Tag Archive for ‘weather’ at T. Longren

Tag Archive for 'weather'

OpenDNS Speed

Published

on July 14, 2006

. 3 Comments Tags: adware, blog, blogs, dns, illegal, news, OpenDNS, Security, software, spyware, virus, weather, www.

Wikipedia defines Adware as “Adware or advertising-supported software is any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertising material to a computer after the software is installed on it or while the application is being used.”

This guy makes some good points, the OpenDNS as Adware idea not being one of them though. He’s had some issues with the typo fix feature of OpenDNS and the OpenDNS search page coming up when it shouldn’t.

So what happens when it doesn’t know the IP address you ask? Well sometimes it returns no answers

javila@BeanMac ~ $ dig verizonn.com @208.67.222.222

;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

And sometimes it gives you back their server. (asdverizon.com. 1 IN A 208.67.219.40) any request to 208.67.219.40 results in a search the attempted url being ran through their systems. If im not misunderstood, they make their money off of adds displayed at this time… therefore, the more they don’t catch, the more money they make on advertising? Ok so I guess for their software it “Pays to be stupid”

Simply because an application doesn’t provided the expected results doesn’t mean it’s adware. OpenDNS seems like the kind of company who is out to stop adware and other sorts of internet baddies. That post is worth a read, it does a nice job of bringing to light some problems in OpenDNS. And, I don’t think the guy was actively trying to take the “OpenDNS is Adware” stand, he did file that post under “Talking Shit” after all. heh.

Another interesting OpenDNS related post comes from Thomas Ptacek. Thomas has noticed OpenDNS actually takes longer to resolve some domains than, say, your ISP’s DNS servers.

74ms longer via OpenDNS. How much of that is network latency? You could turn off recursion, but OpenDNS doesn’t support it, so instead query for OpenDNS’s own names:

nsping -z opendns.com 208.67.222.222
+ [ 22 ] 55 bytes from 208.67.222.222: 261.771 ms [ 192.468 san-avg ]

41ms. Weak evidence that it takes OpenDNS 33ms longer to look up random names at Google on my DSL connection? Note also that all the OpenDNS queries “succeed”, because OpenDNS sends you to a landing page for typos.

Some pretty interesting comments going on at that post too. David Ulevitch and Thomas might end up getting together to do some testing on DNS caches and overall performance. David made a comment in my previous post on OpenDNS in which he explains some of the new features they’re working on:

I agree 100% about us needing to be more transparent. The three biggest things we are working on right now are:
1) Getting account preferences up and running so people can just enable and disable the various features they are working on.
2) Providing a much clearer understanding of where our phishing data comes from and what happens if we make a mistake
3) Bringing up our London datacenter and adding in a bunch of peering and other network connectivity to our existing sites.

I’ve really only witnessed one problem with OpenDNS. This is a prime example, try navigating to http://www.tehserver.us/. It takes you to the OpenDNS search page, right? Well, the first link displayed on the search page is really where I want to go. So, I click the first link and I’m taken right back to the OpenDNS search page I was just on. So, there’s apparently no way for me to get to www.tehserver.us using OpenDNS. Granted, tehserver.us isn’t totally legitimate, it’s definitely not breaking any sort of laws. Perhaps the spellcheck is getting confused. The domain is tehserver.us, not theserver.us.

I’ve been using OpenDNS for about 5 days now. I am going to do some testing tonight at home to see if OpenDNS actually serves up info quicker than my ISP’s DNS servers. I will post the results and how I went about testing. That is, provided I have power at home, there’s been some awesome storms rolling through the last couple days. A welcome event for the farmers around here though.

