When you sign up for an internet provider, like Earthlink, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, Roadrunner, etc – the first thing you probably look at is the bandwidth that you’ll be getting.

“7mbps down, 780kbps up”

Sounds super, right?

But then how many times do you type a URL in the browser, or even search for something in the search field and get stuck with “Looking up ____________________” in the status bar? It could be that your DNS servers are just taking their good old time at resolving the domain name.

What is a DNS server?

Good question. You probably don’t really care. The DNS (Domain Name System) server handles the very first transaction when you try to load anything that has a domain name in it. This includes web pages, e-mail, and even those pesky ads. It converts human-friendly names (like www.google.com) to computer-friendly addresses (like 74.125.95.147). Think of it like a phone book. Easy to remember names translated into hard-to-remember phone numbers.

What your DNS Server is doing

So, the faster you can look up the address, the faster you can start downloading the actual website/content that you wanted to.

Why should I break up with my DNS server? I hardly know it!

Well, maybe you shouldn’t.  But chances are that there is probably a faster DNS server out there for you. And no, you don’t even have to write a breakup note.

I’m not going to go into great detail on how to do this, but I have found a wonderful utility that will basically compare your current DNS servers to several free and public DNS servers. It tests the performance of all of them, and then tells you which are fastest. It is called Domain Name Speed Benchmark.

Here are my personalized results (Running under Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit Wine, from Austin, TX on an Earthlink Cable connection):


As you can see, there were a few public servers that were much faster than both Earthlink and Time Warner’s Roadrunner DNS servers.

So long, Earthlink DNS servers. It was nice using you all of 20 minutes. [breakup] Helloooooo ThePlanet.com and Level 3!

Run the program for your own personalized results. Then, you can set your DNS servers to the fastest ones. I’m not going to outline how exactly to do this, but trust me – its easy with a little Google searching for “Change DNS Servers” + your operating system.

Happy browsing with less waiting!

Every time I buy something on eBay, I’m frustrated by how much excessive mail fills up my inbox with repetitive garbage. Yesterday I purchased a new keyboard. Here is a chronological list of the subject headers that have flooded in over 24 hours. I expect at least 4 more to follow:

• You eBay bid is confirmed
• You won this item on eBay:
• You have won eBay Item …
• Your invoice for eBay purchase
• Good news. eBay item …. (won)
• RE: Item #  … – Notification of an Instant Payment Received
• Thank you for your payment
• Your package will be shipped by PayPal Shipping with UPS
• Your eBay item has shipped

Nine e-mails. NINE! I knew I bid when I hit the bid button. I don’t need 4 e-mails all telling me that I won. I don’t need 2 e-mails telling me that the payment was received. And I don’t need 2 e-mails telling me the same shipping info. What is going on?

Here is what I want:

• You won the item! Here is your invoice. Please pay here.
• Your payment was received. Item will be shipped …
• Item shipped, tracking number. Please remember to rate.

The only other time I want to be e-mailed is if I were possibly out-bid, I guess. Even then, I’m not so sure that would change how I use eBay at all.

The piezo-electric buzzer salesman is one of the most successful businessman of his time. Perhaps not economically, but he certainly got his product into more devices around the world than I personally would ever have wished for.

The buzzer is a simple device – a piece of flexible crystal which flexes itself when an electrical current is applied. Turn the current on and off in rapid succession, and you get a frequency. You attach that frequency to a spasming piece of metal or plastic, and you get movement of air. You move air, and you get a blaring obnoxious noise entering your ear, waking you up at 6:30 in the morning as a construction worker decided to put his vehicle in reverse not too far from your bedroom window.

Is that really necessary? I wonder to myself, head covered in a pillow – trying to fall back to sleep. Why on earth would some engineer decide it was a good idea to make a truck beep when it is moving backwards? Safety seems to be the first reason to come to mind, but what exactly are we worried about? Isn’t the truck moving in reverse indicated by the fact that the truck is, well, moving in reverse? A moving truck is a moving truck is a moving truck.

Imagine any vehicle beeping on and off, once per second, blaring down the highway – driving forwards. Warning everybody in the vicinity “Hey, I could hit you. Hey, I could hit you. Oh, and you over there, I could hit you too!” This would be considered obnoxiously unacceptable, so why do we accept it when the truck is moving backwards?

Trucks aren’t the only machines that we use that make unnecessary noise. A simple digital watch, for instance, can be even more obnoxious. Why was it decided that a beep was a good way to let me that I have hit a button on the side of my watch? Perhaps to let me know… to be honest, I have no idea what it is trying to communicate to me. “Hey, you who pushed the button. Just wanted to let you know that when you changed the mode to stopwatch, it was ‘cuz you pushed a button. In case you didn’t know thats how modes change on the watch”.

Or maybe it’s trying to say “hey, the guy who programmed this wristwatch was too lazy to fix a bug where he accidentally tied the buttons to the piezo-electric. That’s why I only cost $10”.

Or could it be “Hey, yeah you, fumble fingers. You hit a button. Maybe you didn’t want to do that. Do you know how serious this was? You are now in (gasp) stopwatch mode. I just thought I’d warn ya in case you didn’t mean to do it on purpose, to prevent you any grave danger because of your clumsiness”.

I’m really worried about possibly hitting a button accidentally, especially when the airplane passenger in the seat next to me is trying to sleep while I turn off a running stopwatch. Thank you, watch, I now know that when I pushed the button that it was really pushed, and so do the 6 people surrounding me. You know, the only time it would be useful to be warned with a beep is when I accidentally hold the “set time” button down for too long, possibly altering the time and making me late for a very important appointment. Naturally, my watch is silent during this (and only this) transition.

