Sirius Stuff

Namebench for the win! Bad DNS makes my mac slow

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:00:10 PDT

Really bad performance on my MacBook has been driving me up the wall the past few days. Closing all un-needed programs didn't help. I ran several Mac utilities on my system, rebooted and so on and so forth.

Still no good.

There's 8GB of RAM in my (latest model - fall 2010) white MacBook and that really sped things up when it replaced the stock 2GB. It was very frustrating.

Activity Monitor (in your Application/Utilities folder) didn't reveal anything interesting. Everything seemed slow, from opening a file with vi to browsing to a web page.

Searching for "slow mac" brought up references to pages loading slowly. And that reminded me of namebench, a program that tests the fastest DNS servers for you.

Picking the fastest DNS servers isn't as simple as using OpenDNS or Google's public DNS because some sites like Netflix return different answers depending on where you are and what internet provider you're using. What's right for OpenDNS may be much slower for you.

After running namebench, it detected that 75.75.75.75, the DNS provided by Comcast, my ISP, was not working. Using the advice from namebench I put 3 different DNS providers into the router, including two other Comcast addresses and a Google Public DNS.

Today, it's like I have a new machine it's so fast. Opening files is faster, browsing web pages is much faster, etc., etc.

Because of things like Dropbox or other background processes running, it seems like those slowed everything down, even something like vi on a local file.

So if your machine seems inexplicably slow, try using namebench and follow its advice.

What's not perfect with Blogofile

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:00:10 PDT

In Switched from WordPress to Blogofile there are two good things about using Blogofile:

flat files are almost impossible to hack
Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage System) can scale incredibly high

There's some downsides:

blogofile build seems to copy or regenerate every single file
it's not totally happy being on S3 - it doesn't make index.html files for the archive and category directories.
there's no easy way to post-via-email or send a link to start a post

Right now I'm writing this with vi and that's far less comfortable than WordPress's editor which I really liked. But I'm sure I'll find TextWrangler or something as suitable for writing blog posts.

Switched from WordPress to Blogofile

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:24:10 PDT

I really like WordPress for the huge number of themes and utilities that it has. What I don't like, though, is the need for constant vigilance to make sure that your blog hasn't been hacked. When I started the conversion, I found two blog posts that had been secretly altered so that they had links to spam sites. I wasn't sure whether to be grateful that only two had been altered or disappointed that my blog mattered so little that that's all they did.

So it's with some relief that I've switched to Blogofile, a python program that generates flat files that can be hosted on Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage System). This has the advantage of being almost impossible to hack. It also can scale even if this blog was featured on the front pages of Digg and Reddit and Daring Fireball and Slashdot and ...

Not that that's likely to happen little ol' me but it's comforting to think that everyone in the world could read my incredible prose.

Right now I'm writing this with vi and that's far less comfortable than WordPress's editor which I really liked. But I'm sure I'll find TextWrangler or something as suitable for writing blog posts.

Twitter phishers are after your password

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:10:10 PDT

I was burned by this one! Graham Cluley writes a nice article on his blog called Twitter phishers are after your password

What was really appalling to me was getting burned by this screen:

Twitter, like Facebook, lets you use other sites by handling authorization. I’d been having serious problems with Twitter not accepting my password (as were thousands of others, apparently) and it just got fixed last week. So even though I was logged in and active on twitter.com, I wasn’t surprised to be prompted to login. And I didn’t look closely enough at the URL.

Of course I wasn’t surprised to see this:

Takeaways? Twitter has becoming more and more reliable. They are fixing bugs. And we all need to watch where we’re going - sometimes we think we’re someplace we’re not.

images courtesy of Sophos I copied them so they won’t take their bandwidth or disappear if they change their links.

Smart Google Reader Subscribe Button

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:12:12 PST

If you’re like most people, you’ve got more feeds in your news reader than you can keep up with. What’s neat about this script is that it not only makes it easy to subscribe but also shows you if it’s already in your subscription list. If it is, it’s shown with a checkmark over the RSS icon.

My only objection is that it’s not posted to UserScripts, a central repository for Greasemonkey scripts.

Smart Google Reader Subscribe Button is highly recommended.

Greasefire - automatically find greasemonkey scripts

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:12:12 PST

This Greasemonky script Greasefire :: Firefox Add-ons looks interesting but it doesn’t run on Firefox 3.1 beta, which I’m running now. I find the Greasemonkey scripts for Google Reader very helpful.

It’d be nice to look into later.

Google Reader - Colorful List View

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:12:12 PST

If you’re like me and like to read your feeds sorted by tags, you’ll find yourself jumping from blog to blog. Some Greasemonkey styles for Google Reader drop the feed name to save space, making it hard to tell articles apart.

Color is an efficient way to cue people that things are changing. Unless you’re color-blind, I guess. But since I’m not, I appreciate the Google Reader - Colorful List View script because it makes it simple to tell that there’s different feeds.

Note: updated to show correct script

Web 2.0 how-to design style guide

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 07:07:07 PDT

This seemed like a great article on how to develop modern-looking pages. I barely know some of the HTML tags but Web 2.0 how-to design style guide was clear with great screenshots.

Excellent case study and analysis of HotOrNot

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 11:11:11 PST

Nisan Gabbay has an excellent analysis of the site at HOTorNOT.com Case Study: Mixing free and premium services

My wife and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary a few months
ago. I’m happily married, so I haven’t visited HotOrNot in years. I was fascinated by the description of the dating service, which I don’t think they offered when a friend first told me about the site.

“Thus HOTorNOT was able to fill some pretty basic human needs in a way
that no other online service had before. This would later translate
into financial success once HOTorNOT offered its premium dating service
because their cost of customer acquisition was so low - zero. The
largest cost associated with operating a traditional online dating site
is the cost of customer acquisition, which even for successful sites
can be 50% (or more) of revenue. Because HOTorNOT attracted users with
its free rating service, it could offer its dating service for the low
price point of $6 per month. This is a price that traditional dating
sites can’t compete with because it generally takes $15-$30 to acquire
a subscriber for a traditional dating service.”

I wouldn’t think that advertising would be very appealing on the site except to a few advertisers like Budweiser. So the idea of adding dating as a way to make money seems terrific. As the article says:

“Pay $30 a month to troll through profiles? Hell no! Pay $6 to contact a
hot girl who already said she thinks I’m hot too? Probably.”

Neat to see somebody come up with a way to compete not only with the usual paid dating sites (Match, eHarmony, Yahoo) but also with Craigs List and PlentyOfFish.

Can’t recommend this article - if you’re into web startups - highly enough.

Web at work? Use Workfriendly.

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:08:08 PDT

Browsing at work and don’t want people to know? workFRIENDLY - BETA makes your browser look like Microsoft Word. Hopefully you don’t need to use this but nice implementation.

Technorati Tags: work, browser