UPDATE: I can get to tehserver.us with no problem now, I never even see the OpenDNS search page. David mentioned he’s opened a bug in bugzilla for the developers to check out. He also mentioned this post on OpenDNS by Greg Keene. Greg takes a look at OpenDNS and fears even one security breach could make OpenDNS disappear:

My concerns? The obvious, security and security. Will temptation to generate advertising overcome their ‘do good’ nature? We’ll have to see. A huge, obvious hole is their own security. If they get hacked, then their users are effectively exposed — don’t underestimate this. I’d like to get more people using them so we can really find how good they are. My thought is that one security breach could kill these guys, even an exposed exploit would be a very bad thing.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Wilma is Intense

Published

Tyler

on October 19, 2005

in Personal and Science

. 0 Comments Tags: hurricane, hurricane-katrina, hurricane-wilma, katrina, weather, wilma.

Hurricane Wilma is the most intense hurricane ever.

Hurricane Wilma rapidly gained strength overnight and is now a category 5 storm! A recon plane found a pressure of 892 mb around 2:30 this morning, then 884 mb around 5 a.m., ranking Wilma as the most intense hurricane to ever be recorded in the Atlantic basin! It is also the fastest intensification of any hurricane in recorded history. Wilma is packing winds over 175 mph, with higher gusts. Accuweather.com Senior Hurricane Expert Joe Bastardi says it is a very compact storm, with an eye just 4 miles wide and hurricane force winds extending outward only 15 miles from center.

Sounds pretty exciting. I wish I wasn’t smack dab in the middle of Iowa, I love bad ass weather like that. Dan at Riehl World View has links to various radar loops, including one that’s really trippy.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Wicked Katrina Photos

Published

Tyler

on September 23, 2005

in Personal and Science

. 2 Comments Tags: hurricane, hurricane-katrina, hurricane-rita, katrina, new-orleans, photos, pictures, rita, united-states, weather.

California Conservative has some really wicked looking photos of hurricane Katrina as it was making landfall. One of their readers submitted the photos. I’m not gonna post them here, just head over to California Conservative to check them out.

The second picture is 100% pure amazing. I can’t believe how high the cloud walls extend. Very, very good pictures. Check em out.

UPDATE: Peenie Wallie brought to my attention these aren’t Katrina photos. Just various weather phenomenon photos. Still worth taking a look at.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Rita Evac Bus Explodes

Published

Tyler

on September 23, 2005

in Personal

. 0 Comments Tags: houston, hurricane, hurricane-katrina, hurricane-rita, katrina, new-orleans, rita, storm, texas, weather.

Via Sister Toldjah.

DALLAS — As many as 20 nursing home patients were killed early Friday when a busload of elderly Hurricane Rita evacuees from Houston caught fire then was rocked by a series of explosions on gridlocked Interstate 45, a Dallas County Sheriff’s spokesman said.

The bus loaded with 43 passengers was engulfed with flames, causing a 17-mile backup on a freeway that was already heavily congested with evacuees from the Gulf Coast.

“Deputies were unable to get everyone off the bus,” spokesman Don Peritz said. “We believe it’s gonna be closer to 20 fatalities.”

A Dallas County Medical Examiner told KXAS-TV that they are expecting as many as 24 fatalities.

That’s really, really sucky. I feel for their relatives. They probably weren’t expecting their relatives to die on a bus while being evacuated. It’s sort of ironic in a kinda sick way. heh. The local NBC affiliate in Dallas has a slideshow of the remains of the bus, they’ll most likely have updates as they’re available also. Dr. Steven Taylor at PoliBlog has the sad news too.

If this isn’t enough for you, check out what Basil is serving for breakfast this morning.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Rita Preparations

Published

Tyler

on September 21, 2005

in Personal and Science

. 0 Comments Tags: houston, hurricane, hurricane-katrina, hurricane-rita, katrina, mexico, new-orleans, rita, texas, united-states, weather.

I so badly wanted to punch New Orleans mayor Nagin in the face the other day. He’s a total asshat, getting pissed off because Thad Allen warned people not to go back to New Orleans. At least Nagin has enough of a brain to listen to Thad, nevermind Nagin berating Thad for warning the people of New Orleans not to go back.

Supposedly, it’ll take about 3″ of additional rain in New Orleans to breach the levee system again. Scary, as 3 inches of rain at once isn’t uncommon even here in Iowa. I’d expect more than that on the Gulf coast, aside from there being another major hurricane approaching.