Even my alarm clock beeps. Not when you’d expect it to. It beeps when I’m trying to wind down and go to sleep. It beeps when I set the alarm from “off” to “on”. I suppose the well-drawn little light with a bell symbolizing “alarm 1 has been set” is apparently not enough to get the point across. Nope, it needs to beep at full volume at me, irritating me in my sleepy state. The affect is even worsened if somebody is on the floor next to the bed in a sleeping bag, already asleep. Then they get to wake up by the alarm clock’s announcement “Hey, yeah you already asleep on the floor, I just wanted to let you know that I’m gonna wake you up again in 6 hours. In case you were worried you might get a good night’s rest.”

The only time an alarm clock should beep is if it is trying to raise me from the dead of 7am.

Ah yes, and then there is the computer beep. At some point in the early days of the Unix OS, some brilliant computer programmer discovered a most brilliant way to utilize that little piezo-electric buzzer that the salesman sold the motherboard manufacturer of his computer. “Sure, its a good idea to have a buzzer” said the salesman, “there are plenty of useful things that could be communicated through sound in a computer”.

Trying to delete a non-existent character is not one of them.

I’m at a unix console, and I realize that I started typing a filename incorrectly. I hit backspace, holding it down until all of the characters are gone. But, to my surprise, I get chastised and scoffed at by the PC when there are no more characters left to delete.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP…

What? What did I break? Is the computer going to melt down? Is it dying? Is it erasing all of my files? Oh, no, its simply and harshly trying to tell me that when I hit backspace and no more characters disappear from under the cursor that there are no more characters to delete. Because that wasn’t obvious by the visual display that there are no more characters.

Let’s extend this feature to a text editor, please. I really want an entire classroom of focused students to know every single time I hit the delete key one too many times. Because that’s really, really, really important for everybody to know. I like everybody in my surroundings to be annoyed with my completely average butterfingers.

I don’t mind if a computer beeps to tell me “Hey, moron, you forgot to install a processor in me”. “You are about to delete the entire contents of your hard drive, as well as blow the face of Alaska off the planet.” is a pretty good time to beep. Maybe even twice, for that second part. Even “Hey, I’m rebooting because Windows is a piece of garbage and crashed” is acceptable. But please, don’t beep at me to tell me something which is otherwise mundane and obvious.

Hell for the programmer who made this initial decision and standardized it for years to come should be placement in a black room with nothing but a white “>” prompt. The only hope of entertainment of any sort or escape from this room is, in fact, the only object in the room, which is a backspace key. The backspace key only makes a beeping sound and causes the cursor to blink. Take eternity in that, sadistic programmer.

The piezo-electric salesman may have had his way with our electronics, but there is no need to continue this way. With a small amount of engineering effort and prototype testing, life with machines could be so much more tranquil if they are designed to yell at us at only the most appropriately important times.

]]> http://briansaghy.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/things-that-beep-and-i-dont-know-why/feed/ 2 briansaghy http://briansaghy.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/international-dvorak-layout/ http://briansaghy.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/international-dvorak-layout/#comments Mon, 14 May 2007 07:03:51 +0000 Brian Saghy http://briansaghy.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/international-dvorak-layout/ ]]>

Before my study abroad in Spain, I realized that I was going to be doing quite a bit of writing en español, and that this was going to require some new keyboard adjusting, since I didn’t feel like doing the alt-01249 key combinations to get characters like ñ € ó ç º ü ¡ ¿, etc, since they would be quite frequent.

This is great and simple, if you use a QWERTY-style keyboard. The problem for me is that I use the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout, and I have been since my Junior year of High School. Though I can type in QWERTY, I find it uncomfortable and slow. There exist several Spanish-Dvorak keyboard layout setup files for Windows, however they are all designed for the Spanish keyboard layout, not the US layout. This moves around some keys from where I am used to having them on my US-Dvorak layout, which again is uncomfortable. I already know two layouts, why should I force myself to learn a third? All I wanted was my US-Dvorak layout with the special accented characters and symbols. This shouldn’t be too hard.

Doing some long and tedious searching, I stumbled upon Colin at carfreeuniverse.org’s US-Dvorak with Spanish Chars implementation. This was a great starting point, but it still lacked some of the symbols that I wanted. I can’t remember what at this point, as it was a year ago when I first looked at his layout. I believe I needed most the €, º, and ç symbols, especially if I wanted to write some Català. So I modified his layout for my own purposes, and added characters as I found necessary.

Now, I’m trying to teach myself Português, and along comes a whole new set of letters that weren’t needed in Spanish – ã, õ, à, ô, â, ê, etc. So, nearly a year later, I open up the old Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and start doing some edits, and add the characters I need. Finally, this is installed on my desktop, so I can send e-mails in Spanish and Portuguese to my friends without looking like a fool and causing vowel confusion.

The result is a keyboard layout that can be used as the default keyboard dvorak layout when typing in English. When special characters are needed, the ‘, ~, `, and ^ characters are all “dead keys” which are used to modify the following character. The layout thus will not get in my way for any of my everyday typing, and allows me to hold IM conversations and write Spanglish/Esportuguês with zero transition between languages. This may even cover French, but its probably not quite there yet. Maybe in version 3.0. The only thing I modified was swapping the shift state of the ~ and `, since ~ characters are used much more frequently. This may be confusing, because its opposite of the key printing on the keyboard itself. I may change it back if it gets confusing.

Here are some screen shots of the layout:

Default

Shift

Alt-Ctrl

I figured I would post all my hard work for undoubtedly enormous population of US-dvorak-native tri+linguists out there. I can think of at least 2 other people who may find this useful that I actually know, that is, if they even use Windows. More importantly, I’ll be able to access this website and install the layouts from anywhere.

Feel free to comment on the layout. Perhaps I missed some characters or made a goof somewhere. I’d be happy to fix it, so long as I’m in agreement

Click here to download installer