Today, Google launched their public DNS project into public beta. The results are in, and they’re okay, but only okay. Over 1,003 queries for random domains from a pool of 10,003 Website addresses. I used Silverwolf’s excellent DPT to perform this test, and the results are below.

My ISP’s DNS Server
Number of Successful queries : 1,003.
Best Query Time : 62 Milliseconds.
Worst Query Time : 1,061 Milliseconds.
Average Query Time : 220 Milliseconds.
Timeouts (Not Counted in Stats) : 25.

Google’s Open DNS Server
Number of Successful queries : 1,003.
Best Query Time : 15 Milliseconds.
Worst Query Time : 1,186 Milliseconds.
Average Query Time : 167 Milliseconds.
Timeouts (Not Counted in Stats) : 32.

As you can see, the average query time is about 25% faster than my ISP, but there are more failures and a slightly higher worst query time. However, the best query time is 15ms from Google, which is pretty good in comparison to my ISP. Of course, results will vary depending on where the nearest Google data centre is to you, but its worth giving it a try.  It should be noted that certain content (streamed content for example) may actually be slower, as the servers that decide where to send you a stream from may think you are actually in a different location. I think I’ll configure my router with the new DNS now.  By the way, the addresses of the Google DNS Servers are awesome – 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (IP addresses actually owned by Level 4 Communications).

I’ve updated my GUID Generator based on some user feedback.  Thanks to Joel for pointing out that it would be great to be able to download the results. Joel, your wish is my command.  Now there are two buttons on the bottom of the page – one to generate the text, and one to generate a file with the results.  I have also limited the amount of results to 1000, simply because much more than that would kill the server. Also, if you need that many GUIDs, then you can get them in chunks.

GUID Generator

By this point most of you will know that Microsoft have just released Windows 7.  It should be appearing in the shops within the next couple of weeks, and by some accounts is already available in some places.  I have been using it for the best part of half a year I think, and I find it to be far better than Windows Vista from many perspectives. This has left me in a very unfortunate position, as I actually had to go out and purchase copies instead of getting them free.  You see, Microsoft gave me a free copy of Vista Ultimate for taking part in the beta test for that version, but I didn’t get invited to the beta test for Windows 7.  At least I’m not alone in that, and there were many complaints at the start of the beta test from people who expected to get invites not receiving anything. Rather then doing a large-scale beta like previously, they released two builds to the public; an early beta, and the first release candidate.  Like those of you adventurous enough, I had to download both of these, and have been using it mostly without problem since.

So, what’s new?  Well, the UI has been tweaked a little since Vista, and a lot since XP.  The Start button is different enough that I’m going to have to get a new tattoo.  When you click it, you see something similar to the Vista start menu, albeit one where the search function is taken to a whole new level.  For example, when opening Visual Studio, instead of clicking Start… All Programs… scrolling down to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and then clicking on Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, I simply click Start… type “vis” and hit Enter.  The results are shown on the left (click the picture to show a full-size version), and you’ll notice that this is really just an illustration as I have Visual Studio pinned to the task bar at the bottom of the screen.  It is a highly visual illustration of just how much the search feature in Windows 7 has been improved over previous versions.

The next great part of Windows 7 is connected, but a little separate.  The taskbar (the bit down the bottom of the screen to the right of the Start button) has undergone some subtle changes.  First and foremost, you can now “pin” documents and applications to the taskbar, which has been missing from Windows for a very long time.  Don’t get this mixed up with the "Quick Launch” toolbar from previous versions.  It is the same, but also so much more. Applications that are pinned can have what are called Jump Lists.  An example of a Jump List is seen if you right-click the Media Player icon.  Instead of the usual Copy/Paste etc options from previous versions, this click now brings up a special menu for Media Player containing a list of previously played media, which can be clicked on to re-play. Its an incredibly useful (when you remember that it can be done!), that I find myself using more frequently than I had expected.  Also on the taskbar, the notification area to the right has been cleaned up and organised a lot more than before.  MDI or multi-window applications now have a great feature added to them. Instead of switching to the application as an entity and then looking for the document within that application, you can now switch directly to the document.  If you look at the image to the left you’ll see that I have the mouse cursor hovering about the internet explorer icon, and an image has appeared of each of the open web sites.  I can switch to a specific one just as easily as I would switch to a different application.

The general desktop experience is far better than Vista.  In addition to a bunch of new features such as Aero Peek which allows you to look at the desktop and widgets without minimising everything else, several features have been added or enhanced.  Task switching with alt-tab is now much better.  When you press Alt and hit tab you see a new window appear with an image of each open window that you can switch to.  Additionally, after about a second, all of the other windows fade into the background (like the image on the right) with only the selected window showing in its true colours.  Its a simple and exceptionally handy feature that makes it incredibly easy to obtain information from another window without taking your fingers off the alt-tab keys.  There are a bunch of improvements such as these in Windows 7 which I’m not going to go into in detail, for a couple of reasons. Firstly it would take too long to write, and secondly if you really want a good review you should check out some of the better written versions on the net.

