twi.gs

Jack White shouldn’t play the drums in this band ‘n stuff. He plays a mean geetar.

I’m a fan.

Everyone is talking about the Google Public DNS. Faster tubes are always nice and Google hasn’t lead us astray yet (except for that use our servers for your javascript files because then they’ll be fast cause they’re cached. That was really slow and sucked.)

Well most name servers cache, probably all but we’ll play it safe. I use Xmission for my tube connectivity and it’s only 2 actual hops to get to their name server (198.60.22.2). I also happen to know they cache. OpenDNS has been providing free public DNS and let you have fine grain control over which domains you’re allowed to visit. You could block porn sites if you wanted. They cache too. Now we have the Google providing DNS for us. They already know what we search for and what we talk about, just as well let them mine data for what websites we’re going to, right?

Well, faster tubes are faster tubes so which one should you pick?

I ran dig unitedcareerservices.com @198.60.22.2|grep time a few times and came up with these results, discarding the first to ensure that the look up was cached upstream.

;; Query time: 77 msec
;; Query time: 79 msec
;; Query time: 82 msec
;; Query time: 83 msec
For and average of 80.25 msec.

For OpenDNS:
Query time: 73 msec
Query time: 87 msec
Query time: 99 msec
Query time: 94 msec
For and average of 88.25msec.

And for Google:
;; Query time: 134 msec
;; Query time: 98 msec
;; Query time: 126 msec
;; Query time: 138 msec
For and average of 109.0 msec.

What’s the moral of the story? Odds are your ISP has enough users to have cached most of the popular domains you visit. They also have something Google won’t have: A close proximity to you in the network. This means you’re probably still better off using your ISP’s default name servers.

Do you hear that? A collective sigh of relief across the phonese user base.

Ok, maybe not, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve finally released it. Phonese3 got to a point where it was working better than the current version so I released it. I’ll continuously add to it which means you should expect the next feature in 2014 given that the world doesn’t end in 2012.

With the new release, there are a few things you should know.

• Real user accounts. You have a username and password now. You’re going to have to contact me (twitter, jabber, irc, email, phone) to get your password. You won’t be able to submit pictures until you log in and find out the new address to submit to.
• The email to submit pictures has changed. Everyone has their own unique e-mail address to send pictures to. This will enable you to allow multiple addresses to submit pictures to your account. Also, you can control what addresses the system will accept pictures from.
• The Blackberry Pearl works. If you used a Blackberry Pearl, or probably any other Blackberry for that matter, phonese2 didn’t work for you. It will now.
• Your email address and avatars. Sign up for a gravatar account and add the private email address you have in your profile. The public email address is just if you want people to contact you.
• latest.php The address has changed. It’s now http://phonese.cx/api/latest/?username=username
• Bugs and Feature Requests. Throw them in the trac. http://code.twi.gs/phonese3
• User Subdomains They were fun, but served no real purpose. Also not using them turns phonese into a big content site. Maybe one day it’ll get some page rank from the google.

That’s all I can think of right now. I’m sure there’s more. At some point I’ll throw up an FAQ.

Enjoy.

The phonese3 code base has been in progress for years.

A lot has happened in those years, but one thing has stayed the same. The release is just around the corner.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s true this time. Steve has been helping me bust out code and phonese is starting to come together. Tonight I finished changing the URL scheme (no more wildcard domains in hopes for some more Google love as well as easier to code) and threw together a user index page.

I’m hoping that sometime in the first half of February there will be a new Phonese for all.

If you want to see if I’m lying this time you can watch the changes on the phonese3 trac.