DNS Update Speed: A TTL Primer Plus Tips

Just a real quick primer/tip on DNS updates. Keep in mind that this doesn't help if you haven't planned ahead, but if you know a day or two ahead of time that you are GOING to be changing DNS, you should go in and adjust the TTL values for the records you intend to change DOWN to a lower number.

For example, a TTL of 7200 means that the record in question can be cached on a client for up to two hours before the client MUST go back and request a "fresh" record. The problem is, changing the TTL is still subject to the *current* TTL, so if you change the TTL from 86,400 (1 day) to 300 (5 minutes), it will take a day before clients realize they can only cache records for 5 minutes. So this goes back to what I said originally, if you know you're are GOING to be changing DNS in a few days, lower the TTL ahead of time so the clients put themselves on short updates cycles. When you make your REAL DNS changes, they will happen almost instantly, and you can also bump the TTL back up to "normal" at the same time.

The reason you use a longer TTL is because it can pretty significantly affect the traffic load you place on your DNS server. A long TTL means fewer overall requests, because they get cached more. "Good" registrars like Network Solutions allow you to set your own TTL values. "Bad" registrars (**cough*GoDaddy!**coughcough***) don't.

Working for a Living?

It seems I only want to write here when something is going really right, or really wrong. Right now, I'd be leaning towards the latter part of things. I'm annoyed because I'm opinionated. I have a pretty good idea what I want right now, but I can't see a good way to get there. Of course, as soon as I'm there I will probably revise and update "what I want," but that's to be expected-- I just want to be moving down that path at some speed other than "standing still".

The thing of it is, I like writing software for myself. I even like solving other people's problems when I care about them (which admittedly happens pretty frequently.) What I've really been trying to avoid is writing "installed" software for other people. I guess I'm just a typical engineer in that regard: I think I know what's best, and I want you to both pay me, and leave me alone long enough to come up with software that will fix your problem for you in the way I think is best. I don't think it's unusual to not want to worry about deadlines, or even being accountable to a supervisor (or a client). I want to control my own destiny, so to speak.

I am so envious of the guys at 37 signals and Twitter I could just tear my hair out. I'm envious because they just freakin build whatever they want, however they want, and they've managed to find enough people who like what they turn out to support themselves. They decide if they want to add or remove a feature, and they do it when they feel like it, not when their manager says, "have this module done by Wednesday." If their clients don't like it, they cancel their Basecamp and Backback accounts and take their business elsewhere, but they are one-hundred-percent in control of their own products.

There is more I'm envious of too. I like writing custom software solutions, but I hate leaving a client in the lurch. I could write great stuff for my current clients, but what happens to them and their investment in the software if I leave the company I'm at? I work in IT right now, and we deal with a lot of old, abandoned pieces of software that our clients cling to like life rafts because it's all the know and all they have. I don't ever want to be responsible for releasing software like that out into the world. When you write web-based, service-based software, you get to update your code ONCE, and every single one of your client just installed the "patch" immediately and with zero effort. (The flip side with web software is that if you do go out of business, your clients don't even get the "consolation prize" of the last version of the software you released.)

With web services though, support is provided to your paying customers as a part of the service you are offering, instead of an annual service contract that costs more than the software you "sell" (or license.) I also hate software installations as a matter of routine. We're working on an internal web software project right now that has some nasty nasty ugly make-you-want-to-gag-it's-so-distasteful hacks in place in order to get it to talk to Quickbooks. I see this as a HUGE potential point of failure, and again, what are the consequences of my company investing time in me building this software if it's going to be so damn FRAGILE in places like this? I HATE having to worry about integration with other products! I'd rather be the one producing the API that others need to talk to my app!

There's just so much that appeals so strongly to me about hosted web services like Twitter and StackOverflow and (gods forbid) even Facebook. Right now though, I'm totally overwhelmed by the single most important part of that process: thinking up a great idea. I'm not even worried about executing it, or scaling it, or monetizing it. I would LOVE for my biggest worries to be: 1) How to handle a million page views an hour, and 2) How to convert a million pages views an hour into revenue! I would be just THRILLED to have those problems. But no, my problem is that I'm stuck on an even earlier problem: What problem do I have that I need to solve.

I believe in scratching your own itch, but everybody out there is doing such a good job for me, that I'm largely itch-less. My biggest beef with my iPhone used to be that I couldn't sync my calendar with my wife's calendar, so every week we had to sit down and manually type each other critical appointments into our respective phones. But now Google has released that feature using Exchange protocols, and they've done it for free no less, and it works so well for me and my wife that I'm happy. . . . . . so there's nothing for me to do myself!

At my current company, our techs frequently want to bounce ideas off the world in general and get thoughts and suggestions about cases we have. Well, there's a place you can do that for programming problems called StackOverflow.com, and guess what, they're working on an IT version already! Dang.