One of the biggest problems with Windows Vista was that it was slow, at least before the first service pack was released.  A lot of the speed issues were perception rather than reality, simply because Vista was so much more complex than XP.  When SP1 came out, it really came into its own with regards to speed, and that increase was carried forward to Windows 7 too.  If you compare fresh installs of Windows 7 and Windows Vista on the same hardware, Windows 7 is faster.  I believe that the same is true of a fresh install of Vista with SP2 slipstreamed into it too, but I haven’t verified that for sure.  In any case, while there’s a definite increase in speed, there’s also a significant perception of a speed increase.  This is partly because your first indication that things have changed is with the startup speed.  In comparison to Vista, its blinding.

I didn’t intend to go on about it as long as I have, and I’m going to stop now because I don’t really want to actually write a significant review of Windows 7.  Suffice to say I like it, and I bought it for all of the machines in the apartment.  Its going to be all over the place soon, so if you get a chance to score a demo copy then do so and give it a try.

Last night we went to see The Fray in the Optimolwerke in Munich.  The gig was great, albeit we’re just too fucking short for Munich audiences; they tend to be far taller than us and have an annoying tendency to film every gig they go to in significant detail.  I hadn’t heard that much of The Fray’s music before, even though we have their latest album.  Unfortunately I just didn’t have time to actually listen to the CD before the gig which is a pity as I really enjoyed it.  I would have enjoyed it more if I knew the songs better, I guess, but what the hell.  We’re also potentially going to see Athlete in a couple of days, pending ticket acquisition etc.  They have a new album out which isn’t that bad, though I think it needs some more listening in the next few days.

We saw Bell-X1 recently too.  That turned out to be a fantastic gig.  They’re far better in concert than I had expected, and the crowd were great.  As was Duke Special, who supported them.  Even better was seeing The Airborne Toxic Event live, who were just stunning.  Their most famous song “Sometime Around Midnight”, was incredible live. As I’ve mentioned here or on twitter, I have seen more live gigs here in the last six months than the previous ten years in London, and I had seriously missed the buzz from live music.

Oh, and I just bought tickets to see U2 in Munich next September.

Really interesting development from ScottGu today. Microsoft have announced a new program called WebsiteSpark, which basically provides some tools to allow fledgling web developers get off the ground.  Tools include licenses of VS2008, Expression Studio and Expression Web, and a license for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Nice tools, and they’ll only cost $100 for three years of use.  After that three years, you can opt to purchase them direct from Microsoft.

Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program - ScottGu's Blog

So, another day, another German class out of the way.  Unfortunately I have an hour to kill in town before my physiotherapy so I figured I'd hang out in Starbucks for a bit.  I deliberately chose to hang out in town so that I could use the wireless in Starbucks and post a new entry here, but I have to admit that now that I'm sitting here I simply have nothing that I want to write about.  Fucking typical. 
I don't know if I mentioned it before, but we saw a singer called Lenka recently.  She's a Australian who has lived in California for a few years, so her accent is... interesting.  Her singing voice is brilliant though, and you should definitely pick up her self titled debut album.  Before going solo she performed with Decoder Ring.  We went to see her in concert a few weeks ago and she was brilliant.  There were about four fans in the audience, and the rest seems to have been a bunch of jaded music industry insiders.  Reception at the start of the event was kind of bland, with not much enthusiasm from what was obviously a pretty weary crowd.  Lenka brought them to life however, and really livened up what could have been a dead audience.  By the end of the concert, the four fans (of which Anna and I were two) weren't the only ones cheering.

