Sean Leach

How to disable reply animations in Mail.app for Mountain Lion

2012-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

How to disable reply animations in Mail.app for Mountain Lion

16 August 2012 - Colorado

I have been using this trick for awhile, and there is a lot of false information out there, so I figured I should post this for posterity. To disable that super annoying reply animation in Mail (where it slowly fades into the center of the screen) – open Terminal or iTerm2 or whatever and type:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool TRUE

But wait! you say – I have seen numerous posts that say something similar. True dat – but they are all wrong (at least the many I saw). defaults for Mail (in Mountain Lion at least) is case sensitive – I was going crazy trying to get it to work, but they all said com.apple.Mail, which is incorrect – you need com.apple.mail.

Hopefully this saves you all some headaches.

Amazon.com eating it’s own (Cloudfront) dog food

2012-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Amazon.com eating it’s own (Cloudfront) dog food

03 July 2012 - Colorado

I was curious, given the amazing rate Amazon has been improving Cloudfront, if they had decided to eat their own dog food yet and use it as the primary CDN on their crown jewel – the main Amazon.com site. They had previously entrusted Akamai for the majority of their CDN needs.

Long story short – absolutely. Of the 163 external resources on the main page, 74 of them are hosted on Cloudfront – compared to 46 on Akamai (the rest are a mixture of doubleclick, etc.). That’s pretty impressive.

More detail

I used the following methodology to come up with the numbers. My first step was to use the always-awesome Webpagetest to get a dump of all of the external resources – i.e. Javascript, CSS etc. (you can see my report here – to get the external resources you can click on “Raw object data” to get a CSV of each object). From that CSV, I just wrote a quick python script that would use Dnspython on each external hostname, do a lookup, and see if the CNAME pointed to Cloudfront, Akamai, or something else.

Below is a dump of all of the URL’s, sorted by count with their hosting CDN.

g-ecx.images-amazon.com, for example, is hosted on Cloudfront:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
g-ecx.images-amazon.com. 49 IN CNAME d1ge0kk1l5kms0.cloudfront.net.
d1ge0kk1l5kms0.cloudfront.net. 14 IN CNAME d1ge0kk1l5kms0.iad12.cloudfront.net.

while z-ecx.images-amazon.com is hosted on Akamai:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
z-ecx.images-amazon.com. 60 IN CNAME z-ecx.images-amazon.com.edgesuite.net.
z-ecx.images-amazon.com.edgesuite.net. 8725 IN CNAME a1248.g.akamai.net.

Full breakdown.

g-ecx.images-amazon.com => 56 (cloudfront)
z-ecx.images-amazon.com => 27 (akamai)
images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com => 15 (akamai)
www.amazon.com => 10 (Other)
s.amazon-adsystem.com => 8 (Other)
ecx.images-amazon.com => 8 (cloudfront)
ad.doubleclick.net => 6 (Other)
c.amazon-adsystem.com => 5 (cloudfront)
pda-as.amazon.com => 4 (Other)
fls-na.amazon.com => 4 (Other)
s0.2mdn.net => 3 (Other)
d2o307dm5mqftz.cloudfront.net => 2 (cloudfront)
pda-bes.amazon.com => 2 (Other)
ads.pubmatic.com => 2 (Other)
d3l3lkinz3f56t.cloudfront.net => 2 (cloudfront)
tag.admeld.com => 1 (akamai)
c.www.endless.com => 1 (cloudfront)
image4.pubmatic.com => 1 (Other)
tap.rubiconproject.com => 1 (Other)
sis.amazon.com => 1 (Other)
bid.openx.net => 1 (Other)
ocsp.comodoca.com => 1 (Other)
cm.g.doubleclick.net => 1 (Other)
image3.pubmatic.com => 1 (Other)

Kudos to Amazon for making the move.

Ubuntu/Canonical DOES NOT have a US based mirror for us.archive.ubuntu.com

2012-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Ubuntu/Canonical DOES NOT have a US based mirror for us.archive.ubuntu.com

02 July 2012 - Colorado

Ubuntu’s US archive server (used by APT) always returns a /24 that is hosted in London (queried from multiple locations to make sure they weren’t using GeoIP functionality). Side note: Verisign’s Managed DNS can help with that if you are reading this Canonical)

;; ANSWER SECTION:
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.154
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.155
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.176
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.177
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.179
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.180
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.181
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.182
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.183
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.184
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.192
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.193
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.151
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.152
us.archive.ubuntu.com. 600 IN A 91.189.92.153

Example MTR/Traceroute from Amazon AWS US-West

Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
 1. ip-10-166-184-2.us-west-1.compute.internal 0.0% 4 0.4 0.6 0.3 1.4 0.5
 2. ip-10-1-4-5.us-west-1.compute.internal 0.0% 4 0.5 5.7 0.4 21.3 10.4
 3. 216.182.236.73 0.0% 4 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.7 0.1
 4. 205.251.229.107 0.0% 4 1.4 1.3 1.2 1.4 0.1
 5. 205.251.229.9 0.0% 4 2.3 8.7 2.3 20.1 8.3
 6. xe-0-0-0-0.r05.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 4 2.8 2.9 2.8 3.0 0.1
 7. ???
 8. ae-4.r07.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 4 166.1 169.9 166.1 171.3 2.5
 9. ae-7.r20.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 4 3.1 3.1 3.0 3.2 0.1
 10. ae-4.r21.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 4 75.7 75.7 75.6 75.8 0.1
 11. ae-2.r23.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 4 156.8 159.9 156.8 163.7 3.5
 12. ae-1.r03.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net 0.0% 3 160.8 163.2 160.7 168.0 4.2
 13. te3-2-0-cr0.nik.nl.as6908.net 0.0% 3 162.9 163.7 161.2 167.1 3.1
 14. te1-4-3508-cr0.thn.uk.as6908.net 0.0% 3 172.1 190.5 172.1 206.8 17.5
 15. canonical-gw.datahop.net 0.0% 3 153.8 155.0 152.1 159.1 3.7
 16. haetae.canonical.com 0.0% 3 158.3 154.5 146.1 159.1 7.3