DNS – Tweaks take 2

 Tips  Comments Off
Dec 212010
 

Although I have good results tweaking my DNS it appears it can have its side affects if you have a very fast internet connection and are doing some serious streaming… have a read of the following quoted article.

If I ever get a fast home connection then I will be aware of this… until that day…or just incase santa lays some fiber optic cables..

The experience of one Mac developer with his new Apple TV box, offers a reminder to the tech-savvy “power user” that Google DNS and OpenDNS may take a serious toll on performance video streaming.

On his blog, Joe Maller wrote that he had a fast Internet connection (15 – 20 Mbps), and so he was shocked when his Apple TV reported that it would be several hours before he could start watching his HD video. The culprit in his case was Google DNS.

It appears that Google DNS and OpenDNS don’t mix well with the way that distributed video is served up. This can be Apple TV or YouTube.

This totally makes sense. iTunes’ video content is delivered by Akamai who has distributed massive datastores around the world so those large files originate from nearby servers and spend less time getting switched around the network. Akamai somehow uses our DNS routing to determine our location. If Google DNS or OpenDNS routes everyone to Akamai the same way, then those Akamai nodes and the pipes leading to them get overwhelmed.

Ironically, people feel that they’re doing the right thing by switching over to OpenDNS or Google DNS. In this case, it appears to be the wrong choice. Maller points out, that in this case, it is the “tech-vanguard” that will take the hit here. Most non-savvy users will simply hook into their ISP’s DNS.

After switching from Google DNS, Maller said his Apple TV rentals were ready in less than 30 seconds.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/reminder-google-dns-can-slow-down-apple-tv-streaming/8960?alertspromo=&tag=nl.rSINGLE

 Posted by at 12:10 am  Tagged with:

AzureKit and COBOL

 COBOL, Tips, VisualCOBOL2010, Windows Azure, Windows Azure  Comments Off
Dec 142010
 

AzureKit is a nice piece of source code released on CodePlex by Mark Rendle. The AzureKit makes life much easier for creating, searching, deleting elements in your Azure’s Table Storage.

My idea was that if the AzureKit was easy enough to use, then it could give us a nice way of accessing Azure’s table storage without to hosted in Azure itself.

Given, this idea I recently spend a bit of time exploring the APIs and how they could be used from COBOL and to be honest it was a pleasure to use, so thank you Mark for the good work.

For anyone not familar with Azure Table Storage, it is a structured storage that uses tables.. sounds obvious. It does not have a SQL interface, so it is marked as a NoSQL storage mechanism.

The normal Azure Table Storage APIs are fine but reasonably complicated… perhaps too complicated for most people to use.

The APIs Mark has put together really does make life easier.

The AzureKit provides you with an IDictionary, IEnumerable and IQueryable style interface which for anyone familar with .Net this API style will feel very natural to them, so I think it gives you a nice programming model.

This combined with Visual COBOL’s support for doing ‘perform thru’ on IQueryable objects make its easy to use.. Anyway enough talking time for some code…

data division.
working-storage section.
01 movieTable type AzureKit.Table.
01 movie type IDictionary[string, object].
01 movieQuery type IEnumerable[
type IDictionary[string, object]].
01 movieIQuery type System.Linq.IQueryable[
type IDictionary[string, object]].

procedure division.
set type Azure::Account to "mystorageaccount"
set type Azure::SharedKey to "myverylargesharedkey.........."
set movieTable to new type AzureKit.Table("Movie",
type AzureKit.IfTableDoesNotExist::CreateIt)

*> Delete ALL
perform varying movie thru movieTable::GetAllRows()
invoke movieTable::Delete(movie)
end-perform

*> All two items
set movie to type AzureKit.Table::NewRow(
"Jaws: The Revenge",
type Guid::NewGuid()::ToString())
set movie::Item("Year") to 1987
set movie::Item("Director") to "Joseph Sargent"
set movie::Item("Rating") to "Worst Movie Ever!"
invoke movieTable::InsertRow(movie)

set movie to type AzureKit.Table::NewRow(
"Empire Strikes Back",
type Guid::NewGuid()::ToString())
set movie::Item("Year") to 1982
set movie::Item("Director") to "George Lucas"
set movie::Item("Rating") to "Best Movie Ever!"
invoke movieTable::InsertRow(movie)

*> query
set movieQuery to movieTable::Query(
"PartitionKey eq 'Jaws: The Revenge'")

set movieIQuery to type System.Linq.Queryable::AsQueryable[
type IDictionary[
string, object]](movieQuery)

set movie to type System.Linq.Queryable::FirstOrDefault[
type IDictionary[
string, object]](movieIQuery)

display movie::Item("PartitionKey") " -> "
movie::Item("Director") " -> "
movie::Item("RowKey")

*> show the results
perform varying movie thru movieQuery
display movie::Item("PartitionKey") " -> "
movie::Item("Director") " -> "
movie::Item("RowKey")
end-perform

goback.

end program Program1.

That’s pretty easy… now what shall I do with the APIs… answers on the comment strip!

http://blog.markrendle.net/

http://azurekit.codeplex.com/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179423.aspx

 Posted by at 11:26 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

DNS – Tweaks

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Dec 142010
 

DNS speed can really affect your home router either for the better or worse..

I use a open source bit of software called namebench to periodically verify that I am using the most performant/reliable DNS server.

Take a peek, it really does help… http://code.google.com/p/namebench/

 Posted by at 3:01 pm  Tagged with: , ,
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