Cow Computing

Recently, i have my Ubuntu VM upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 aka Karmic. And when i tried to develop program using eclipse, i found out that, sometimes, in certain dialog boxes, “next” or “ok” button didn’t give any response. Initially, i thought it’s my VM’s problem, but when i repeated it with my desktop, the same thing happened. After googling abit, it was found that the problem was due the the recent change in GTK with 9.10.

To get around the problem, the simplest thing to do is to “Tab” and “Enter”. It was so annoying…

Luckily, there’s a trouble-free solution to it. You might try to set the environmental variable “GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS” to true before executing the eclipse. To make thing simpler, here’s a eclipse.sh that you might want to use for starting eclipse.

#eclipse.sh
#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true
<path to eclipse folder>/eclipse

Do change the <path to eclipse folder> to your eclipse’s current location. chmod it to 777 and run it with ./eclipse.sh

Finally, the long awaited Thunderbird 3 is released. This new version is really great, and seem to have fixed some bug i occasionally  encountered during my extension development on Thunderbird 2. In the following, i shall show you those features that i find particularly useful. BTW, do take a careful look on the logo for tb2 and tb3, they are actually DIFFERENT!

1. Extension can now be searched and installed within the extension browser. Users no longer need to access the extension website to download and install an extension which is troublesome.

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Google has announced the release of “Google Goggles“. Now, we can use it to search visually, in addition to text search and voice search. It’s amazing, and it works by just taking a picture with a phone and search with it. Nevertheless, not all searches could return proper result, as it’s still new. According to google, animals, furniture, and apparel wont work on goggles. (*Note that goggle is only available on Android 1.6+, and you could get it from Android Market)

ICANN has announced the open-up of Non-Latin Characters’ URL for registration. If everything is good, the service will commenced mid-2010. So there will be another battle of url registration.

Afterall, is having Chinese URL available, good or bad?

On the POSITIVE side: First, it creates lots more space/possibility for meaningful URL, as current latin url has been exhaustively registered by bulk registration. Meaningful and Short URL is hard to create. Second, chinese url is more familiar to chinese people and they can easily remembered the address. Third, It’s another $$ opportunity. Lastly, some proper rule could be implemented on top of the new registration procedure to reduce the chance of abusing url registration.

On the NEGATIVE side: First, chinese url doesn’t sound meaningful to any foreigner, and in particular, it requires users to know chinese typing in order to access the website, which limits business (of course, it could be solved by purchasing TWO sets of URL, Chinese and English). Second, on the technical aspect, it creates trouble for writing regular expression, since some programming language like PHP, doesn’t have a easy way to match unicode characters, and another set of regular expression specifically addressing unicode would need to be added to current working web app to extend its functionality to accommodate chinese url (e.g. to validate website address / email address). Third, headers (e.g. HTTP, SOAP or so…) will need to be able to handle unicode or at least Chinese Character, which is another big changes.

It could be seen that Chinese URL has its own use, but is it necessary?

Well, Google finally realizes the important of participating in the DNS service. Not only can this service help boosting its earning and status in the web business, but it can also give Google the ability to control user’s networking (e.g. browsing) behavior.

Normally, a user knows nothing about DNS and it’s taken care by the ISP. Whenever we type a domain name in the browser, it will in fact send an request to the DNS resolver to do the look up, and return the destination IP for fetching the website.To know more, do visit HERE.

DNS as an infrastructure, it does affect the internet speed and speed matters. Thus, there are OpenDNS, and now the Google Public DNS. But do becareful when you are deciding whether to switch over to Google from your current DNS, as it does not actually guarantee a positive improvement in speed (at least this is the case for me).

In order to use Google Public DNS, set your DNS to either one of the (8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4), or set them both for primary dns and secondary dns. (for detail of how to set it, visit HERE)

I have indeed written a simple benchmarking script to compare Google’s DNS to Hong Kong’s ISP DNS.
Here’s the result of Google vs Hong Kong’s ISP(s) DNS

(*red indicates the slowest)

As you can see, most DNS resolved by Google Public DNS are slower when compared to those from ISP. We can learn that, at least in Hong Kong, Google Public DNS is not preferred .

You might want to grab the script and have a test on your current DNS setting compared to Google’s. Here’s the Benchmarking Script, GDNSBenchmark.sh

#!/bin/sh
for dns in 8.8.8.8 $1; do
    echo DNS: $dns >> result.txt
    for site in yahoo.com bing.com twitter.com facebook.com google.com youtube.com; do
        echo "$site: \t" `dig @$dns $site | grep 'Query time:' | awk -F : '{print $2}'` >> result.txt
    done
    echo "\r\n" >> result.txt
done

Usage: ./GDNSBenchmark.sh <your current dns>  (e.g. ./GDNSBenchmark.sh 192.168.178.1)