I love The Wire. It's my favorite TV show of all time.

But I shake my head when I listen to interviews with the creator of the show, David Simon. How could someone so closed-minded, uninformed, and condescending -- and by the way wrong -- create something as wonderful as The Wire. I don't get it.

Think about Season 5 (spoiler alert), where a newspaper reporter and cop conspire to fabricate a story that turns a city upside-down looking for a mass murderer who doesn't exist. The management of the paper lays off the best editorial people while trying to manufacture a Pulitzer Prize for itself. How could a person who sees the crap in news be so nostalgic it as it goes away. It's like wishing the East River could be polluted again, now that it's almost fully cleaned up. (Not a perfect analogy of course.)

And by the way, I read the interview with him on The Guardian website. I got the link from an RSS feed, but I could have just as easily gotten it from Twitter.

Twitter is often used to publish links to stories, not the stories themselves. His critique is based a misunderstanding of how Twitter works.

That's why a little curiosity to go with his bombast would point him in a positive direction. He could do some good with his mind and creativity and fame.

 6/22/2011; 12:38:18 PM.   .

In a conference call yesterday I said I'd do a podcast more regularly. 

So here's the first installment of what I'm calling DaveCast for lack of a more imaginative name.

BTW, my revelation for the day is Negative Time To Live, which is part of the DNS protocol. Until yesterday I didn't know it existed. I assumed that every time I do a DNS lookup I get a fresh bit of data from the authority on the name. I didn't know that servers could cache the negative result.

But, I don't think negative results should be cached. Why would I be repeatedly asking for the definition of a name that you just told me was undefined? I must have some idea that it should be defined.

Maybe I defined it.

Amazon, in Route 53 provides a way to query the status of a request to create a new record. Usually it takes 5-7 seconds for a DNS request to go from pending status to insynch status. So I made the Blorkmark request be synchronous. It doesn't return until Amazon says it's defined. Then I do a DNS lookup. It works, and we're ready to roll.

Seems DNS itself should be able to handle it. Amazon doesn't really know if the domain will resolve, it just thinks it will. DNS is authoritative.

 6/22/2011; 10:12:39 AM.   .