Yay ICANN!

So over a year ago I wrote a remote debugger stub for REALbasic. This lets you run the IDE on one machine (like, say, a Mac) and debug your application running on another machine (like, say, Windows or Linux) so you can track down platform differences or just to see what it looks like running on another machine. Obviously this application uses the network to do the transfer, and so I have to use at least one port on the user's system. Well, when you do this, good citizens don't just steal a port and hope no one else uses it. Instead, they are supposed to request a port assignment from the IANA (which can be found here) and then use the one given to them. Well... I put in my application for port assignment about halfway thru development....

Jump forward in time to last night, about 11pm CST. I got an email from ICANN saying "do you still need that port? What port are you currently using? If it's open, it's yours". It took them over a year to get back to me! I had just figured they ignored my request or lost it or something. Basically, I gave up all hope of ever doing things the right way. But it turns out they're just dog slow in assigning port numbers to people. But at least they got it done!

Sadly, this makes me wish I had also applied for the Project Manager port number at the same time since it'll take over a year to get that port registered as well.