy”.
You are free to change the class names as well to match your website look & feel.

<!--
	here we have oygContext top DOM element to which the play area will be bound;
	the HTML template has more binding sites or various visual parts of the puzzle:
	oygHeader, oygHeaderMenu, oygState, oygPuzzle, oygPuzzleFooter, oygListH, oygListV, oygFooter;
	all element names for binding are prefixed with "oyg"
-->
<div id="oygContext" align="center" style="width:100%;">
	<table class="oyOuterFrame" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
		<tr><td align="center">
			<table class="oyFrame" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
				<tr>
				<td colspan="5">
				<table class="oyFrame" border="0" cellpadding="0"
					cellspacing="0" width="100%">
					<tr class="oyHeader">
						<td class="oyHeader">
							<div id="oygHeader"></div>
						</td>
						<td align="right">
							<div id="oygHeaderMenu"></div>
						</td>
					</tr>
				</table>
				</td>
				</tr>
				<tr style="height: 4px;">
					<td colspan="5"></td>
				</tr>
				<tr>
					<td rowspan="3" class="oyPuzzleCell" align="center" valign="top">
						<div id="oygState"></div>
						<div class="oyPuzzle" id="oygPuzzle"></div>
						<div class="oyPuzzleFooter" id="oygPuzzleFooter"></div>
					</td>
					<td class="oyListCellDot">.</td>
					<td class="oyListCell" valign="top" id="oygListH"></td>
				</tr>
				<tr style="height: 4px;">
					<td colspan="4"></td>
				</tr>
				<tr>
					<td class="oyListCellDot">.</td>
					<td class="oyListCell" valign="top" id="oygListV"></td>
				</tr>
				<tr style="height: 4px;">
					<td colspan="5"></td>
				</tr>
				<tr>
					<td colspan="5" class="oyFooter">
						<div id="oygFooter"></div>
					</td>
				</tr>
			</table>
		</td></tr>
	</table>
	<div id="oygStatic" align="center" style="font-size: 10px; color: #4282B5; font-family: Arial;"></div>
</div>

Include JavaScript & CSS files

Secondly, you need to include appropriate JavaScript and CSS files.
You can merge all files into one to reduce loading time.
Please make sure that the order in which individual files are merged is the same as shown below.
You can also load these files in the HEAD section of HTML document.

        <!--
		here we include all oy-cword-1.0 CSS files; all our style class name are prefixed with "oy"
	-->
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="./oy-cword-1.0/css/base.css" type="text/css">

	<!--
		here we include all oy-cword-1.0 JavaScript files; order is important;
		all the files can be combined into one file to reduce number of separate requests
	-->
	<script type="text/javascript" src="./oy-cword-1.0/js/oyPrologue.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="./oy-cword-1.0/js/oyJsrAjax.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="./oy-cword-1.0/js/oyClue.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="./oy-cword-1.0/js/oyMenu.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="./oy-cword-1.0/js/oyPuzzle.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="./oy-cword-1.0/js/oyServer.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="./oy-cword-1.0/js/oySign.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="./oy-cword-1.0/js/oyMisc.js"></script>	

Configure the puzzle object

Next step is to configure the puzzle object.

	<script type="text/javascript"><!--

		// 
		//	here we include our own puzzle; it has to be fully prepared with
		//	all words properly arranged on the grid;
		//	currently only one instance of the puzzle can be embedded
		//	into the page, we may fix this in the future
		// 

