Time on Evan Hoffman

Benchmarking DNS servers with Java

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:33:28 +0000

I’m currently in the process of moving our DNS over to another provider and I was curious as to whether the old or new provider offers faster lookups. dig shows query times, but I didn’t want to just run that over and over. I decided to write something to do this, in Java since I like Java. I found this post, which has the meat of the work done already. I also read some of Sun’s JNDI/DNS lookup info, which was pretty dense. All I want to do is specify the name server’s IP and do the lookup. I don’t even really care about the result, just how long the query takes.

US Public Debt - historical

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:14:10 +0000

In a recent “debate” with a friend, I looked for historical data about the US public debt. I found Google Public Data, which has info about the annual budget deficit/surplus, but apparently (oddly) doesn’t have the debt. Odd because this info is available on the Treasury website.

I copied & pasted the data into Google Docs and made a chart of my own and some basic comparisons over time. Here are some of them rendered as images, though the scale makes the horizontal access kind of useless. I tried embedding the interactive Flash-based graph but it didn’t work. Oh well.

33 hours to restore a Postgres DB

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:10:01 +0000

Restoring a huge DB takes a long time.