Damon, Jothan, and I in front of the “A” root DNS server at VeriSign’s registry headquarters in Virginia, shortly after eNIC was acquired by VeriSign in September of 2001.
The latest DNS cache poisoning attack has been published. If you run a DNS server, and haven’t patched yet, you should really think about doing that ASAP. If your ISP hasn’t patched their DNS server, consider using OpenDNS.
An excellent post by Alex Iskold that points out what most experienced technologists already know: the most important part of being a good software engineer (or anything for that matter) is having a solid grasp and understanding of the fundamental concepts involved.
Tumblr Bookmarklets
Now *THIS* is really interesting. I could picture a whole set of bookmarklet-based tumblr-viewing tools (slideshow, link aggregator, etc…) for the power reader.
I’m a little torn because I know people put a lot of effort into their themes and having their tumblelogs viewed in the way they’ve specified, but I’m also excited to be able to flip through peoples’ photos and stuff in a slick and consistent way.
So many projects, so little time :)
dankantor:
here is a bookmarklet so that you can insert the player into any Tumblr blog that you visit. So if the blog owner doesn’t offer it, you can still enjoy the tunes!
Very cool, this looks great!
It also reminds me that I never posted instructions for *my* now ancient tumblr mp3 widget (seen in my left sidebar), so here they are if you want to use it. It’s especially handy if you want to embed the music from your tumblelog on another site, like your blog or myspace profile.
Also, for the techies out there, you can also use any XSPF-compliant audio player with your tumblr blog, if you know what to do with this script :
david:
Dan Kantor made a tumblelog widget that plays through all of your Audio posts
Instructions for Daryn's Tumblr MP3 Widget
Update: Now it’s even easier!
Get this widget from Widgetbox
If you like the tumblr MP3 widget seen on this blog and want one for your very own use, just copy & paste the following code wherever you want it to appear. This can be tumblr, iGoogle, your other blog, or anywhere JavaScript and Flash widgets are accepted.
<script>var dn_tmblr="http://blog.daryn.net";</script>
<script src="http://s3.daryn.net/js/tumblrmusic.js"></script>
If you want to use it on site that doesn’t allow JavaScript (but DOES allow flash) such as Myspace, you can also embed it using the following code. It is missing the pop-out feature, but will work besides that.
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="250" width="175" data="http://s3.daryn.net/tumblemusicv3.swf">
<param name="movie" value="http://s3.daryn.net/tumblemusicv3.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" />
<param name="flashvars" value="tumblr=http://blog.daryn.net" />
</object>
Of course, you’ll want to make sure to replace “http://blog.daryn.net” with your own tumblr URL.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here, or send me an email at daryn at daryn dot net.
Alas, I’ll be out of town this weekend, but maybe one of my Seattle friends is interested…
gtmcknight:
Go see Girl Talk, Les Savy Fav, Vampire Weekend, Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head, The Dodos, Kimya Dawson, The Hold Steady and more for free
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The Dutchess & The Duke - Back To Me
I posted another song from this album a few weeks back, but the whole thing is just so good, I had to post another.
Free Idea for TipJoy
If you haven’t seen TipJoy, it is essentially a web 2.0 ( easy-to-use! social! micropayments! ) version of Amazon’s old school Honor System. I love the idea, but still feel like there to is too much effort/thought required to tip someone. So here’s my free idea for the day:
Allow me to make automated payments of a specified amount (say $0.10), whenever I visit a TipJoy-enabled website. I’m happy to tip, say, $100/yr to the blogosphere as a whole, and if I could pre-fill my TipJoy account with that money, and then have it distributed to participating sites that I visit, without requiring my interaction, that’d be awesome.
Tie that to emailed reports of my activity, which would also serve as good leads into additional explicit tips, and I think you might have something…
The Great S3 Outage of July 2008
When S3 launched less than 2.5 years ago, it was clear that it was a game-changer as far as storage infrastructure was concerned. Today’s outage, however, really reveals just how dependent many webapps have become on the service.
I use S3 for personal storage, as well as for static resources like my tumblr music widget (which does ~500k hits per month). For roughly $2/mo, I get performance and reliability which is least on par with what I could do on my own for several times the cost. I don’t carry a pager monitoring my personal web assets, and if it’s down for a few hours once or twice a year, I can live with that.
However, we also use S3 for business purposes, for serving our video ad player and media assets, and clearly this outage is a bit more of a concern, and I’m sure we will have a big conversation tomorrow about mitigating the effects of this happening again.
Personally, I am of the opinion that cloud storage is the best choice for us, and will only increase in reliability and performance over time. CDNs are still priced prohibitively expensive for our needs, but we may need to bite the bullet at some point, as we get bigger and have our own SLAs to adhere to. Ultimately though, it comes down to having a disaster recovery plan, and being ready to act on it.
So what will we do to be prepared for next time?
- Handle any detectable errors gracefully. Unfortunately, our customer-facing endpoint (our ad player) is hosted directly on s3, and often has to be embedded directly, so there isn’t much we can do if the user can’t download that. It is, however, in a different bucket than our media assets.
- Drop DNS TTLs on our ad/asset hosts down to the smallest reasonable time (probably 5 minutes). Our DNS is distributed enough to handle the additional load without problem.
- Maintain a local copy of all S3 content, with matching taxonomy.
- Setup a basic static content server that can serve as a failover for the s3 buckets
- Manually failover our DNS to our backup servers as soon as a major outage is detected
The goal isn’t for this setup to be more reliable than S3, but to reduce the risk of a complete outage (like today), by having redundant options available.