I wrote that first paragraph about three weeks ago, fully intending to finish it off and publish the post.  It seems I’ve been a little lax.  Some of you have made up for it however, and some of you seem to have stopped blogging altogether.  What’s that about, dude?  Anyway, since then, a bunch of interesting things have happened.  We were in Berlin last weekend for the U2 concert, which was every bit as good as I expected it to be.  I think Anna has some photos of me screaming like a little girl when. I have a couple too, and some videos, but they were recorded on my mobile and really don’t do the experience justice. This is a concert and stage that has to be seen to be believed.  It was truly Magnificent. The set list was awesome, and comprised of Breathe, No Line on the Horizon, a much better than expected Get on your Boots, Magnificent, Beautiful Day (awesome… Dave B, was it you who said this song just made you smile every time you heard it?), Mysterious Ways and I Still Haven’t Found what I’m Looking For in which the seventy thousand strong audience possibly out sang the band. Angel of Harlem was next, which was assisted by three musicians dragged from the audience who apparently had a flag saying they were a band from the Czech Republic.  Bono asked our forbearance while they tried something new… and promptly had the three guys play Angel of Harlem, assisted by U2!. Pure magic! Then came Stay, Unknown Caller and the ever wonderful and even better live Unforgettable Fire. Next was City of Blinding Lights and Vertigo (which I had never seen before live), and a different version of I’ll go Crazy than the one on the album.  It was… interesting, and reception was perhaps a bit more muted for it than some of the other tracks.  Then Larry started up the intro drum sequence for Sunday Bloody Sunday and seventy thousand fans just went apeshit.  I have to include myself in that too.  There may have been a couple of tears brushed out of my eyes during that one.  An awesome rendition of Pride was up next, at which point I started to lose my voice. Then MLK and Walk On, and then Desmond Tutu was shown on the screen saying that everyone should be nice to each other, with some background music that faded into the intro for Where The Streets Have No Name.  I almost lost it at this point I have to say, it was a moment of sheer awesomeness that is going to be hard to beat. Once that had ended, and the crowd finally calmed down, we were brought back up again with One which Bono described as having been written in Berlin years ago. You can imagine the reaction to that.  Then came Ultraviolet, which was awesome too, and With or Without You which was so much better than I was expecting.  Bono’s voice cracked (deliberately I think) slightly on the higher registers, giving the song a kind of magic it doesn’t have on the studio version.  Finally Moment of Surrender and that was it for one hell of a memorable night. Luckily enough we were staying in Anna’s uncle’s apartment which is in Charlottenburg and very close to the stadium.  We were home in twenty minutes.

We also visited the Reichstag in Berlin, the Berlin Wall Museum and the obligatory ancient stuff for Archaeology geeks.  The ancient stuff was better than I was expecting actually.  It was in the Pergamon museum where they have the Pergamon Altar, Ishtar Gate and the Gate of Miletus all housed in lifelike surroundings.  We picked up some excellent audio guides for this tour, and again I have pictures but they don’t do it justice.

I often have to generate GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers) for applications, and I’m sick of the process of googling “guid generator”, and then going there.  So, instead of simply adding a favourite, I built my own.  Its here.  Knock yourself out.

The APN for the HTC Dream on Alice in Germany are as follows.  I haven’t seen this published anywhere else, and some of it has been deduced by trial and error.  There seem to be a couple of settings missing.  Namely, the message indicator doesn’t light if you have voicemail, and some other things I’m working on now.  The voicemail number is +4917993000333.  More as I find it :-)

Name : Alice 3G
APN : internet.partner1
Proxy : <blank>
Port : <blank>
UserName : <blank>
Password : <blank>
Server : <blank>
MMSC : http://10.81.0.7:8002
MMS proxy : 82.113.100.41
MMS port : 8080
MCC : 262
MNC : 07

Enjoy :-)

I guess it had to happen eventually.  I’ve just wired some of our apartment for network.  There’s now a 10GB (Cat.7) link between the router in the cupboard and the office.  Originally there was a wireless bridge, but in order to set that up in such a way that we had good coverage I would have needed to have four routers and a bridge functioning all the time.  Now I just have one router and one bridge.

The original idea was a a good one, and one that should have worked perfectly well.  I have a router in the cupboard in the hall that handles the internet connection.  Its relatively central in the apartment, and so would have been the perfect candidate for a base station for wireless.  I would then have three more wireless repeaters in the office, bedroom and living room.  Unfortunately I use (and already had two) Netgear routers. It turns out that when bridging with them that a) the base station can’t be connected to from a PC, and b) the base station wasn’t actually able to handle three dependant routers without seriously degrading the network throughput. 

So there were two ways to proceed.  I could fuck around with more expensive routers replacing the ones I had, or I could lay a cable to the office.  We have parquet flooring here, which made it both simple and more difficult to work through.  There is space under the floor for some cabling, but I would have had to lift a lot of floor to do that.  The alternative was to go around the walls, using the small gap created between the wall, parquet and skirting boards to store the cables.  However, in order to do that I would have to rip out the door sealant and handle some tricky corner work close to the office.  I managed it though, and it has worked out pretty well.  I’m going to need to add a then second layer of sealant to the one I’ve already put there, and get some parquet pins to re-secure some of the skirting boards, but other than that its finished.I now have gigabit cabled Ethernet in the office and 802.11n wireless throughout the apartment!

VPC images of Windows, with IE6, 7 and 8 have been released by Microsoft. They are very useful for testing different browser versions on web sites. I use the latest one with IE8, Google Chrome, FF3, Safari 4 etc.  The next image gets IE7, FF2, Safari 3 etc.  Getting all three images allows a full browser suite test to be done in relatively short time.

IEBlog : IE Testing VPC Images Updated