		var oygCrosswordPuzzle = new oyCrosswordPuzzle (
		  "5748185539682739085",
		  "./oy-cword-1.0",
		  "/a/a",
		  "Gang Of Four &#x28;GOF&#x29; Software Design Patterns Crossword",
		  "This crossword tests your knowledge of software design patterns.",
		  [
			 new oyCrosswordClue(8, 
				"This factory creates an instance of several families of classes", 
				"Abstract", "26f265b96e01081a5ef26a432eda9cff", 1, 12, 6)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(7, 
				"Separates object construction from its representation", 
				"Builder", "88a259cdfe3cb78a40ec120a63fac540", 0, 12, 7)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(7, 
				"This method creates an instance of several derived classes", 
				"Factory", "c1fa41b9627f8ea09e5a2a6ee22d6bc5", 0, 9, 9)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(9, 
				"A fully initialized instance to be copied or cloned", 
				"Prototype", "394941ddf24e90c70298d4c2750db4d9", 0, 9, 13)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(9, 
				"A class of which only a single instance can exist", 
				"Singleton", "c31a3cbd6db754a0e4ac5fd8e6ec3e54", 1, 17, 2)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(7, 
				"Match interfaces of different classes", 
				"Adapter", "76fb70e9d93dedce00308eeb0c304412", 1, 10, 7)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(6, 
				"Separates an object's interface from its implementation", 
				"Bridge", "3a8203786f83c06011189ab882b1894c", 0, 13, 5)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(9, 
				"A tree structure of simple and composite objects", 
				"Composite", "0de044b990184a9d27dddf0f5e6806af", 0, 11, 3)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(9, 
				"Add responsibilities to objects dynamically", 
				"Decorator", "d51d27de85dae46db969b1012a317f12", 0, 1, 19)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(6, 
				"A single class that represents an entire subsystem", 
				"Facade", "815dbf1b993d1c86356056c4ba416fb2", 1, 3, 0)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(9, 
				"A fine-grained instance used for efficient sharing", 
				"Flyweight", "d87301a9c82ad02e5de19981236773d6", 0, 2, 11)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(5, 
				"An object representing another object", 
				"Proxy", "a8b79bae14cff23069a1793ba55f2966", 1, 4, 7)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(14, 
				"A way of passing a request between a chain of objects - chain of __", 
				"Responsibility", "d29967be8acd1416731808c024de639c", 1, 7, 4)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(7, 
				"Encapsulate a command request as an object", 
				"Command", "f3a3c64bbcdc310786988833c04d1ba4", 1, 1, 0)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(11, 
				"A way to include language elements in a program", 
				"Interpreter", "d078000250c55212b9584cc691119138", 0, 0, 5)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(8, 
				"Sequentially access the elements of a collection", 
				"Iterator", "1ea9447c03c6840641f5abd5f284c3c2", 0, 1, 8)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(8, 
				"Defines simplified communication between classes", 
				"Mediator", "90740e7f8d0d00a7f7e39ee8b40e85c1", 0, 2, 16)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(7, 
				"Capture and restore an object's internal state", 
				"Memento", "97e8a2700b6a48922738058cd57cd0ab", 1, 17, 12)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(8, 
				"A way of notifying change to a number of classes", 
				"Observer", "582925e788eda44bdd66bb70b26b488d", 0, 11, 15)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(5, 
				"Alter an object's behavior when its state changes", 
				"State", "2c7c2e5c518ad7e1469073f6d5aa992a", 1, 9, 1)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(8, 
				"Encapsulates an algorithm inside a class", 
				"Strategy", "30a9b3595abdedff29f2aa6a391b560e", 0, 9, 1)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(8, 
				"This method defers the exact steps of an algorithm to a subclass", 
				"Template", "550857c3398f86050a550e250cf19b7e", 0, 11, 17)
			,new oyCrosswordClue(7, 
				"Defines a new operation to a class without change", 
				"Visitor", "1e5fe27c47649dddeb7ed2b2d86bb583", 1, 5, 13)
		  ],
		  20,
		  20
		);

	--></script>

Configuring puzzle involves creating instances of oyCrosswordPuzzle and oyCrosswordClue JavaScript objects.
Let’s see what parameters are required for each.

function oyCrosswordPuzzle(
	guid,	// universal identifier for this puzzle
		// in your system, i.e. "12345"
	home,	// relative location of js libraries and image files
		// relative to the main HTML file where puzzle is embedded,
		// i.e. "./oy-cword-1.0"
	ns,	// think of it as of your own 'cookie'; you set it and it
		// is carried all the way to the server when the move is submitted, i.e. "67890"
	title,	// title of the puzzle, i.e. "World's Best Puzzle"
	desc,	// description of the puzzle, i.e. "This is for all puzzle lover's out there..."
	clues,	// array of oyCrosswordClue objects for this puzzle
	w,	// play area width in cells, i.e. "20"
	h	// play area height in cells, i.e. "20"
){...}

function oyCrosswordClue(
	len,		// length of the word in symnbols, i.e. for the word
			// "Abstract" this will be 8
	clue,		// the text of the word clue given to the user, i.e.
			// for the word "Abstract" this will be "This factory
			// creates an instance of several families of classes"
	answer,		// thw word itself, i.e. "Abstract"; maybe be ommited,
			// thus disabling the reveal function
	sign,		// MD5 signature of the word itself with puzzle uid,
			// i.e. for the word "Abstract" and uid "5748185539682739085"
			// this will be "26f265b96e01081a5ef26a432eda9cff"
	dir,		// word direction; 0 for horizontal and 1 for vertical
	xpos,		// zero-based coordinate of the word on X axis, zero on the left,
			// i.e. for the word "Abstract" this will be 12
	ypos		// zero-based coordinate of the word on Y axis, zero at the top,
			// i.e. for the word "Abstract" this will be 6
){...}

Configure the Crossword Player Behavior

Now it’s time to customize the crossword player behavior.
We can specify publisher information and control whether or not server hassupport for tracking actions and maintaining scores.
Many more things can be customized, but you have to look at the source code.

