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.

Browsing for something on the google earlier today, I ran across a way to set up a git branch aware bash prompt. It’s pretty slick if you are always in and out of git branches (if you’re not you should be)

First download git-completion.bash
http://repo.or.cz/w/git.git?a=blob_plain;f=contrib/completion/git-completion.bash;hb=HEAD

I saved it as ~/.git-completion.bash.

Next edit your ~/.bash_profile

Add

source ~/.git-completion.bash
PS1='\h:\W$(__git_ps1 "(%s)") \u\$ '


Finally source ~/.bash_profile to make zee changes active.

What results is this when you are in a git repository:

bigtex:jason(jquery_localize) jason$ git checkout master
Switched to branch "master"
bigtex:jason(master) jason$ git checkout jquery_localize
Switched to branch "jquery_localize"
bigtex:jason(jquery_localize) jason$


Well, I’ve done it.

I have signed up for an Adsense account and plastered my blog with hideous advertisements.

The server that hosts zzq im and phonese2 is starting to run out of RAM. I can’t add any more RAM to the server pronto dedicated server that I use to host these things because the package I use (AMD Value) maxes out at 512M. I have to upgrade to AMD Power ($70/mo) to pay them money to put some more RAM in it.

At this point I’m thinking it’s going to be better to buy my own server and use their colocation services to host these services. It’s only $35/mo to colocate a server with them so now I just need to come up with the couple grand to buy a real server.

Well the zzq im service isn’t thaat popular and phonese2 isn’t awesome by any means, so I have a hard time justifying $70/mo or $x,xxx for a server (plus a lot to ship) so this is where the ads come in.

Some of my blog posts are popular among the google searches pil on os x for one), so maybe I’ll get a nickle or two.

When phonese3 releases they will probably have ads on them too. I would like to make it last.fm style where you can donate $5/mo to remove the ads from your page for everyone and everyone’s page for you, but that will be a future feature.

Hopefully this will offset some of the cost of the snail like growth zzq is experiencing. If it doesn’t, we’ll have to start harvesting human organs and selling them on the black market in Hong Kong.