Way back in 2004, I invented a humorous Flash application named the Autorantic Virtual Moonbat. It was a chatty hate-filled robot who generated random nonsensical leftist rants, such as “Chimpy McBushitler STOLE the ELECTION by outsourcing transgendered polar bears!!!” Perhaps you saw it. It wasn’t just on my blog, it was on hundreds of others as well, because I let anyone who wanted it embed it. It was very clever and funny, because it aped the style of excitable liberal writers so well.

And then, well, time passed. It still works, but I stopped updating its knowledgebase years ago. The poor dumb thing still thinks George Bush is running the world, and that global warming is a credible theory. Well, okay, so do other liberals, but my larger point is, I was pretty much done with it. And yet I still believe it can have a successful career in politics. That’s why I’m sending it to the United Kingdom.

An English political blogger contacted me, asking if the AVM could be reprogrammed as a crazy British leftist, rather than the American sort, in time for the upcoming U.K. general election in 2010. I answered in the affirmative, and so soon the device will have a new home — and a new name! — and a whole new list of enemies to hate. I will certainly keep you abreast of details as they are made final.

I’ve been planning things for the new house in my mind. The kitchen there is much larger than the kitchen here, which has five square feet of counter space. We have room for a microwave, a coffee pot and a toaster and absolutely nothing else, no room to prep cook, nothing. Standing in the new kitchen is marvelous.

I’m going to take Trixie and Gilbert over there this evening, let them see it. I’m not taking Bede until we’ve finished the flooring changes because I don’t want him to have one image in his mind and get it all confused. I don’t anticipate him having much trouble with this move (well, no more trouble than a nonautistic six year old) but why take chances. Man, I am so looking forward to NOT HAVING STAIRS. While they have rocked my glutes with no effort (woohoo!) they are so dangerous. I worry daily that someone will be angrily shoved near the top of the flight and then tumble down, down in a sickening heap. Shudder! Soon, soon.

We’re going to get vinyl plank flooring for the living/dining room. Stuff’s badass, I tell you what. I’m willing to trade natural for waterproof, inexpensive and resilient.

Gilbert has been trying to say words with no vowels and he sounds like he’s speaking Klingon. Cute, lispy, five year old Klingon. Think Alexander Rozhenko.

The apathy on my part is not shared by the ravenous children who are damn tired of their mother not feeding them dinner. So long, Internets.

Before answering such a question, one must first define precisely what “running out of room” might mean, but as you’ll see, by any definition, the number of URLs we can shorten is… rather a lot.

http://u.gleeson.us/[#]

where [#] stands for the ID number. But the shortened URLs aren’t decimal numbers. They are written in a custom base-52 numbering system, so each place can have 52 distinct values. Here are the 52 characters this system uses (in order, from 0 to 51):

23456789-bcdfghjklmnpqrstv
wxyz_BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ

So, in this system, the character ‘2’ is really 0, the ‘Z’ is 51, and all the others are the values between: the ‘k’ is 16, the ‘G’ is 35, and so forth. So the shortened URL

http://u.gleeson.us/G

would really be a reference to the URL with ID number 35 in our database. (We don’t have that many yet, so don’t try it.) We could theoretically encode 52 URLs without even needing a second digit, but in practice, it’s really only 51, because the ID numbers in the database start at 1, not 0.

Of course, there’s no reason to limit ourselves to just one digit, but there must be some number of digits that we don’t want to exceed, and that number will be the key to answering the question of how many URLs we can hold before we’re full. The formula is

Q = 52 ^ D - 1

or, the maximum quantity Q equals 52 raised to the power of the number of digits D, minus one. As we’ve seen, when D = 1, Q = 51. But Q grows exponentially as you add digits.

2 digits => 2,703 URLs
3 digits => 140,607 URLs
4 digits => 7,311,615 URLs

So we already exceeded (by far) the number of URLs that Phoebe and I could ever possibly need to shorten, and the system is nowhere near full. There’s no theoretical or practical reason to stop at four digits. The lowest “limit” I can rationalize is 5 digits, because that would make a URL of 25 characters (the first 20 characters are used for the “http://u.gleeson.us/” part), and 25 seems like a pretty good cutoff point. (For instance, Twitter automatically truncates URLs longer than 25 characters.)

So, this will be my answer to the question, how many URLs can u.gleeson.us hold before it runs out of room? It’s at least 52 to the fifth power minus one, or 380,204,031. I doubt that we will ever reach this limit, but even if we do, I can always build us a new shortener at a different URL.

From Mr. Patrick Swinnea, a video producer and game developer in Colorado, comes 3D Manifesto, a blog about 3-D photography, cinema, technology, and related topics. Just launched last month, 3D Manifesto promises to become a valuable and enjoyable resource for the 3D enthusiast.

I especially like Patrick’s own anaglyph photography. Don’t miss his Toys and Models gallery, which is great fun. And of course I appreciate how he adds depth to the website design elements themselves (page backgrounds and certain headlines) as I have done at Swell 3D.