I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but I wish I had a serious problem I could solve with a good web service!

What I need to bring all this back to is that I don't think I'm going to be happy working for someone. I would be thrilled to be working with people, but not for, not anymore. I crave freedom, and if I didn't have a mortgage payment and a wife that deserves some of the niceties of life, it might be a lot easier to take a big risk in that direction.

Of course, it doesn't help that I'm generally a conservative guy anyway. I'd love to have my cake and eat it too. If the guys at 37s are hiring, I'm available. (I'm just not sure I'm quite sharp enough to work with that crowd.)

Opportunity

Tonight I am struck by the awesome amount of optimism and opportunity for change that our new president elect can bring to the table for us.

I admit this is an unusual opinion for me to hold.

The Past Year

Now that the wedding is finally here, this is what the past year has felt like.



...except for the stabbing and dying parts of course. Really, it just feels like we've been working towards this for so long, and it's never really felt like we were getting any closer until the rehearsal and dinner today. And then FINALLY we're all of the sudden here, and it's finally happening. I don't know what we're going to focus on once the wedding is done and the house is built. There will be no anticipatory tension left!

Saturday Morning at PAX

August 30, 2008 3:20:17 PM CDT

We're back in the hotel taking a breather after the absolutely hilarious Penny Arcade "Make a Strip" panel. Gabe sounds a whole heck of a lot like Dana Carvey-- it's really striking. What I love the most is, after seeing them, realizing how much of their personality is coming through in their comics. They took a couple suggestions from the audience as they were creating the comic for Monday. (The girl coming out of Mr. Coulton's trailer was originally a brunette.) They also changed Tycho's expression in the third frame from a disapproving look to one of envy/longing. All in all, it was amazing to watch them both work, and they're great presenters. They're naturally funny, and obviously they relate well with their audience.

We also sat in on the "Raising Children with Games" panel, which was interesting, but a little slow. They touched on a couple things that really resonated with me. The biggest of which was making single player games into communal events. My brother and I used to "tag team" single player games, passing the controller back and forth for alternating levels. We also used to just sit and watch each other, especially as we got older and our tastes diverged. I would watch him play Parasite Eve and ask questions to fill in the back story I missed before I sat down. He would watch me play FF7 (even though he played it too) just so he could experience it again without having to press X himself to get through all the dialog. These were great times my brother and I had, and I remember many occasions where we left an NES game that didn't have a save feature running over night so we wouldn't have to start from scratch.

The other thing that the panel touched on was incorporating mechanisms to control or remind people of how long they're playing. The panel, and most of the audience, seemed to think this was something we should "start" doing now, but Jenn and I both already had examples of games that did this in our minds. Guild Wars starts reminding you every hour (after a few hours) that you should take a break, and even 15 years ago EarthBound had a gimmick where the father of the main character, Ness, would call you on your cell phone and ask if maybe you felt like taking a break. That in particular was a great and really effective way of reminding the player of how long they'd been sitting there without fully breaking the fourth wall. It's not a new idea-- it's just that developers have a financial motivation to make their games as appealing as possible FIRST. Realistically, developers want you to play their game forever.

Friday Night Concert

August 30, 2008 9:19:59 AM CDT
The Concert Friday Night

Was amazing. Mostly.

The OneUps had already started playing by the time we got through the queue room, but man did they sound good. In spite of the fact that they mostly played music from games I had somehow missed as a kid, I was still perfectly content to listen to them. They had cleared the main theater of all the chairs so that it was standing-room only, and geeks being geeks, there was a huge mass of people crowded around the stage...plus another huge mass lining the walls of the room that were all sitting on the floor playing their DSs. It was an incredible sight actually, to look around and see so many faces bathed in the white glow of their handheld's screen, totally enjoying the live music while they played their favorite games and chatted on PictoChat. This whole trip can be characterized as me getting hit by things, because I was once again struck at how unusual this type of behavior was for a concert, but how right it felt anyway. I wish I had anticipated this better, because I had (quite foolishly) determined that there was no need to bring my DS with me to a concert.

There was actually a second reason I ended up wishing I had had it, and that's the Freezepops. Now, I like to consider myself a mild fan of electronic music. I go from the pretty mainstream end of things with Moby, through Blueman Group right up to Daft Punk. (Please don't criticize me for thinking is the "opposite" end of the electronica spectrum: it's what I know.) Where I start having a problem with electronic music is when it's just a synthesizer on a loop for 32 measures. The incredibly slow, 2 minute fade from ba-ba-dum, ba-ba-dum, to baaaa-dum, baaaa-dum doesn't do it for me, and neither does the "let's see how many instruments we can bang on all at the same time" kind of noise. While quite a few people at the concert seemed to appreciate this type of music, it pretty much just made my head hurt. Jenn and Pat sympathized, and we went outside into the lobby to wait for them to finish their set.