<script type="text/javascript"><!--

	//
	// here we configure puzzle options, callbacks and publisher information
	// 

	// publisher information
	oygCrosswordPuzzle.publisherName = "by Pavel Simakov";
	oygCrosswordPuzzle.publisherURL = "http://www.softwaresecretweapons.com";

	// game exit URL
	oygCrosswordPuzzle.leaveGameURL = "http://www.cnn.com";  

	// this is how to turn off server support; score submission and action tracking will be disabled
	oygCrosswordPuzzle.canTalkToServer = false;

--></script>

Configure the Server for Action Tracking and High Scores

There are couple of things you may want to on the server side: track actions and record scores.
Look at the file submitScore.php and trackaCtion.php files in the /app directory of the ZIP file above.
If

Here is a Crossword Player, Where is a Crossword Weaver?

Keep in mind that I only present here a Crossword player, not the Crossword weaver.
You may need to use third party (likely commercial) Crossword weaver to create custom crosswords.
I tried to develop a weaver, but it turned out to be very hard problem.
Till date I did not have time to solve it myself, but there is someone who did.
His name is Franz Korntner.

In 1996 Franz participated in Programmer of the Month (POM) competition.
His crossword weaver jigsaw was a winner of the Crozzle POTM challenge.
The c source code of Franz’s entry can be found in the file jigsaw.c.
You can compile it yourself quite easily on any Linux box like this:

$ gcc -o jigsaw.exe jigsaw.cc

The code works very well and is very tight and heavy on recursion.
Given a list of words it will tightly pack them onto a crossword on the fixed size grid.
I was able to understand most of it, but not quite enough for the rewrite.
The problem is that we need to set the target grid size (10×10) before we start layout.
So if it turns out that the words can’t be layout out in the 10×10 grid, program stops instead of automatically increasing the grid size.

Instead of trying to fix the c code, which is difficult, I used different approach.
I simply compiled different versions of the program for the different hard-coded grid sizes.
When trying to layout the crossword, we would try to layout in the smallest grid.
If fails, we try larger grid and so on until success.
Horrible solution, but it works…
This is how I created the original Gang Of Four Software Design Patterns Java Script Crossword.

Marc Kummel, another participant of POTM competition, has wrote his crossword weaver in BASIC. His program XWORD.BAS took 6th place overall. I have a copy here, and it runs on my Windows XP box just fine.

We start by scoring each word for how many letters it shares with other words in the list, and then we normalize the scores for the word length. The alignment starts with a high-scoring medium-length word, which we put near a corner, and then we build a linked list of crossed-words from that. If it’s the best so far, we remember it. Then we try another one, and so on. It doesn’t get any smarter as it works longer, but it randomly breaks its own rules now and then.

Almost Ready Weaver

There is another great crossword weaver by Michael Johnson.
It is written in JavaScript itself and runs surprisingly fast.
See how it lays out Gang Of Four words here.
Look at the source of the HTML document to see how it is done.

While it works great, there is an issue that this algorithm often leaves some words orphaned and not connected to the rest of the word structure.
Refresh the page several times and it eventually finds a fully-connected layout.
Let’s hope Michael finds fix for this problem soon so both the crossword weaver and the crossword player are both open-sourced in JavaScript.

The Final Word

Hundreds of people sent their positive notes about my JavaScript Crossword Engine.
Thank you!

It is a real pleasure to have customers that love your product!
Trust me.

Windows 7 is out and it is great. It is much less annoying compared to Vista. It
also has some very attractive features to geeks like me.
I am completely sold on Windows 7 and moving over from tried and true Windows XP.

My favorite feature of Windows 7 so far is its software RAID.
It is available in the Professional edition and above.
Software RAID was available in the past versions, but in the Enterprise, not the Professional editions of Windows.

There are couple of usability issues around configuring software RAID and dynamic disks
on Windows 7.
These caused me some pain and I want to share the solutions with you.

The Solution

In order to configure the software RAID on Windows 7, open the Windows Explorer, right mouse click on the My Computer
and select Manage.
When Computer Management console opens, navigate to the Disk Management.
Now you should see all the physical disks available on your system, their partitions and logical drives.

Configuring RAID starts by creating the dynamic disks, adding volumes, adding mirrors and so on.
The challenge is to find the right menus where these actions are available.

Windows 7 Disk Menu

If you right click on the Disk area (as shows in orange below) you will enter Disk Menu.
Here you can find actions to create new spanned volume, stripped volume,
mirrored volume. Here you can also convert physical disk to dynamic disk or GPT
disk or to take disk offline.

