Zhanga: December 2009
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Thursday, December 31, 2009 (1 comment)
Real dogs should never be able to do stuff like this:
4:22AM
Saturday, December 19, 2009 (9 comments)
If my Zhanga posts had titles, this one would be called Hanif's Revenge.
After just one week of not sweeping my apartment's floors, here is what I collected just now:
7:09PM
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 (4 comments)
Here's Morgan passed out in the back seat:
Someone once said that the Tiburon back seat is only good for getting groceries, but I found that this is not even true. The foot space between the back seat and the back of the front seat is great for jamming a watermelon in there (so it doesn't roll around in the trunk), but to put anything else in the back seat is inconvenient because it's hard to reach back there to get them back out.
Luckily, the dog moves under her own power so I don't have to drag her out, and the back seat is an ideal place for her to curl up and sleep.
6:17AM
Thursday, December 10, 2009 (2 comments)
I've been working on our awesome Bing navigation app by day and my new blog by night. At last, it's ready to be viewed: www.dzhang.com.
The initial plan was to use that site as my site for work-related stuff, you know, stuff like code snippets and screenshots, and make myself look like a good developer. But now that I've developed that blog, I want to just throw this one away. The code for this site (icydog.net) was first created freshman year of high school and pieces of crappy code just got cobbled on here haphazardly as I figured things out. Now that I have actual CS and software engineering experience, I've been able to create a new site that's literally orders of magnitude easier to maintain than this one and is not a steaming pile of hack after hack.
By the way, when Morgan takes dumps out in the cold, liters and liters of steam comes out. Before I got a dog, I did not realize that "steaming pile of shit" is not completely metaphorical. Is it bad that the first thing I thought of was the ideal gas law (seriously)? I'm going to have to classify Morgan's poop gas as far from ideal though.
4:12AM
Friday, December 4, 2009 (9 comments)
Google launched a public DNS service today, so if the DNS you're using now sucks or it goes down, you can point your computer to the easily-memorizable IPs of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Is it worth it for everyday use, though?
Some people's internet connections (Handi) are screwed up by pathetically slow DNS lookups. If a website itself takes a third of a second to load, but DNS lookup takes a second, and you have to do 5 DNS lookups for that page (DNS lookups have to happen before the page can load)... well that's a bummer. In this admittedly drastic scenario you could speed up your page load speed 20x by using a faster DNS server.
Google advertises their DNS resolver as being fast. So how fast is it? I compared Google with dnsmasq, which I run on my network, and with OpenDNS, a competing public DNS provider. I've configured dnsmasq to ask my ISP (Qwest) for lookups, so for uncached queries it will be the same speed as Qwest's servers.
First, I ran a not-so-realistic test of querying for a bunch of domains that exist and successfully resolve to something, but are garbage names and so will result in a cache miss. An example is blahhpawtq.xanga.com, which resolves but won't be in anyone's cache because nobody else will have requested it before. Google sucks.
(In all graphs, the vertical axis is milliseconds, and lower is always better.)
This one tests common domain names. I tested a bunch of domains like facebook.com, yahoo.com, and yes, google.com and opendns.com. Google sucks.
Finally, this one tests cached domain names. I did a lookup of a domain and didn't record its speed. Then I repeated the lookup for that domain 12 times and recorded those speeds. I did this for a couple of domains. Google sucks slightly less in this one. (All data points for my local dnsmasq resolver were 0 ms.)
Conclusion: Use Google if your DNS goes down or your ISP sucks (apparently Qwest doesn't), otherwise there's no point telling Google every domain you access. As if they don't know already.
4:46PM
Thursday, December 3, 2009 (4 comments)
My drive to work this morning was interesting. I was on I-90, which had moderate traffic flowing at the speed limit (60). The guy in front of me was a Volvo, but I think he missed the memo about Volvo drivers being safe. He tailgated the van in front of him for about a mile, pretty much bumper-to-bumper in the left lane, repeatedly hitting the brakes while the van travelled at a constant speed. Then I saw the Volvo swerve into and out of the left shoulder about 5 times. Eventually, we entered a tunnel where the shoulder was narrower than one car, and he decided this would be a great time to use the shoulder to pass the van. So with his passenger's side hanging out well into the van's lane, and with a gap of only about two car lengths in front of the van, he floored it and used the left shoulder to pass the van. I was both surprised and admittedly quite disappointed when he came out in front of the van alive...
I exited the highway about three miles later. The Volvo was still one car ahead of the van. I hope that guy kills himself before he kills someone else.
Later on down the highway, there was one tire sitting in the middle of my lane with no damage that I could see. A quarter-mile later, I saw a stupid riced-up car on the right shoulder with three oversized wheels. Unfortunately this was not the Volvo.
Here's a unrelated pic. Not really sure what to say about this one but I figure I have to give you guys something to comment on:
6:17PM
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