We stuck around though, because Pat and I both really wanted to see Jonathan Coultan perform. This turned out to be a wise move, because he was entertaining as hell. I may be too naive to know better than to admit this, but I actually only know of him because of the track he did for Portal called Still Alive. The rest of the audience was (once again) far better informed than I and was able to sing along to pretty much every track he played.

Friday in Seattle

August 30, 2008 8:50:08 AM CDT
Written Saturday morning about sightseeing in Seattle on Friday

My mouth is...let's see, how would the kids put it these days... nuked? We just barely caught the start of the concerts last night, which included the amazing OneUps, the Freezepops and Jonathan Coultan. That's kind of starting at the end though, so I'm gonna back up. (Writer's note: it's going to be a while before I get back to this.)

The whole day was awesome. We woke up early (and by early I mean 7ish local time, which would have already been 9 in Illinois and an incredibly late start for me). Pat was riding into Seattle to spend the day with us doing touristy stuff. We started out by going down to the Farmer's Market, which I can only really describe as a chaotic and haphazard assortment of inside and outside streets, alleys and hallways all lined with tiny little shops offering an incredible variety of goods. We saw the fresh fish counters, where they toss the goods across the room to each other (they didn't toss anything while we were watching though), and a bronze pig that apparently was some kind of historical thing. I don't know. We took a picture.

We spent some time wandering through the passageways getting lost and looking for a shop to sell us something tasty for breakfast. We found a corner bakery that smelled absolutely incredible. A mix of the freshest bread and cinnamon. In fact, the place had "cinnamon" in the name, but I can't remember exactly what it was called. (Edit: Despite the fact that I've attached an image with the exact name. Oi I'm dense sometimes.) I got a HUGE cinnamon pull-apart roll thing and a cup of coffee (NOT starbucks) and Jenn got a muffin of some sort. Pat got a cinnamon roll too and we walked down to a park area overlooking the bay. For some reason it was really windy-- Jenn and I joked we must have brought the "windy city" thing with us from Chicago. I couldn't complain though: bright, sunny, warm but not hot: it was perfect weather other than the wind and I was happy for it.

I want to take a minute here and make sure you understand that I've lived my entire li fe in Illinois; a state that has very little vertical geographic variance. (That's a nerdy way of saying "it's really damn flat".) I've spent my entire life in the suburbs and more or less surrounded on all sides by corn fields. Visiting a place like Seattle is interesting to me if for no other reason than for its actual honest to gods geography. There's real hills, and a bay, and things beyond the bay. It's all very interesting to look at. I was also struck by the idea that at some point in history, people had to build around the land and not just put things wherever the hell they wanted because everything was already completely flat without any water in the way. It really reminded me of SimCity. (Interesting point: when I play SimCity, the first thing I usually blow my entire budget on is terraforming the entire map to a nice flat area with n othing in the way to build around. I'd be the worst urban planner in the world. If I want to get really psychoanalytical, this urge must come from playing too much Populous as a kid.)

After we finished eating, we took all the obligatory photo combinations: Jenn and I, Jenn and Pat, me and Pat, just Pat, just me, just Jenn, some other random couple (they saw us doing our little photo shoot and asked us to take a picture of them), and of course the three of us. From there we walked along the water south past the aquarium and a bunch of seafood places. (Something else we don't have in Illinois: fresh fish.) Eventually we turned back towards the heart of the city and started trudging up some gnarly hills. We made a second city comparison at that point: we wondered if we were now in San Francisco. Some of those hills must have been close to a 40 degree grade, and we took 2 breathers on our way up 9 blocks. Pat showed us the areas where the underground tours run, and we once again took some obligatory tourist photos of the spot marking the historical start of the city (or something-- even Pat wasn't too clear.)

We're really bad tourists.

And Pat is a really bad tour guide.

Having satisfied our need for occasional exposure to the sun, we headed back towards the hotel and changed clothes (too many damn hills!) then headed down to officially start PAX. Jenn and I had planned our itinerary more than a week ago around the events we wanted to watch, the panels we wanted to sit in on, and where Wil Wheaton was going to be, so we had already decided to skip the keynote and its long queue line in favor of being able to catch a couple other things instead. We went to the expo hall while we waited for the first panel.

Editing note: The story stops here, abruptly, again. When one is on an awesome trip like this, finishing your complete story from yesterday isn't as important as going out and experiencing a great story today. The funny thing is, I can't remember everything we did after that but before the next post, which I guess proves my theory that it was a really damn good idea to write it down. Too bad you can't pause time and write for three hours to get everything in while it's still in your pathetic little head.