Michelle Malkin has some good links, including one to Jason Smith (Generation Why). Jason’s got pictures comparing the evacuation of Houston compared to that of New Orleans.

PowerPundit has word that Rita is approaching level 5 hurricane status. The WeatherBlog has the same information. Wasn’t Rita still a tropical storm yesterday?

Heather, who has written for HurricAid and lives in Houston, is evacuating her residence tonight. She has contact info for anyone staying in Houston who wants her to publish some information for them. Could be useful once Rita makes landfall.

The Political Teen has Rita’s expected track. The stormtrack has been basically the same for a few days now. I think it’s expected to make landfall slightly more north of their original estimates. In all reality, it could do anything from hitting Mexico to clobbering New Orleans and the rest of the northern gulf coast again. Should make for an interesting next couple of days.

I’ll be interested to see what level of hurricane this is when it makes landfall. I believe it’s technically still a level 4 hurricane, but a powerful level 4. Sounds like Katrina. Looks like Katrina.

I hope it doesn’t hit New Orleans again. Or anywhere in the U.S. If it does, and causes serious damage like Katrina, expect the islamo-nuts to praise Allah for sending Rita to destroy all us dirty kuffars. Just like they did with Katrina. They’re silly. claim.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Politicizing Katrina

Published

Tyler

on September 2, 2005

in Govt., Personal and War

. 3 Comments Tags: california, earthquake, gulf-of-mexico, hurricane, hurricane-katrina, katrina, looting, new-orleans, storm, united-states, weather.

The left is taking full advantage of Katrina for their Bush-bashing agenda. All of their theories so far basically revolve around Bush “stealing” money away from the New Orleans levee system to fund the war in Iraq.

Too bad for them the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came out today stating that “the decision to build levees for a Category 3 hurricane was made decades ago based on a cost-benefit analysis.” Tell that to any lefty and they’ll refute the evidence as though it doesn’t even exist. All the links above go to Rob’s Say Anything.

Along with stealing money away from the New Orleans levee system, Bush also brought this on by not having strict enough environmental regulations. Not really, but that’s what the left would have you think. It’s not like Katrina was a freak of nature that was produced due to crappy environmental conditions. It was a level 4 hurricane when it hit the coast.

And how are they gonna blame current president Bush for the environment? The environment doesn’t change just like that in 6 years. These changes occur very slowly over a long period of time. So, even if Bush did tighten pollution laws, we probably wouldn’t see the desired effects for 30 or 40 years. I was listening to Cindy Sheehan blame all this on Bush the other night. She was taking the “Bush destroyed our clean atmosphere and is causing all these freak storms to pop up out of now where” stance. She’s totally off her rocker. And that picture of her with Rev. Al Sharpton bout made me noxious.

Others speaking about the politicizing of Katrina include Blogs for Bush and Patrick Ruffini. Both are very worthwhile reads.

So, enough of that for now. I’ll continue with some updated Katrina news. Outside The Beltway is reporting that a massive explosion ripped through New Orleans this morning. The explosion was at some sort of chemical depot. Apparently a huge fire is now burning. James also has news of the Louisiana governor ordering National Guard troops to shoot and kill looters. This could end up being a huge deal. I have to wonder if the National Guard will really shoot and kill looters. Some will probably refuse the orders. I for one never thought I’d witness National Guard troops opening fire on American citizens. But, times definately aren’t “typical” down there.

HurricAid has a link to a scanner feed from New Orleans. I’ve been listening to it for the last half an hour or so. A few minutes ago some guy was on there saying they’re getting ready to drop a bunch of cell phones to people. Not sure if the people were at the convention center or what. And they just had some kid on there that’s looking for his dad. They ended up giving the kid a phone number of the shelter his father was at.

Riehl World View has reports of a 5.1 magnitude earthquake in southern California. Unfortunately there’s not really much information on that at this time.

I need a fatwa!

Popularity: 3% [?]