Windows 7 Partition Menu

If you right click to the left from the disk area on the partition area of the empty disk
(as shows in orange below) you will enter Partition Menu.
Here you can create different types of volumes spanning the entire partition or
just a part of it. You can create new simple volume, spanned volume, stripped
volume or mirrored volume. Note that there are no actions here to convert to
dynamic or to GPT disk. These are only available in the Disk Menu as
described above.

Windows 7 Volume Menu

If you right click to the left from the disk area on the existing volume (as shows in orange
below) you will enter Volume Menu.
Here you manipulate the volume. You can extend volume, shrink volume, add
mirror, change drive letter, format or delete volume. 

The Final Word

Now you aware of all the menus you need to know to configure Windows 7 software RAID.
Hopefully, you will not be lost when reading Windows software RAID articles elsewhere.

Windows 7 software RAID available in the Professional edition is a major win for
geeks like me.
Originally I was planning to get one of those NAS devices that have hardware
RAID and are attached to the LAN. But this was before I knew the software RAID.

When you use hardware RAID on NAS device or in the computer, you risk loosing
data if NAS device or the hardware RAID card blows up. If replacement device of
the same make and model is not available, you are like not being able to restore
the RAID volumes.

With Windows 7 software RAID the story is different.
If your box goes, you just get another box, install Windows 7 and pop  in your disk into it.
Should work just fine… Will report how it goes if I ever have to try it…

He nicely called PayPal a first order data source. And as a key advice to PayPal Adaptive Payments team, he mentioned this very nice quote attributed to Josh Bloch: API design is like sex: make one mistake and support it for the rest of your life. Which is so true…

Google was mentioned a lot of times and in many contexts, especially around abundance of data on the web. Listening to Tim I discovered new aspect to Google strategy. Google seems to both encourages us to produce more data (by giving us tools like Google Maps, Picasa, GMail, …) and gives us tools to manage this data (Search, Translation, …). If there was an open market for data, I would call Google “a market maker”.

In this context it is clear why Google’s Quest for Artificial Intelligence makes sense. They need new methods to extract, manage, process and correlate data. They also need new methods to input/output data from/into the real world and its players: humans.

Just came back from the LinkedIn Tech Talk on Scala.
It is very cool for the LinkedIn to organize this type of event for a hundred people or so.
I hope they have this more often with both the interesting speakers and the cool topics.
The food was great as well…

The talk, or rather moderated question/answer panel, was about Scala.
My first experience with Scala was about 18 month ago.
At that time there was not a single book published.
Today I felt that Scala is quite mature.
There are several books out.
Several large sites are trying to run on Scala with the positive gains in the levels of abstraction, concurrency control and the positive operational experience.

It started with Martin Odersky, who gave a status report on Scala.
He mentioned, on the developer productivity front, that people report 2:1 savings in the number of lines of code in Scala vs. Java.
He further reaffirmed that the languages directly addressing the concurrent programming have to have large functional component to them, because it is easy to scale when you have a good grasp on immutable state and sideeffects.
My personal favorites – the named and the default arguments are now in Scala 2.8.

Sounds like Scala is at use in Twitter, according to the second panelist and Twitter’s systems architect Nick Kallen.
Nick tried not to disclose anything confidential about the algorithmic details.
This made it difficult for me to really understand how they use Scala at Twitter except the general direction that they do use Scala to reimplement Twitter’s Social Graph Services.
When asked why Scala got chosen after all, he pragmatically mentioned that in addition to the language niceties, Scala actually runs of JVM, which has superior runtime capabilities and management interfaces.
Martin also mentioned that they did originally implemented Scala on top of Java because reimplementing enterprise strength garbage collection may be a much more serious undertaking, then writing a new language.
There was a question why not use Haskell for the Twitter, but it was decisively put to rest by Nick.

The third panelist, David Pollak of Lift, was a nice addition to the mix.
He did not seem like a purist or a language geek and maybe because of that :) he had the least talk time.
He did mention one of the interactive game sites running on Scala/Lift and it sounded like the performance held up quite well.
He kinda implied that if Twitter used Lift it would not have any performance problems. Funny…

Having the moderator from LinkedIn, some of the angles the questions were phrased and the whole fact that LinkedIn organized the talk on Scala is interesting.
Why would Twitter and LinkedIn, both having the large social graphs in the core of their systems, both choose to embrace Scala?
Do they really believe that language like Scala brings sufficiently more scalable abstraction mechanism to improve social graph computations?

Don’t know…
But don’t forget that Scala is not the only solution for large scale concurrency.
I just attended a Hadoop talk on Java One…
What if Hadoop Pig proves to be effective SQL-like language that automatically optimizes and runs on the Map/Reduce infrastructure?
Would not this work as well?
It might, unless the upper management is offended by the Pig Latin technology and choose sexy name Scala for the aesthetic reasons.

What about you?
What’s your take on Scala and systems vs. languages?